I n the aftermath of death, everyone was only more eager to celebrate life.
When the feast began, wine glasses were emptied in seconds. The
music was so loud it vibrated in our bones, great cacophonous sounds that seemed at first like they didn’t belong together, but soon became inseparable. Long tables were brought out, so many that they were forced wherever they would fit—not only on the stone patio of the palace, where Caduan sat at the head of a massive table that must have dined fifty, but also throughout the streets, wobbling legs on uneven cobblestones steadied with whatever people had on hand.
There was food everywhere, and more platters brought out before the current ones even began to be exhausted. The table became a painting of colors—the deep bronze of roasted meat, the bright red of berries, the purples of root vegetables, the white of cream cakes, the cream of great bowls of sauces or soups.
Meajqa and Luia quickly entertained themselves with others. I sat between them, close enough that their elbows jabbed me with every one of their gesticulations, but feeling very alone.
I glanced up to the head of the table at Caduan, who looked deeply engaged in whatever Vythian was talking to him about. He met my stare and gave me the faintest ghost of a smile before looking away.
The night quickly turned to joyful euphoria. The music grew louder, more frenetic—the guests grew more drunk and affectionate. Plates of food were abandoned for dance floors, where Fey reveled in the movements of each other’s bodies. All those impeccable outfits devolved into sloppy
streaks of color. Couples, or more than couples, fell all over each other, delighting in unraveling each other’s clothing.
I watched this in fascination. This sort of pleasure was oddly foreign to me, like a mathematical equation I had yet to decode.
Meajqa was suddenly beside me, caressing the bare skin of my shoulders. If his misstep at the ceremony still bothered him, he hadn’t shown it—he had joined the festivities with seemingly carefree enthusiasm. “Dance with me, Aefe,” he purred in my ear, words slightly slurred.
“We both look too good not to.” “I do not know how.”
“It’s alright. I’ll teach you.” His fingers trailed my arm, making goosebumps rise to the surface. “Or we could skip the dancing part.”
I frowned, confused. I did not know what that meant.
He took a seat beside me. “Would you like to be alone, Aefe? Find a little pleasure together?” he said quietly. He smiled, but this time, it struck me as a sad expression. “Maybe us broken things need to stay together.”
The realization hit me—sex. He was talking about sex.
I considered it. Meajqa was a handsome man. And perhaps he was right. We were both broken. Perhaps there would be no better person to show all my ragged edges to.
But it didn’t seem… right. So I shook my head and said, “No, Meajqa.”
Meajqa gave me a wry shrug. “I had to ask.” He stood, kissed me on the cheek—so unexpected it made me jump—and was off again to the dance floor, a bright smile lighting up his face as if our solemn moment had never happened.
 |
I SAT ALONE for some time longer. Luia had long ago abandoned her seat in favor of dancing, leaving me to be the only one on this side of the table, elbows leaning in the only patch of clear space among discarded plates and half-empty wine glasses.
I became aware of Caduan before he spoke, in a way that hit my every sense at once.
“Did you like the ceremony?” he asked, behind me.
I turned. I realized that something had indeed changed in how I perceived this world. I now understood how to truly admire beauty. And when I looked at Caduan now, I thought, Beautiful.
He sat in Luia’s empty chair, waiting for my answer.
“It was…” I paused, and then said the only word that my mind would now produce. “Beautiful.” I looked around at all the celebrating. “It is strange that no one seems sad.”
“Why would they be sad?” “There was so much death.”
“Death is not a reason to be sad.”
I thought of what Caduan had said to the Fey lying on the table, rescued from the Aran queen, what seemed like a lifetime ago.
Death is not an end. Death is a door. “Do you truly believe that?” I asked. “I do.”
You can not lie to me, I thought.
And it was a lie. I knew this because he had gone to such lengths to return me from death. Perhaps death was a door, but if it was, he had torn it open to drag me back.
This realization made me uncomfortable. I did not like to think of Caduan as a hypocrite.
“But, I think there is certainly plenty to love about life, too, and it should be saved whenever possible.” Caduan looked at my plate, then at the dance floor. “You aren’t eating or dancing. Why not?”
“I just… I don’t feel the way that they do about these things.” His smile softened. “You looked a bit lonely over here.”
Not anymore, I thought.
“I confess that I often feel like an outsider, too,” he said. “I was watching you and thought, ‘She looks just like I feel.’”
“But you looked so—”
“Attentive?” He let out a short laugh. “Do you remember how I used to be? I used to think there was no value in pretending for pleasantries like this. But when I built Ela’Dar, I realized that people sometimes need you to be a different version of yourself. Sometimes, it being important to them”— he nodded out to the dancing crowd—“is enough to make it important to me. So I pretend.”
“You lie.”
“It isn’t a lie. I respect my people and what matters to them. And besides…” He took in the surrounding celebration. “This has grown to mean a lot to me, too. It is important to remember the joy in being alive.”
The joy in being alive.
Was that what it was when I felt Caduan’s heartbeat?
Caduan watched me like I was a puzzle he was trying to put together. “You should eat. The food is delicious. The best of the year.”
The overflowing plates overwhelmed me. I didn’t know where I would start. And—“delicious.” What did “delicious” even mean?
I must have looked lost, because Caduan reached for a cream-covered pastry and held it out to me. “Here. Try this.”
The piece of cake between his fingers was yellow, with white frosting and bright raspberries over its top.
I took a long drink of wine. Then I leaned forward and ate the pastry from Caduan’s fingers.
Caduan’s eyebrows arched, an almost-laugh of surprise escaping him. Not that I was paying attention. An explosion of sweetness rolled over my tongue, the texture of the cream cool and smooth compared to the soft warmth of the cake, all cut by a sharp punctuation of berry.
A wordless sound escaped my throat. Pleasure. This was pleasure.
I looked at Caduan, eyes round, and he chuckled. “Good?”
“It’s… It’s…”
“Your body is capable of powerful things, but it is capable of pleasure, too.”
I felt foolish for not realizing this sooner. First, I thought my body was a prison. Then I realized that it could be a tool. And now I realized that it could allow me to experience things—useless, wonderful things—that I had long ago forgotten.
I took another drink of wine, savoring the way the bitterness mingled with the sweetness still left on my tongue—savoring, too, in the soft blur it draped over my senses, making everything stronger and softer at once.
Then I pointed to a plate near Caduan. “That one. I want to try that one.”
“As you wish.” It was a strange looking food, some sort of flaky pastry designed in a shallow cup, filled with glistening gold. He handed it to me.
“Be careful, it’s—”
Sweet, sticky custard filled my mouth, “—Messy,” Caduan finished.
I didn’t care how messy it was. It was too wonderful. It was only after I swallowed that I thought to be conscious of how ridiculous I must have looked.
Caduan was giving me a strange look that I could not decipher. Heat rose to my cheeks.
“You have…” He reached out and pressed his thumb to the curve of my lip, gently tracing its shape. A bit of cream still sat on his fingers, left over from when I had unceremoniously snatched the pastry from his hands.
Without thinking, I brushed my lips over his thumb, my tongue darting out just enough to lick the cream from his skin. The sweetness mingled with the clean, salty taste of his flesh.
Time seemed to hover for a long, suspended moment. The amused smile faded from Caduan’s face. Something I could not identify drew tight in the space between us, a strange fissure of tension that skittered across my skin.
Then he pulled his hand away and chuckled. “Better than letting it go to waste,” he muttered.
I took another drink of wine.
Suddenly, I felt very aware of my own body. Every sense seemed fuller than it had been, every feeling stronger and more intense—no longer overwhelming, but joyful. How had I found this music too loud and ugly? Now the beat of it thrummed through my skin like my heartbeat. I wanted to drown in it. I wanted to see how far this would go.
I jumped to my feet, without fully meaning to.
A bemused smile curled Caduan’s mouth. “Do you want to dance?”
“It seems… silly. There is no purpose in it.” I looked out into the mass of dancing bodies. It was…an oddly appealing movement, and now that I could feel the music washing over me, I could understand the desire to move with it.
“There isn’t,” Caduan agreed. “But for them, that’s the pleasure in it.” “I will try it,” I said, and again I thought of the way sugar tasted as I
watched the smile roll across his lips.
 |
CADUAN and I danced for a long time. He was right—there was something pleasurable in useless movement, especially with Caduan’s scent surrounding me and his forehead pressed against mine. I felt like my understanding of the world, and this life, had changed dramatically—like a mysterious equation had, at last, been solved, and I reveled in the answer.
Eventually, though, I grew tired. The blur of wine combined with the sheer overwhelming volume of sights and sounds and sensations began to wear on me. Caduan must have seen this, because he pulled me closer and murmured in my ear, “We can go somewhere else.”
I was relieved to escape.
We walked away from the party, tracing the paths that wound behind the palace where the stone met the forest. We’d gone this way once before, I remembered, when Caduan took me to the training house at the edge of the grounds. Then I didn’t notice such things, but now I found myself transfixed by the wild, untamed elegance of the gardens back here. Flowers of clashing colors, wildly overgrown, crept over the trails.
I watched Caduan carefully as we walked. “You are tired,” I said.
“Hm?”
“You are frequently tired.”
He smiled wanly. “I’m getting old.”
This statement startled me. It had not occurred to me to think of Caduan as old. As Reshaye, age did not exist. Time was a flat line stretching out in all directions. Humans changed, but I remained the same.
I remembered Caduan in another life, as a young man with a crown too heavy for him. But five hundred years had passed between then and now. Caduan had borne the weight of every one of those years.
Caduan would die, one day. I did not like this thought. “Do you fear death?” I said.
He did not react to this question, as if he did not find it at all surprising. He was silent for a long moment before answering. “I fear only what it could take from me.”
I realized that I feared Caduan’s death. “I wanted to die,” I said.
His expression changed slightly. “I know you did.”
“You do not understand how painful endless existence is. Existence that should not be.” I shook my head. “It’s torturous.”
Caduan said, softly, “I do understand.”
“I wanted to rest.” I swallowed. My time as Reshaye felt like a whole other life, just as my time as Aefe before that did. I answered to both names now, but neither of them felt like me. I carried both sets of memories, but they were like windows into other lives. “I thought I was dead already, before you brought me back. I gave up my life to save Tisaanah’s.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“A curse demanded payment. A life. And there were two of us, in her. My life as Reshaye was nothing but rage and desire, and that was my sole reason for living. Even then, a part of me was afraid of death. I knew only want, and death is the end of wanting.”
“Why did you do it, then?”
My brow furrowed. It felt so long ago. Deciphering my past intentions seemed impossible. “I had made many marks on the world,” I said. “But all of them were scars. I wanted to leave ink instead, like the stories I used to wear. Tisaanah sometimes made me feel that… that there was more in me. I had committed centuries of violence. But in that moment, I felt…” I swallowed. Pressed my hand to my heart, without thinking, like I did every time I needed to remind myself that I was no longer Reshaye. “I felt for the first time that I had a choice in what I wanted to be. Centuries of violence, and just one act of sacrifice. One act of generosity.” I gave him a weak smile. “That and… I wanted to rest. I was ready to rest.”
He looked at me solemnly. “You wanted control over who you were, because you never had it before.”
“Of course I had control. I defeated entire armies by taking control.” “No. That was destruction,” Caduan said. “But that is not the same as
control. You were still at their mercy. The real claim of power was letting it go.”
I stopped walking.
This realization shook me. As Reshaye, I had craved power. But there was no true control in that. It was wild and greedy, and that desire had dominated me.
But it also took my pain away.
There was no shame in those things. Perhaps that desire for blood was just as invigorating as the taste of sugar on my lips.
“Perhaps,” I said. “But I am learning to find joy in hunger. And I had never been hungrier than that.”
We rounded a corner. We were now far behind the palace. I saw movement ahead, where the gardens gave way to the trees of the forest. In the darkness, it took me a moment to decipher what I was looking at: two forms, tangled up so that they were an indecipherable mass of limbs, fabric bunched around bare skin. Golden hair, cooler than usual beneath the moonlight. A single silver-gold wing.
It was Meajqa, I realized, entangled with a woman. He pressed her against a tree. Her legs wrapped around his waist. His lips were against her throat, and her face, covered by her dark hair, was thrown back in pleasure. Their discarded clothes sat in a pile of fine fabric in the dirt.
Caduan let out a huff of a laugh and tugged my arm. “I suppose we’ll go another way.”
We took the opposite path, now walking through the western gardens. I was silent.
Despite myself, I replayed the image of them in my mind. They looked strange, ungraceful, nothing but a tangle of bodies and movements too hungry to be elegant. And yet there was a beauty to the hunger of it—or fulfillment of it.
When I was Aefe, long ago, I knew the pleasure of sex. But as Reshaye, I didn’t understand it, not even when I experienced those desires as Tisaanah or Maxantarius had felt them. I had looked at the carnal uselessness of it and been confused. What was the purpose of such feelings?
But…
I pictured the pleasure on that woman’s face, brazen and impassioned. “Aefe?”
“Hm?”
I hadn’t realized he was talking to me.
Caduan seemed amused. “You look like you’re thinking very hard.”
I said, without hesitation, “Meajqa asked me if I wanted to have sex with him.”
Caduan choked, lurching to a stop. “He what?”
“He didn’t use those words. But that was what he was asking.”
Caduan looked straight ahead, blinking twice, not moving. I had never seen him behave this way.
He cleared his throat and continued walking. “What did you say?”
“I said no.”
The muscles of Caduan’s jaw flexed. Realization dawned on me.
Could that be jealousy? Possession? When I had been Reshaye, I had wanted nothing but to consume and be consumed by the person I was with. It was a desire so deep and so all-encompassing that it took over all of me. That was love, and it was awash with jealousy.
If Caduan felt jealousy, did that mean that he loved me? Because jealousy meant love, yes?
This string of epiphanies hit me one after the other, knocking me somewhat off kilter.
“You could have said yes,” he said. “If you had wanted to.” For some reason, I was a bit hurt by that.
“I didn’t want to.” We walked in silence that had become suddenly awkward. “When I was Reshaye, I did not understand it.”
“Understand—?”
“Sex. What does it feel like?”
Caduan made a strange, wordless sound, something between a laugh and a strangled clearing of the throat. “It feels… good.”
“Like it feels to taste honey?”
The corner of his mouth curled. “Perhaps in select scenarios.”
I had to admit, I was a bit intrigued by this. That was a very, very good feeling.
“If you’re curious about it,” he asked, very casually, “why did you reject Meajqa’s generous offer?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I should not have.” The first part was true. The second, less so.
But I took gruesome delight at Caduan’s reaction to this. Again he stopped short, turning to me, and for a split second, he looked… was it angry? More intense than I had ever seen him.
I enjoyed it when he looked at me like that.
He stepped closer once, and then again. My back pressed against the stone of the palace wall, cold against the bare expanse of my skin. And then he was leaning over me, the contrasting warmth overwhelming, the scent of pine surrounding me.
“You’re that curious?” he said. His voice was soft and hard at once. Full of promise.
It was an invitation.
I met his stare and said, “Yes.”
I was delirious with all the pleasures I had experienced tonight, but instead of feeling sated, I wanted more.
His hand pressed to the wall over my left shoulder, his head bowed close to mine.
“When it is right, it feels like ruination.” He spoke quietly, voice low and rough. His fingertips trailed down my waist, then my hip, and then slipped between the layered slit of my dress. I drew in a breath as he touched the tender skin of my upper thigh—hot and cold at once.
My blood felt so hot in my veins, and my heartbeat pounded, skin reddening with the rush.
“And?” I breathed.
His fingertips trailed further, landing between my thighs, sliding over the silk of my undergarments in a feather-light touch.
Such a small movement, but my gasp shook my whole body. A spark of pleasure shot up my spine. Everything in the world fell away but his eyes, and that single touch.
“Should I stop?” he asked, quietly. “No.”
No, no. We had barely started. My hunger was now something uncontrollable. My thighs parted slightly, without me even meaning to, and Caduan’s forehead pressed against mine as he let out a slight breath.
His eyes were fire.
His fingers moved again, in small, gentle circles.
My world began to unravel. I released a sound I didn’t even realize that I had made—my knees went weak. I was nothing but mindless desire. Pleasure consumed me and yet it only started to fill the yearning inside me
—I needed more.
“It feels like the stars,” Caduan murmured. “It feels like touching everything about another person’s body. Like devouring them and letting them do the same to you.”
Everything, he promised. But this was not everything, this was just one touch and the desire for more—for so much more—even as that single touch reduced me to nothing.
I wanted to tell him this, demand more from him, but I opened my lips and only managed to produce a single strangled whimper.
He was leaning heavily against the wall now, closer to me. His body, and the stone against my back, were all that kept me standing.
The circles grew faster, harder. The additional pressure drew a moan to my throat, made me press against him.
“It feels like the basest hunger,” he said. “It is selfish… and giving.” His fingers pushed aside my undergarments, and two slid inside me. I swore.
Everything disappeared except for the sensation of him within me—still not enough, not enough, not enough—and yet so much that my body didn’t know how to react, that I forgot how to breathe and see and speak and move. The pain was brief, gone quickly beneath a wild, impatient pleasure slick with my desire.
I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t know what I wanted, except that it was everything—faster, slower, deeper, gentler, harder, I didn’t know, I only knew that I was coming undone and I wanted more of him everywhere.
He bowed his head, brushed his lips to my throat. He pressed against me, and the pressure of his body, even clothed, was too much.
It was too much.
“Let go, Aefe,” Caduan murmured against my skin, his voice rough and demanding—like he was begging me, like he needed this just as much as I did—and I didn’t even know what he was asking me to do but suddenly I was doing it, I was falling, I was exploding, I was stars and earth, I was everything, and I was relinquishing all of it to him.
It was only once I started coming back to myself that I realized I had been saying his name, over and over again, in desperate moans. I was boneless, barely managing to stay upright. I felt messy and undone and… and exposed, like I had just shown him something raw and vulnerable.
He breathed heavily, too, looking as shattered as I did. He, too, looked afraid.
My lips parted, though I didn’t know what to say. But his hand swept over my cheek in a small caress and tipped my chin towards him.
I did not know how to kiss someone. But this kiss was easy. The touch of his lips was gentle over mine. Slow. Almost shy—perhaps it should have seemed strange to share such a timid kiss in this moment, something so tentative, but it felt right. He tasted like honey.
He pulled away, and for a moment, neither of us breathed. I leaned in again.
But then Caduan’s face changed abruptly. He jerked away from me, leaving me scrambling to push myself upright.
“I— This—” He ran his fingers through his hair. “This isn’t—” He glanced at me and snapped his jaw shut, then turned away. “I shouldn’t have— I should go. Goodnight, Aefe.”
I didn’t know what was happening. One moment, his presence surrounded me, and the next he was halfway down the path. The world was cold without him.
“Caduan!” I called after him. But he was already gone.
