Saving the Immortal

Chapter Fifteen: Just Like Them

A visiting princess arrived at court some days after my fall, once I had recovered sufficiently to attend the evening's festivities properly — Princess Cordelia of some southern kingdom whose name I did not entirely commit to memory, though her appearance, I confess, proved rather more difficult to forget.

She was beautiful in the manner court poets favored — golden-haired, delicate, possessed of a laugh that carried easily across any room she occupied. And she had, I noticed within the first quarter hour of the evening's feast, taken a particular interest in my husband.

I watched them speak near the hearth, her hand resting rather longer than necessity required upon his arm, her gaze holding his with an intensity that left very little room for misinterpretation. Ruselon, for his part, did not seem to discourage the attention with any great urgency — smiling at whatever she said, inclining his head toward her in a manner that felt, from where I stood watching, entirely too warm for simple courtesy.

Something ugly twisted within my chest.

"You seemed rather engaged with Princess Cordelia," I said, once we had retired to our quarters for the evening, my voice carrying more edge than I had intended to permit it.

"She was pleasant company," Ruselon said, removing his coat with an ease that suggested he had noticed nothing at all remarkable in the evening's exchange.

"Pleasant," I repeated. "Is that the word for it. I confess it looked considerably warmer than pleasant from where I stood."

He turned to look at me properly then, something shifting in his expression.

"Are you suggesting," he said, "that I behaved improperly?"

"I am suggesting," I said, my composure fraying further with each word, "that you looked at her the way a man looks at a woman he finds appealing. In a manner I have not yet seen you look at me."

"That is an unfair accusation," he said, his own voice cooling now. "She is a visiting royal. I offered her nothing beyond ordinary courtesy."

"Ordinary courtesy does not typically involve permitting a woman's hand to remain upon your arm for the length of an entire conversation," I said, my voice rising now despite my better judgment.

"You are jealous," he said, something almost incredulous in his tone.

"I am your wife," I said. "I am entitled to some measure of concern when I watch you entertain another woman so openly, in full view of the entire court."

"I have given you no reason whatsoever to doubt my faithfulness," he said, his composure cracking now into something sharper. "I have shown you nothing but restraint since the moment we were wed. And yet the first evening a beautiful woman shows me some ordinary attention, you accuse me of behaving carnally—"

"I did not say carnally," I said, though the word had, in truth, been precisely the shape of my thoughts. "I said improperly. There is a considerable difference."

"Is there," he said, his voice going cold now in a manner that reminded me suddenly, unpleasantly, of the fury I had witnessed in the courtyard days earlier. "Because you sound, at present, entirely convinced that I am incapable of simple courtesy without it becoming something base."

"Perhaps," I said, my own anger overtaking whatever caution remained, "I am simply beginning to understand what everyone warned me of before this marriage."

The room went utterly still.

"What, precisely," he said, his voice quiet now in a manner considerably more dangerous than shouting would have been, "is that supposed to mean?"

"It means," I said, the words leaving me before I had fully considered their weight, before I had properly accounted for what damage they might do, "now I see they weren't wrong. You really are a monster."

The silence that followed felt, for a long moment, entirely without end.

I watched something break behind his eyes — not fury this time, nothing so simple as anger. Something quieter and considerably more devastating, the specific collapse of a man who had spent his entire existence being told precisely that, by everyone who had ever claimed to know him, and who had, for one brief handful of days, permitted himself to believe I might be different from the rest of them.

"I should have known," he said finally, his voice carrying none of its earlier heat, only a hollow, exhausted quiet that struck me far more forcefully than any shouting could have. "I should have known you were just like them."

He turned and left the chamber without another word.

I stood there a long while after the door closed behind him, my own fury draining slowly into something considerably colder and considerably more regretful, the weight of what I had said settling over me with a heaviness I had not anticipated feeling so immediately.

You really are a monster.

I had not meant it.

I understood that now, standing alone in that quiet room, my anger having burned itself out entirely in the space of a single sentence, leaving nothing behind but the plain, ugly truth of what I had chosen to wound him with — the one accusation, above every other cruelty this court had ever leveled at him, that I now understood cut deepest of all.

I sat by the fire long into the night, waiting for him to return.

He did not.