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Clive perched on the end of a bed in the shadowy infirmary, winding a length of gauze around his left arm. Tarja watched, looking down at him with arms crossed.
“Change it twice a day, and cleanse it with the antiseptic I gave you. If the edges turn red, or if you’ve any pus from it, or if you’ve the slightest hint of fever, come to me immediately.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Clive said, with real deference, but also the sliver of a laugh in his voice.
“I mean it. I’ve not had to amputate many limbs and I mean to keep it that way.” She continued to watch him as he wrapped the cloth around his hand and tucked in the end. She came closer and bent to inspect it, and as she did, she noticed that he turned his head away, ducking his chin into his neck on his left side. It was a movement she had noticed him make more than a few times.
“I wish you would let me take the brand off of you.”
Clive stilled for a moment, and stretched the fingers on his injured side, pretending to be engrossed by them.
“There isn’t time,” he said. “Or need.”
“It’s not a frivolity,” Tarja said as she stood straight. She frowned down at him in search of a way to make her point. He looked up at her now. Afternoon sunlight limned his hair, lighting one grey-blue eye and casting the unmarked side of his face in shadow.
“I know you won’t thank me for saying so,” Tarja said in a low voice. “But you are one of the most handsome men I’ve ever laid eyes on.”
Clive visibly tensed, both of his hands were on the bed now, ready to jump to his feet. To do what? Tarja wondered. Fight? Run?
“You’re right,” Clive said after a moment, relaxing, but with effort. “I don’t thank you for saying so.” Without the trust between them, Tarja knew he would be stalking out of the room. He looked up at her now, gaze cold and steady. “Is that what this is about? You want to save my pretty face?”
Tarja sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, feeling suddenly desperately sad and weary. “I hope you don’t think me such a fool.”
She fetched a three-legged stool from the side of another bed and sat across from him, knee to knee. “Clive, just now, you cringed away from me. Like this,” she said, mimicking the way he had drawn his chin into his chest to his left side. “I would think you simply mistrust me, but I’ve seen you do it quite often. I don’t know that you’re aware you’re doing it. You also try to make your hair fall in front of the brand, though you must know that won’t hide it. You do it even here in the Hideaway, where none would think less of you for it. I can only imagine how it is for you elsewhere.”
Clive turned his face away from her and touched his fingers to his left cheek. “It’s not that I haven’t thought on it,” he said. “But there’s little use. There would still be a scar. It’s not as though it would ever truly be gone.”
“Many men have scars,” Tarja said. “Especially men who carry greatswords on their back. Outside these walls, most think removing the brand a sure death. Very few would recognize the scar for what it was. And a scar may be easier to think of as part of your past, one that needn’t be part of your present.”
Clive shook his head. “There isn’t time. I can’t afford to be down for the time it would take to heal.”
“Believe it or not, Clive, we can function without you for a few weeks.”
“I know that,” Clive said, shaking his head in a somewhat canine fashion. “I’m not so arrogant as to believe it always has to be me, but there’s always work for a good sword-arm. Something always comes up. I won’t leave things undone, not for my vanity’s sake.”
“Do you think it was vanity that made me take a blade to my own face?”
Clive looked Tarja in the eyes for a long moment. He looked away and shook his head. “No. No, I don’t.” Drawing a breath, he looked at her again. “But shouldn’t we also show people that it’s no mark of shame? That it hasn’t broken us? That it has no power over us?”
“I know that some see it that way,” Tarja said slowly. “I know that some have learned to see it as a badge of honor. But I don’t believe that you can, or you would have learned the trick of it by now. Clive,” she said, putting a hand on his uninjured forearm. “The reason I called you handsome isn’t because I have some secret passion for you. It’s because that beauty could and should be a tool for you, but right now it’s only causing you pain.”
Clive opened his mouth to ask a question, but Tarja pressed on.
“You are the kind of handsome that makes those that think they don’t favor men take a second look at you. You are a rare enough beauty that people will feel rewarded by your mere attention. People will listen to you in a way they might not ever listen to someone else.”
Clive looked bemused. “If all that is true, surely a little black mark couldn’t dampen it overmuch.”
“But it does. Because now, you hate people looking at you. I drew attention to your looks and it made you want to flee. I won’t ask you why only because I have too fair of an idea already. And I believe taking the brand off may bring you closer to feeling that your body is your own, that it does not belong to those who used you. I wouldn’t press this if I didn’t believe it was causing you more pain than you realize. Taking it off helped me, I know that much.”
Tarja released his arm. Clive leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring at the floorboards.
“Are you afraid?” Tarja asked gently. “I’ve done this dozens of times. The people I’ve lost, the brand was already damaged. I won’t claim there’s no risk, but it’s small or I wouldn’t be urging you to it.”
Silence stretched.
“I’ll let you do it,” Clive said finally. “Someday, when there’s time.”
“If you don’t make the time, there will never be the time, Clive.”
*
Weeks later, A small crowd lingered in the atrium around Lukahn as he turned from his usual dreary ballads to a reel. The crowd included the cursebreakers Clive had returned with that morning. Jill sat near them but not of them, her boots on the table, her sewing in her lap. Clive’s eyes lingered on her. She was unaware of him as she pulled her needle through her cloth, a small frown pulling her brows in. Her skirts draped down below the table. Stockings beneath preserved her modesty, but her careless posture never would have passed muster in his lady mother’s solar. Part princess, part pirate. Clive smiled.
“What are you working on?” he asked as he approached.
“Oh! Clive!” Jill started, swinging her feet off the table.
“Don’t stop on my account,” Clive said lightly.
“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” she said, smoothing her skirts. “Only practice. I was afraid I’d lost the knack.”
Clive glanced on what she was working on. A semi-circle of silver-grey vines wound around the edge of the frame.
“It looks well to me,” he said.
“I suppose,” she said, running her fingers over the thread. “But it’s taken me so long. I’m afraid I’ll never finish anything larger.”
“I do keep you busy, I suppose.”
Jill waved a dismissive hand “Oh, it’s not that. If anything, the opposite. When I’m out fighting, I feel useful. But when we come back home…. There’s always work to do, mending and minding and washing, but no one will let me do it. I can’t say that I blame them, I’m less use than a child at most of it, but I feel… guilty. For staying idle.”
“You know they do it out of respect. They feel like they’re failing in their duty if they need their lady to mind the cookfires.”
“Yes, but.” Jill looked away unhappily, folding her hands primly in her lap. “I am no better than they. Worse, in some regards. I am no princess. Never was, truly, not that I can remember. And aren’t we working toward a world without those distinctions?”
“Even without the titles, some men will be soldiers, others will be… bakers, brewers, farmers…. People will still specialize.”
“Is that what I am? A soldier?”
“I… well… No. No.” Clive thought for a moment. It looked painful. “Or…. Yes, actually.”
Jill laughed, but not very happily.
“We’ve neither of us had much choice in what we became,” Clive said.
“How true that is,” Jill said, and looked blankly where the small crowd around the bard was beginning to divide off into couples for a dance. “But you seem like you were born with a sword in your hand. You practically were. You always fit the part. The First Shield of Rosaria. I can’t imagine you as anything else. Whereas I….”
“You’re a more than good swordswoman, if that’s what concerns you.”
“It’s not that I doubt my skill,” Jill said, running a thumb over her needlework. “Though I’m glad to hear I’m no burden to you. It’s that…. I never would have chosen this, Clive. I never would have gone into battle by choice.”
“Does anyone? I don’t believe any good man—any good person—draws a sword except as a last resort.”
“But men dedicate entire lifetimes to expecting it, planning for it, even if they never see a battle. You were always on the road to becoming a warrior. I look at you and it’s not hard to see the boy you were. I think about the girl I was—about the woman I was bred to become, the lady of some castle... Of what I would be if things hadn’t fallen apart…. That woman is a stranger to me.”
“She’s no stranger to me. You would be as you were. As you are. Kind and faithful, and…. Immovable.”
Jill bowed her head.
“Even had Rosaria never fallen,” Clive offered. “Shiva would have eventually woken in you. You would have been pressured into making war, or at least preparing for it in order to threaten Rosaria’s enemies—or those of whatever lord you found yourself married to.”
“Would Shiva have woken in me? I don’t know that she would have.”
“Jill, if you think you’re some sort of failure for being molded into a weapon, then what does that make me? Even if the empire had never touched me, I would have commanded men against the Ironblood. There is no world where my primary use as a man was not my skill at arms.”
“Yes… but…. I’m a woman.”
“Do you view yourself as a failure as a woman because you can fight?”
“No,” Jill said slowly. “Well, perhaps a failure as a lady, but as we said we’re working toward a world that needs no ladies. No, I. No. That’s not the reason. I think…” she trailed off and bit her lip.
“What?”
“Men want… or men seem to want… a woman in need of protection. If she doesn’t need that, sometimes they don’t seem to see her as a woman. Or see her at all. I think…” she looked beyond Clive, to a sliver of sky visible between the walls, golden with the setting sun. “I think sometimes men go to war not out of need, not to defend anything they love, but to prove themselves men. And to them, I’m some sort of abomination, with or without the eikon.”
“If men go to war to prove themselves men, they’re only proving themselves fools. I think, that a woman with the strength, who failed to protect the meek, not because she couldn’t but because she is a woman, is…. Well, she’s not fulfilling her duty. You’re strong, Jill, not just in body and magic, but in will. You’ve used that strength. Justly, I believe.”
“But I am a woman, still,” Jill said, looking at him pointedly. “I feel sometimes everyone forgets. I’m afraid you forget.”
“Have I asked too much of you? More than you can give? More than you’re willing to give?”
“No. No. I often wish that you would ask more.”
“What more could I ask?”
Jill turned her face away from Clive. For some reason she seemed embarrassed.
Oh. Clive realized.
“Jill, I…” Clive started, and stopped, when he realized he was about to repeat her own fears back to her. What use would I be to you?
Instead he stood, and held out a hand to her. “Come on, let’s dance,” he said.
“Oh, I… I don’t know this one,” Jill said in sudden panic, but she took Clive’s hand and rose from her seat.
An improvised percussion band that include spoons and a couple of metal washbasins in addition to clapped hands had joined Lukahn’s lute. The dancers were stomping in one line before twirling around their partner to the rhythm.
“We’ll learn together,” Clive said, pulling her along.
“Clive! Come to join us, have you?” someone shouted.
“CIIIID!” someone else roared.
“Lady Jill!” a woman’s voice exclaimed.
“Dance with us Miss Jill!”
Jill was ducking her head and failing to look anyone in the eyes, but she was smiling. Together, she and Clive mimicked the steps of the other dancers. They pranced around each other with arms crossed, a little out of step. Just when they seemed to be getting the hang of it, they crashed into another couple. Clive laughed and apologized, waving a hand at the pair he had thrown off balance.
The band began another song, one Clive recognized. Together, Jill and Clive got through the dance with a bit more grace this time. The song after that seem to have no set steps, with partners swaying and prancing around each other. Jill seemed momentarily like a stunned animal, unsure what to do, but she moved her feet to the rhythm, and swished her skirts with it, and Clive moved in response and reached his hand out to her. They kept their eyes on each other, their movements an unspoken, slightly awkward conversation. Hips swayed, hands met hands.
There was a pause in the music. A girl new to the Hideaway, who Clive had seen but never spoken to, was being pushed toward Lukahn by her friends.
“Lania, Lania, come on, sing for us!” one of them urged. The girl seemed embarrassed, but not displeased, and ducked behind her hand to have a quick, whispered conversation with the bard. They agreed on a song she knew, and Lukahn played, slow at first.
Clive lost the thread of the lyrics. Something about a lost love and the light of the moon. The girl had a sweet voice, deeper and richer than her tender years would have suggested. Lukahn harmonized with her at first, then dropped out to accompany her on the lute, as entranced as the rest of the crowd.
Clive and Jill swayed to the slow rhythm, close together, not a sliver of light between their bodies. A warmth stirred in Clive, low in the base of his spine and his lower belly, spreading upwards to his heart. He wrapped his arms around Jill and tilted his chin to rest it on the top of her head.
Clive slowly realized that all the other couples had moved out of the dance floor to watch as well as listen to the girl sing, leaving him and Jill alone. As the only couple still moving, and as such well-known figures in the Hideaway, nearly as many eyes followed them as were entranced by the girl Lania’s unexpected talent.
For a moment, it didn’t matter and all was still well. Jill’s hands were climbing up his back. He was exactly where he wanted to be. He was safe here and it didn’t matter if everyone in the Hideaway watched them.
But then Clive was outside himself, seeing the pair of them as an onlooker.
Some noblewoman and her Branded pet, he thought, and twisted the left side of his face into his shoulder in shame just as Tarja had accused him of doing.
It didn’t make sense, and he knew it. It wasn’t fair, not to his comrades, and not to Jill. But that didn’t stop the sweating of his hands or the quickening of his breath. Reason couldn’t argue away the desire to shrink away from Jill’s touch, to flee, to slink into the shadows where no eyes could fall on him and add up the paltry sum of his worth with a glance.
He couldn’t run. It would embarrass Jill, it would invite questions, it would ruin the lovely performance they were witnessing. He continued to sway in place, but like an automaton, all peace and desire from mere moments ago lost.
Jill noticed his discomfort, either in the tension of his body or in the stutter in their rhythm, because she looked up at him, and then laid her head on his shoulder, and whispered where only he could hear. “Shhh, shhh, all is well. All will be well.”
Far from comforting him, her whispers made him want to rage and weep. What did they do to me? What did they take from me, that the woman I love feels the need to comfort me like a child? That her touch makes my skin crawl? What did they hollow out of me and what did they replace it with?
When the song ended, the little crowd clapped and cheered, and he pulled away from Jill, and away from the impromptu party, walking deliberately slow so that no one would know anything was amiss. He even paused to speak to the girl, Lania. Her other admirers parted to let him near. “That was beautiful. We’re glad you’re here. I hope to hear you sing again,” he said, but he didn’t pause to gauge her reaction, instead slipping into the deeper recesses of the Hideaway.
Jill met him at the door to his quarters in awkward posture, one arm holding the other elbow. “Thank you,” she said, her gaze downcast. “For dancing with me.”
Clive looked for a response that wasn’t either churlish or a bald-faced lie. It was a pleasure. Any time. It was wonderful until it wasn’t. I panicked when I realized other people could see me. I’m sorry, it won’t happen again.
The silence stretched. Jill shifted on her feet. Clive knew he had hurt her. “It’s not… you,” he said, hating himself for voicing the non-explanation of terrible lovers in this and all other planes.
“You can tell me,” Jill said, and her eyes shone in the shadows. “You can tell me what it is. Whatever it is.”
Clive thought about it. Faces swam into his mind, the reasons he never slept out of arms’ reach of his sword. A fellow bearer who had been kind to him when he was young and newly branded until he had drugged him and hissed into his ear now you don’t want to let anyone know this happened, do you? A knight whose comments about his body he had simply accepted with silence and a dead-eyed gaze because he had learned by then that very few battles were worth fighting. He’d learned to keep his head down--a habit hard to make and then harder still to break--because a Bearer that met a free man’s eye was guilty of pride and insolence, if not worse. There were things he had done as willingly as any Bearer did anything, because it won him some paltry gain: a decent meal, a night’s sleep in a real bed, a hand that caressed his hair instead of striking him across the face. Sometimes, it hadn’t been that bad. Accepting the touch of some noblewoman was surely more pleasant than fighting for his life on the battlefield. Surely the work of his hands and his tongue damned him less than the work of his sword-arm. All was done at the behest of his masters. All was done for the sake of survival, because like a beast, he had no other hopes.
No. What he had endured tonight was less than any of that. Not things he dared not voice, but something too unimportant to give voice: the fear that when someone looked at him, they saw something completely other than what he was. How could he say that he felt that they were measuring his worth by the mark on his face? How could he accuse them of that, when most of them bore that mark as well?
“I would rather not,” Clive said finally.
“Do you not trust me?” Jill said, stepping close to him.
“Of course I do, Jill, but I would rather not burden you with it.”
“I would understand,” she said.
“I know you would. Probably all too well. Which is why I would rather…” he gestured vaguely at his head. “Keep it here. Not spread it. Let it die with me one day.”
“Clive,” Jill started, and touched a hand to his shoulder.
He pulled away.
Jill dropped her hand. She looked down, and pressed her lips together. She pushed past him, saying: “Good night, Clive.”
**
Clive knocked on the infirmary door first thing the next morning.
“Clive,” Tarja said when she opened the door.
“Take it off me,” Clive said, with more desperation in his voice than he had intended. “As soon as you can.”