~*~
Melisande turned around on the path like the first purl row on a long scarf. Birds chirruped in the trees. The goat bleated.
A wife. Was it better to know the fate of a cat gone missing than to be left hoping for and imagining something kinder than the truth? She moved unsteadily to the garden bench where the maiden’s cloak lay half draped on the ground beside the broken teacup. A chill crept up her spine as she bent to retrieve it.
A dropped stitch in the heart of a rose. Surely not.
The cloak slipped from her fingers. Flooding into the wake of her scorned heart came a ferocious, ice-jammed torrent of what was and what might have been; the swordsman’s touch, his smile, the sound he made in his throat when rolling her into bed, the clumsy way he had muscled a ladder to the wall to fix a crack. Dark spots filled her eyes as she walked to the cottage. What use had she for marriage? For her work, the villagers helped her. And children? Pah! She preferred cats. A goat. A garden with violets.
For all that, a swordsman was quite nice to care for.
She reached the door in a near run as the pain flooded down. She had never asked the war god to be true to her; she preferred him free. What did she expect?
A wife?
She entered the cottage and stumbled to her knitting cabinet. She flung open the doors, ripped the drawers from their tracks and rifled through yarn until she found a skein of blood red. Tears streaming down her face, she clutched the coils in her fist like a beating heart, snatched up a pair of elegant needles and sank to her knees, pattern sense rising and falling in her fingers like the breath of a dragon. She could change this. End this. Turn of a heart, death of a wife, fall of a trickster. She could—
With a cry, she dropped her woolen heart and threw the needles skittering across the floor. Then she buried her face in her tingling hands and wept.