The Blood Mirror

  “But there was another school of thought. Instead of ignoring the flaw, they highlighted it instead. It’s called golden joinery or golden repair. Look, maybe this is all just artists’ bullshit, right, but they say it’s not a celebration of flaws but an acceptance of them, addressed insofar as the structure needs it. Here, Phaestos—that was the woodwright’s name, just came to me—here in addition to the gold dust that would be mixed with the joinery glue to hold the knots together and make the starburst patterns, he also employed some master drafter-artisans.”

  Her face had relaxed as she told Kip of her people, as he had hoped it would. She was intensely proud of them.

  “But I’m boring you,” she said.

  “Not at all. Why masters? Slap some solid yellow in knotholes. Problem solved, right?”

  “Structurally, yes, but these were women who’d been asked to work with Phaestos himself. Well, we don’t know their names. It’s assumed they were women because they were yellow superchromats. They were great artists, too. A true artist is one for whom there is no ‘good enough.’ They drafted perfect solid yellow for the structural integrity, but then they filled channels so small we can’t see them or perhaps natural air pockets in the wood with a yellow luxin ever so slightly off spectrum so that on moonlit nights, some of the yellow would release into visible light. They say it was like seeing the moonlight shimmer on the undulating waves.

  “The downside, of course, is that when you have luxin decaying, no matter how slowly that is, it eventually disappears. They say the shimmering luxin lasted more than a hundred years. Some say there is a lesson there about the longevity of what is made by magic and what is made by hand, and what endures—Phaestos’s work remains while theirs is gone. Personally, I think a century is pretty good.”

  “No one could fix it?” Kip asked.

  “It’s not like sending gleams to refill the lanterns at the Chromeria, Kip. They tried. They failed. There are some things that pass from the earth and are simply lost.”

  “Huh.”

  They sat together for a time, looking at the salving curves and basking in the soporific natural wood tones.

  “Do you buy it?” Kip asked finally.

  “That they used the luxin for art?”

  “No, the bit about golden joinery.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, it’s one thing when you see the technique used on a bowl or plate. The woodwright could have simply tossed out a piece of faulty wood and made something perfect with another piece, so you know that incorporating the flaw was a choice, right? But on something this massive? There wasn’t a choice. Orholam only knows how many trees they must have gone through to get the perfect tones and patterns already. Maybe the flaws came first and the justifications came later, like this is what they had to work with, so they made the best of it.”

  “Regardless, they did a helluva job with it, didn’t they?” Kip asked. “I can imagine the ceiling without those golden stars reflected in the rippling waves, but they add something beautiful, don’t they?”

  He saw a wave of gooseflesh go over Tisis’s skin. Perhaps it was merely because the room was cold.

  “You bastard,” she said, but she wasn’t angry. She turned and looked at him. “You already knew about golden joinery, didn’t you?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Actually, I was hoping we could learn about it together.”

  Her body tensed and she sucked in a breath, and then tears blossomed in her eyes.

  He saw her, in that single moment, fall in love with him.

  If their brokenness were anything else, they would fall into each other’s arms and let their bodies now speak with wordless urgency the vows they’d made long ago. But where bodies fail, words must stand.

  “I will not leave or forsake you,” Kip said. “This is something we need to fix; it does weaken us, but someday, it will be a source of our strength.”

  Tisis fixed intent eyes on him. “Kip, I’m going to cry now, and I need you to hold me and not try to fix it. It’s the good kind of crying.”

  There’s a good kind?

  “And then,” she said. “To the best of my ability, I am going to ravish you.”

  And so she did.

  After they had pleased each other, and laughed, and held and been held, in the moment where Kip was torn between ramping up the passion again or maybe just admitting it had been a damn long day and maybe they could make love again in the morning, Tisis said, “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “You can’t,” Kip said. “I’m asleep.”

  Very subtly, he wiggled deeper under the blankets.

  “Kip,” she said plaintively.

  “Oooh, what have we here?” he asked her chest.

  “Kip—oh! Kip, I’m—mm… serious.”

  He sighed. If he was learning anything about marriage, it was that talks must come. Putting them off did nothing good.

  He poked his head back above the covers.

  She looked mildly disappointed—not fair! But then she gathered her wits. “Um…” She blew out a breath. “Kip, I want to make love tonight. I mean, I want to try again.”

  Kip dropped his head onto his pillow with a groan. They had fresh bread and fine cheeses, and she was going to complain that they didn’t have wine? “Tonight? When everything is so perfect? You’re doing this now?” Eat the fucking bread and cheese, woman!

  “I want—”

  “We’ve talked about this! We agreed! Can’t you just leave well enough—”

  “I knew you were going to do this,” she said.

  “Hold you to your word?!” he said.

  “That is not fair!”

  Yes, it was. But Kip bit his lip.

  A man who’d just been pleasured by a woman so beautiful shouldn’t feel the depths of rage Kip felt now. “I have made my peace with this,” Kip said.

  “I haven’t,” she said.

  “Well, you’ll save yourself more heartache the sooner you do,” Kip said. “This is how things work in my life. Nothing can be all good; there always has to be birdshit floating in the mead. If I have a friend, I have to know he’s going to die. If I love a girl, she’ll fall for someone else. If—against all odds!—I have something as good as what you and I have, there’s no way it can be whole. This is as good as it gets.” He waved a hand at the rippling, polished grains of the masterpiece above them. “I don’t understand why the hell you’re looking at this marriage and calling it a dead ceiling.”

  “Oh, Kip,” she said, but she couldn’t find words.

  They lay beside each other, still in the midst of wealth and beauty, but Kip felt as if all the mud and shit at the bottom of Kip Pond had been swirled back up, and he didn’t trust himself to find words that didn’t reek of bitterness. He just needed time for all that shit to settle down again. Just let it be.

  “Maybe, maybe you’ve noticed me working with Evie Cairn?” she asked, still lying on her back, speaking as if to the ceiling.

  “Yes?” The healer?

  She rolled her eyes. “And here my first plan was to wait until you asked me about it.” It was an attempt at levity, but a weak one.

  Kip didn’t say, ‘You meet with people all day long, and most of them are your sources for something or other, why would I even—’ Instead he said, “So, honey, why were you meeting with a healer?” It was an attempt at sincerity, but a weak one.

  And lo and behold, that question didn’t lead to a fight.

  Damn, this controlling-his-tongue thing was seeming like a better and better idea all the time.

  “She said she’d seen this before. Especially in girls under incredible pressure or who’d had bad early experiences.”

  Kip wasn’t understanding. He propped himself up on an elbow.

  Tisis continued, “Or women who have a lot of negative attitudes about lovemaking, but obviously that’s not really my case, ha. But the first two…”

  “What? What?”

  “So I’ve been t
alking through some things with her,” Tisis said.

  Kip felt like the time when Ramir and Sanson and Isa and he had gone swimming. Ramir’s idea, of course, and when Isa had balked at taking off her tunic by pointing out that Kip was wearing his, Ramir had been furious with him. He’d cornered Kip, and forcibly stripped off his tunic. Then he’d mocked Kip for being fat, as Kip had known he would.

  That sensation of being stripped naked for someone else’s commentary came rushing back. “You’ve been telling some stranger about what we do and don’t do in our bed—”

  “Kip, dammit! You think it was easy for me? Don’t you trust me at all? And she’s not a stranger now.”

  It wasn’t just embarrassment, it was bigger than that. “Do you realize what could happen if my grandfather or your sister finds out? Orholam’s balls, Tisis, your cousin could take a quarter of our army away—”

  “I wasn’t thinking about them! I was thinking about us!”

  He didn’t say, ‘And you put everything at risk to do so!’

  He didn’t say, ‘That’s the problem, you didn’t think at all!’

  Instead he took a breath.

  And in his momentary hesitation, she spoke again. “It was supposed be a surprise. A good thing, Kip. I can’t—I can’t live like this. I’m sorry you’re angry, but I’m not sorry I did it.”

  “Great. So you’ve risked the entire war so that you can have girl talk with someone who—for all we know—could be an enemy agent. Do you feel better after talking it out?” Kip demanded.

  He was being an asshole. He knew it; he couldn’t stop it.

  “Gods! I don’t understand you at all sometimes. I don’t know how you can be that magnificent giant I see bending the world to his will one day and then the next day be this, this dwarf.”

  “Oh, come, look at it another way,” Kip said. “If I were smaller—much, much smaller—we wouldn’t be having this problem at all.”

  “Orholam dammit, Kip!” she said. “I don’t know why you’re embarrassed. You feel exposed, ashamed? It’s not even your fault! She told me all the things men often do and say that make it even worse, and you’ve done none of those. You’ve been perfect. This is all on me.”

  And she was silent, and she was hurting, and Kip’s heart opened to her because he knew what being silent and hurting and trying to suck it up and not complain felt like when it seemed everything was your fault.

  “Don’t be like that. Don’t do that,” Kip said.

  “What?”

  “There’s no your problem or my problem here. There’s only our problems. There’s only things we each have to do for our marriage to thrive.”

  “Yeah?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’ve been trying. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but… I thought you’d forbid it, and we’d just have to endure good for the rest of our marriage. I don’t want good with you, Kip. I want amazing. I won’t settle for less than that.”

  “I just don’t…” He stopped. Tried again. “I appreciate that. And you’re right. I would have been an asshole, and I would have tried to stop you, and… and I would have been wrong.” Because the entire fucking war is totally worth risking for my personal happiness, right?

  Shit.

  No, it was because it’s never good to give up. He had, and she hadn’t, and he was wrong to ask her to be more like him in this.

  “So what now?” he asked.

  “So… I’ve been, um, practicing? Training?”

  “Practicing? Practicing—wait, with who?”

  “Orholam’s beard, Kip, no, come on! I haven’t been seeking out men with small penises.”

  “Well, I… okay, maybe that was kind of stupid. What did you mean, then?”

  She looked awkward. “I don’t really know how much you want to know. I mean, some wine beforehand and olive oil and, uh, graduated cylinders.”

  “Graduated cylinders?” Then he thought of cones he’d seen in her luggage. And then he thought about them again. “Ooooh.”

  “And with your constant late nights, I haven’t had much privacy to work on it.”

  “Oh. Uh, sorry? That does sound… awkward.”

  “You walked in on me once, don’t you remember?”

  “Was that when you had the coughing fit?”

  “And you came over to comfort me. I thought the smell would… Anyway…” She was blushing hard.

  “I thought you Foresters were supposed to be unembarrassable with, ahem, matters of the root and cave.”

  She ducked her head. “Clearly I didn’t spend enough of my youth here.”

  “Oh yeah, seeing as my dad sort of took you hostage and all.” He grinned. “I am really, really blind, huh?” Kip said.

  “Only wh—” She stopped herself.

  ‘Only where I’m concerned,’ she didn’t say.

  Shit.

  She was right. And she’d stopped herself from saying it because she was kind.

  Somehow the ice was melting, and more than that.

  “You do realize that I love you, right?” Kip said.

  It was, now that he thought about it, actually the first time he’d ever said it. Somehow he’d thought his actions should have made it obvious.

  She burst into tears.

  Kip was no expert, but he didn’t think these were the good kind.

  “You big idiot,” she said through her tears. “That’s not how you tell a girl you love her!”

  “I thought it went without saying!”

  “Those words never go without saying!”

  “Well!” he shouted. Then he got quiet. “Now I know.”

  She hesitated, uncertain where he was going next.

  “First time I ever said it to anyone,” he said.

  The future was a chasm, and her love was a plank, and he didn’t know where it ended. And he’d just run three steps blindly into the darkness.

  “You know I love you, too, right?” she said.

  “Well, now I know,” he said with a half grin.

  “I’ve said it before,” she said. “Pretty much.”

  You won’t accept a tacit ‘I love you,’ but you want me to? But he didn’t say it. It wasn’t exactly analogous anyway. “I didn’t believe it,” he said.

  “Oh, Kip, you make me want to take this big knot of all these feelings I can’t even name and have gneas sáraigh.”

  “That was… not clear,” Kip said. He could memorize foreign terms, but he didn’t think this was one he was going to want to ask anyone about.

  She exhaled and reached under the covers. She grabbed him and squeezed. Not softly or erotically, either, though there was something inescapably and confusingly erotic for Kip in having Tisis grab him.

  She said, “I am so frustrated and I want you and I want to hurt you and I love you and it’s all such a jumble—”

  “No, I think I’ve got the feeling pretty exactly. It was the phrase I didn’t know. Ow.”

  “Oh.” She loosened her grip, but didn’t let go. Better. “Closest I can translate it would be ‘fucking it out.’ It’s when you make love after you’re angry and then you feel better. It’s different than caidreamh collaí feargach, which is just angry lovemaking, where afterwards you feel better because you just had passionate sex, but you’re still mad at the other person.”

  “That sounds good,” Kip said. “I mean, the former. I mean, the latter sounds not too bad, either, but only if after a few rounds of it you eventually got to the former. So, uh, let’s do that—the former, I mean.”

  “I, um.” She cleared her throat. “I said I really wanted to—and I do! Not that I can. Because I can’t. And if I get even a little bit nervous—well, we’ll fail. Again.”

  “Very… well…” Kip said. “You just tell me what to do that will make you happy, and I’ll do that.”

  “Can you, like… hold all that grab-me-and-hold-me-down-make-me-quiver passion in your eyes, but not actually do anything to scare me?”

  Now
Kip cleared his throat. “You’re asking a lot of a man.”

  “You are a lot of a man,” she said with a naughty little grin.

  It was as if they were playing roles for each other, but all in all, being silly and out of your depth was better than being angry and confused, wasn’t it?

  He kissed her, and slowly, the inner turmoil vanished. Then, slowly—more slowly than either of them wanted, but as slowly as was necessary—they made love.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. It was halting, and it was asking questions, and it was some answers that would not appear in one’s fantasies. But Kip shut up and he began to listen, and once he began to listen, he began to hear snippets of her song, and then all he had to do was hear the ever-changing verses of her heart’s desire and sing them in a refrain to her body.

  Though perfectly attentive, perfectly diligent, Kip was not a perfect lover yet. But love doesn’t demand perfection, only focus and time and effort. And before the night had passed, they had finally, joyfully, consummated their marriage.

  It was a beginning, and it was a promise, and it was love; it was what had been broken fused together anew.

  As the dawn rose, they lay head to head, staring up into the center of A World Begins, and Kip understood why this was treated as a honeymoon chamber. For a wedding was a world’s beginning, a start from which all was possible, and a couple would lie head to head like this only after the lovemaking and after the cuddling, after their desires were sated, and their hearts were full, and their minds at ease, and their bodies at rest, and now they could be refocused together to a single purpose.

  As the light rose like gold through the mirrors and lenses channeling the light above, Kip felt open to all the world, at peace, and in that morning color, he intuited another truth, coded there in the luxin itself: even perfect repairs must be tended.

  The golden yellow was a mere hair’s breadth from perfect luxin yellow, and, seeing that, Kip looked for superviolet, and it too was there, and a smidge of orange, and even the tiniest slivers of red and sub-red. There was blue for some stars, and red for others, there were nubs of paryl and triggers of chi.