A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood #1)
S.T. Gibson
To those who escaped a love like death,
and to those still caught in its grasp:
you are the heroes of this story
PART ONE
I never dreamed it would end like this, my lord: your blood splashing hot flecks onto my nightgown and pouring in rivulets onto our bedchamber floor. But creatures like us live a long time. There is no horror left in this world that can surprise me. Eventually, even your death becomes its own sort of inevitability.
I know you loved us all, in your own way. Magdalena for her brilliance, Alexi for his loveliness. But I was your war bride, your faithful Constanta, and you loved me for my will to survive. You coaxed that tenacity out of me and broke it down in your hands, leaving me on your work table like a desiccated doll until you were ready to repair me.
You filled me with your loving guidance, stitched up my seams with thread in your favorite color, taught me how to walk and talk and smile in whatever way pleased you best. I was so happy to be your marionette, at first. So happy to be chosen.
What I am trying to say is I am trying to tell you
Even loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.
I am trying to tell you why I did what I did. It is the only way I can think to survive and I hope, even now, that you would be proud of my determination to persist.
God. Proud. Am I sick to still think on you softly, even after all the blood and broken promises?
No matter. Nothing else will do. Nothing less than a full account of our life together, from the trembling start all the way to the brutal end. I fear I will go mad if I don’t leave behind some kind of record. If I write it down, I won’t be able to convince myself that none of it happened. I won’t be able to tell myself that you didn’t mean any of it, that it was all just some terrible dream.
You taught us to never feel guilty, to revel when the world demands mourning. So we, your brides, will toast to your memory and drink deep of your legacy, taking our strength from the love we shared with you. We will not bend to despair, not even as the future stretches out hungry and unknown before us. And I, for my part, will keep a record. Not for you, or for any audience, but to quiet my own mind.
I will render you as you really were, neither cast in pristine stained glass or unholy fire. I will make you into nothing more than a man, tender and brutal in equal measure, and perhaps in doing so I will justify myself to you. To my own haunted conscience.
This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. I suppose both are a sort of gentle violence, putting down in ink what scorches the air when spoken aloud.
If you can still hear me wherever you are, my love, my tormentor, hear this:
It was never my intention to murder you.
Not in the beginning, anyway.
You came to me when the killing was done, while my last breaths rattled through failing lungs. The drunken singing of the raiders wafted towards me on the breeze as I lay in the blood-streaked mud, too agonized to cry out for help. My throat was hoarse from smoke and screaming, and my body was a tender mass of bruises and shattered bones. I had never felt pain like that in my life, and never would again.
War is never valiant, only crude and hideous. Any left alive after the rest have been cut down do not last long exposed to the elements.
I was somebody’s daughter once; a village girl with arms strong enough to help her father in the smithy and a mind quick enough to recall her mother’s shopping list in the market. My days were measured by the light in the sky and the chores set before me, with weekly spoken mass in our tiny wooden church. It was a meager existence, but a happy one, full of my grandmother’s ghost stories by the fire and the hope that one day, I would run my own household.
I wonder if you would have wanted me if you found me like that: vibrant and loved and alive.
But you found me alone, my lord. Beaten down to a shadow of my former self and very near death. It was as though fate had laid me out for you, an irresistible banquet.
Of promise, you would say, of potential.
I say it was vulnerability.
I heard you before I saw you, the clink of mail and crunch of debris underfoot. My grandmother always said creatures like you made no sound when they descended onto battlefields to sup on the fallen. You were supposed to be a night terror made of smoke, not a man of flesh and blood who left footsteps in the dirt.
I flinched when you knelt at my side, my body using what little strength was left to jerk away. Your face was obscured by the blinding sun, but I bared my teeth all the same. I didn’t know who you were. I just knew I would claw out the eyes of the next man who touched me, if my fingers didn’t seize up and betray me. I had been beaten and left for dead, and yet it was not death that had come to claim me.
“Such spite and fury,” you said, your voice a trickle of ice water down my spine. It rooted me to the spot, like a rabbit entranced by a hunter’s snare. “Good. When life fails you, spite will not.”
You took my wrist between your fingers, chill as marble, and brought it up to your mouth. Gently, you pressed a kiss to the pulse quickly going quiet in my wrist.
It was only then I saw your face, while you leaned over me and gauged how long I had left to live. Sharp, dark eyes, a Romanesque nose, and a severe mouth. There was no shadow of malnutrition or disease on your face, no childhood scar gone white with age. Just smooth, impassable perfection, so beautiful it hurt to look at.