On the drunken night when Idezza celebrated their triumph, Taffiz took me to a watchtower of Idezza's castle. The place was deserted, for he must have paid for it.
"Good thing we don't expect a surprise attack," I said and looked around.
The sky turned crystalline and starry, despite the bonfires and the funeral pyres smoldering at the Piazza Divina. Heights didn't make me dizzy, but my head spun because of our victory and my ascension to the title of Captain-Commander. Someone spread cushions, blankets and rose petals. Their fragrance completed the transformation of the rough-cut stone floor into the lovers' bed. Stars, pillows, rough surface—my lips stretched in an amused smile. This couldn't be a coincidence. Taffiz and coincidences didn't go together.
"Oh, sweetheart, you have more freedom than any other man I've met," I said. "But, apparently, all you've ever wanted was what Kozima had at seventeen?"
"Ah," he said, nuzzling my hair. "Isn't that what we all want? To be seventeen? After I've indulged so many of your dreams, fulfilling one of mine didn't feel like such a terrible idea."
"I hope there will be no surprise attack." I rubbed my shoulders. "I'm too exhausted to fight or even raise an alarm."
"There will be no surprise attack." He slipped a band of thick silk over my eyes.
I snorted. "Remind me of the last thing you've said? Something about not expecting any surprises?"
"Except for this."
Blindfolded, I sensed the warmth and pressure of his mouth on my lips more acutely. His teeth grazed my lower lip, a tiny pinch. I found his tongue with mine and nearly burst into laughter. He used chamomile to mask Ashanti!
I didn't have the heart to tell him that chamomile was the only flavor I abhorred more than Ashanti. Suppressing a wince, I tasted his mouth some more. Was it so bad? Bitter, but fresh. Hmm.
I pressed his head closer, digging my fingers into his silly plait to loosen his hair. He earned this. He was a good kisser. But the blindfold bothered me. Was he using it to save me from seeing his face while we were together? I touched the dark cloth and his lips slipped to my ear.
"I have silk bonds," he whispered. "If it helps... if you'll trust me more."
"No, I'll trust you more like this." I tugged the loose knot on the blindfold free and let it fall. A little shimmy, and with the help of his agile hands, my dress followed in the rustle of fabric. "I want to see you, I want to feel you and I want to know you."
His breath hitched as his glance roamed over my bare shoulders, breasts and hips.
"Did the story of your childhood really make Parneres weep?" I asked, taking a small step back.
"I lied," Taffiz confessed. "When I discovered that his unavailability wasn't what attracted you to him."
"So you lied, because you hoped I'd transfer my affection to you, if you can trick me into thinking your past was tragic?"
He shrugged. "When you put it like that... You have a strange effect on me, Ishmara."
"How so?" I pulled his shirt over his head.
"You make me behave irrationally." His eyes shone so brightly that I could see their glow through the black silk. Long limp hair glued itself to the shirt's fabric before I tossed the garment to the floor.
"Tell me anyway." I traced the neat arrangement of his stomach muscles with my fingertips.
He dropped to his knees, hid his face in my navel. "I was born in Saragon, in the City of Valenta."
I sat next to him. His hands were so presuasive, that I was glad I'd demanded the story of his life upfront. Otherwise, I might have never gotten around to hearing it.
"My mother is a High Scribe. I have two sisters, an older one and a younger one, so Mother has never objected to me being schooled with them. Firstly, because my success shamed them into trying harder. Secondly, because..."
I gave into the suggestions from his hands and arms and stretched out on the pillows, my head in his lap. "Because?"
"Because... because..." he squeezed his eyes shut to focus on the past. "Because it was clear from the earliest days of my boyhood I was too ugly to marry well."
An unpleasant thing moved in my chest. Guilt for saying things I had said to him in the past. My fingers threaded through his hair.
"Naturally, like any child whose nose is rubbed in someone else's excellence, my sisters found countless ways to wound me. I fought back by stealing their clothes to sneak into the madrasahs, study even more and best them again. There are so many madrasahs in Valenta! They don't call it the Scholars' Paradize for nothing. As I matured, I found that I enjoyed studying in peace, a clever girl among other girls, not a freak of a boy fluent in the Mother of All Tongues."
If I married him, I realized, I would have to contend with one of those horrid High Scribes as a mother-in-law. I imagined Baroness Ornatti's spitefulness added to a brilliant mind like Phedoxia's and groaned. "Sweetheart, I'm afraid a Captain-Commander wouldn't be good enough for your mother. Women of war don't count for much in the Scribes' Halls. Would she even consent to our marriage?"
He picked through the strands of my hair like a magpie through its mate's feathers. "Don't worry. I'd already applied myself to marrying someone Mother wanted. A noblewoman, the true blood of Saragon and powerful at Court."
"You're married?" This news shouldn't have upset me. I'd never cared before who he was involved with, be it professionally or personally. Mythra's fangs, he bedded Anastasia, and I didn't care one whit! But a wife who was in every respect my better in the eyes of the world? If I knew, I wouldn't have mentioned a marriage.
He stopped me from springing to my feet, then tickled my chin with my own hair. His eyes hooded, his voice assumed its huskiest timber. "I wasn't her senior husband. That honor went to a scion of a royal family. I was a junior husband, which was an excellent match for me. And I was her favorite."
Something in his tone made me bite my tongue.
"Come on," he chided. "You're dying to know why."
"Fine. Why?"
"Aha! My lady wife mercilessly whipped her manservants for smallest errors, but in bed..." he paused. His violet eyes twinkled.
I sighed. "You're impossible."
"In bed, she wanted to be spanked and scolded like a little girl. That was her secret and I used it to force her to marry me. It also kept me in her favor. It didn't hurt that she also wanted a supply of poisons on hand to ruin things for her court rivals."
"You've killed for her? I thought Guild forbade it?"
"No murders. Just embarrassing incidents. Social triumphs thwarted by bouts of diarrhea or hives."
"Devious!" I caught his fingers in mine, and twisted them all into a knot. "Are you still married to this lady?"
He shook his head in denial. "Divorce was ten times harder to secure than marriage, but I did it. I'm a free man!"
"You're bragging again." I tilted my head and arched my back to touch the Scorpia brand on his chest. "What of this? Are you also free from it?"
"The Scorpia is how I escaped my home in the first place. The recruiter, once I've unearthed her... Ah, Ishmara? Can I brag?"
I laughed helplessly. "You would no matter what I say. So brag on. What about this recruiter?"
"It was maddeningly difficult to make contact. I was eighteen and could teach mules how to be stubborn."
"It doesn't surprise me."
"Imagine my outrage when after all these efforts, the recruiter didn't want me!"
"I wonder why."
"The Guild normally seeks men like Parneres. Beautiful, witty, willing to fish for secrets once a woman's head rests on the pillow. But like I said, finding the Guild was so difficult, I lost my temper when she rejected me."
I flipped over, propping myself on an elbow. Kissed him on the lips.
"Mmgh. She thought my unmanly arrogance and cross-dressing habit could be turned toward working with..." He kissed me back. Very lightly, but enough to rekindle everything that settled down while he was talking. "...extreme tastes, like my lady wife's. Then I was branded as a Scorpia. And you became a bone in my throat. "
He used kisses for punctuation. I found his grammar impeccable. My fingers caressed the covered parts of him through the silk. His calves, and hips and what lived a life of its own in between.
"If you don't take me in a womanly fashion, I'll toss myself off this tower," Taffiz said hoarsely.
"Knowing you, there is a pile of straw at the foot of it for you to land on."
"No. No tricks at all tonight."
Forgetting the words, I anchored him to the floor. Yansara's silver light gilded his arching neck and pointed chin. Rose petals ground on the stone underneath us gave out their oil to perfume the air.
He wasn't a gentle lover, but an exciting one. By instinct or education, he knew where pressure and bite gave pleasure before becoming pain. Because of his secretive nature, I expected him to be quiet in Indara's ecstasy, but he cried out before collapsing under me. And he kept moaning, holding on to me.
"Ina'amatus, ina'guarda, ina'Ishmara." Guarded by thy love and Ishmara's.
"There is no temple that would sanctify a marriage in the name of a Bhuta," I teased him. "Your vow doesn't count."
"Bring me before an altar of your choosing, and I'll say the name written on it. But we aren't in a temple," he replied, "this is between you and me. The vow is in your name."
I racked my coitus-addled brain for the words in the Mother of All tongues. I didn't think I got them wrong.
"Ina'Ishmara, tea... tea'amatus, Taffiz. In Ishmara's name, I love you."
"And?"
Tea'guardo. He wanted me to say the words, 'I guard you'. "Of all men, you're the only one who doesn't require a woman's protection."
"Say it anyway, Ishmara. Please?"
This wasn't a game for him, not lovers' banter. I said the full vow, almost word for word, as written in the Primordial Age. "Ina'Ishmara, tea'guardo, tea'amatus, Taffiz." In Ishmara's name, I guard you and love you, Taffiz.
Then, against the Tenets, the tradition, against all that was proper, he echoed me.
"Ino'Taffiz, tea'guardo, tea'amatus, Ishmara." In Taffiz's name, I guard you and love you, Ishamara.
And he did, he did for so long.
The Knowable World swung around us. Its moon, its stars, its jungles and its rivers were full of Divine grace. Their touch was evident in even the paltry things, including him and me, two lovers who said and did things others never approved of.
And in Kozima, who abandoned the comfortable dreams of his boyhood for an uncomfortable love.
And in Ondrey, who even now fought bravely in the Land of the Swift Sunrise, shrugging off scorn.
And in Parneres, who tangled himself worse in the spider's net trying to escape, but still had the strength to break free.
And Nirav, who blundered and barely held it together in the face of fear, but stood tall in the end for the sake of the only person he truly loved even if it wasn't me.
As the dawn bathed the world in red, I, the newest Captain-Commander of the Deadhead Company, gazed into the beautiful face of my sleeping lover. Taffiz recognized the power in me and mine. He put the power he couldn't wield into my hands. He told me that the war was coming, the Second Primordial War.
And he was right.
He was right.
I didn't make the Knowable World, I just lived in it. My entire life and this night brought me to understand this one thing. Until we change our ways so that everyone may follow their heart in this one life they live right now, not waiting for a rebirth, we'll never have true peace. It was blaspemy. It was truth.
"Listen," I said to the rising sun and the jubilant, forever renewing Knowable World. "Listen to me!"
The End
Calgary, June 25, 2020
Last Edited: January 06, 2023