Page 44 of Ravished By the Revenant

The modern word in his ancient mouth almost gets me. Almost. But I can still hear the words he said in that cellar, and the wound feels too fresh.

I pick up my boots and turn my back on him to sit on the edge of the raised bed and put them on. The dry socks are warm. He warmed them. By the kitchen fire, probably, while rehearsing his speech, because he rehearses, I’ve heard him do it through doors.

I lace my boots and say nothing.

The silence stretches long enough that Shmoo starts washing his face.

“I will make food,” Aldric says finally, quietly, to my back. “You have not eaten since yesterday. It will be waiting when you are ready. Or it will be waiting anyway.”

His steps retreat up the path. The garden door opens and closes with a gentleness that’s somehow worse than slamming.

“I’m still mad,” I tell Shmoo.

Shmoo looks pointedly toward the keep, where a thread of smoke is already rising from the kitchen chimney.

“I am.”

My stomach, that traitor, growls loud enough to startle a bee.

I hold out for another ninety minutes, which I count as a moral victory, and then my body stages a coup and marches me inside.

He’s waiting at the great table. The spread is ridiculous. Roasted chicken, bread still steaming, butter, honey, the fan of sliced apples he creates when he’s trying. Even candles.

I sit. I put my napkin in my lap. I look at him with all the warmth of a Swiss bank denying a loan.

Aldric isn’t smirking. He’s just watching me carefully, his undead eye seeming less vibrant than usual.

“When I touched the goblet,” I say, tearing bread with more force than bread requires, “I had a vision. The witch. I watched her pour the souldust into your wine, right here in this hall. Then I saw her younger, in a meadow, with two little girls. Her daughters. They all had my hair, Aldric. My eyes. She turned and looked at me, like she knew I was watching, and she was about to speak when someone bellowed my name and broke the connection.”

His knuckles whiten around his fork.

“So I’m going to touch it again,” I continue, buttering the bread with surgical precision. “Today. And this time nobody is going to interrupt, and I’m going to hear what she has to say. This isn’t a request for permission.”

His jaw flexes and I can almost see the arguments he’s lining up, a whole medieval army of objections mustering on the field.

He swallows them.

“All right,” he says.

I blink. “All right?”

“You will not go alone. That is my only term. If the dust takes you somewhere, I will be there when you return.” He pushes the chicken toward me. “Eat first. Visions on an empty stomach seem inadvisable.”

I eat. It’s delicious. I refuse to tell him so.

Aldric goes down the stairs first with the candle and the glow of his heart. The goblet isn’t where it rolled this morning; it’s righted now and returned to its shelf behind the iron grate. He must have replaced it after I stormed out. I picture him standing alone in the dark with it, and I squash the sympathy like a mosquito before it can do anything stupid.

Shmoo takes up his post on a wine barrel like a fuzzy court reporter.

“You are certain,” Aldric says. It’s not a question, but his hand hovers near my elbow without landing. “The dust made me what I am.” He nods at Shmoo. “It made him what he is. We do not know what it will do with you, even if it seems you are somehow related to the witch who cursed me.”

“I’m certain.” I flex my fingers. “I want this curse broken. Even if you’re a terrible boyfriend.”

His jaw clenches so hard I hear his teeth creak. The word boyfriend visibly ricochets around his medieval skull looking for a definition, and he’s none too pleased with the adjective preceding it. He says nothing, but he does step back and gives me room.

I pick up the goblet.

Cold metal. Heavy. The crusted residue glitters faintly in the candlelight, and I wait, heart hammering, for the world to dissolve.