“Vash!” Lasrua mumbled. “You smell like…”
Her first dim memories of comfort and warmth crystallized into more troubling recollections. Stale smoke, muzzy with damp. Lor’s shoulder beneath her face – Lor’s coat, which she would feign a chill to borrow so she could strut about wrapped in its baggy folds. The smell of smoke had made her feel dangerous and wicked. But now she knew that Lor had been dangerous and wicked all along.
“…home,” she whispered, since she had to say something.
Vash must have spent the evening with his father. She had overheard her father lamenting that Sorin’s smoking had been getting out of hand since they had gone away. Ris was not the elf to teach him moderation.
Then she wondered whether Vash had been smoking himself.
She lifted her head and let him step back.
No, Vash’s smile was warm and real. His twinkling eyes focused cleanly on her face.
“I smell like damp elf,” he said. “It’s mizzly out there.”
“Whose fault is that?” She fluffed her fingers through his sparkling forelock and dried his hair in a spray of mist.
“Didn’t want to frighten the men by stepping in dry out of the rain.”
He winked towards the doorway. Alred could have understood none of their conversation, but he had patiently awaited an acknowledgment before taking his leave.
“I leave you two to your congratulations,” he said. “I shall be in my study, at your service.”
He made a handsome bow and stepped out.
“Congratulations!” Vash said. “I’m fortunate he was here – I always forget that word!”
Lasrua flushed and giggled in spite of herself. She had not yet tired of hearing it.
“So,” Vash whispered reverently, “you’re married now!” He stroked his hands down her arms. Lasrua braced herself not to shudder when he reached the dead flesh, and nevertheless he noticed.
“Sorry – did I hurt you?”
“No no – it’s only numb…”
She stepped back, but his hand lingered on her arm, as hands often did. It seemed everyone wanted to touch it, as if their touch would be the one to effect a miraculous cure.
Lasrua did not like to be touched as a rule, but these ghostly strokes made her skin crawl. Once or twice she had even dreamt that her entire body had gone numb, and Malcolm was touching her – they were naked and twined together, and he was kissing her and caressing her – and it was as if he was not there at all.
She jerked her arm away. She hated that dead touch.
But because it was Vash she threw on a smile and tugged at his coat with her other hand. “Come sit with me! I’m so glad to see you! Have you seen Paul? Or my father?”
Vash helped her sit on the rug and settled himself cross-legged before her.
“I saw your brother a few days ago, and your father a few days before that. But I’m – ”
“Can’t you make them talk?”
Vash abandoned his original statement with a sigh. “Nobody can make either of those two elves do anything, Rua. Paul bites, and your father simply slips out from beneath one’s thumb. I’m convinced that what they both need is time.”
“But now Paul doesn’t want to see our father either!”
Vash pinched his lip and appeared thoughtful, but he kept his gaze on Lasrua’s face. He did not seem to be thinking of what to say so much as what he could permit himself to say before little childish her.
She was married now, a grown elf, and still she was a baby to her family – too ignorant to have an opinion that mattered, too silly to understand. It made her new family’s respectful attentions seem flattering indeed.
“That will pass,” Vash said at last. “Neither of them will say it, but I believe both of them have fixed the baby’s birth as the absolute limit – ”
“But that’s moons away!”
Vash smiled indulgently at her interruption. Lasrua could have pinched herself.
“Yes,” he said, “and that is why they don’t mind being angry now. But as the day approaches they’ll begin to worry, and one of them will give in and talk to the other, and the other will be relieved. Just in time for Cat to throw boots at both their heads. You’ll see.”
He went on smiling, but Lasrua was determined not to. His smile sharpened as if he knew it, and he leaned his head so near to hers that she scented smoke again.
“However, I am not here to talk about your tedious father nor your exasperating brother. I am here to talk about your favorite subject. You.”
Lasrua squawked and shoved him away. He laughed his easy laugh, and it struck straight to her heart, like an old, unforgotten scent-memory of love and home. Though her pride required her to slap at him a few times, she abandoned her resolution and laughed too.
When it looked as if she had finished flailing, he lowered his arms and said, “Con-gra-tu-la-tions! But I cannot believe you’re married. I keep thinking you’re still only about this high, in pigtail braids, tearing after us everywhere we go.”
He held his hand at about the height of her shoulder – while seated – and Lasrua hooted and smacked it down.
He lifted his other arm as a shield and went on, grinning. “Remember how Paul and I used to sneak out over the roof for fear your mother would make us take you, too? The most annoying elf-child ever born!” he declared, imitating her brother’s whine. Then his arm dropped, and his smile fell into a mock frown of concern. “I hope somebody warned Malcolm.”
“Warn Malcolm?” she gasped in delighted outrage. “Warn him? He is the most annoying living creature ever born!”
Vash laughed. “More annoying than myself, elf-child?”
He lifted his hand to shoulder-height again, and Lasrua pushed it down. “Infinitely!”
“More annoying than your brother?”
“A thousand thousand times! Paul is ever only one stuck-out tongue away from pitching an incoherent fit, which has always been a great comfort to me. But Malcolm is insufferable. One cannot win an argument with him. It is simply impossible.”
Vash sat back and smiled with one corner of his mouth. “One of those abominable fellows who’s always right, is he?” he asked, looking as if he thought himself one of the type.
Lasrua said, “Worse than that! He doesn’t care if he’s wrong!”
Vash laughed aloud.
“He is the most abominable, most cheerfully wrong person I have ever encountered! He makes one feel silly for having gone to all the trouble of being right!”
“So you married him!”
Lasrua sniffed and fought to maintain a haughty pout. “There was no point in arguing with him when he asked me.”
“You would only have lost. And felt silly afterwards.”
“Precisely.”
Vash laughed and shook his head. “I hope I shall have a chance to meet this man. I hope he won’t steal away with you to Scotland as soon as he comes.”
He smiled and seemed to busy himself with an adjustment to the cuff of his sleeve, but he kept one eye on Lasrua. He was even less subtle than her father.
Lasrua looked down into her lap. It was no longer such a struggle not to smile.
“Naturally I shall ask him to stay a while and meet my friends. I’m not certain where we shall go afterwards. He has a house in Scotland. But we’ve had offers… Sir Sigefrith said we could stay in his house while he’s away. And… other places. Dunstan says we’re welcome to build a house anywhere we like on his land – as near or as far from everybody as we like.”
Vash murmured, “Beside the lake…” By this time his study of his wrists and hands required both eyes.
“For instance. But I think I should at least visit his family in Scotland. At least take a bridal trip.”
Lasrua’s cheeks began to warm again. Britamund and Gwynn had impressed the romance of a “bridal trip” upon her, and Scotland did not seem such a bleak place if it was only the destination of a visit.
“I’m learning Gaelic as fast as I can. The people don’t all speak English there. Few of the ladies do. But it’s a dreadfully difficult language. Don’t ask me to say anything.” She paused, almost hoping he would.
Vash looked up at her and smiled. “It will come easier once you have a more fascinating teacher.”
Lasrua flushed at the thought of her nightly whispered Gaelic practice; her spare pillow stood in for “a more fascinating teacher” for now. Sometimes, too, her pillow patiently endured a practice kiss.
To distract herself she gabbled, “Lady Gwynn is ever so much more clever at it than I. I wish I could take her with me to translate when I’m alone with the ladies. Sir Malcolm and Connie come by almost every day – ” She winced. She had babbled too far. “You don’t mind if I talk about Malcolm, do you?”
Vash had gone as pale as she felt, but he gave her a reassuring smile. “Not if he’s your friend.”
“Right, well… sometimes Domnall comes too. And they all sit around and have a conversation in Gaelic, and I sit by and pretend to understand.”
She smiled, and he smiled.
“I know your Gaelic is better than that,” he said. “You would never admit to being stupid unless you weren’t.”
Lasrua laughed and gave him a gentle shove. “And that’s why you never admit it, either, stupid!”
“Nonsense! I freely admit it! You’re thinking of your brother, there.”
“My other brother.”
Vash’s merely teasing smile turned wistful at this reminder of her old nickname for him – so old that it dated from a toddler’s misunderstanding.
He bowed his head closer and took her hands in his: the strong and the limp. The odor of smoke reached her nose again. A chill fell over her like a tall shadow, and the sense of a menacing, restless third presence sparked a twinge of fear.
She wrenched her good hand out of Vash’s grip and yanked at the breast of his coat. It was identical to Lor’s, even to its scent.
“Take off your coat and stay a while! We shall have a mug of wine, and if Alred promises to behave perhaps we shall have him, too!”
Gently Vash pushed her hand down and clasped her fist in his long hand. “I cannot stay, Rua. The moon is full.”
Lasrua sat back, mortified. She had not even thought of it. She had lived so long with the men that she only knew the phase of the moon when she chanced to step out at night and the sky chanced to be clear. She had been reckoning Malcolm’s absence and eventual return as a matter of seven-day weeks.
“You’re going to the lake,” she whispered.
Vash drew up his leg and rested his elbow on his knee and his chin in his palm. His hand hid the expression of his mouth, but even his long fingers could hide the sickly pallor of only one cheek. And without his dependable hint of a smile to make them wistful or wry, his sad eyes were simply sad.
She asked, “How long has it been?”
He sighed and lifted his head. “Dreadful of me, isn’t it? These days I never go to see her unless I want something from her. I always swear never to return, but I lack even honor enough to keep my dishonorable resolution.”
“Nothing you do is dishonorable, lord. It suffices us to know that you have done it – or even to believe that it is what you would do – to declare a thing honorable.”
He dismissed the notion with a flick of his fingers and a sigh. “What if I haven’t done it yet? What if I don’t know what I would do? I need your opinion, Rua.”
“Mine?” Lasrua’s heart beat faster. Vash was asking her opinion–her opinion – on what seemed to be a very solemn matter. Suddenly she did not feel so very grown-up at all.
“What should I do? Tell me: should I go? Or should I stay here with you and Alred and get a little drunk and forget all about it?”
Lasrua whispered, “You’re going to ask her to teach you.”
“If I go, I surely shall.”
Lasrua had never seen him look more like his father. Sorin’s wrinkles were etched between his brows, and his gentle mouth had fallen into Sorin’s weary frown. For a moment he had stopped teasing her, reassuring her, cheering her – stopped burning himself away to provide light and warmth to all who surrounded him. The lingering scent of smoke in her throat made him seem a snuffed wick.
Then he turned his face away, and his presence went colder still.
“She warned me I wouldn’t last a year. So I swore I would wait at least that long. But that’s stupid of me. See?” He managed a quick smile. “I freely admit it.”
Lasrua’s heart ached too much for his sake to reply in time with a smile. He looked back at the empty doorway, bare even of mistletoe now.
“The only one I’m hurting with my stubbornness is myself. I know that. I only wish I could be certain I would hurt no one else by giving in. That’s why I wanted to ask you.” At last he looked into her eyes. “What do you think I should do? Help me decide.”
She realized then that it was her lady’s opinion he wanted, and this was why he had not gone to her father or her brother. He did not want her to imagine herself in his place, but in Iylaine’s.
What would she have wanted? If she were separated from her husband but still tenuously bound to him? Was she not? Did she want Malcolm to set her free? Never – a thousand times never. She was his and he was hers forever, though they never met again on this earth.
“I don’t think you…”
Vash folded his leg beneath him and sat eagerly forward. She imagined Malcolm sitting just so at the fisherwife’s table, his head leaning near Drileu’s to hear her shyly spoken advice. Lasrua would be grateful to the woman of Brittany until the end of her days.
But although she could imagine her husband in the place of Vash, she could not imagine herself in the place of Iylaine. Lasrua’s only other love was dead, and even his memory was a sinister shadow, frightening her with what might have been. Lasrua did not love another man – and Sir Malcolm was a good man – and no other man loved her. She had no children, no home. She had hurt no one else by giving in.
Lasrua looked down at her lap: at one hand and the other, one strong and one almost dead. So long as she did not move them, she could not have told which was which. She did not know what to tell him.
She asked softly, “You needn’t decide tonight, need you?”
Vash blinked.
“I mean, she isn’t going to do anything tonight? Only teach you how to do it?”
Vash swallowed and nodded. She saw his breath come faster.
“So why don’t you ask her? What would you lose?”
His chest rose and fell sharply beneath the breast of his coat. His face and lips paled; he looked like an elf who had smoked too much, who was about to be sick. Lasrua feared she was saying something wrong, but her only idea was to speak faster.
“You will simply have the knowledge – you won’t be obliged to use it. You will have plenty of time to think it over and talk to your friends. If you go, it is not deciding anything, Vash. Nothing changes.”
“And if I decide not to go?”
“If you don’t go, you are simply avoiding a decision. Don’t you see the difference?”
Lasrua thought she had struck upon a pretty piece of argument, and she charged onward in spite of his white-lipped silence. Her solemn advice made her feel grown-up indeed.
“I think you have been hiding behind your ignorance a little, Vash. So long as you did not know how to free yourself, you were at liberty to long for freedom just as much as you were at liberty to revel in your captivity. Nothing you did or said could change your situation.”
She lifted one of his hands in her good hand and squeezed it. She could move the other and even hold things in it, but she did not take his other hand. In her numb grip it would have felt dead.
“I think you should go to the lake. Not until you have the key will you know whether you truly want to open the door.”
What a beautiful chapter. I particularly adore the relationship between Vash and Rua. 
Chapters
Poor Vash. I want Iylaine just to dump Malcolm and go back to him. It's not that I don't like Malcolm, I just like Vash more.
And Ruua of course isn't happy either. Your husband in a far country, while your family seems to treat you as a kid and your father and brother are angry at eachother. But as she says, they will be fine when Cat has her baby.