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One might assume that, upon the exorcism of the demon who had possessed Mirnatius since birth, he might become a wholly different person.
One would be quite mistaken.
Oh, he has no intentions of murdering his wife anymore — if anything, his feelings for her are a tangled, thorny mess that he refuses to so much as examine. She is his savior — he owes her his very life, to say nothing of his freedom — and she holds the key to said freedom in her hands. As long as the ring is around his finger, he is safe.
But it is ultimately her ring.
She could revoke her claim on him quite easily. And why wouldn’t she, when he’s spent so long trying to kill her? Even from their first meeting as children, he’d been hellbent on distressing her. She kept her distance until she no longer had a choice. Has she a choice in this now? Is she biding her time until Lithvas is secure (perhaps with an heir, or even a spare, too) to throw him back to the demon?
Or is this forever?
Whatever the truth may be, he cannot cease his weeping.
For so long, he has been forbidden to feel anything. Perhaps not outright, to be fair, but when one lives one’s entire life with a demon in one’s belly… one learns how to close off any feelings. Feelings, to a demon, are weakness. They are vulnerability. They open one up to danger.
In Mirnatius’s case, they opened him up to the most miserable torture he could have imagined. Nothing compares to burning from the inside out, wanting desperately to beg for death but knowing better than to do more than lie there and wait, lest the demon draw it out even longer.
They open one’s loved ones up to danger, too, as Mirnatius knows too well. He still mourns his brother, even as he knows that Karolis was cruel and demanding; he was the only one to have ever shown Mirnatius so much as a shred of affection.
Until now, that is; if one can call his wife’s coolness affection.
Oh, to be sure, she clings to him in public, laughing at his quips and reaching for him — giving him small little touches that signify her ownership of him. It is ownership, after all.
She allows him to bed her (and he is not foolish enough to disregard her pleasure in the matter), and says nothing when he weeps afterward (and not just the first time). Instead, she now draws him into her arms and strokes his hair until he ceases; until he has no more tears to weep. As far as he is aware, she shares this vulnerability of his with no one.
Were he anyone else, he might begin to trust her.
Mirnatius, however, is fundamentally damaged to his core. It is the fault of his mother, truly. Mothers are, as he’s been told, meant to love their children; to protect them from the ills of the world as long as possible.
His mother sold his soul for a shred of power before he was even born.
If nothing else, he knows Irina would never do such a thing to any children they may have. She may have too been raised without a mother’s love, but she had that ridiculous nanny of hers. Her father may have been aloof toward her, but he never would have sold her soul, either.
It does, after all, require a special sort of evil — of utter selfishness — to promise one’s firstborn to a demon who will eat them alive each night and kill anyone with whom they may form any sort of attachment, simply for the satisfaction of seeing their misery.
Slowly — ever slowly — he begins to consider that Irina may not kill him, either.
It is not simply that she tells him that she has no intentions of doing so (that he needs her more than she needs him; that she would be in far more danger with any other man — and yes, it is true that Mirnatius, for all his murder plots, would never dare harm his wife now; would never have ever dared harmed her in the way she so clearly fears, though he cannot say whether rape is preferable to being eaten alive by a demon, having only experienced one of the two horrors).
It is in her actions. It is in the way she holds him as he weeps in the privacy of their own bedchamber. It is in the way she encourages his artistic pursuits and promises to alleviate the stress of running the country (it is in the way she follows through on said promise).
It is in the way she acts when that Jewish girl comes by (with a girl she introduces as his sister, though her blonde hair marks this as a clear lie) as if she (along with Irina) never attempted to take his life. Irina grants her a courtly welcome, and, despite the bite of the winter air, the four of them promenade privately in the courtyard.
The blonde girl, introduced as Wanda, seems in awe of everything. However, she gathers enough nerve to ask, “And what might have happened had Your Majesty’s mother never sold your soul?”
Mirnatius wants to protest such boldness — to order the girl and her so-called sister (to whom he does owe some sort of debt) out of the palace; out of the capital — but Irina, darling Irina, catches him by surprise.
“I suppose that would depend on whether my beloved husband would have still tortured squirrels.”
If the two others understand, they do not show it.
“That was Karolis’s influence,” Mirnatius says, wishing desperately to be elsewhere — and not just for the cold.
“Even so,” Irina says. “You are, despite his best efforts, not a cruel man. It may very well be that my father would have aspired to marry me to you regardless.”
He stops in his tracks. His world freezes. He should beg for privacy; should drag Irina away to some alcove or other. Instead, his voice is hoarse as he says, “What?”
“You are the tsar of all Lithvas, my beloved husband,” Irina says. “And my father is an ambitious man.”
This time, he is unsure whether he can detect any irony in her voice. “Irina,” he says, too agitated to play along, “you cannot possibly have wished to marry me.”
“Not knowing that you were a sorcerer,” she concedes. She looks to the other women. “There is little point in drawing up hypotheticals. This is the way things have happened, and Lithvas is prospering under our rule. While the winters doubtlessly would have been far shorter and far less harsh — far fewer people would have died — we cannot undo the past. We must look forward.”
“Yes,” Miryem agrees, though she has the nerve to give Mirnatius a strange look, as if being the bride of a Staryk lord makes them at all equals. “Hypotheticals help no one. And I do thank you both for the lessening of restrictions on Jews.”
“Of course,” Irina says, even though Mirnatius knows nothing about any of this (he simply signs whatever Irina puts in front of him). “We do remember those who have aided us.”
Those who tried to kill him, no one says, even if it was for the greater good. Perhaps he is being uncharitable. It was, he knows, a Jewish jeweller who crafted the ring around his finger from Staryk silver. Without this ring, he would not be standing here.
“As do we,” Miryem says.
That, it seems, ends the conversation. It swiftly turns to politics, which Mirnatius does not even pretend to understand. Irina is transparent among friends, after all, and it does seem that these two women count among them.
He does not wish to bring his doubts to light, but when they retire that evening, Irina reaches for him. She is nothing if not methodical in the way she removes his clothes. Is there warmth in the way her touch lingers on his skin, or is he simply desperate for any shred of affection?
She leans in to kiss him, and even after months of marriage, he cannot help but touch her reverently, as if she might disappear. His wife may not fit any traditional standards of beauty, but among these tangled feelings lies an undeniable attraction to the woman in his arms.
They slide into bed, and while he might, on other nights, hold back, he kisses his way quickly down to settle his face between her legs. There is nothing that tastes more divine than his wife. He spreads her open and sets to work on bringing her pleasure. He relishes the way her fingers find his hair; the way she tugs him close, one heel digging into his back. They won’t produce an heir this way, but they’ll get to that later.
His wife is a dignified woman. She is well-bred. She was raised to be a proper lady. He never imagined she would plead for him the way she does, repeating his name as a benediction, making the most exquisite sounds as she begs him for more. Her hips shift as she gets closer, so he focuses his attention on the little bud at the apex of her core.
She cries his name as she climaxes; he kisses and licks her through it, savoring her taste.
He slides back up to kiss her properly. This is also something he never imagined. He never dared dream that Irina would let him kiss her; that she would kiss him back.
He could weep, but instead of that — instead of pushing in and trying to make a baby — he asks, “Did you mean it earlier?”
She is still unfocused. “What do you mean?”
“You think we would have married were I a simple second son.”
“Oh,” she says. She furrows her brows adorably and reaches up to stroke his hair. “I think you are a far better husband than most. Or do you believe that many of your male courtiers would be so focused on bringing their wives pleasure and treating them as the intelligent, capable people they are?”
It is not a love confession — it does not even begin to approach one — and her words certainly ring true. She is not unreasonable to fear that any other man may, more than disregard her pleasure, outright rape her or abuse her. All Mirnatius has ever done is try to kill her to assuage the demon in his belly.
But…
In the moment, he is utterly overwhelmed by longing for this reality that will never exist. A second son, permitted to focus on his artistic pursuits. A wife, a duke’s daughter, clever enough to thrive in court and keep him from looking a fool. Perhaps affection. Perhaps even something deeper.
Something that he does not want to put a name to.
“Of course,” he says, as the realization sinks in, making him sick to his stomach. He cannot betray himself; cannot allow the inner turmoil to come to the surface.
He doesn’t even mean to untangle his feelings. He would have been content to leave them, unexamined and unimportant, for the rest of his life.
Because his wife does not love him, as content as she may be now. She may never love him. It may, in fact, be that Mirnatius is utterly undeserving of love — who could possibly love a man who had been rejected by his own mother?
Leaving the feelings tangled would have prevented the longing that now threatens to claw its way out of his chest, as if possessed by a new demon. (He is not possessed, though; of this he is certain.)
This time, when he weeps, he knows exactly why.
His wife — his beloved Irina — draws him into her arms and murmurs soothing words as she strokes his hair and his back. She has no idea of the truth, of course (or perhaps she does, and simply chooses to ignore it; Irina is incredibly clever, after all).
The feelings that have so plagued Mirnatius since he was first granted freedom are, as it turns out, quite simple. It is little wonder it has taken him months to see the way through.
Love, after all, has never come easily to him; not when love meant death and misery.
But Chernobog is gone and Irina will be here in the morning, alive in his bed. Perhaps that will be enough, even as she will never love him as he loves her.
It will have to be enough.
He cannot fathom being able to withstand it otherwise.