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“You didn't thought about marriage?” she screamed, sweat pouring down her dark skin and the cold ripping her spine into a thousand pieces.
He looked at her with some fear and Merly was used to that kind of look about her, just not coming from him.
“Not even a little in the months I was away, almost dying, did you entertained yourself with the idea of asking me to marry you the moment I got back?”
And then it dawned on her, from the way his lips opened and closed quickly. In the way his shoulders slumped considerably after the end of her sentence, and how his eyes refused to meet hers.
It struck her as such a primal force in all life in this world, that yes, Filun had thought of marriage. In a family of many children, with a yard full of apples and oranges, a green lawn and a hot oven baking savory cakes with rosemary. He had thoughts of marriage, just not with her.
Merly moved her eyes as pointedly as moving a sword in her hand. Her eyes focused as they did at the moment when she's in the middle of a battlefield, slicing bodies, ripping throats and throwing horses down, and a scream of suffering that she knows, with every ounce of strength in her body, coming from one of her own men.
She looked intently at Lucilia's hand, and everything shattered so sickly.
The metalthat touched Lucilia's delicate skin, when it should have been Merly's skin, shining like a sun in that cold and sad night. It oozed happiness, vitality and love, so much love, because the stone was so small, delicately tiny and white. Which symbolized that the love, dedication and importance that both placed in that relationship, was more important than the size of the stone.
Lucilia was wearing her wedding ring with pride and pleasure. She expounded in a sickly cheerful way, across the house, chatting with the friends they both had in common. Because Lucilia, this delicate woman with red hair, thin and with large busts, was Merly's best friend. Best friend's of a woman with hair shaved so low that she looked like her soldiers, too scarred and too muscular to be judged weak.
She was her best friend, who Merly had asked to take care of Filun, to look after him and not let him get lost in her absence.
"Not like that" Merly whispered in a very low voice.
It hurt in a way so personal because it was Lucilia, not Merly… not even Jarmy, who had awkwardly declared himself to Fulin the last day the four of them had been together. Or even kneeling down to Merly amid the rain that cleaned their armor after a battle, confessing that he had slept, felt and pleasured Fulin on their last day alone, without Merly or Lucilia presence.
But Merly wasn't sad in any way, she didn't want to cry and beg Fulin to give her that ring. Give her that love.
No, she felt angry. So sick and cold, Merly found herself falling into an endless abyss of rage and hatred for Fulin and Lucilia.
She had just returned from a war, just arrived from weeks on the open sea with tons and tons of supplies. Of food, weapons and gold, lots of gold. Merly had just won a war, bringing in her personal bag the head of the other king who dared to step into her house, her country.
Merly fought, bled and watched her men die for that kingdom. But she had bled and sweated and cried, betrayed and engineered the deaths of children for Fulin, because she went to war in his place.
She fought in his place, not being able to conceive of the idea that the man she loved would go to war to die.
She thought about him every moment, every second and every fight, every death!
She killed for him, For the Gods of the Mother Tree!
Merly peeled her skin, tortured and was tortured by it, refusing to tell the truth thinking of her home. How Fulin would be in her bakery, making too many cakes for him to send to the orphanage later. She cried so hard in her tent the moment her letters stopped coming. Now it occurs to you why Fulin stopped writing to you. He was too busy asking Lucilia to marry him.
So she didn't say anything, didn't even look into his eyes or acknowledge the moment that Lucilia removed the ring from her finger after seeing that Merly had arrived. She just turned her back on Fulin and walked away, back to palace of her King, the one who gave up on her a long time ago, who had almousto died of shok when she invaded his personal dinner with the other king's head.
She rode back, and it was raining, as hard as it had been at the battle of Sulis. She thought that, like that night, the water falling from the sky was cleaning the blood on her armor.
Only now, all the blood that oozed from her clothes, weighing down her limbs, was Merly's. All the blood, all the suffering and all the pain was hers. Hers and hers alone.
It burned, something inside her chest burned, and Merly prayed to all the gods that existed that it was her scar, that it was the cut in her chest made by a soldier from the other army.
Let it be anything but your heart.
Because she thought she still had one when she stepped into the realm again, when she thought to buy the ring with a small stone, when she knelt moments ago in front of Fulin.
Merly thought she still had a heart, and she wanted to have it... because... she didn't know why, but she really wanted to have a heart still, and that it wasn't broken, shattered and rotten by everything she'd done.