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It was hardly the wedding night she’d imagined.
Ekka had had no grand hopes for that, of course. She was a village girl, not some lowland warlord’s heir. But she’d thought her expectations were modest enough to be realistic: a larger dinner than usual in the town square, Rhinnah and Mallum guesting one night in the next house to give them some privacy while they made their first fumbling love, and her leading her husband under the lintel, to the big bed that used to belong to her parents.
She’d always known she would need to bring in another person to keep the household going—she and Mallum both, ideally. She would have her children before the cough killed her; he would bring them up alongside his own. It would be hard, but it was the only way for them to survive.
There were busybodies in the village who judged Rhinnah for not bringing in a man, despite everything, and Ekka was getting old enough that tongues were starting to wag about her too, putting forth names from their village and the next who she might be able to draw in. She hadn’t even disagreed with them. But it was hard to make a choice, knowing how much rested on it. That her family would live or die depending on who she brought in—her husband too.
Of course, her family would live or die based on a thousand thousand things, and most of them out of her control.
In her darker moments, she’d thought she might be the one following her spouse into a new home. Hers was a house of three people: horrifically vulnerable. If Mallum died unwed, or if Rhinnah died before he was old enough—then the survivors might well be unable to keep things going alone, or persuade someone to take the risk of helping them.
Without her—what choice would Rhinnah have to make? Or would she stick it out until Mallum was old enough to marry into some other family? It was hard to imagine her succeeding in that, when it had been so hard with Ekka there.
Ekka refused to think that it was a moot point, that they were dead before her. She hadn’t seen them die, so they were alive, down in the village all those miles away, safe in the stone house her parents had left them. They had to be.
And she was alive, when they must have given her up for dead. Alive in this strange dungeon cell, the narrow little bed abandoned, clinging to a stranger for warmth, sprawled across his chest to give him as much of her body heat as possible while he wrapped his arms around her and pulled up his legs to return the favor.
There was no thought of sex, even if the Overlord had wanted them to get to it. If he wanted them to do as people usually did on their wedding nights, he could give them a furnace. And if he wanted something else… well, he’d have to make himself clear, then.
(How quickly she’d gone from rank terror to that kind of defiance. Terror had its limits, apparently. She wished she could tell the others. She’d have to tell Mortarion, once he calmed down enough that it wouldn’t seem like a taunt.)
Was it even her wedding night? It might be day; it might be the night after. It might have been weeks. It didn’t feel like it had been, but her sense of time was attenuated, unreliable. All she was certain of was the cold, and her companion. Her husband.
She felt horrifically vulnerable, small as she was next to him, in his arms. Even his chains could so easily be weapons, now that she was in his reach. But at the same time, his nervous caution made her feel powerful and dangerous, as if she could crush him if she moved wrong. Logically the risk only went one way—but she felt as if it were mutual. He’d convinced her it was.
She wasn’t sure which was more frightening—that he could hurt her, or that she might do the same to him, without even meaning to.
How strange, though, that she had gone so quickly from terror and suspicion of the monster sharing her cell to being afraid of hurting her husband. And how strange that she’d so quickly taken the Overlord’s decree of marriage to be true. She hadn’t had to; they were all slaves of the Overlords, but that didn’t mean they married at their will. But Mortarion took it seriously, and his belief had made it real to her too.
She shifted, pressing her ear closer to his heart. To where a normal man’s heart would be, anyway. She heard a strange, doubled beat, loud enough to fight its way to her ear past her own labored breath, and wondered if the man the Overlord had made had his heart in the usual place, or if she was hearing something else entirely.
But all the same, the rhythm was a comfort. She tried to keep her breathing slow and even, to give him something to cling to in return. Her breath; his heart.
She timed herself to him: four beats in, four beats held, four beats out. He was slowing, she thought. Perhaps he was growing calmer. Or else his terror had exhausted him, as hers had.
She wondered if he would be able to sleep like this. If she would.
And when she woke up still cradled to his chest, she had half the answer.