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Queens did not weep. Irene had trained herself out of tears years before she’d ever taken the throne. Even in the solitude of her own bedchambers her eyes stayed dry and cold, any lumps in her throat swallowed before they could take root. There was a bitter sort of irony that now, now that she was married to a man who loved her and who she loved back, now that she was happier than she’d ever been before, she couldn’t stop crying.
She sat, turning herself to stone as she always had, watching as Relius was beaten until his face purpled and his breath rattled in his chest. He didn’t look at her, didn’t cry out for her, didn’t acknowledge her presence at all. Irene left the dungeons, dismissed her attendants, and locked herself in her room for hours after. She’d meant only to recenter herself, so the shaking and sobbing that came upon her as soon as the door closed was a shock. Less of a shock were the arms gathering her up scarcely a few minutes later, and Eugenides didn’t even bother closing the passage through her wardrobe before settling on the floor and tugging her into her lap and rocking her gently as she wept like a child. Her face pressed into his shoulder, hands fisted the material of his shirt, nails digging into his back. He didn’t flinch, but she did. All she did was hurt people. The hook he carefully angled away from her as he held her was proof enough of that.
“I wish you’d sent word you were coming back,” Eugenides murmured in her ear when her sobs began to fade. His fingers worked through her hair. She hadn’t noticed him taking it down. “I meant to be here as soon as you returned. I’m sorry you were alone.”
He was sorry she was alone. For perhaps ten minutes, perhaps twenty, before he rushed to the comfort of the monster who had outlined the same torment she was weeping over now, the monster who haunted his nightmares. She said nothing, only pressed her face into the crook of his neck and tried to swallow the last of her tears. She felt wrung out and sick, head pounding, eyes burning.
Lips pressed to her temple and the hand in her hair smoothed its way down her back. “Irene. Are you alright?”
She took a shuddering breath. “…It will be worse tomorrow. I don’t know if I can watch again.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I must.”
Eugenides sighed, his breath fluttering her hair, and said nothing else.
By the third day it was easier. She sat in her chair in the corner and imagined herself hollow. She stayed hollow until the torturer began his work, removing Relius’ fingernails one by one. No one is brave in the palace dungeons, but hearing Relius scream and plead when he had so often been by her side forcing the screaming made her feel dizzy and sick, and she wished he would be quiet. She wished he was braver. The only relief was Relius’ continuing not to look at her, to speak to her, because if he begged her for mercy she didn’t know what she would do to grant it.
She pictured herself hollow and let Relius’ pain fill her to the brim, until it was spilling over, and then she returned to her rooms and emptied herself out again, crying into Eugenides’ chest as he held her, every time. She really couldn’t stop crying. She’d cried over something nearly every day since their wedding night, but crying over Relius cut the deepest. The hollowness turned brittle and cracked, and while cosmetics could hide the puffiness in her face, her eyes were beginning to stay red throughout the day.
The day she condemned Relius to death, Eugenides cupped his hand to her cheek, dragging his thumb under one eye. “You cannot, Irene.”
“What other choice is there?” she asked him bitterly, because what did he know of leadership?
“He is your dearest friend. You cannot lose him.”
She bowed her head to hide the water gathering in her eyes again. No one had ever called Relius her friend before. The word rattled inside the hollow amphora she’d made herself to be once again, clay crumbling into mud. Her dearest friend. Her only friend, for so many lonely years of making herself into something that didn’t feel, even as it killed her.
A soul was like water, a deep well, a laughing brook. She and Relius had made their beds in damming theirs up, hardening the vessels that held them, and going thirsty in return. The only reason either was still alive, she thought, were the scant sips they’d offered each other of their own selves, letting each other in through the cracks in the mortar. Now hers was free to build up into rapids and spill out her eyes, and Relius’ would be poured down the drain in the dungeon floor. The parts of her she’d given him would never return. She could not lose him and stay whole.
“What other choice is there?” Irene asked again, this time weak and wet and whispering.
Eugenides kissed her brow and pulled her close again. Irene let herself be gathered, but not soothed. She thought of Relius, alone in the dark, in pain, trapped with his own sick and filth and misery, yet still unwilling to call out to her because he’d hurt her enough already. The tears came again, and she let them fall.