Jade Fern Grove klagelied

You did things I didn't ask for, she said, as gently as possible, wanting to avoid an argument and accusations, and held me in contempt for it, and ignored everything I did ask. That was why the ways he tried to show his love were not enough. Maybe she had been too vague. Maybe she had hinged too much on his intelligence or his devotion to her and not been clear with her wants. She thought she was a simple enough woman to read, but the reality was that Wylla was incredibly complicated and damaged from a time before, and often there was no rhyme or reason to the things that set her off. Mahler would have had to navigate a proverbial minefield to understand what Wylla needed from him, but the man who told her he loved her after not seeing her for a year and some change seemed the sort who would try. This man he was now merely stood to the side and waited with hands clasped behind his back for her to come to him, as if he alone, with no effort, was worth it.

Dawning realization came with a death-knell; as the viper's voice inside her mind suspected, he had not asked about Ciri and Elke and Astraeus because he was truly considering her plea at all. He simply wanted her to give more and more while he gave none, and wanted her to speak aloud that she would do so, just so he could... what? Kick her while she was down? Again. And again. And again. They always came back to this.

Wylla's vulnerability, something rare to behold, began to slither back into the depths of her soul, replaced slowly over the course of his words with ice and steel. There was no anger, but he would likely be able to detect the moment she began to shut down to protect herself from his rejection. What desperate light entered her sole eye would flicker out and turn flat. Anger would come much later. Brokenness, now. She snapped the fraying ends of her sensibility back into her grasp, wrestled it back under her control, pulled it away from him.

You were enough, she breathed, before. Now? Now he would not even give up a stone in the earth where everything had soured for a dream of togetherness. Maybe her mistake was thinking that opening herself up to a man who already loved her, thinking that if she ended up falling for him that it was a sure thing, would not bring her more immense pain than the rest of her life combined had. In no surer way could a man kill a woman's small, hidden dream in a thing like love than to promise it to her and then yank it away in the name of duty and obligation, as he had the entire time.

The words she spoke next came out rote, like she had rehearsed them a hundred times. She had at least repeated them to herself often enough, because of the great weight of blame she put upon herself for it. She didn't know why they suddenly leaked from her mouth now. She had not intended to ever tell him.

Tiercel found me. A quaver, a moment where she had to steady herself. What she didn't know was that everything Tiercel told her had happened even before the birth of Phaedra and Thade; the rawness of her daughter's pain and hatred had made it seem recent. While I was here with you, she was raped. Her children died. Buried beneath a tree on the way to Keokuk Glade. She thought, absurdly, that she must now visit the grave, but that was too long a journey to make on the cusp of winter. The corner of Wylla's mouth twitched upward, flashing an unhinged and mournful smile. Her grandchildren. She called me a whore. She hates me. For not saving her. A piece of me died that day.

It seems to me that I have sacrificed a lot, she said, again in a voice that was devoid of emotion and even accusation. A simple stated fact. Her body for his children. Her self esteem for his contract. Her confidence to support him as a co-leader who was never treated as such. Her eldest daughter. It hurts that land and titles and children and contracts all mean more to you than loving me. He could still have all those things without her, of course. He could not put his love for her above his obligation to leadership, as he had never put his love for her above anything that he had wanted.

I'll go. There was nothing for either of them here, then. She could not return. He would not leave. And she could not bear to be in his presence any longer with the continued knowledge that love, to him, was an afterthought to put beneath everything else, when for her, it was a tiny flame on a candle she had guarded all her life in hopes that someday, she would find something grand. Something her mother had not had, something to give meaning to her life. An absurd desire to reach out and preen his fur and turn this last memory of Mahler into something passionate rather than painful seized her, but she stamped it down. That would solve nothing, and the red paint of passion would soon fade to pain regardless.