The Rain-Dark Sky Painted Her (A short story)

She awoke in a dark, dripping forest, on the side of a road, with droplets from the leafy canopy above pelting her flesh.

For a moment, lightning from the rain-dark sky painted her inside a ghastly nimbus. It displayed her tattered gown, torn nearly to pieces, hanging upon her scrawny limbs like a pale drapery—a drapery seemingly ripped to scraps by a beast. And between those dangling shreds of fabric, discolorations daubed her arms and thighs with unsightly purple splotches in a motley patchwork of scars and bruises.

In fact, her entire figure was a tale of untold torment, her flesh marked deeply with the hues of torture.

Baffled, she levered upright—and felt like a living canvas of agony, the pain raw, hot, and stinging beyond the rain that chilled her to her marrow. A lingering, pulsing hurt from—

What?

What had brought her here?

Here, though, her memory played truant. An imp dancing beyond her grasp, it laughed as it withheld the knowledge of what had happened to her.

Hesitantly, she trailed her fingers over her rain-damp cheeks, finding raised scars there as well as sore spots from new bruises. When she wrapped her arms around her frail shoulders, her stretched muscles stung from half-healed welts. Wounds she hadn’t been aware of smarted afresh as the invasive drizzle targeted every spot of bare skin.

Whatever had done this to her, her voyage to this moment had left her bloody and battered, as if she had been tortured inside out. And then someone had discarded her here, or she had dragged herself here.

Why?

Again, she plundered the depths of her mind, but she found no past. No name. She struggled to her feet, alone in the rain—In the chill, relentless rain, she singsonged, in a long pale dress, a lady without a name.

She couldn’t really sing, though, for her throat felt as scoured as though old screams had clawed up from a place where human hands couldn’t reach. Her insides ached with every shiver, and her mind wrestled with what to do next, for the darkness was a gluttonous dark that fed insatiably on her hope while the rain wolfed down the stars; and the moon, too, slid down its wet gullet.

She limped toward the muddy road and winced as her limbs found it difficult to move, every tentative step in the pervasive chill shooting discomfort through bones already snowy with cold.

She peered at the swampy road through blood-caked hair, the strands sopping with rain. Please, she begged. Someone, help me.

For a moment: only the impersonal touch of the storm.

And then: the spraying clop of galloping hooves.

She dragged her weary squint toward the impenetrable forest. “Stop,” she tried to speak—too hoarse, and her bony arm was unable to lift. Weakness coursed down her like a brook that wanted to sweep her away. “Please,” she squeaked, “I beg…”

She couldn’t even hear herself, wobbling and—

A colossal warhorse charged out of the layers of darkness and rain, riding the shriek of the wind. It reared before her in the misty drizzle.

For an instant, a lightning flash showed the stark ribs of the mount’s emaciated silhouette. A startled whinny mingled with the cried order of the man dragging back the mount’s reins.

The horse splashed back down on the marshy road, spattering the young woman with smatters of mud.

She flinched back—and then strained forward—toward horse and man, both living beings.

The stranger was unlooping the reins from his fist, his whipcord-tight arms proving that he was as gaunt as his steed. His sleeveless jerkin, with no doublet beneath, bared him to the elements.

Rain ran in runnels down his lean, honed arms—strong, she thought. He still had enough muscle to help her, surely, for she scarcely possessed the strength to stand. She swayed as the traveler dismounted.

Nevertheless, breathing in the storm and the rain and shivering in frenzied anticipation, she peered at him fervidly—and somewhere deep inside, she discovered that hope hurt.

His face was as sharply fractured as a hawk’s, a strip of cloth slanted across one of his eyes. He’d tied it over the black hair plastered to his scalp, and beneath the cloth, an arcane symbol branded one of his cheeks while a jagged scar slashed across his other.

And when his gaze alit on her—

He collapsed to his knees. “My lady!”

*

Winded from shock, Exavier felt his knees cave and mud spray beneath him, then his fingers mashed into the squelching mire as he dropped in obeisance. Lowered to all fours like the dog he’d been born—raised in the castle kitchens and cuffed by every servant, rogue, and noble, nothing but a raggedy boy no one had cared for.

He knelt now before his princess.

A princess supposed to be dead.

Beyond belief, though, it was her.

Gone were her fine damask clothes and her once-lush figure.

Gone was the haughty air that had earned her the antipathy of the servants.

Not even her silken slippers remained, her bare toes sinking into the same quagmire of filth in which he knelt.

Gone, too, her flawless skin—skin that, once, no one would have dared mar. Now it appeared that someone had attempted to carve away every last unmarked vestige of it.

There was no reason at all he should recognize her beneath those welts and weals, with her hair lank and drenched, her body hardly hinged together at the joints, her posture reduced to paltry survival.

No reason save one.

He had loved her.

Now she dug her hands into his wet hair, and the shock of her touch vaulted through his body—even after all these months, even after all her cold rejection by merit of being too highborn for him.

She dragged his bowed head back. “You know who I am?”

With her fingers wound tight in his hair, and raindrops from the sky disguising the tears upon his face, he stared up into her scarred features, delicate features that someone had tried to destroy—and failed, because he could still see their beauty.

He would always see their beauty.

Then her question clawed into his awareness.

His own voice grated out, ugly from long lack of use. “Why would I not know who you are?”

She abruptly jerked her hands away, and the mouth he had so longed to kiss trembled. “I myself don’t know who I am.”

“You don’t know?” He blinked away the rain where it dripped off his lashes, her words striking him so hard that he reeled, dizzy.

She looked away, biting her quivering lip and denying him her yet lovely eyes. “Do you know me?” she asked.

I know, he could say. You’re the princess, and I was once your father’s watchdog. I protected the sanctimonious tyrant who called himself our kingdom’s ruler but who so antagonized the people that the peasants rebelled. They murdered him and his queen despite how I tried to save them, then their murderers left me to die at the feet of my master’s slaughtered body.

They left me with only one eye.

He’d regained consciousness in a tangled morass of bloodied corpses while the marauding rebels had still swarmed the castle. Laughing and exchanging bawdy jests, they’d shucked the dead nobles of their jewels and slit the throats of the surviving noblewomen they’d raped.

Exavier had had a knife in his eye, and they’d thought him dead—he should’ve been dead, perhaps, but some deity had been cruel, or some attacker’s assault had been weak, and after the butchers had departed, he’d jerked the dagger out, staggered to his feet, and gritted his teeth against the upheaval of his gullet. His hand had staunched the blood-flow from the socket while he’d swallowed hard, swallowing the pain while the throbbing from his eye unbalanced him.

Lurching around the room, he had looked for her body.

He’d never found it. She alone of them all was missing.

Even knowing he should escape and save himself, he’d pawed through the carnage over and over again. His eyes had scanned the bodies, terrified he would find her.

Terrified he wouldn’t.

He hadn’t.

Eventually, he’d left and given up hope.

Until now.

Now she stood before him alone, with all that had gone before wiped from her consciousness.

No memory of him, of her status, of anything that had once separated them like a gulf.

No memory of the… moments… the glimpses he had been sure he’d caught from her, the hints of something more.

The extra coins in the coin pouch he received on the days he’d been in her service.

The days the cook had slipped him extra bits of food—so grudgingly, though, that Exavier had known that some royal command must have forced the servant’s hand to such charity.

The times the king had commanded Exavier whipped and the princess had brushed a few low, imperious words across the executioner’s ear and Exavier had been dismissed instead of flogged (once the king had stalked out of sight, of course).

Now Exavier blinked, raindrops sliding between his parted lips and flavoring his tongue with freshness.

All that had gone before was wiped from her consciousness.

She looked to him to tell her the truth.

And he could tell her that truth, at least the truth as he guessed it: that the peasants who had killed her parents must have taken her captive and tortured her. Tortured her until she’d shut off her mind and shoved out her past rather than recall a single part of it.

He could tell her the other truth, too.

You’re the woman I love. I’m a landless swordsman, forced to wander from town to town to seek any employment on offer, but I would protect you to my last breath.

There is nothing for you back at the palace. Come with me.

Stay with me.

She stared at him, licking the rain off her lips while a shiver racked her body. She wrapped her too-thin fingers around her shoulders, hunching inward. “Sir?”

And there was another option.

A better option.

He could lie.

Looking up into her tortured face—the face that was still more beloved than any other he’d ever beheld, the woman whose kindnesses, however tiny, had never wavered into malice—he swallowed.

He told himself there was no other choice.

He shot to his feet, took her icy hands in his feverish ones, and rushed out: “Do you not recognize me?”

Before she could respond with more than a parting of lips, he pulled her close to his chest. And it hurt, for she smelled of fresh rain and washed-away pain and daring, darting hope.

He looked into her eyes, but his words, for a moment, wrecked on trembling excitement; they fumbled to find their way before they burst free. “You don’t recognize your betrothed?”

Her hands jerked in his, but she didn’t break his hold, her gaze not disbelieving, not yet. Just… strange as she looked at him.

Believe me, his earnest eyes told her. Trust me.

He shifted closer.

She didn’t balk, drizzled drops of rain gemming on her eyelashes, her eyes bewildered and unsure. “Your… betrothed?”

His mind worked quickly, his resolve intensifying, and his words strengthened. “I’ve been searching for you for months. That’s why I collapsed, praising… I couldn’t believe… You were abducted. A crazed band of robbers torched our home and stole everything we owned. They took you. I thought—” This wasn’t even that far from the truth, he persuaded himself. “I’ve been searching for you ever since then, hoping you would escape somehow or that I’d find them and save you myself.” And all of that was true.

The sincerest truth of them all was that his heart had been searching and hoping for the impossible for an anguished eternity.

His hoarse tone broke, barely audible above the patter of raindrops and the whinny of his mount. “Can I kiss you? Let my kiss betray my love.”

Her lips parted again, mute, but after another strange look he still couldn’t define, she jerked her chin in a nod, and—

He couldn’t contain himself any longer. He buried his hands in her matted hair, his fingers tangled in those strands he’d never dared stroke before, and he kissed her full on the mouth with the pent-up passion he’d suppressed for years.

Exhilaration, terror—an entire chaotic mesh of emotion tore through him and shuddered into her. He thought his heart might burst from his chest.

He was petrified she might fragment under his touch like a wraith he’d only summoned briefly into life.

But she didn’t.

She was solid, yielding, yearning, and exquisitely real in his arms. She kissed him back with unpracticed lips that told him so much it broke his heart a little, adding to the web of cracks she’d already left there, with those soft, quiet glances back at the palace just between them, the glances across all the stratums that had divided them.

Rain poured through their hair and between their lips, pressing their drenched clothes to their hot bodies.

He forced himself to pull back but kept her hips close, with her cradled so near that their mingled breath curled into entwined vapor. “Do you believe me now?” he murmured against her lips.

“I believe something.” She cupped his cheek—the side branded with her father’s crest, the brand that marked him as a nothing—nobody—and then she dug her fingers into his wet hair and tugged his head down for another kiss. “I believe only the future matters now… Exavier.”