He Would Always See Her Beauty

An old love story, retold. I could never get the beginning of this story right. Did I finally get it?

(The Proud Princess is still percolating… but I think another part is coming soon!)

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She woke in the rain, in the chill, relentless rain, in a long pale dress, a woman without a name.

Or perhaps she had a name, but could not remember…

She remembered nothing. Nothing of why she lay on the side of a road, in a dark, dripping forest, with droplets from the leafy canopy overhead pelting her flesh.

Lightning from the rain-dark sky painted her briefly in a ghastly nimbus… displaying her tattered gown, torn nearly to pieces, a mere pale drapery hanging upon her scrawny limbs—a drapery seemingly ripped to scraps by a beast.

And between those shreds of dangling fabric, discolorations daubed her thighs. Her arms were unsightly with purple splotches.

She was a motley patchwork of scars, her figure an untold tale of torment, bruised flesh marked with the hues of torture.

She levered upright—and became a living canvas of agony. The pain was raw, hot, stinging beyond the rain that chilled her to her marrow. A lingering, pulsing hurt from—

What? What had brought her here?

Her memory played truant. It was an imp dancing beyond her grasp, cackling while it withheld the knowledge of what had happened.

Did she want to know?

The hesitant fingers she trailed over her rain-damp cheeks told tales of raised scars and new bruises. Wrapping her arms around her frail shoulders made healing welts she hadn’t been aware of smart afresh. The invasive drizzle targeted every spot of bare skin, and every shiver pained her aching body.

Her voyage to torment had left her bloody and battered, tortured inside and out.

And then someone had discarded her, 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.

She should shout for help. Shriek for it.

But her throat felt as scoured as though old screams had clawed up from a place where human hands could never reach. Her insides wept as the sky wept while her mind wrestled with what to do next.

She needed shelter, warmth, but the darkness was falling ever deeper. A gluttonous dark feeding insatiably on her hope.

All around her, the rain wolfed down the stars, and the moon slid down the same wet gullet.

Little light. No hint of which direction led to safety (if any led to safety).

She at last limped down the muddy road and winced. Her limbs proved difficult to move. Every step in the pervasive chill shot discomfort through her bones. She had gone icy with cold.

She peered at the swampy road through her blood-caked hair, both the strands and her gown sopping with rain.

Please, she begged. Someone, help me.

Only the impersonal touch of the storm replied.

No. There: the spray and clop of galloping hooves.

She dragged her weary squint toward the impenetrable forest. “Stop,” she tried to speak—too hoarse, her bony arms unable to lift. Weakness coursed like a brook about to sweep her away. “Please,” she squeaked, wobbling, “I beg you…”

A colossal warhorse rode the shriek of the wind as it charged from layers of darkness and rain.

She couldn’t even scream as it reared before her in the misty drizzle, a flash of lightning showing its emaciated ribs.

Its startled whinnies mingled with the cried command of the rider dragging at its reins.

The horse splashed down to the marshy road, spattering the woman with smatters of mud.

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

The stranger was unlooping the reins from his fist, his whipcord-thin 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 arms—honed, though, and strong, she thought; he still had enough muscle to help her, surely, for she scarcely possessed enough 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, hope hurt.

His face was as sharply fractured as a hawk’s, and 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 visible eye, an arcane symbol branded his cheek while a jagged scar slashed his other.

And when his gaze alit on her—

He collapsed to his knees. “My lady!”

*

Exavier’s knees caved.

She was supposed to be dead.

Winded from shock, he had no breath. His knees spattered the mud and his fingers mashed into the squelching mire, dropped into obeisance before his princess.

She was supposed to be dead.

Beyond belief, though, it was her.

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

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

Gone, her silken slippers remained; her bare toes sank into the same quagmire in which he knelt, lowered to all fours like the lowlife dog he’d been born, a boy raised in the castle kitchens and cuffed by every servant, rogue, noble; nothing but a raggedy boy no one had cared for.

Gone, too, her flawless skin—skin that, once, no one would have dared to mar.

Now it appeared that someone had tried to carve away every unmarked vestige of her.

There was no reason at all he should recognize her—not beneath those welts and weals, her hair lank and drenched, her body hinged together by feeble joints, her posture reduced to paltry survival.

No reason save one.

He had loved her.

She dug her hands into his wet hair, and the shock of her touch vaulted through his body—even after all these months, after all her cold rejection, all of her 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 on his face, he stared up into her scarred features, her delicate features that someone had tried hard to destroy… and failed, because he could still see their beauty.

He would always see their beauty.

Then her question clawed into his awareness. What?

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

She 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…?” He blinked away the rain where it dripped off his lashes, and her words struck 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 you, he could say. You’re the princess, and I was 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 jests, they’d shucked the noble dead of their jewels and slit the throats of 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 had jerked the dagger out, had 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 was missing.

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

Terrified he wouldn’t.

He hadn’t.

At last, he’d left; he’d given up hope.

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

Fresh hope?

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 wrapping her too-thin fingers around her shoulders. Shivers racked her body. She hunkered inward. “Sir?”

There was another option.

A better option.

He could lie.

Looking up into her tortured face—the face 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 and took her icy hands in his feverish ones. “Do you not recognize me?” he asked, and he pulled her close—to his chest, where she smelled of fresh rain and washed-away pain and sweet, sweet hope. He looked her straight in the eye, at her lips parting on a sigh, and his words, for a moment, wrecked on his fumbling tongue. “You don’t recognize your betrothed?”

Her hands jerked slightly in his, but she didn’t break his hold—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, merely blinked up at him from drizzled raindrops gemming on her lashes. “Your betrothed?” She was bewildered and unsure.

His mind worked quickly, his resolve intensifying, and his words strengthened. “I’ve been searching for you for months. That’s why I collapsed… 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, hoping you would escape somehow or that I’d find them and save you myself.”

All of that was true, but the sincerest truth of them all was that his heart had been searching and hoping for the impossible for an agonizing eternity.

His hoarse tone broke, barely audible above the patter of raindrops and the whinny of his horse. “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 it. 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.

An entire chaotic mesh of emotion tore through him—exhilaration, terror—and shuddered into her. His heart might burst from his chest. He was petrified she would fragment under his touch like a wraith he’d only summoned briefly into life.

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 more, adding to the web of cracks she’d already left there. All of her soft, quiet glances back at the palace just between them, the glances across the strata 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.

“I believe…” 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. “Only the future matters now… Exavier.”

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I hope you enjoyed this story! If it seemed familiar, it’s because it’s an old one revised. If you’d like a print copy of it, it’s at the end of the print verson of Wishes and Whispers and Sibilant Hisses.

I hope excellent times are happening on your end, y’all! Thrice the Shadow. (Nope, I still have not decided what that means LOL)

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