Chapter Fifteen
Tell me not of sorrow,
You who contain all joy.
Tell me not of love,
You who love all things.
Tell me not of time
You who are of eternity.
For though you brought life to all things, I brought life to only one, and though given to me as a blessing, I hold my love even if it becomes a curse. I am the Prophet's mother, and though he may belong to all the earth, he is the son of only one.
Prophesy to me not of death, merciful angel of God,
For I knew as I gave it that life would one day end.
Prophesy to me not of tortures and pain,
For I felt them all in the hours of birth.
Prophesy to me not of betrayal, of sacrifice
For tears are in a mother's milk, loss kneads her lifelong bread.
You of divinity may say to me nothing that shall be new, only tell me the place, merciful God, and let me be there in the time of trial, in death as in birth, attendant with agony if I must. Tell me that I might no more be haunted by only dreaming, as if your spirits were evil spirits of possibility, rather than noble spirits of truth.
In truth I can weep truly.
In falsehood, I can only sorrow for its lack.
***
Stag Lake was born of a bed of limestone and the calming of the river Verun as it buried its fingerling springs into the ground. The fine, cold water was called pure, its properties mysterious, but as Ainjir lost its mystery, so did the lake. Once fabled to hold the graves of the thousand warriors of the first king, it was said the lake was cold because the chill breath of the dead rose through it.
Any other culture would've called that ill-omened – to old Ainjir, it was destiny.
Old Ainjir faded like the trees, though: slowly, given to sporadic bursts of resurgence. It appeared as pockets of fall-colored forest in late summer, always first to show in dark and shaded parts of the woods, and like the forest, it thinned and shrank and died as the Capitol came nearer, raising its hoary stone towers from the basalt cracks splitting the bald earth of the Ards. Old Ainjir lived in wild places, the way the God of the Prophet lived among people.
Nika couldn't help the precipitous rise of the city's towers in his mind, even as the beauty of the lake tried to close it out for him – a parting gesture by the gentle gods that blessed this place before dying their slow and solitary deaths underneath a military boot. They rested easy in the loam. Soon, he would too.
All of his life before the war, he had tried to understand what the difference was. What did it mean that for the Ainjir to say they were of the land, and he was not, when the closest connection they both had was that they and their mothers and fathers had once crawled on it on infant knees? He wondered what the land under his feet meant to him when told he was something other than 'from' it. He had never been able to feel the difference.
During the war, he had been too busy to think about it.
Now, with the proposition of being buried under it arising, he yearned for sand he had never seen, in hopes it would somehow be warmer to his soul than this cold earth. Now, the clay felt stifling and foreign, and his body remembered things about the land that birthed his ancestors. How could he want to lie under the soil with this land's dead gods? He was no god, and he was no native, and he didn't belong there.
It wasn't his to want. It was his to do.
Stag Lake was beautiful, tree-shaded, cool, and the jungle gave way to its gentler cousin, the forest, at its border. A series of rocky pools made for the stop the army took; around the far bank a tier of them marked what was once a set of sacred pools, and now stood as solitary testaments to rank. The higher you went, the higher the rank. Made sense, then, that the one at which he would meet Cole was at the very head of the river, up a series of multicolored stone steps, worn in the center from ritual tread. Not that anyone in Ainjir would call it 'ritual' anymore. Tired bureaucracy, perhaps, given the dragging feet of his guards and his guide. That was ritual enough – ritual like paperwork.
Nika didn't have the right to consider this a loss. In truth, Nika didn't have a right to consider anything at all. Treason kind of voided those rights.
The old gods wouldn’t have felt that way. Sure, they would have shown him his liver, just as the bureaucracy was going to do in its tired way back at the Capitol, but the gesture would have meant something – it would have become some story to tell, at certain apt ceremonial moments – rather than a cross-through on a list full of steps to take, instructions for moments of crisis. If he showed up in other stories – because the best and worst always did show up again – he might even have a whole new fable attached to him. Instead, at the most, somebody in some desolate hamlet might find finger-bones in wolf shit and wonder where they had come from before driving their sheep away.
In his climb, his hand slapped upon the wet stone, still sun-warm despite the river's spray, and it felt like the commiserating palm from the buried gods of Ainjir pushing him up. In truth, once buried in the deeply shaded earth, what was the difference between traitors, gods, and finger-bones in wolf shit? The old gods of Ainjir had no answer, anymore.
Cresting the last outstanding stone, he was surprised, nearly running into the hand of his guard offering to help him up. He refused it, but only because he didn't need it. Once they stood on the top, the little nameless officer spread a hand out, job done.
Cole dismissed him, and he was gone. Cole wasn't in quite full regalia, but nearly, like a flippant dignitary fatigued from the ball. His deep blue coat, lined with gold, lay with all its fifty buttons open over his shoulders – and only someone with shoulders as broad as Cole's made this look like anything other than laziness. It was like the grandly gilded fabric couldn't contain his breadth of chest, so puffed by valor and innate manliness.
Nika wanted to laugh. He looked like the paintings of all the old paunchy generals in the Academy's halls. They has sworn never to become those portraits, but of course this was youthful fear of age, the fear of becoming laughable to themselves when they were no longer able to run all day, and still be eager to find hidden bowers and ponds for lovemaking, and to leap undaunted from heights that could have killed them. God-hear-him, youth shouldn't be allowed to make promises meant to last into age.
The guards lingered. Nika wondered whether they were going to get to watch him be yelled at. Amazing how much could change in a day and a half, and how much didn't change over years. The grooves in his heart into which Cole fit still served now, as perfectly ground as ever. They were now in the groove for 'about to get yelled at', which, though not a happy thing, was a nice thing to have.
“Please tell me that whatever you have in store includes a bath,” Nika said. He brushed what remained of his sleeves with his hands. “I think the smell's even thrown them off their beatings.”
The guards exchanged markedly different glances; one looked offended while the other had a moment of panic worthy of battle.
“You do realize provoking them isn't the best of ideas,” Cole returned, walking up to stand next to him.
“I tease,” Nika frowned theatrically. “We are all friends now.”
At this, both of the guards looked panicked – whether that he might be serious or they might be in trouble it was hard to tell. Nika laughed. Cole patted his shoulder. “All right, now. I'm the one that threw them off their beatings. They could get in trouble from your loose-lipped joking.”
“I know,” Nika said, to watch the guards jump. They did, to his satisfaction. “I know it was you, I mean. Though I got to see Guy do some impressive 'Captain'-ing reinforcing your orders.”
Cole raised his brows, glancing at Nika. “It wasn’t really orders. To have to put out orders would have made the lot of us look bad. It was more a strong suggestion. But that’s good to hear. I thought the shock of jumping ranks might paralyze him.”
Though his tone was light, Cole appeared restless, his feet shifting to resettle his weight. This could be for two reasons: he appeared restless for the sake of making the guards nervous, playing Nika's game, or he appeared restless because he was restless and was too distracted to hide it, in which case things with Cole were very bad.
“Anyway,” Cole said, “Your job is done here. Thank you, you are dismissed.”
Nika might actually have cursed aloud, but nobody heard it over the whip of the guards' heads turning towards one another in shock. Cole was indeed pissed, but Nika didn't have time to dwell on that. The guards nodded, mutual resolution apparently reached at some previous council.
“Sir, we must protest.”
Cole had already begun to turn, too-polite officer's smile gone from his face, but this brought him up short. He turned back to the guards. Nika pretended he was a tree in hopes no one would notice him.
The guards, seeing how lifeless their general's face had become, again exchanged resolute nods.
“Sir, we must respectfully protest.”
Cole resettled himself. The gesture, done quite the way he had done it, tended make inert objects nervous, so it was no surprise the guards had to stop themselves from stepping back a pace. Nika had to give them much credit, though, for their faces were hard set, looking towards honor and glory.
Though it did not happen often, Cole could be just as brutal as Nika – especially when his focus was elsewhere. That was the trouble with carrying everyone with you wherever you went; people sometimes forgot that, though they felt important, they were not important, and not-important things, when they became troublesome, got stomped flat.
The Provost soldiers, used to Hammerlyn's overt demonstrations of displeasure, did not realize this. They could not possibly realize it. They also could not possibly realize that, to Cole, this was not a lone incident of dissent, but one added to the long chain of ill behavior encompassing any and all contrary-to-expectations-or-honor acts from the beginning of the march to now. It took time to adapt, and Cole was very forgiving, until it was time not to be.
Cole’s eyes narrowed, drawing on his memory. “Heary… and Lo, isn’t it?” Their shock implied that it was so.
“I commend this gesture,” Cole said, in a very even voice. “It is… admirable, in its way. Though it’s rare I would interfere with what is clearly an honorable and heartfelt course of action, on this occasion, I heartily discourage you from continuing it. Consider it marked, in my memory – I will take it for the act of dutiful and virtuous soldiers that it is, but I must advise against continuing. I may even go so far as to suggest you do otherwise.”
Nika was not often jealous of Cole’s ability to handle people, but he had his moments. Could the guards not feel both complimented and threatened by this pretty statement? Could they not understand it as both high praise and extremely dire warning? On the one hand, it drove Nika mad to try to understand how to walk that line, and on the other, were he as displeased as Cole seemed to be, he would have just ordered them flogged and gotten on with the day by now. It saved time.
The guard Nika recognized stepped forward, expression pleading. “Sir, please. We're supposed to ensure your safety. We can't in good conscience follow this order.”
Apparently, his guards were stupid, or at least, had no idea the great mercies being offered them. If Cole didn't officially insist, they weren't officially eligible for punishment for dereliction of duty. 'Dereliction of duty' wasn't really the worry, anyway: 'disobedience to an order' was. Nika only did it once, at Academy. He was laid up for a week recovering from his wounds, and it was only a week because they wanted to keep him. Who would want to keep stupid guards?
“Are you stupid?” Nika asked, interrupting everyone. He looked at his guards, who looked at him. “Did you not listen to my speech?”
After a long moment, one – maybe Lo, he didn’t know – started to say, “I… we don’t… speak Midraeic?”
Nika ‘tsk’ed and rolled his eyes, turning to face them; he could feel Cole’s anger burning against his back. “I surrendered to General Cole. What am I going to do now that I wasn’t going to do days ago when I had a whole army to back me up? It is too elaborate to throw a whole war and then surrender just so, what? We can end up in single combat and then you can kill me on the way down to…? What do you think? Rally those assholes? Anyway, I surrendered – I gave my word – and I can’t guarantee the safety of my men if I don’t abide by my word. You act like I would lose twice, just for fun.”
The guards looked at each other, which, as it meant they looked at neither Cole nor Nika, served very well. They couldn't see how nervous Nika was, and they couldn't see Cole’s anger. Cole’s actions were always carefully tailored to his image; interference was unwise. Nika didn't need Cole to have any more reasons to be angry at him, but Nika also knew when Cole needed the chance to get a hold of himself.
The familiar guard finally tried again. “In the past, Midraeic promises have not served...”
“What about the promises of Ainjir?” Cole stepped forward, so he stood beside Nika. “What about my personal promises?”
The guards hit the shit-your-pants realization at about the same time. Nika would have left it there, but this was Cole.
Cole smiled – and easy, humoring smile, like they had all shared a slightly risqué joke. “As I said, I admire your devotion to your duty, and I understand your objections – we haven’t served long together, I don’t blame you. I’ll make my order official if it helps, and I would understand if you should register a complaint with Captain Guy or Provost Officer Gaereth. In any case, if it eases your minds at all, then I give my word as a gentleman, should anything happen, you won’t be held responsible.”
See, Cole was able to do this thing, where he could threaten people and make them happy about it at the same time. He had increased the threat – now his personal honor was at stake – but it was all so friendly. He smiled – they smiled, albeit nervously – and in the end, they weren’t stupid. They straightened themselves out, and gave salutes – and honest ones! Salutes full of pride and exactitude. God's Will! but they loved Cole, even when he stood against them.
Nika and Cole waited until the guards were well out of earshot, over the rim of the rock outcropping, and working their way down the stone steps.
“Do they know you’re not a gentleman?” Nika asked, hoping a joke might delay things.
The smile that pulled up the corner of Cole's mouth was grim. “I doubt the strict definition matters. You would be surprised, how often that works. I thought being a gentleman was an affliction only prized at the Capitol.”
“Prized by those who can earn the title,” the stupid words tumbling out of his mouth before he could stop them. It had been funny, at Academy, to joke about their potential futures – neither Nika nor Cole wanted a title, but even if he had, Nika couldn’t get one, so Cole always won that battle – but the future was here, and it wasn’t funny anymore. Though Nika had been the one to insist on them before, he didn’t mean to keep pointing out the battle lines between them.
“Are you saying there were no lords or gentlemen among the Comids?” Cole asked, a dull disinterest masking icy fury in his eyes.
“Ha,” Nika said, with a quiet, joyless laugh, “you have never seen such hypocrisy…”
But under Cole’s sharp gaze, Nika knew if he kept talking – or kept looking – he would crack. No way to make the gesture casual, he turned to walk away.
And knowing that if he let Nika hide now, they would play this game of secrets until it was too late, Cole seized Nika's arm before he could.
Nika's gaze flashed down to the grip, then up at Cole, but like a clockwork toy slipping a gear, the furious blow that should have followed dissolved to a twitch of his fist.
With an expression annoyed as it was sullen, Nika again glanced down at his forearm, where Cole's hand lay. Cole's brows went up, but as for removing his hand – he respectfully refused. Nika frowned before he could control it – but that was all.
Maybe it was that they were not as young as they had been, or maybe it was that they had both seen too much violence. But for all Nika felt the fit in his heart of them together – even in the bad ‘groove’ of ‘about to fight,’ more like something thing broken, rejoined than separate pieces brought together – this would not be like the explosive, physical fights of their youth. For one, Nika probably couldn’t afford it – though he could have won, all the same – but for another…
Well, maybe they had grown up. Or maybe Nika felt death too close already. He couldn’t imagine what Cole felt, and trying to…
Trying to hurt more than violence.
In Cole’s grip, Nika’s arm began to twist, almost gently, but with stubborn persistence, searching for weakness. Cole let him, already thrown off by the fact Nika hadn’t reacted to being stopped, or grabbed, but too furious to wish to give in. He had almost lost his temper with guards, and Nika stopped him – which made him more furious, for how off-kilter everything had to be if Nika was managing his emotions when Cole, himself, couldn’t. But just when everything should have come to a head between them, in a raging torrent of regrettable furies, Nika had just… twisted. Anger abated by surprise, but not quite cooled, Cole was going to let him twist.
Twist Nika did, his arm going one way, then another, very deliberately searching for a way out, rubbing raw already sore skin on his wrist. He didn't want to lay hands on Cole in return and start a real fight. Of course, Nika didn't want to start a real fight. Of course, not wanting to fight was how all of their real fights had begun. Until the last, when Nika had made it impossible to fight, by leaving.
Nika struck out, the heel of his palm smashing into Cole's chest with all the sudden fury of his beating heart, but it was a foolish thing to do. Cole stumbled back at step, but his other hand whipped up, seizing Nika's striking arm by the wrist. Cole coughed, but now had both of Nika's wrists.
As quickly as his fist had struck, Nika growled, “What the fuck was I supposed to do? I didn't want to involve you.”
Cole, delicately gasping for breath, had always found Nika’s speed impressive. How had he put it before, mere days ago? Focus and brutality – and, he should have added, speed. Mentally, physically – deadly on both accounts. Now that he had the fight he expected, he just needed to stop admiring Nika’s speed and catch up. Oh, sure, he was still angry, but a pop in the ribcage had somewhat dimmed the heat of that fire temporarily.
“It was a war, Nika,” Cole said. “I swore an oath to fight for my nation in the event of a war. I was involved before anything even happened. And for so long, I made it through that war by thinking you were safe, away somewhere.”
“I swore the oath, too,” Nika said. Though he scowled ferociously at Cole, it wasn’t Cole he was angry with; that was obvious to both of them.
The twisting had stopped, though with both arms trapped, Nika was in a worse position than before. The knowledge of it tightened his jaw with worry, beneath his scowl, but he did not move to free himself, or even to resist, to make Cole fight for his hold. He couldn’t bring himself to make Cole fight anymore.
“There was nothing I could do,” Nika said, “no letter I could write, no word I could send, no messenger who would carry the words. I couldn't do anything.”
It was very quiet. The rush of the water over the stones, a gentle roar, dipped to a whisper, as if their air had turned to a thick, swaddling cloth.
Cole pushed. By instinct, Nika pushed back, only to give, too full of guilt not to. Cole worked until he had Nika’s arms pinned behind his back, bringing them deceptively close for how distant they felt from one another.
“They had you trapped, Nika? How? Who could possibly have outmaneuvered you?”
“Fools,” Nika said, and his anger turned in another direction along with his eyes. “Fools and cowards.”
This much Cole could have guessed, though hearing a few more details would have been nice. He pushed again, this time stepping even nearer; this time, Nika stood his ground, and by doing so let Cole get close enough he could speak into Nika's ear.
“You were fighting against your will.”
Nika didn't confirm it. That was more than Cole could extort from him with just Nika's remorse to use as leverage. Though Nika did, for one frozen second, seem to sigh.
Cole began to push again, and Nika let him, stumbling backwards. He wouldn't go too far – Nika had his limits, and starting pushing back when he felt the stone trail away under his feet and the softness of moss and soil take its place. With a grunt Cole shoved, chest to chest, until bark scraped both of their hands, and Nika's back hit the tree trunk with enough force to knock the wind out of him.
“Cole...” Nika's voice had lost its bluster, but still had urgency as he caught his breath. “I did fight. I did intend to win. You can't doubt that.”
Shaking his head, Cole looked up at the tall tree above them, spiny branches managing to obscure the sky in spite of their fineness; he hoped he could stifle his emotions half as well as Nika had somehow learned to over the course of the war. “I don't. I lost too often to doubt that. I don't lose to just anyone. I fought you, too, just as honestly. Once I knew it was you… I wanted to see you lose.”
A poor summation of the feelings of that moment! So poor that Nika’s eyes searched Cole’s face in concern – and when Cole looked down at him, Nika very nearly gave it all up.
Instead, he forced out, in a voice hollow and cracked. “I did it. I did all the things that hurt you. I did it, and I knew I did it.”
Poor Nika, Cole thought. So good at making plans, so bad at making himself happy by them. If, for once, he made a plan that was not the best plan, but the plan for what would make him happy, maybe then Cole wouldn't feel like Nika's tearing out of his heart was merely a foreseeable consequence he had failed to avoid.
Now he was letting Cole push him around, letting himself be trapped, and bullied, and accused – as if to do penance. He wanted so much to atone, but Cole didn't believe in penance.
Cole smiled at him. Slipping his hand out from between Nika and the tree, putting his other finger-tip light on his chest, Cole punched him hard enough that Nika had to grab the tree trunk to stay up. Cole then put his hands out, palms forward, down resting easily at his sides, inviting return.
Working his jaw with his hand, Nika glanced at up him.
“Is this a fight?” Cole asked. “Or are you trying to get me to punish you? Or maybe, trying to punish yourself.”
“That wasn’t even hard,” Nika said quietly, referring to the punch.
Sighing, Cole stepped forward again. Cole put a hand under Nika's jaw and lifted his head, kissing softly the spot his knuckles had left on his cheek. Cole stroked the chin in his hand, and then leaned in, body pressed up against Nika's, and let his weight rest. Nika was pushed against the tree trunk, Cole's head resting over his shoulder, body lying heavily against Nika's own.
“If we’re going to fight, we ought to fight. We’re good at fighting, but there’s no point to it if we don’t each believe we’re right. Our fights are too costly to be pointless. You don’t get to stand there, being pathetic, letting me push you around because you think you deserve it.”
Nika didn’t dare move, though it was a little hard to breathe. “Cole, I… I d–”
“Shut up,” Cole said pacifically, voice muffled by Nika’s shoulder. “I'm so angry with you I could crush you. You lied to me – which is fine, it was a ruse, but then you made a liar of me. You took the one thing that made me happy through some of my very bleakest moments, and made falsehood of it. And you won't dignify me by telling me the truth of it, because it would ruin whatever plan you have going on right now. I could kill you, Nika, except you're off to get yourself killed.”
Nika shut up, though his gut wormed with pain and his fingers twitched with searching for something to do to make it right. He could hear Cole's breathing, feel his body and rise and fall against Nika's own, and Nika would hardly fill his lungs lest he disturb Cole's breathing.
“I'm sorry, ‘Ras”
Hearing his name like that both hurt unimaginably and flooded him with relief. The pain of it made him raise his head from Nika’s shoulder, to get a clear breath, then he kissed Nika’s cheek again, putting it back down without looking at his face.
“I know,” Cole said. “I hit you because you still seem to feel like you should suffer to make your regret clear, but you don’t. You don’t even have to say it. But please tell me that that’s not why you’re doing what you’re doing now – trying to get yourself killed to pay for some terrible misdeed.”
Nika shook his head, before realizing it probably upset Cole's position. He spoke, instead. “No, I swear it. It's the only way.”
Taking a few more moments to rest, Cole finally pushed himself away. He was extremely doubtful that it was 'the only way' – the best way, perhaps, but never only. Not as long as there was an Esras Cole to meet his Dominicus Galen. Still, he was reluctant to look directly at Nika, so he let his eyes come up slowly, following his hands as they grasped Nika's hips, his waist, ran up his chest to his shoulders, and finally traced a hand over the new bruise he had made. Rather than feeling angry, as he had been, Cole only felt sorry that he had done it. He looked Nika in the eye, and said Nika’s own words, from years ago, back to him.
“What we have is not love, for love is too arbitrary, too easy, to prone to flight instead of combat and stubbornness instead of persistence. What we have is faith. Abuse of faith eats the soul, taking what was given in trust, and leaving nothingness behind, to stand instead.”
The words hit Nika worse than a blow, worse than any physical pain could have, but Cole’s smile, afterward, was a balm to heal every wound.
“I have faith in you, Nika. You have not betrayed me.”
Nika smiled, too happy not to, though it was hesitant, shaking and wary as newly-hatched bird. His voice was quiet. “I betrayed a lot of things. I betrayed my word.”
“I know,” Cole said, kissing his cheek again. “You are a difficult bastard to love. Any chance you'll tell me what 'it's the only way' to do?”
Cole's finger still traced gently at Nika's throat. It might've been as close to seducing anything out of Nika that he had ever gotten. Or at least, the most important thing he'd ever seduced out of him.
Alas. They could forgive one another, but this wasn't between just them anymore.
“No,” Nika said, though he had hesitated. “I can't.”
“I'll figure it out,” Cole said, with quiet confidence. “I just hope you don't drive me to killing you before I get there.”
“It's more likely you'll drive Guy to death on your way.” Nika replied. “He is working very hard.”
“If he is, I haven't been directing him. I gave him most of today to handle plans. I was planning on working him tonight.”
“Not tonight,” Nika said, shaking his head.
Coming up from laying kisses on Nika's neck, Cole caught Nika’s eyes, resting steadily on his own. Cole nuzzling at his ear. “Perhaps not tonight.”
Though he made the suggestion, Nika still couldn’t bring himself to put arms around Cole, or return his kisses. His voice was so quiet, if Cole's ear had not been next to his mouth, he would not have heard it. “Cole... do you forgive me?”
Cole's eyes came open; what rested before them was not the dark tree bark, but the painful uncertainty of the future. If Cole didn’t succeed, the problem would not be forgiving Nika.
“It's Dolorosa, isn't it?” Cole said gently.
Now was the moment, if there had ever been one, to at least forgive the past.
“Let’s be sorry for other things.”
Nika nodded; though Cole had closed his eyes he felt the brush of Nika against him. Loath to leave their position, pressed so close, there really were more important thing to handle before the sun set. He pushed away with hands on Nika’s hips, and smiled.
Rubbing a hand through his hair as well as he could, Nika tried to shift some of the nerves off his shoulders. It did weigh heavily on him, now that Cole had swept away the debris before it, that it was Dolorosa.
Sweeping a hand out towards the pool behind them, he invited Nika to bathe with a soothing voice. “It is important you get the chance, I think.”
Nika nodded and headed for the pool; though he didn't need to, he grasped Cole's hand and let him drag after him.
Who could have imagined how important the rituals would become to Nika? With a mind so occupied with other things, other stresses, other horrors, being stopped and forced to clean his lips or to kneel and pray or to greet with peace those for whom he wished nothing but a hard death had taken on a comforting separateness from his feelings, his day-to-day trials. Like the cadet who learned how to win by losing, over and over again, he had learned somehow to be as peaceful as the words he spoke, how to forgive himself for things proper to forgive... how to stop, as Cole stopped, and control himself for the sake of something better. Odd that fighting for a cause he didn't believe in, surrounded by those he hated, and having holiness shoved down his throat, that he had finally understand what ritual could do.
Cole understood in the abstract at least. He had brought Nika here for a reason, though he wouldn't be surprised if Nika didn't dignify his impulse with the name. In truth, he hardly would either; it wasn't so much betting on forgiveness, as even in the height of his anger wanting Nika to be happier. It took some brain-cudgeling to remember the ritual itself, but he'd always liked the idea of Dolorosa. Once he had started putting the patterns back together, they had all flowed nicely from the depth of forgetfulness.
Really it required warm salt-water for cleansing, but they had none. There would be a woman, an aged mother, to recite the story of the Holy Mother's visitation, her reprimanding the angel of God, but their memories of mothers would have to serve. Normally there would be selections of morsels of food to eat, each one symbolic of some step in the holy mother's path to revelation, and her standing and awaited griefs, but Cole didn't have any of the right things. He had cobbled together some supplies, and foraged some. One of his men had found him a chunk of cocoa, which wasn't appropriate, but he'd filched a teapot and some peppers for it anyway, because in the end, there would be time for comfort. These were all hidden behind a rock, because there were supposed to be separate rooms for the different ritual parts. There were many parts to Dolorosa. They had none of them, really. Just rocks and pools and each other, and plentiful sorrow.
Odd that it was Dolorosa, now, Nika thought – or rather, in a day or two – an accident of Ainjir fortune, mixed with the perfect timing of God. Dolorosa was perfect. Nika had always underrated it, as a boy, preferring quiet studies and prim piety. Cole had liked it, once he learned of it, which even without a belief in God made more sense than Nika wanted to admit.
Cole certainly thought it fortunate that it was Dolorosa. By going through Dolorosa, they could both finally lay what was past behind them, and focus on heading towards the future. Cole needed to be able to focus on what lay ahead, and he couldn't focus when torn up by the past. So let this Dolorosa settle it; let the past lie.
Let his traitorous love rule unquestioned.