Page 31 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
The project might have been a success, by Cyrus’s estimation, but Hope herself remained a puzzle. She was not afraid to negotiate with him, about anything and everything. Sometimes he thought she argued with him simply because she enjoyed it—when no one else would dare behave in such a manner. It was how he had agreed to allow her to call her mother each day, though he was not sure he liked it.
It was good that the older woman was doing better than Hope had imagined she would. Cyrus was pleased this was so, as it made Hope visibly happier and he found he was far more interested in her happiness than he should have been.
He had accepted that she hadn’t known that she was promised to him. That her father had not told her directly and she had found no papers in his things—or, as she had confessed one night, perhaps she had but had not known what they were.
I was fourteen, she had said softly.And I had to take on so many things.
When Cyrus was fourteen, his father had decided it was a kindness to teach him how to survive sandstorms in the desert with nothing but a horse and a tarp. They had ridden toward the sand, not away, and Cyrus had spent long nights in between these sessions waking up in the night from dreams of sand filling his mouth, his nose, his eyes—
Or sometimes with tears on his face and his mother’s songs in his head, something he had not admitted then and could not admit now, either.
That was the part of her keeping in touch with her mother that seemed to lead to more of those questions from Hope that he did not wish to answer.
Or maybe the deeper truth was that he did not know how to answer her, and he liked that even less.
You do not seem to have much use for mothers in general, she had said one night, walking with him in one of the gardens that were the pride and joy of the courtyards in this place. Gardeners from all over the kingdom competed for the chance to come here and make the fortress green in some small way as a way of celebrating and yet shifting the kingdom’s past when this place really had been a military outpost.
Yet that night, the only bloom he had seemed able to focus on was Hope.
Don’t be ridiculous, he had replied.I hold mothers in general in the highest regard. Motherhood is a sacred state. Some claim it is the apotheosis of a woman’s life.
According to...women? Or according to the men who wish to lock them away to breed?
I do not wish to lockwomenaway.He had frowned down at her.You are the wife of the King, Hope. You could be taken and used against me by any enemies who might happen upon you. More than that, were I to allow such a thing to occur, it would paint me as a small, weak man, unworthy of the crown.
As was typical with her, she had only smiled.So it’s only mothers, then. Only mothers who you can’t abide.
The only mothers I have paid the slightest bit of attention to in this life are yours and mine, he had told her shortly.And it is not the fact they are mothers which offends me. It is that they are both dreadful at the only important jobs they have ever had.
Hope had only looked at him in that way she did sometimes. As if he broke her heart.
My mother loves me unconditionally, she had told him.What she might do or not do doesn’t change that. You don’t have to be a perfect person to love someone, Cyrus.
And despite himself, he had been hit with another memory he went out of his way to lock down, far out of sight. He had been sixteen. It had been a long time since he’d woken in the night for any reason at all. But one night he and his father had journeyed to one of his father’s minister’s homes in the southern city, and Cyrus had been relegated to a guest room while the older men talked privately.
He’d seen the interview by accident. He’d been flipping through the channels, telling himself that he was merely cataloguing the sorts of things that rotted the minds of Aminabad subjects, and then there she was.
Until he saw her, he hadn’t remembered it was his birthday.
I don’t need it to be his birthday to remember him, she’d said, and though she hadn’t been singing, her voice had gone through him all the same. Into him, like bone finding bone.He’s with me always. I hope he knows that.
He’d felt as if someone had taken an axe to his head. He’d stood there, frozen in the guest room of a stranger’s house, unable to move. He’d drunk her in on the screen before him. Her face, just as he recalled it. The anguish in her eyes.
The way she put her hands to her heart.I love you, Justin, she’d whispered, looking directly into the camera, her eyes filled with tears.No matter where you are. No matter what. I will always love you.
It had taken him so long to remember himself, to move from where he stood after the new program moved on, that his feet had fallen asleep beneath him. And it wasn’t until weeks later that it occurred to him that she’d used the name he was meant to hate and reject.
What had shamed him since was that he’d never admitted what had happened to his father. And he’d played her words over and over in his head during the military exercises his father made him practice, to harden him, and the nights his father made him sleep alone on the bare floor of the fortress’s dungeons, so he might understand that even that was a measure of his benevolence.
That his life was the gift his father had given him, and everything else was up to him to make his own.
He had told himself then, and since, that he was grateful for the lesson.
What he had never told a soul was that he had heard his own, lost name like a song all the while. As if it alone had sustained him. His mother’s voice in his ear, his heart, his bones.
How he had always despised himself for the weakness.
Back then and that night with Hope in the garden, too. In the garden, he had stared at her until she looked away. Then he had told her that there would be a price if she wished to have closer contact with her own mother, and a greater one still if she insisted on mentioning his.
