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Inez turns to Damon. She does not sit. She clasps her pale hands in front of her slender body. “Well?” she says. “What do you wish to say to me?”
“Inez, you are correct, there is nothing to explain. I am as you have seen. My nature is what it is. I cannot change it. I will never shame you. Whatever you choose to do now, you are my wife and I will protect you from dishonour with all that I have.”
Inez looks slightly shocked by this declaration. “Whatever I choose? You think I have a choice? You think I will go to Doroth Zain and accuse you?”
“You ought to. The law of Zai is clear.”
“It would shame me too — if you were publicly accused of sins of the body.”
“You would prefer to avoid that shame?”
“Damon.” Inez sighs “I cannot avoid the shame of being your wife. The rumours about you already shame me. People say things to me that they’d never dare say to you. They come to me in a cloak of pretence that they simply worry for me and my soul. But then the things they say are cruel. It has been said to me that the only way you would share my bed would be if I cut my hair and let you take me on all fours like a sly whore.”
Damon swallows, the pain in Inez’s voice slices his heart like a knife.
“But,” says Inez, “it would do me no good to add my voice to those who wish to undermine your status by speaking of your nature. It would only make things worse. If you were found guilty of sins of the body you would be exiled and our marriage dissolved. I would be left with nothing. I have no real choice. I will forget what I saw, but it must not happen again. I can keep silent, but next time it might not be me who came upon you.”
Damon nods. Inez is right. What had he been thinking? He had been behaving like a man possessed by a demon. His voice sounds thick when he speaks. “You are right. Dear wife, I am sorry. I will do everything in my power to dispel the rumours about me and protect us both.” He goes to his knees in front of Inez. He takes both her hands in his. “Selim gifted me a great treasure when he gave you to me as wife,” he says. He means it.
Inez looks down at him. Her face is still hard. “You mean that? I am not merely an encumbrance to your desires?”
Damon shakes his head. “No, fair Inez, you are my wife. I vowed myself to you. I will do everything in my power to make you happy.”
“Then will you come to my bed? Your refusal to do so since you returned from war has been noticed.”
“I could lie in your bed and sleep, but more than that, I do not think my heart would allow.”
Inez’s eyes look glassy. Her voice crackles with unshed tears. “I must give you a son, Damon. You know I must.”
Damon knows Inez is right. If he does not produce a son within a year the Rose Court will want to know why. “I am aware. I will find a way.”
“Damon,” Inez says sweetly. “Have you done penance since you returned from Jur-Mattan?”
Damon shakes his head.
“Perhaps you should go and seek an audience with the Immurite and ask her advice. She will give you strength.”
Damon leans forward from his knees and kisses each of his wife’s pale hands. “If you wish it, wife, I will go today.”
The sun is well past its zenith when Damon arrives at the Rose Palace and makes himself known to the Imperial Guards.
His horse is taken to stable and he makes his way through the huge carved doors into the wide courtyard at the front of the Rose Palace. His childhood home.
The enormous palace square is bustling with the wealthiest people of Attar. Merchants do business, the highest nobles meet each other, minstrels play sweet music. Inside the walls of the Rose Palace is a city inside a city. A brilliant, glittering citadel. The turrets of the palace rise up, sparkling in the Azurian sun. The old Rose Temple, destroyed by Sarelik Darek two hundred years ago, was built of a strange pink stone. The origin of that stone is unknown. No one knows where it came from. It has never been mined anywhere in the empire, there are stories it came all the way from The Cradle. Others say it came from the frozen lands beyond the sea north of Ismagaar, where the fae still dwell.
When the Rose Palace was built the structure was far larger than the temple it replaced. It took almost all of Sarelik’s life to complete. The Azurians claimed, and claim still, that it is the largest building in the world.
The stone recovered from the destruction of the temple was not enough to build the palace. So the pink stone was mixed with the more common white and brown stone that forms the majority of the buildings of Attar.
The combination is very beautiful, but Damon wonders how beautiful the Rose Temple must have been.
Damon crosses the square, past fountains that sparkle with waters brought from the Gleam on aqueducts, and an elegant rose garden. The blooms are fading now summer is almost over.
All the roses die.
Damon has heard that somewhere in the Rose Palace is a stone maze large enough that a hundred men could be lost in it, and that it has a beast in the centre that eats the hearts of sinners. Somewhere else there is an entire forest that is home to a thousand calcis birds. These stories could be true. No one knows the entirety of the palace. Not Emperor Selim, not Doroth Zain, not even Chancellor Vindar, the Thousand Eyes.
He turns left towards the Temple of Sarelik, a huge wing of the Rose Palace. The home of Zai and all who are devoted to him.
