I Wish I Never Let You Go

I have told the story to myself so many times that it has worn as smooth in my mind as a desire path, trodden by many feet. I loved you enough to let you go, that was the truth of it in my mind, though you hesitated to believe it. I stood at that gate in the rain and I did the good thing. I gave you your freedom, but freedom tastes so bitter to one who does not know what they escaped. I have lived inside this story for years, dawnlark, and felt the shadows of it carry the weight of my guilt. Until tonight, when I find it will hold me no longer and I am laid naked and bare to the sun’s exposing glare.

So let me tell the tale anew, once, to you, who will never open this letter to read it. The truth can cost the two of us nothing now.

Give me your wrist. I know that I cannot, but I take it in my mind, turn it to the candle, and there it is. The mark that the seer set into us. A thin thread of pale silver laid across the inner arch of our wrists where the pulse can be felt the most.

Mine is warm tonight, as it is warm every night. You, above all others, know what that means, for yours was bound against mine when the ritual words were spoken. You felt the heat spark in it like a match put to a flame. This bondmark, it remains warm while the love lives. Turns cold when it dies. Mine has not cooled by a single breath in all these years, which only tells me that yours has not cooled either. Somewhere on this very night, in a grand hall that is not mine and a bed that is not mine, your wrist is warm, and the two of us lie awake in our separate shadowed rooms, knowing the one thing that neither of us will ever say.

I wish to look at you, dawnlark, while the candle’s fire still remains.

My dear, you were always so alive in any room you entered, and the room, regardless of how full it may have been, knew it before you had crossed the threshold. Your skin, deep, lustrous brown, dark and clear as a moonless night, and it did not so much catch the light as enrapture it, so that even on the greyest morning you seemed forever lit from somewhere deep within. You preferred your hair in a high crown of tight black coils, and through them you threaded small rings of gold that had come down to you from your mother's mother. When you turned your head quickly, they would ring softly one against another, and I learned to read your moods by that chiming before ever you spoke. You were not tall, yet your energy filled a room as though you were. And how you had a temper. Quick to blaze and quicker to laugh, a gap in your teeth when you did. You rode your steed much too fast and argued with priests and grey-bearded men twice your years, and not once in your life did you ever look away first.

You would have fought, that much I know. Even then I knew it, as I stood at the gate and turned my eyes from you. That if our places had been switched, you would have fought the whole world barehanded before you let them take me even an inch from you.

Do you remember the night we ran to be bound?

We told no one, for we could not. Your house and mine would have stopped us, with their treaties already half-drawn and their careful plans laid out for the pair of us. So away we went into the raining darkness, our horses slipping slightly on the hill road, your laughter ringing out back to me over your shoulder. Then we hammered on the door of the old seer's hollow until she came to us, with a face lined with cross intolerance, and let us in. She was older than the stones of the place, you could see it in her eyes. And she knew us at a glance for what we were, nothing more than two children of warring houses. Yet she bound us anyway, because the old binding rite does not answer to house and crown, only to the truth of what stands between two people. She bared our wrists,

We had it then. Do you see what I am telling you? The one thing that cannot be given twice nor taken back. And I let them take it from us anyway, our promise.