Page 24 of The Second Marriage

Sejun’s footsteps approached. “That fancy stone looks like a fish.”

“Yes,” Taral said, without looking up from his painstaking chipping. “I think it probably is a fish. I read a treatise by a scholar from the mountain regions of Absou, and she described very similar fossils and argued that they were fish. I’m inclined to agree, although of course I’m no scholar.”

“But how could a fish come to be here, buried inside this mountain?”

“No one knows.” Taral set down his chisel and looked up at Sejun’s sweetly baffled face. “This same scholar said that maybe these mountains once lay beneath a great ocean, although she didn’t say where the ocean might have gone to, or what caused it to disappear.”

“An ocean here? That seems unlikely.” Sejun squatted to examine the rock where Taral was working, and sat in silence for long enough, hugging his shins, that Taral went back to his work. At length, Sejun said, “How old is the world?”

Taral shrugged. The rocks couldn’t speak, and the scriptures likewise had nothing to say on the matter. Before the One God, there had been nothing; before They made the world, there was no world. But as to how long ago that had been, there was no telling.

“What a strange place,” Sejun said, voice soft. He reached out and touched his fingertips to the edge of fin Taral had exposed.

“There were dragons once, and as many omegas as alphas. Many ages have passed even in the brief memories of men. Why is it so hard to believe there was an ocean here?”

Sejun scoffed. “Dragons! That’s a child’s story. Don’t tell me you think dragons once flew in these hills, as they say, and breathed fire to terrify all the steadings.”

Taral smiled. “I haven’t found a fossil of a dragon yet. But who’s to say? Maybe that’s what I’m uncovering here, and you’ll come to regret your hasty words.”

“A dragon,” Sejun muttered, but he sat and watched Taral work for long enough that it became clear the fossil was in fact merely a fish.

They ate their midday meal there, seated side by side at the edge of the outcrop as traffic passed on the road below. Then they climbed down again and turned the horses back toward Gurratan’s stead. Taral was pleased with his progress on the fish fossil and anticipating a bath and, perhaps, a nap. Sejun began whistling again, his spirits not at all dampened by the effort of the climb.

“Thank you for coming with me,” Taral said as the farmstead came into view around a bed in the road, the white house on the far side of the river. “I was glad to have the company.”

Sejun smiled at him. Taral knew what he was thinking, but he wasn’t wrong. Taral was, in fact, warming to him, a slow and inevitable thaw like the snowpack in the high mountains when the year turned around toward summer. He was as helpless to stop it as the snow was to stop from melting in the sun.

CHAPTER11

Sejun had been well aware for several days that Taral’s heat would begin sooner rather than later. He smelled of it, for one thing, and responded to even the most casual touch with greedy urgency. But he had thought Taral would want to return to Tadasho, to pass his confinement in familiar surroundings, and was surprised when Taral announced, the day after their trip to the quarry, that he intended to stay in Barun until his heat was past.

“Unless you object,” Taral added in response to whatever he saw on Sejun’s face.

“No, I have no objection. I only thought you’d want to go home. But that’s fine with me as long as Gurratan and Ram don’t mind being ousted from their home.”

“It was Ram’s idea,” Taral said, which made sense; it didn’t seem like the sort of scheme Taral would cook up on his own. “Another day or two, then, I would imagine.”

“Yes, you do smell of it,” Sejun said, mainly to make Taral blush.

The next morning, Taral ran around the house with the frantic energy of a rooster checking in on his hens, doing every possible unnecessary task and squabbling with Ram about whether he was permitted to rearrange the furniture. Sejun watched with amusement from his seat in the front room, where he was playing capture stones with Gurratan. “I think we’ll decamp to the main house after lunch,” Gurratan said with a smile, and Sejun couldn’t say he was wrong.

Sejun went upstairs at midday to put fresh linens on the bed and fill the pitcher with water. Gurratan had said they would send a servant over from the main house, but Sejun didn’t see the harm in making some preparations. With that done, he sat down with a letter from his mother he had begun reading several times and never managed to finish. He was halfway through when Taral came into the room, smelling strongly of heat and with an air of dishevelment even though not a single hair was out of place.

“It’s time for my confinement,” Taral announced.

Sejun set aside his letter. Taral stood at the threshold, the door still open behind him, and Sejun didn’t know what came next; he had missed this part the first time. “Would you like me to stay?”

Taral rocked on his feet. “I don’t know. I suppose so. I’m not—it’s not quite time yet, but. Yes, you should stay.”

This was new for Taral, too, Sejun reminded himself. His second shared heat, and during the first one Sejun had come in when he was already well into it. Taral didn’t know what he wanted. They would have to find out together.

Taral shut the door. He went to the window and opened the shutters wider. Then he turned and stared at Sejun for long enough that Sejun finally gathered his letter and his cup of tea and said, “I think I’ll go sit on the balcony for a while.”

“All right,” Taral said.

The sun was hot and bright. Sejun removed his outer robe and draped it over the railing to give him a patch of shade to sit in. He heard no noises from within the room as he finished reading his letter. Everything was well in Merek; the fields were growing well with all the rain; his sister Sreva and her wife were expecting a baby, and the letter heavily implied that a cousin’s husband had assisted with the situation, although it wasn’t polite to speak of such things outright. Good for them, Sejun thought with approval.

He had left the door open, and Taral came to the doorway now and stood there. Sejun looked up at him, unsure of what to expect. His emotions were a knot that Sejun couldn’t unravel. But his scent—oh, his scent held no ambiguity at all.