Steps

Kharris danced.

Moonlight and surf courted her on the waves, and her bare feet were wet from where they hovered and over the ocean’s chilly, tentative touch.

The beach was close, but each step took her farther. Bonfires from Shadowprey dotted the coast, their own shapes dancing in the brisk wind. They marked the town, but Kharris did not see them, her eyes were closed.

She was lost to the rhythm of the sea and the dance. Light skirts snapped around her legs  but she was unhindered—she was dancing, her body would adjust. Her hair was pulled back from her face in four tight braids that hung down her back and with beads threaded in by nimble trollish fingers, clacking like conversations in a language unknown to any elven ears.

She was lost to the rhythm of the dance and it was the closest she’d been to peace in months. But it was not peace. Peace was an active process, in its way. This was something… blank.

Dancing, there was no need to think about the losses she was remembering, the emotions that had been her personal maelstrom, the physical pains she had suffered. No need to think about them because they *were* the dance: the slide of her hands across her arms, the movement of her toes where they curled toward the tops of little waves, the pull of her hips toward the horizon, and the roll of her neck. They were in the Shadows that twisted around her like veils.

Her finger tips swept down and dashed across the water, flinging water into the sky like teardrops, reoffered to the sea.

She did not cry now, not while dancing. She had lost the will to wonder if he was watching. Another time, and she might have wished she never had to stop dancing, so the emotions did not come crashing, crushingly back—but now, there was no wishing for anything. That took desire and emotion she couldn’t feel. In emptiness as deep as the dark of the night’s ocean, there was nothing.

Neither of them had wanted to be alone. It had been two years ago they had lost their son before he had even finished greeting the world. Two years since she’d failed at protecting her baby. When her own body had seemed to betray them both. And now, this year, again, she was failing Rowan’s father.

For whatever reason, she had lost him. When he used to burn for her, now there was no longer even a spark. There was duty and responsibility, but no passion. There was no longer any need. No longer any *desire* for her. It was … comfortable and complacent.

Or it appeared comfortable until she tried to connect to him. And then it was by turns terrifying, frustrating, and destructive. Either he did not care to see it, or he did not care. Kharris suspected the latter.

Everything about Iloam was shifting. He was trying to make himself something new, and apparently that meant leaving Kharris behind.

She had been trying so hard to keep up. To adjust and make him happy. To be a woman he would want again, but it had been more than half a year since she had felt him connect to her.

So she danced, alone, hanging over the hated sea on a magical cantrip her mother had taught her as a small child. If she stopped moving, she would just float in the air over the water, adrift and at the whim of the sea. She did not stop moving.

She knew when it had started. When he had returned from his long absence in Gilnean waters. When the Marquis had come into their life, through a simple, entertaining dancing job that Iloam refused to accept for what it was. Enraged, jealous, moody and irrational, Iloam had never seen the truth of what Kharris told him. He had seen only his own replacement, an attack to her which had so shocked Kharris she had floundered in confusion at countering. Through crisis after crisis, heartbreak after heartbreak, nothing she’d tried to do had helped.

All the things she had done, none of it was seen for what it was. Iloam had lost sight of her. He could not see her, and he refused to listen. Whether it was her own fault or his didn’t really matter. There had been a curtain of mistrust and delusions between them, and Kharris had never learned how to penetrate it.

But the Marquis had told her he knew how. And he would teach her. He would help her save her husband from the dangers Iloam pursued relentlessly in his passions. What a lie! He may know how to push that curtain aside, but not for her. And he never taught her. He teased her with ideas, manipulated her with promises. And when they didn’t materialize and nothing helped, he blamed her. She was not trying. She was not mature enough. It was her fault everything was crumbing and wasn’t he so very, very disappointed in her.

So it seemed the Marquis had instead stolen Iloam’s passions. With calm words and the harsh punishments Iloam craved, so the Marquis said. His motives were anything but altruistic, and Kharris knew a wrong step in her dance between the two men could easily lead to disaster. And, day by day, Iloam’s eyes shone for the Marquis like they did not for Kharris. The desires were there, but redirected to the human man. What he held that Kharris didn’t, she didn’t know. Where was the appeal, when before there’d been only hatred?

She was far from land now. The bonfires were orange specks, flickering on the distant shore. The moon was stamped in the sky like a portal to another world, its pale face fixed on Kharris and silhouetting her sharply. She was soaked by spray and smelled of the sea.

Kharris hated deep water. Kharris couldn’t swim. Shadows slipped over her, whispering to her ears the subtle sounds of intoxication and destruction.

She stopped moving and wondered how long she could keep up the concentration to levitate just out of reach of the water. Without dancing, the creeping heaviness of the water all around her started to weigh on her. Her head turned in all directions. Water. Water. Water. Distant shore.

She was no longer following the ‘rules’ set for her.

She was no longer going to listen to those who told her she was wrong. If she was wrong, they had best start proving they were right—none had been able to so far. Bellani had the right of it—make your decisions and remember yourself.

Decisions she had put off, or hidden from, stared back at her from the shore. It was time. Time for her to remember herself.  She had spent too long listening to everyone else. Listening to Iloam. Listening to Ythgar. Listening to people around them.

Maddie thought it was about getting Iloam to talk. Maybe it was. But it was also about getting him to listen.

One foot in front of the other, back toward the beach. She had decided.

Step by step, all the moves until now were wrong. She could see that now. Pledging herself a ward of the Marquis, in an attempt to protect Iloam, she had lost Iloam. In listening to the Marquis’s reprimands and lectures, she had lost herself.

Shadows engulfed her, giving her strength and resolve with each graceful, sure step. This is who she was. A dark shape moving over dark water, lit eerily by the moon behind her, and preceded by her rippling shadow on the water like a herald with a standard.

There was nothing left to lose.