A coil of inky black rises slowly from one central point, gradually growing into an undulating coil. It doubles back on itself, rearing and winding like a mass of snakes. And then it pauses, and I know it's looking at me even though it has no eyes. it begins to unfurl itself like some dark wing, each feather elongating into a spike that pushes against my closed lips. The spikes become fingers, dark and insistent, prying open my lips and clenched teeth as I desperately try to gnash them shut. I need to push it off of me, out of me, but it only moves faster and farther down my throat.

"O'otani, wake up," a soft voice says. A hand shakes my shoulder lightly, then more insistently as the nightmare clings to me, refusing to retreat as consciousness dawns. "It's just a dream, okay? Breathe, little tiger girl. It's not real."

I feel like I'm pushing my way through thick water to wake up. Something slippery and dark curls around me as I try to climb out of the depths of my reverie. It doesn't want to let me go, but his touch brings me back to life, gasping and breathless as the new light of dawn bathes my face. I lift my hands to my cheeks in dismay, finding them wet.

"Breathe," Sholu repeats. He's on his side, leaning his head on one hand while the other rests lightly on my arm. So I do. In and out, feeling the rapid rising and falling of my chest as I can't seem to suck in enough oxygen. Slowly, though, my breathing calms. My heartrate returns to normal. I push myself up slightly on the plush pillows, using the corner of the white sheets to wipe the wetness from my face.

"You were screaming," he says softly. "And talking fast, but I couldn't make out what you were saying. You sounded so scared, though."

"So you woke me. How kind of you," I say as sarcastically as I can manage with the residues of terror and sleep dampening my voice.

He sighs, lowering his head onto his arm so we're face to face on the pillow. "Believe it or not, I find there are far better reasons to hear a woman screaming." His smile is lascivious and I feel my pulse begin to quicken.

"So you woke me from one nightmare into another," I breathe onto the cool silk sheets between us. He frowns.

"You never asked what I was dreaming of, husband."

"What was it, then?" He asks, looking a little suspicious.

"A dark, snake-like tendril pushing its way inside of me," I tell him without feeling. "I'm no interpreter of dreams, but it's not very subtle, is it?" I pause for a long moment before adding "I was dreaming of you."

"Nothing about you is subtle," he says, pushing himself up onto his elbow. "Everything is good and evil, black and white, heaven and hell. There are angels and demons, not women and men." That strange light enters his eyes as he looks at me, and before I can react he throws himself on top of me, straddling my chest and pinning my arms on either side of my head. I struggle against him, but he holds me tightly, barely seeming to break a sweat as I twist and writhe beneath him. His hair falls forward over his eyes so I can't see them, but he's smiling.

"Like this," he says, his breath slightly sour from sleep. "Right? This is what you want."

"Want?" I snap, gritting my teeth to quell the panic rising within me. "Are you truly that deluded? That blind? Do you really think that I want you somehow?"

"No," he says, leaning forward inch by inch until his grey eyes float before me like twin moons. "I think you want my actions to conform to your stereotype of evil so that you can pretend everything is simple. Easy. I'm a monster who thinks nothing of murder, of rape, and you're just a sacrificial lamb too in love with a man who left you to die alone to fight me."
He leans down further, until his lips are almost grazing mine. "It's easier for you if I just hurt you, isn't it? It's easier when I'm the devil and you're damned. You're terrified of us just being a man and a woman together in bed at dawn. This," he says, closing the space between us and pressing his lips against mine so lightly I can barely feel it, "this is your nightmare. The moment you're forced to confront the fact that there's a beating heart in my chest that shares some kinship with your own."

His touch softens and he releases my arms, lifting his body from mine. I fight the urge to turn on my side and curl in on myself. "Don't you dare speak of my heart like you know it."

"Nothing about you is subtle," he sighs, ignoring my interjection. "But life? Life is a gray haze where you can barely tell dawn from dusk. Life is calculations, adjustments, so many more exceptions than rules. And your version of morality, your account of our history, cannot survive that truth."

I try to laugh, but it sounds forced. "Spare me the armchair philosophy."

"We both know it wouldn't bother you this much if it wasn't true."

"Bullshit!" I snarl, rising suddenly. "You just want to exonerate yourself for the inexcusable."

"And you just want to damn us both," he replies evenly, "to protect your exalted memory of a past filled with saints who never actually existed."

"I want to protect Shikkah! To protect Shira!"

"Shira left you to be shot by my men without a second thought and Shikkah wanted you to hang."

"You can't know what he thought," I mutter. "You don't know if he thought twice before he left me."

"You're right," he admits. "But I do know what a man does when the woman he loves is facing a volley of bullets. And it isn't run away."

"He would have died in there with me had he tried to-"

"So what?" He asks, voice heavy with feeling. "So fucking what? Maybe he should want to, maybe the thought of losing you should be so unbearable to him that he rushes into the room wanting that bullet to pierce his breast and stop his broken heart from beating."

I look up into rage-filled eyes, shocked by his sudden emotion. "Is that what you did?" I ask. "When they shot, what was her name? Lira?"

"Lizsa," he corrects quietly. "Her name was Lizsa Lascovi Korahaim." His countenance darkens, eyes cutting into mine. "And you want to know what I did that night? I fought, goddamn it. I cut down anyone that got within five feet of me with no regard for my own survival. I didn't save myself because without her, I had no self to save. I was already fucking dead; my body just didn't know it yet. So don't tell me that he had no choice, that he was doing the only thing he could when he left you there to die alone. He chose, and he didn't choose you."

"That wasn't- that was never his prerogative," I say, softer than I'd like to. I hate how easily my voice changes around him, how its rising volume or slight quaver reveal the effect his words have on me. "I was the Izsaiki, the protector. The only reason they ever put a sword in my hand was so that I could keep him safe. I was raised to confront hell itself if it were necessary to ensure his survival. His duty, his loyalty, lay with Shikkah. And he did what Shikkah bid. He kept our heir breathing."

"Is that what you tell yourself when you lay awake at night, remembering that last moments of stillness before the firestorm? When that chaos lays itself bare to you in your nightmares, and you wake up screaming and shaking with tears staining your cheeks, do you remember how he technically broke no vows? How he did right by the institutions that raised you? Or do you remember looking for his face in the chaos, praying he would reach out and take your hand so you didn't have to walk through hell alone?"

"I remember praying that he was very far away."

"Well, he was that," Sholu agrees. "He left the country before he even knew you were dead. But let's say, for argument's sake, that he simply assumed it. Well, the world knows you're alive now. They have for moths. Surely he's come back for you."

"He can't come back!" I snap. "There is no back. You torched the bridges. You torched everything. He knows that if he steps foot on Shikkan soil, he'll hang!"

"And yet you're still waiting for him," Sholu says, walking closer to me. "I see it in your face, hear it in your voice when you whisper his name like a prayer. You still hope that he'll find you again."

"Of course I do, you stupid fuck," I throw back. "I spend all day surrounded by filth. The noraya's vice, the vasayaste's dirty money, the sin of Arzsa turning its back so quickly on its rightful rulers. The stink of that mad jungle cat and worst of all, the rotting jackal now sleeping by my side. When it's late and I start to feel like I'm suffocating, of course I imagine his soft white hand taking mine and pulling me away from it all. Of course I imagine gazing into the last pair of eyes that look like home to me."

"You know what I think?" He asks.

"No," I mutter. "I have no interest in thinking about you, let alone trying to follow your perverse thoughts through your twisted head!"

"I think that your love of him isn't about him at all. It's about you." He pauses, as if waiting for me to protest. "It's about what you need him to stand for."

"And what do I need him to stand for?"

"What you would fall for, too, in both senses of the word" he tells me. "Perfect love, contrived innocence, and the unimpugnable holiness of the dimaraste. Great and powerful things." He holds my gaze without blinking, an unspoken challenge twisting his mouth into a half-smile. Go on, it says. Tell me I'm wrong.

"Your whole life has been about protecting and supporting Shira; from birth, he's held up the center of your world. He's as much a god to you as Zsavina and you can't bear to think ill of him or blame him because your identity is so wrapped up in his. If he's the perfect prince, you're his righteous protector. But if he's just a scared little boy running away from a fight he didn't even try to win, well then, you're nothing at all." He speaks slowly, clearly, watching my face the entire time. He's baiting me, expecting an explosion, so I bite my tongue and keep my expression as neutral as I can. Which is, admittedly, still rather hostile.

"Your family has to be beautiful and wise and grand, never mind if you were ever truly happy with them, nor the slights they did you and your mother. If they aren't the zenith of human existence, your entire world begins to unravel. Admitting that they weren't the best future for Shikkah would mean admitting that you've spent your entire life defending an ideal that never even existed. You think you've lost everything else, and you can't bear to lose the last of your pride and purpose."

I pause, fists clenched tight, wanting so badly to start screaming. To claw at him, beat against his chest, tell him every reason he's wrong. But that's what he wants, and I won't be so easily lead, nor provoked.

"You know what I think?" I say, taking a step forward and looking straight into his cold grey eyes. "I think you heard gunshots splitting the night, then silence, and you lost a wife. So the next time you brought the guns, you made the silence, and you kept one girl alive to fill that void at your side." He's stripped me bare with his words and dissected me so coldly, that I want, no, I need to hurt him. To shake him like he's shaken me. I think this was never about me, never about us. You're dressing me up as a ghost because you can't let go of some dead norayasti whore."

I know the second I say it I've gone too far. The man, with all his showmanship and arrogance, is shrugged off like an ill-fitting garment. And beneath, there's something darker, something with teeth. It's the first time he's looked at me like he truly wants to kill me, and I feel a shiver of fear run down my back.

He grabs me by the throat and pulls me towards him. I know already that each finger has left a bruise I'll need to wear high collars to cover. "Listen carefully, koi dizsa," he murmurs in a silken voice completely at odds with the violence in his eyes. "You've been misled by my indulgence. I may tolerate you insulting me at every turn, I may choose to hear Mesviraste and whoreson as terms of endearment instead of slander, but that leniency does not extend to Lizsa. The next time you speak ill of my dead, I will choke you until you pass out. Do you understand?"

He lessens the pressure his fingers are exerting on my windpipe. "There you are," I sputter out, coughing. "There's the real Sholu. Not the gentleman with fine manners and gray silks who quotes poetry and lectures me on moral philosophy. This is who you are. I see you. You're a jackal sewn into the skin of a man. You're a monster."

"You're right," he says, his hand still loosely gripping my throat. "I'm the devil himself." And then he does the last thing I expect, leaning forward and kissing me. Not lightly, but deeply, hungrily. A wolf pulling meat from gristle and bone, gripping the thin fabric of my nightdress in his fists. I push him away and he lets me, retreating to the other side of the bed while I suck a ragged breath into my burning lungs.

"I'm your monster, I'm a man, and I'm your king." He's breathing fast, cheeks flushed red above a smile that's halfway to a snarl. I bear my teeth, completing it between us.

"You will never be my king," I whisper, meeting his eyes so he can see the madness in my own. "Not for one fucking second. It takes more than a crown to make trash into treasure. All you've done is snatch it from our brow and parade around town in it like a newly wealthy fool."

"A fitting comparison," he tells me, leaning casually against the bedpost. "In plays and poems, it's always the fool who tells the truth. And believe me, I'm the cleanest brow and clearest conscience that's worn this crown in decades."

"Somitu-"

"Was willing to let this country go to the wolves to keep things the same as they've always been. Fought hard to disenfranchise the very people who bailed her out during the starving times."

"You are the wolves," I spit. "Mangy, dirty, howling wolves."

"How about the brow before her, her brother and your uncle Arjuuna? Will you defend the virtue of a man who tried to have his half-sister killed when she wasn't yet thirteen years old because he was afraid of his father favoring her? It's ironic, really, how similar to Arjuuna Kyoro turned out to be."

I see her for a moment, flashing before my eyes like a familiar apparition. And I find for an instant that I can't remember her face. "Don't you dare talk about my mother, you-"

"You talked about my wife, didn't you?"

"I am your wife!"

"Let's go back farther, then," he continues, ignoring my interjection. "Your esteemed grandfather Sorzsa Ladfel Amarin. He became obsessed with Amsol Kalth, had her husband murdered, and married her himself. He threatened her family to accomplish this, of course."

"A man became obsessed with a woman who didn't want him, threatened her family, and forced her into marriage? Where have I heard that before?"

"All the evil I've done, I've done for a good cause. I saved your life, O'otani, whether you'll admit it or not. Sorzsa, though, Sorzsa sinned for the sheer pleasure of it. He was an Amarin, of course, so he kept those sins close to his chest. But secrets have a way of getting out."

"He was dead before you took a breath," I snap. "What would you know about it?"

"What Lusca Nali Korahaim told me. Lizsa's mother."

"And what would some gutter-" I pause, seeing a flash of fire in his eyes. "What could she possibly know about my family? Gossip, nothing more."

"Everything," he replies simply. "She knew everything."

"I'm not playing this game," I growl, stepping away from the bed and walking over to the open window. It's a bright day. I can hear children playing in a courtyard below.

"It's not a game," he tells me. "It's your history. Our history."

"Everything is my history, Sholu. I'm an Amarin. We've ruled Shikkah since the days of Blessed Aramizsa's conquest a thousand years ago. We're tangled up in everything."

"It wasn't a tangle," he says, stepping closer to the window. "It was a noose."

"You know all about those, don't you, whoreson?"

"Better the son of a whore than an Amarin," he tells me. "Amidst all of the attempted sororicide, disinheritance, divorce, and murder, not to mention things far darker than that. I know they're your idols, and you think I'm the evil creature who smashed them against the temple floor, but the truth isn't so simple."

I snort derisively. "I don't think. I know."

"Well, don't you want to know the whole story?" he asks.

"You obviously want to tell me."

"You're right," he admits easily. "I want you to know the whole and complete truth before you judge me, unlike everyone else in your goddamned world who filled your ears with lies, abbreviations, and circumlocutions. I want to complicate that binary worldview of yours, make it harder to sift good from evil." He pauses. "And I want you to know that amongst the dusty hollows where dark things hide, I'm far from the worst monster."