Episode 233: Misha (Giana)

The world undulated and ululated. The first, because drunk persons ought not to dance. The second, because she was here in a gypsy camp full of catcalling men and people nearby having atrociously loud sex.

They ought to be embarrassed, but they weren’t, and Giana discovered that she was incapable of embarrassment about it either.

If anything it made her want to sob.

She had enjoyed some very loud, very perfect sex this morning.

Apparently, that had been too much touch. Affection with Meldrick ought to be limited to Sundays and the occasional Wednesday morning. Oh, but he was Elesarian, so Dorvish and Sandwich. Sendvish. That one.

Maybe she ought to go to him and propose a touch treaty.

The man had cats, for goodness sake!

She paused in her dancing. It wasn’t really dancing, in the way the other girls danced. They did something lolling with their hips which made them seem to long for intimacy regardless of love.

Giana essentially waltzed with the air, comically fast because the music was in 6/8 time signature and because the band seemed to have a speeding train for a conductor.

Her pause nearly made her stumble into the fire.

She flinched away at the heat. Even drunk the grief at her predicament joined with this harsh and difficult knowledge: By killing her in the lake, Rhoda had removed the elixir to Meldrick. She had removed the fire and water magic which Giana so loved. She had removed the immortality.

Giana was this: A drunk, very young, human girl, dancing in the firelight, longing for a partner.

She’d argued with Rhoda about that too, as she’d argued about much of their encounter at the lake.

It was such an affront, to be mid-discussion with Meldrick, midway through having her heart broken, and in the next instant be submerged to her neck in water, surrounded by gypsy men with swords and a woman with terrible teeth.

It was such an affront, to be drowned.

Death was peaceful. So peaceful that when Rhoda yanked her back to life, Giana scarcely argued about Rhoda’s claim that she would have stayed in the lake of souls following the attack.

Rhoda’s assurance that she would hunger for the touch of a stranger before the night was over…Giana never could have imagined herself in that state.

“In all future but this, you keep the death. In all future but this, Niels die.”

Rhoda certainly had a knack for getting right to the thing that would upset Giana.

“And he needs me to save him, does he?” Giana had laughed.

“He need you here. Learn drom. Join in his battle, save him.”

Giana had no idea what drom was and she’d never asked because one of the men had selected that moment to hold a stein of red liquid up to her face and pour it down her throat.

That was also an affront.

The red drink, Giana suspected, was the reason Rhoda laughed about the stranger’s-touch argument. It seemed there was a potent aphrodisiac of some sort in the solution.

No wonder Nim had gotten pregnant. Poor Soren. All the self-control in the world would never have stopped the force that was Rhoda, and Soren was a teen boy with none of the self-control in the world.

Giana made a mental note, if she ever went to the Dells again (which wasn’t likely because Mel was king there and Niels would be angry or embarrassed or ashamed or she didn’t know what, but she couldn’t face him after he’d warned her against dating Mel) to be kind to Soren, perhaps a little more understanding and helpful with his children.

For now she rocked by the fire. Every time grief about Meldrick or confusion about Meldrick or longing for Meldrick threatened to overspill her eyes with tears, she took Rhoda’s advice: “Stare into the flames, let the fire burn your grief.”

She did that. The smoke burned her eyes and her throat ached with held back tears.

A hand grazed her waist, precursor to a stranger, a young man, walking in front of her until he faced her. He inclined his head toward her.

She swayed a little.

“Good evening,” he said. “I am Misha. Will you dance?”

He had a beard, which Meldrick didn’t. His dark hair was so different from Meldrick’s. Giana could have done without his blue eyes, but Viggo had brown eyes so she was going to suffer through eye color troubles either way.

He was tall, muscled. He wore some kind of shirt with the t-shirt sleeves ripped out so that shreds of dark green thread hung down his arms.

He was a man, an attractive man. He looked nothing like Mel or Viggo. Her body, whether it was grief or the red drink or some combination of both, trembled with longing at the thought of his touch.

“I don’t know that dance,” she warned him.

One of the girls, Krelia, had tried to show her and failed. One did not simply go from waltzing to undulating in one dance lesson, drunk or no.

But Misha had a nice voice, deeper than expected and tender, uncertain.

And his touch on her waist…

He took her hands this time, and moved opposite her, in time with the music. Waltzing was no longer appropriate (had it ever been?), but he moved his hands to her hip bones and showed her, with a calm focus, how to move them.

When she had sorted it better than earlier, he stepped back slightly so that she could see his face again. “Misha is my name,” he told her again. “What is yours?”

Not Giana. Rhoda had made it clear that Giana was dead. Whatever suffering it caused her children, she would not see any of them again until the battle, whenever or whatever it was. She was kidnapped, if that meant free to go anywhere but home.

Besides, she didn’t want to be Giana anymore. Giana was a woman who let things happen to her.

“Ana,” she decided. It was Roma enough. She smiled at him. Damn the consequences. Giana cared about consequences. Ana wanted to feel alive. “Hello, Misha,” she said in what she hoped was a flirty tone. Flirting was not in her set of skills.

He met her smile. “You are new here,” he observed. “Where are you from?”

“Denmark,” she said in Danish, so it sounded like Danmark like it ought to. “In Babylon. You live here? I went swimming in the lake.”

She wanted him to touch her again. She suspected there was something she could do with her eyes to make herself more alluring, but whatever eye language a certain type of girl knew, she did not know it.

“When I’m not travelling,” he told her. “You like swimming?”

No, not in that lake, not ever again. Rhoda had done something to inhibit her magic, and then she’d drowned her and sliced her body open and done who knew what else. When Giana revived, her body was whole but the lavender water around her swirled black with her own blood.

She shuddered at the memory, and his hand found her – shoulder, back, waist, and slid around to the front of her abdomen, where it rested on the place where there ought to have been a scar from what Rhoda did.

“And you dance as though nothing has happened,” he marveled.

She wondered whether it would be too forward to put her hand on his and slide his lower, inside the hem of her skirt.

Giana would never do such a thing.

Ana, though.

She met his eyes. “I dance as though I have nothing to lose.”

He drew her hips against his so that their bodies wove through the music together. It reminded her of one of her favorite Elesarian concepts – rather than hearing or listening to music, Elesarians described it as being inside the music.

And she was. She could feel the music with every ounce of herself, pulling her, calling her to him.

“This,” he told her, a question in his eyes, “is a dance about everything to lose.”

Yes.

He ran her hand beneath her jaw lightly, skimming the sensitive skin of her neck and collarbone before he settled his index finger into the cleft between her clavicles. She let out a low moan and tilted her head back as her body pressed against his, wanting more of his touch.

He ran his fingers over the exposed skin of her neck and pressed his lips, hot in a way she never would have noticed if she still had fire magic, against the hollow beneath her jaw.

“What else do you like?” he asked. Watching her eyes, he ran his hands down her neck, past her collarbone, to the top of her breasts. The peasant-style blouse Rhoda had given her made her breasts stick up like the centerpiece of the feast that was her body.

She loved that analogy.

“Misha,” she breathed against the side of his face. Her hands shook.

He drew back, leaving her alone in the cool night air. “Yes, Ana?”

Oh, she wanted him. Giana was afraid, but Ana wanted him.

Giana wasn’t afraid. It hit her with a wave of emotions that triumphed over the aphrodisiac and the alcohol and the feelings of worthlessness and not being wanted.

She wanted Mel.

She might not be able to get him again, but she certainly wasn’t ready to move on, only hours later.

She stepped away from Misha, away from the fire, and set out to find Rhoda.

If Rhoda didn’t want to send her home, that was fine, so long as it saved Niels like she promised. But Giana had the right to a private tent, and the right not to be meddled with.

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