“Were they taken apart like this? But they seemed to be able to function after, though I couldn’t imagine how we would. We clung to each other. After a while I started to cry. Annalise held me. “‘In the book,’ she said, ‘they say that after fucking one is omnivorously sad.’ “‘It’s not that.’ “‘What then?’ “‘It’s so easy for you.’ “‘Easy?’ She looked at me and her grin slipped off, right off into nowhere. ‘Easy? We could die of this. Don’t you feel it? Right now, we could be dying of each other. How do you think that feels, when I could be thrown out like garbage any day? And you, you are the heir to everything.’ “She had never talked about it before. Now I was so far into my own fear that it took me time to realize they were the same fears. We lay in silence, holding each other tight, until I caught up to it and passed ahead. “‘How can she hurt them?’ I said finally. ‘What if…?’ “‘You are not her,’ said Annalise, which she had said before, but now, she took my shoulders fiercely and held me so she could look into my face. ‘You are not hers,’ she said. The difference was immense, and she struck my fear away easily. I was washed with gratitude, relief. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘You never cry.’ “‘I never knew stuff before,’ I said. ‘How this changes everything. How it’s full of fear. In the books I read, it’s full of joy. In the books you read, it shows you how to put your hands into me and pull my heart out.’ “‘Poor princess,’ she said. ‘And what have you done with mine heart? You have eaten it all up.’ “After that we were shy and had to start to make stupid jokes, though I could not imagine ever seeing the light of day again, I felt so different.” LoveFearFriendshipHealingTraumaDevotion Book:Black Wine Source: Black Wine
“I could hear the roaring fill the air but I could not find a source. A waterfall around the bend, I thought, across these rocks. Ahead, I could see a small crack in the rock. I went forward prepared to leap it. As I took the step nearest it, I glanced down. “And nearly fell, two hundred feet I’m sure, into a boiling cauldron of water trapped in a deep, narrow chasm of stone so curled and convoluted by erosion that it seemed like some fantastic cloth. I can record all this now but at the time I had to fling myself back, and the navigator grabbed me and prevented me from sliding in. We both fell backward, and I lay there panting and sweating. “‘What?’ she said. ‘What?’ I gestured, and she crawled ahead. When she returned, her face was white, but she was laughing. “‘I can die now,’ she said, that Avanue phrase Annalise has read in books but I had never heard spoken before. The navigator lay beside me laughing until she calmed, while the others, including the merchanter, took their turn. He alone seemed unmoved. “When we jumped across the chasm (so narrow there was no effort to it)—and there is no easy way to say it—she jumped not across but in. I did not see it. No-one saw it but the merchanter. I only heard her falling laughter.… “Annalise tells me that if a northerner says that phrase ‘I can die now,’ it means great joy, but they mean it truly. Not many of them choose to actually die, but they do not grieve for those who do.” LovePainHappinessJoyFearGrief Book:Black Wine Source: Black Wine
“They all know the chant except her. She tries to follow along but her signs are halting. Still, the people on either side of her smile at her. The silence in the room is overwhelming, broken as it is by nothing but the involuntary sounds of the deaf and the rustling of the sleeves of the signing people. The girl is about to start to cry when she hears around her a muted chuckling sound. Who’s laughing, she thinks furiously, only to realize that the sound was the sniffling of other people already weeping. At the realization, she is hard-put to suppress giggles instead. She thinks: maybe all ritual has mystery and absurdity, and maybe that is what it is for. It is a curious and complex thought and like most of her legacy from the madwoman it makes her head hurt. She concentrates then on her signing.” LoveHopeLanguageLossGriefSecretMysterySlaveryDeaf Book:Black Wine Source: Black Wine
“It’s about…’ but there isn’t a word for it in a language he knows. “He makes the sign again, two hands intertwined. “‘Fucking?’ “His face darkens. He makes the sign for fucking. It is different. He pushes his hands away and apart. Then he says, =Not fucking. That we have to do for them. Something we do for ourselves. Because we—= and he makes a strange sign, which she does not understand, then spells it out, *love*, repeating afterward his hands-on-heart sign. “=Do we ‘love’?= she signs back, because she doesn’t know a word for it in the spoken language he knows.… “She pulls off her shift and sits naked before him. He puts a hand up, halfway. Her hand meets his. Later she is not sure who first pulled the other closer, even though it all happens very slowly.… “Suddenly, an unfamiliar and terrifying feeling mounts through her belly to the top of her head. It seems to spread in circles, like the concentric circles at the servants’ ritual, but spreads and spreads. She cries out, ‘What is it?’ but her voice is wild and she doesn’t know what language she has used. Suddenly she cannot bear his hand any more: she clasps it to her belly and pushes against him and he comes into her harder, comes with a ragged shout of his own which he later tells her would have been words if he hadn’t, so many years ago, had his words stolen away. “They lie down then, touching over more surface than she has touched anyone in her short life, and sleep entangled like his fingers were when he made the sign for this, for whatever this has been, this that they have done together.” LoveSexHealingTrauma Book:Black Wine Source: Black Wine
“It is only for a while. I will receive you when you die, with special love.’ “‘That won’t do me any good.’ Essa struggles through sobs, finds speech, bends it until she can keep hold of it. ‘It won’t be a little while for me. It’ll be my life. And when you receive me, I’ll be dead.” LoveLifeDeathLossSeparation Book:Black Wine Source: Black Wine