The Worth of Love
The worth of love is so terribly, immeasurably high.
"Mama loves you, Ely."
Even though she had grown into a proper adult, it still took far too long to send away that small, adorable, precious, fragile little rabbit of a girl. Her mother stroked her, gathered her close, breathed in her scent, drew her long hair again and again through her fingers, and rubbed her back with small hands that held such a gentle, warm, enveloping heat.
Those hands had been damaged in so many places from the painstaking care of an injured husband, and yet they were still so beautiful, so fine. She had never forgotten that moment. The day she left her family far, far behind. The present she lived in now, made distant because she loved them.
Her memory drifted a little further back.
"I love you, Mama! I love you, Papa!"
She had stood side by side with her little brother and shown off for their parents. It must have been their father's birthday. With warm, contented smiles, struggling to hide the tears that welled up at the children's earnest hearts, they threw their arms wide and gathered the running children into their embrace. That, without a doubt, was love.
But she had known from a very young age that the love her mother and father spoke to their children and the love they spoke to each other were different things entirely — different in a depth that could not be measured. The distinction had been hard to grasp as a child. Once she had grown, she understood how important it was, and how precious. She understood it from the heart, and from nowhere else.
The love a parent holds for a child is, in a sense, a given. To call it a given felt almost careless, given the wretched humans and beastkin she had seen — other races, now and then, as well — but in most cases it was the most natural thing in the world. Parents cherish their children. Children hunger for their parents' love. They show off, they fuss, they demand more attention. Like baby birds chirping at the nest, like a kitten kneading its mother's belly, like a puppy nipping at its mother or father and making a nuisance of itself — all of it is done to draw interest and affection, protection and warmth. And what comes back in answer, once those children have finished growing, is their own voluntary repayment. Even words will do. A hug will do. A smile will do. An occasional letter, a scrap of news, is enough to make a parent glad. That is the care and the love a parent holds for a child.
But the love between her father and her mother was different. Different beyond all comparison.
A parent and a child are bound by blood. Half from the father, half from the mother — and what comes of that mixing is nothing other than the child. Now and then, strangely, the temperament of a grandfather or a grandmother, or of some other member of the wider family, will surface in them, and even that is a pleasure of its own for a parent to see. It is wonderful. It is joyful. This is unmistakably their child, the fruit of their love.
A husband and a wife, however, are not bound by blood. Search as you like — there is not a single connecting thread. Two complete strangers meet, and they love each other. Nothing about that feeling is a given. Nothing about it is owed.
It is natural for a family to love and cherish one another. The blood is shared, and so they are drawn together, and they hold each other dear. But this man and this woman, called father and mother, have not a single link between them. They cherish each other with one feeling alone — with love, and only love. They remember each other. They work to make each other glad. They want nothing more than for their spouse to be happy in their company, to be at ease, to carry good thoughts and good memories — and for that, they devote everything they have to another person who does not share so much as a single drop of their blood.
And the strangest thing of all is this: that stranger becomes the one who knows everything about you.
A child grows and becomes an adult, and in the moment of becoming a proper adult, they learn what shame is. Even without growing that far, they understand well enough that to be naked is to be embarrassed. And yet that very thing is shown without reservation to one's partner. One's own parents do not know it. Even one's brothers and sisters cannot know it. But a spouse — a complete stranger — does. And they find it beautiful. They leave upon each other the marks of pleasure and of love.
That is what love between spouses truly is.
When she understood it, she was unbearably envious of her parents. Someone who cherished you. Someone who stayed beside you at your hardest. Someone who always, with everything they had, tried to make you happy.
Even when her father injured his leg so badly that he might never walk easily again, her mother gathered him close. When he blamed himself, she took his hand and held it tight, and told him he had worked so hard, and thanked him. Even as every one of them slowly felt their life growing poorer, her mother never spoke a single word of complaint. She only asked the neighbors for sewing and odd jobs, and with those small earnings cooked as much as she possibly could for her family. No matter how hard their days became, she never uttered a single word of resentment. She only went to her injured husband's side every day, and smiled, and kissed him.
She would touch her partner's ears with painstaking care, check the state of his injured leg, and change the bandages. She would knead his whole body so that the muscle would not waste away too far. Her own body must have hurt. She was bearing a brutal share of work upon a frame far too slight for it. She never complained. She only went on smiling, for as long as it took, and looked after her children, and whispered love to her injured husband.
That was a spouse's love.
But there were limits. Not of love. Of the body. A mother with so frail a frame could not possibly go on carrying that much. And even when Ely herself helped with the work, the income was far too little against the unreasonable weight of it. However much goodwill the villagers showed, they would not give that much help to a complete stranger. And so she decided to leave.
So that her mother could go on loving her partner. So that her father would no longer blame himself and weep. So that her childish little brother would no longer clutch his empty stomach every day and say things that showed he knew nothing of the world.
She loved her family. And so she left them.
She made a place for herself far from her family. Fortunately, it did not take her long to understand the worth of her own beauty — in a rather filthy, sordid fashion, of course. Had it not been for her long experience in the dungeons and the strength she had been born with, she would surely have carried a wound that would never wash clean. But she was stronger and sturdier than she might have seemed, and she was able to dismiss the whole affair as a minor commotion.
That commotion let her introduce herself to the city with a certain flourish, and any number of people, drawn by her striking looks, offered her work. Of all of them, the one that seemed to her the most decent, and the most appealing, was a position at an inn.
Even while she worked, she never neglected to watch the people who passed through. She saw the loves of countless men and women. Not the tender love of a father and a mother in a home, but dirty, insidious loves — loves of nothing but wounds, or of nothing but suffering. She saw twisted, warped, bizarre affections, and ugly deeds carried out under the shell of love. Lies and deceptions. Wounds and pain that did not discriminate between men and women. She frowned at them, and her heart was scraped raw. Just because it was someone else's affair did not mean she could refuse to feel it.
And what rose in her anew, through all of it, was a reverence for her parents. Theirs had been only pure love, and within that love there had been only pure devotion.
Until he was injured, her father had given himself to his children's education and to earning for the household. Every day when the work was done he would come home laden with good ingredients, and for all his exhaustion he would prepare the evening meal together with his wife. When the tiredness caught up with him, he would sit for a moment on the sofa and catch his breath. It was her mother who would lean in and give him a brief kiss. When the dishes were all washed, she would take her dozing husband's hand and lead him gently to the bedroom. She would work the groan of muscle-pain from his body, kiss him, and see his day to its close — and then coax the children who were not yet asleep into their own rooms. She would sing them lullabies, and only once they had all departed for dreamland would she go into her husband's arms. Her husband, stirring half-awake, would draw the stranger he loved most deeply into his embrace. And in that embrace, his wife would reach out and press her arms around his back, holding him there. And so, even on the coldest nights, the two of them would end the day in a warmth beyond compare.
Broken homes that could not hold a candle to a household like that — she saw them at the inn's door and out in the street, dozens of times, hundreds of times. She had spent a mere five years in the city, and she had seen far too many loves that fell short of her parents'.
Amid those bleak sights, her thirst for a true love only grew. Could she, too, love the way her parents had? Was there truly not a single person in this world who would sincerely cherish her, hold her, worry for her, love her?
...If she had simply gone on living her life as it was, perhaps there would not have been.
And yet all of this changed when a man happened to appear in her life. From another world, no less — having tumbled into hers by the sheerest accident.