But at some point, he’d come to know the woman apart from her spread legs. What was it he’d learned? With whom had he fallen in love? Esmenet, the Whore of Sumna. Often, in his soul’s eye, she was inexplicably thin and wild, buffeted by rain and winds, obscured by the swaying of forest branches. This woman who had once lifted her hand to the sun, holding it so that for him its light lay cupped in her palm, and telling him that truth was air, was sky, and could only be claimed, never touched by the limbs and fingers of a man.
