Gallows Pole

by Eris Adderly

“Will you torment me all night, husband?” Venom filled the new title. “Rut me and get it over with.” “Do you beg for it so soon, wife?” His words came at her ear, humid and amused along with more superficial pumping. If blood could have boiled in her veins, Emmat would have blistered the hangman away in an instant. She spat at him, foul words for foul company. “Fuck you.” His chuckle was a dark song. “As you like.”

The law. Emmat snorted. A highwayman wed to a duly appointed executioner. The crime and the punishment both, in the same bed. Did he take a sick joy in the fact?

Emmat Bird belonged to the hangman now when she’d never belonged to anyone but herself. Whether it ought to be a source of pride or of shame, she wasn’t certain, but the decision to do so in both cases had been none save her own.

She’d brought in coin the only way she knew how. He’d brought in a wife, a companion, the only way he knew how. The only way in his mind he could ever have these things.

How was this the man who’d spirited her from the crest of Gallows Hill, who’d dragged a chaplain to marry her under threat in a lightless stone house, miles from anywhere? How was she the same Emmat Bird to allow it? And not merely to allow it, but to hold him to her, to see in him this…this long-harboured emptiness, and to want to fill it. It flew in the face of reason, but some immaterial voice suggested if she were to place her own empty spaces against his, she would find the void made whole.

When they slowed from the grip of delirium, they were a pair of beings, changed. They’d come to the reckoning as hangman and thief, but found themselves bound in it, husband and wife.