Chapter Eight
Once the first jolt of seeing Achlys had passed, the evening settled again into music, conversation, and the steady work of public courtesy.
Marsh servants moved through the hall with trays of wine in low green glasses and little plates of sugared nuts, smoked fish, and honeyed roots cut into neat rounds.
The musicians changed sets every so often, and with each change the room altered too.
Sometimes the dance floor filled completely.
Sometimes it emptied into pockets of talk under the lanterns while older fairies claimed chairs near the walls and began offering judgments no one had asked for.
Ina danced twice more, once with an elder from the marsh court who smelled faintly of river mint and had very strong opinions about willow groves, and once with a young sky court lord who nearly lost the beat entirely because he kept looking too often toward the queen’s smiling green eyes and not
enough toward his own feet.
“Lord Gildes. If you’ll allow me.” Derran cut in on the next turn, with a grin so easy the young man thanked him for it.
Ina smiled. “Here you are again, staging a rescue.”
He twirled her, a delighted twinkle in his eyes. “Anything for you, my queen.”
Karai spent much of the evening in measured conversation, towering over people who plainly found him more forbidding in rumor than in life.
He did little to correct them, though now and then Ina caught the flicker of dry amusement at the corner of his mouth when some nervous courtier discovered that the feared prince of the burrow court could, in fact, answer a civil question without ripping anyone to shreds.
“The canopy’s memory is its greatest gift,” she heard him say once as she walked by, and the kindness in his voice made her pause, just long enough to press her thighs tightly together and collect herself.
Still, under all of the amusement, Ina kept watch on Achlys.
The marsh fairy never once came near enough to force another encounter.
She moved through the room with the assurance of someone who knew her place and intended to keep it.
That might have been reassuring if Ina had not already seen the look on her face when she bowed.
Nothing Achlys did afterward could quite erase it.
The hour grew late. The hall had taken on that softer disorder that comes when people have eaten, danced, and spent enough time under lantern light to forget how straight they meant to stand. Then Lugomir lifted one hand for quiet.
He did not shout for silence. He did not need to.
Word of it passed quickly enough. The music dropped away.
Conversation thinned and then stopped. Jasenka stood beside him in dark green silk with silver water-bead embroidery at the hem, sashes and pins and ornaments hanging from both of them, newly forged crowns gleaming on their foreheads,
and together they made a stately picture at the front of the ballroom.
Jasenka looked, for a moment, as though she might say something. Then Lugomir looked out over the gathered courts and spoke before she could, in a voice that carried without strain.
“My friends,” he said, “I am glad to see our court full tonight. Marsh, burrow, canopy, sky. It honors us that you have all come.”
He paused long enough to let the room settle fully around him.
“I am proud to stand before you as the new prince of the marsh court. I know well what has been broken among us, and I know too that it won’t be mended by speeches alone. Still, I mean to do what I can. Peace, where peace can be built. Unity, where unity can be earned. And honesty,
where it might not yet live.”
That was well said, and better heard than some of the old court declarations Ina had suffered through in recent months. The room listened.
Lugomir turned his head slightly toward Jasenka before going on. “I believe, in my heart, that peace and unity begin first in love. Not in decrees. Not in banners. In love.”
He lifted a hand, and a servant stepped forward carrying a polished wooden box. That drew a murmur from the crowd. The box itself was ornate, made from some deep red wood with a clasp of worked silver, but the interest in the room became louder when Lugomir took it and turned toward Jasenka.
“A token of my love,” he said, “to the sweetest woman I have ever known. My wife. My princess. My dearest Jassie.”
Jasenka’s breath caught, though she recovered herself quickly. That was in keeping with her.
Lugomir opened the box.
Even from where Ina stood, the necklace flashed brilliantly enough to seize the eye.
Twelve large diamonds lay in a graceful curve, each one set apart and then joined by strands thick with smaller stones.
In the center, between the sixth stone on one side and the sixth on the other, sat a gem larger than all the rest.
It looked red at first glance, dark in the middle and bright at the edges, with the color of a ruby held under clear fire.
A stir ran through the ballroom.
Lugomir, who plainly enjoyed that, lifted the necklace slightly so all could see it better.
“You may think the center stone a ruby,” he said, unable to help a grin. “It is not. It is a diamond too.”
He looked at Jasenka when he said the next part.
“A magical diamond, full of magical love. A piece of my heart rests in it, forever in your care, my darling. I would give you my whole heart in my bare hands if I could, my dearest, but then it would mean I would not have the pleasure of your eternal company.”
That won him a laugh, including from Jasenka herself, though the sound in the room held warmth with it too. Lugomir smiled at his own line, with the earned vanity of a man pleased he had landed it well.
Jasenka looked at the necklace, then at him. She did not make a speech of her answer.
“You are my diamond, Lugo,” she said. “I love you.”
He closed the box only long enough to set it aside, then drew her into his arms.
The whole ballroom broke into applause. Even Eogan clapped, though with less enthusiasm than the others.
Derran did so freely. Karai as well, with proper courtesy.
Ina joined in, but while she smiled, she could not help finding the business of the heart inside the stone a little unsettling.
Apparently her face gave her away. Karai bent his head a little nearer and murmured, “Don’t be so judgmental. It’s an ancient marsh court tradition to give one’s love a part of one’s heart.”
Ina kept clapping and whispered back, “Glad you’re not from the marsh court.”
At her other side Derran gave a brief snort of laughter.
Karai’s mouth shifted, not quite into a smile, but close enough to count.
Ina knew why he reacted that way. Karai had been raised from childhood to regard all court customs with seriousness, whether he liked them or not.
Not that long ago, he had expected to be king over all of them, and a future king was not permitted to scoff publicly at another court’s sacred habits, even when those habits involved putting bits of one’s body into jewelry.
Still, his almost-smile said he saw her point.
Derran leaned over then, whispering with a delight that suggested he knew a secret she did not, “You should ask Karai about the burrow court’s tradition involving diamonds.”
Karai heard, and his face turned sheepish when Ina looked at him expectantly. “We burn the dead,” he muttered. “Make their ashes into gemstones. Sometimes put them in the palace walls.”
The musicians began again after that, with a brighter tune this time, hiding Derran’s burst of laughter at Ina’s suddenly pale face as she recalled the brilliant shine of the burrow palace’s hallways.
The gift had sent a pleased mood through the room, and for the next stretch of the evening things went easily enough.
Lugomir danced once more with Jasenka. The necklace reappeared around her throat and looked so grand there that no one could deny the gesture had been effective, however odd its magic might be.
Toasts were made. Sweets were served. A few older marsh courtiers became sentimental in corners.
Younger ones became careless and had to be guided gently away from the wine.
At last the hour came when even celebration had sense enough to end.
Rooms had been prepared for the visiting courts.
Since the marsh gathering ran too late for a comfortable departure, the royal guests were to stay the night and travel in the morning.
Servants with lanterns led the way through the guest wing, which had been dressed out in finer fashion than the last time Ina had been quartered in the marsh court.
That thought came too late.
Derran walked on one side of her, Karai on the other. The passage was built of woven reed panels, polished dark beams, and broad doors fitted with iron latchwork worked to resemble vines. The marsh fairies liked richness when they meant to show it. The lantern light lay amber over everything.
They reached her room first.
The servant bowed, opened the door, and stepped back.
Ina stopped.
It was not the same room she had been trapped in.
She knew that, of course she knew it, and yet she did not know it at all.
This chamber was far larger, the bed wide and dressed in green linen with gold thread, the triangular windows cracked open and hung with sheer curtains that stirred in the night air, the washstand carved and polished, the hearth set with a screened blue flame for warmth and light.
Still, the creak of the doorway and the color of the lamps and the shape of the windows caught her in the wrong place.
A room in the marsh court. A bed. Closed walls. The knowledge that someone else had decided where she would sleep.
Her feet would not move.
The servant, seeing something was amiss but not knowing what, hesitated. Derran dismissed him quietly. “That will be all.”
The servant bowed again and withdrew.
Ina stood in the doorway staring into the room. She could hear the blood in her ears. Loudly, wildly, enough to know her body had gone ahead of her mind and felt forgotten danger where none was presently meant.
She turned and threw herself at Derran.
Hard enough to knock him back an inch, though he still caught her fast and folded her against him without question.
She was not crying. That made it worse somehow.
She was trembling in quick, contained shivers she could not stop, and her hands had fisted in his robe before she even knew what they were doing.
Derran held her close and looked over her head at Karai with an expression that was almost apologetic.
Karai stood awkwardly for a breath, not because he did not understand, but because he now understood too well and did not know where to put himself in it.
Derran lowered his mouth near Ina’s hair. “We can stay with you,” he murmured.
“Both of you,” she said. The demand came out rougher than she meant it to. She did not care.
Derran looked at Karai.
Karai nodded slowly.
“Both of us,” Derran told her quietly.
Only then did Ina lift her head. She still did not look at the bed. She looked at them.
Karai stepped closer now, his face serious and stripped of any edge, and put a gentle hand on her back. “Come inside.”
Between them, they got her over the threshold.
The room proved easier to bear once it was occupied.
Once their boots stood by the chairs and their voices moved through it and the place no longer looked like a waiting trap.
Derran lit another lamp. Karai checked the windows, triangular and yellow-green as she remembered, but much larger than those in the prison room and thankfully without any bars down their middle.
Ina stood by the bed and tried to bring her breathing back under some sort of order.
They changed quickly. No one made anything of it. Nightclothes, unlaced ties, the small ordinary work of getting out of court clothes after a long evening. Derran and Karai climbed into the bed first and settled on either side, leaving the space between them open for her.
Ina, halfway through unpinning the last of her hair, glanced at the door.
Then she crossed the room and checked it.
The latch lifted easily. Dropped. Lifted again. It did not lock.
She checked it a second time.
Then a third.
No one told her to stop.
At last she stood there with her hand still on the latch and looked back over her shoulder. Derran was already lying down, one arm bent behind his head, watching her with open patience. Karai sat upright against the headboard, quiet and waiting.
Satisfied at last, or at least less unsatisfied than before, Ina let go of the latch and crossed to the bed.
She climbed in between them.
The mattress held her weight with firm luxury.
Derran pulled the gold-patterned cover up over her shoulder.
Karai lay down on her other side. The bed was wide enough that none of them had to crowd, yet close enough that she felt them both there together, one warm body on either side, one familiar presence to the left and another to the right. Guarded. Held in. Safe.
That was what her body took from it, and finally relaxed.
No one reached for more.
They were all too tired for that, and too worn from the evening in different ways. Derran brushed a hand once over her hair and then let it rest. Karai adjusted the blanket at her shoulder with the same absent care he might have given to a page in a book he meant to keep from creasing.
Ina shut her eyes, relieved that the last thing she knew clearly was the feeling of them beside her.