Chapter 22
Chapter
Twenty-Two
RANIEL, OF THE PRINCESS
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
—Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3
“ A erinne! Wake up!”
Juliette's expression stops my heart. I don't want to hear another person has died.
“The Prince is in the courtyard.”
“What?” I say. Juliette rips away my light bedcovers. “I was impaled only four days ago.”
Ishaan made it to me in time, though I’m told he’d had some choice words to say about my decision making process, and isn’t that familiar verbiage.
He’d healed damage to intestines, resealed torn blood vessels and given strict instructions.
Evidently he was pleased to note my hard head took minimal damage.
“I’m supposed to be on two days bedrest and?—”
“Tell it to the Prince. He asked for you, and he refused to come inside.”
She drags me to the closet that doesn't exactly function as a repository for clothing. But my Ninephene styled Court robes do hang in it. I would have preferred a pile in the corner of the stables, but I was vetoed.
“I think that's for the best. We aren't prepared and. . .” My cousin pauses after she yanks cobalt robes off a hanger. Not dress robes, but suitable for a morning call from a Prince. “He's like Nora. But?—”
I see the words in her eyes. A lot scarier.
What does he want only days after the battle of the White Square?
I would rather you understand completely the nature of the male you challenged.
Or rather, what does he want so soon?
I woke, Aerinne, for you.
Fair warning. I mean for you to be mine.
Several grim possibilities float in the back of my mind, possibilities I wouldn't entertain if it wasn't for that damn letter, Nora, and that every time we meet in person he touches me. Touches me like. . .
He already has plans .
There are many, many creative ways I can be punished for Embriel, and Lords with power usually start with the most banal and work their way up.
Rape is a bloodless, brutal, debilitating punishment for all it lacks creativity, and it isn't even a crime. Perhaps I should change that. I wonder how hard the Houses would fight—all the extra paperwork.? i
“I thought I'd have more time,” I hear myself say. At least until the end of the negotiations. I thought he wouldn't want to start playing sex games until after the real business was concluded.
“We should have expected this.” Juliette’s tone is grim. “Nora and I had a talk.”
I can imagine.
“He’s really just hanging out in the courtyard?” I say in English, because there are no words in Everennesse I can use to express my blank confusion at this untoward behavior.
“Less talking,” Juliette barks, sounding like her older sister. “Brush your teeth and wipe down your face. Sixty seconds.”
We leave, running down the hall and stairs like we're thirteen again. I step through the front doors of Faronne House and meet the gaze of the Prince as he turns to face me. It isn’t a sunny morning, but the clouds are a gentle gray, allowing a hint of the sun to shine through.
I pace forward, my wound aching as stomach muscles flex, and at the appropriate distance I sink to one knee until he bids me rise. He’s still for so long the hair on the back of my neck rises.
Finally, the barest touch under my chin tilts my head back and then his fingertips are slow, featherlight touches on my forehead, drawing down between my eyes, down the bridge of my nose, brushing over the high slope of my cheekbones and the curve of my jaw as if he's blind and memorizing my face.
“I dreamed,” he says quietly, “as I slept. Some of them, dark. But there was always one face, one voice, in the mist. If capable of pity. . .but it has been long since I was.”
The Prince lowers his arm to his side and I rise, his words plucking at strings of memory.
He says nothing, studying my face as I study his.
I will not speak unless asked a question.
The eyes that take me in are the same color as his layered robes, a deceptively soft sky blue that bridges the distance to gray.
“I have something for you.” The Prince reaches under his robes and withdraws a long, delicate gold chain.
A trident dangles on the end. He lifts it over his head and it dangles in his hand.
“Your mother gave it to me many thousands of years ago when we were near your age. One of many over the years.”
It’s a struggle. To stand here, to breathe through the fist in my chest, to not weep. I have jewelry of hers, of course, but nothing this old. Nothing from her youth when she was, maybe, like me.
Stepping forward, he reaches out and drapes it over my head, gathering my hair in one hand to lift it up out of the way. The chain is warm, and it settles around my neck as his breath touches my cheek. I clutch the pendant, looking down to avoid his gaze.
“When you are ready,” he says, releasing my hair, his fingertips brushing my neck before they withdraw, “we will speak of her. There are no books that chronicle the history in my mind.”
“There should be,” I manage to say .
“Then I give you leave to write down what I say. But that will be for another day.” He touches my cheek. “There will be many, Lady.”
I nod, and compose myself before looking up. “Thank you, Prince.”
Another small smile briefly touches his lips. “There are gardens on your lands, if I recall.”
I let out a deep breath and shake my head, hand still clutched around the pendant. “We transferred the flowers to a public park a few blocks away, to honor my mother. The gardens here now grow nothing more grand than carrots and cabbages, but they would doubtless be honored by your presence.”
“Doubtless. In the same fashion mine would be honored by yours.”
Such a quiet, civilized conversation, the same as the one before our battle and he delivered the most punishing beating of my life.
I hadn't felt the pain as much at the time with the adrenaline of battle and the burn eclipsing it, but I felt it after.
Ishaan healed major wounds but left the bruises, as healers are wont to do, trained as they are to conserve energy.
His gaze touches on the side of my face where he backhanded me.
“You fought well at the Square,” he says.
I incline my head. “It was instructional.”
The ghost of a brief smile touches his pale lips. “As intended. Perhaps you will not require such vigorous instruction again in the near future.”
I say nothing.
“Will you show me Muriel’s gardens then?” he says and sweeps an arm toward the gate, his trailing sleeve a graceful thing, like the half braided blue-black hair that drapes over his shoulder.
I don't want to show him anywhere except to a grave six feet by six feet deep, but I won't anger him when he stands in my District. He can do too much damage, and I won't be the cause of death because of something as petty as poor manners.
But I hesitate. One does not simply take a stroll with the Prince of Everenne. He hasn’t been awake in my lifetime, but I understand this meeting, the gift, and then the walk, can be interpreted by the Houses in many ways.
This isn’t a male in rut who simply wants sex.
“Ishaan put her on bedrest,” Juliette says. “Your Highness.”
He glances over my shoulder. “I will not keep her long.” His tone is. . .familial. An older cousin speaking to a younger. “And nothing will harm your Lady while she is under my protection.”
She doesn’t protest so I walk forward and he falls smoothly in at my side, as if we've gone on leisurely morning strolls countless times before. We walk through the gates, the warriors on post silent as we pass. I signal them not to follow.
The streets are empty. They shouldn't be empty at this time of morning, but I'm glad for it.
He walks staring straight ahead, one arm at rest across his abdomen. An unhurried pace, we walk down the wider cobblestone street, then turn a corner into a narrow alley just wide enough for two people shoulder to shoulder, the tall stone residences on either side of us casting shadows.
The narrow alley emerges into a rounded park, the perimeter laid with tall dense hedges for the privacy of those within. I lead him through the green entrance and stop in front of a fountain. Once again, I wait for him to break the silence.
“I am waking, and I cannot risk sleep again anytime soon.” He seemed pretty damn awake to me on the battlefield, but whatever. “You have a few days yet.”
“Until?”
The Prince turns to face me, and somehow he's now too close.
“There are still experiences I have not been granted, even in what most consider a long life. I fear what may happen when I am other than my whole self will not be to your benefit. I have never been kind, Aerinne, in any of my iterations.”
“I don't understand.”
“I know.” His voice is soft, the hand that cups my face softer still. “They will make a sacrifice of you, as they always have to appease my line.” His hand falls away, expression hardening subtly.
There is something ancient and pained in his gaze; it halts my recoil.
“What will you do then?” I say.
The smile isn't a ghost now but it contains the same pain, framed as an exquisite work of art.
“Better to ask, what will I not do.”
I can't look at him anymore, not without my own answering pain crawling up my throat. I turn away, walking blindly to flowers. A stone bench. Trees.
I see none of it. “Why me?”
“The answer is neither short nor simple, and I find I am not yet willing to expose myself to you in that fashion.”
Hands settle on my shoulders, slender and ringed in gold and silver, then slip down to cup my upper arms. He's close enough I feel the rise and fall of his chest and it's as if we've been here before. As if his arms have slid around and held me fast in some other time, other place.
“The fourth,” I say.
“The fourth?”
“Time you’ve touched me without my leave.”
If his voice isn't kind, it is at least gentle. “Aerinne, I need none.”
One beat of silence, two. “So this visit is a warning.”
I pull away but he resists, hands tightening.
Anger rises, but is chased away by a brief spill of a few unfamiliar words from his lips that I'm not certain are spoken aloud, quiet words with the sonorous quality of a chant, or a prayer.
They wrap me in a haze, stealing any emotion stronger than wonder.
“What do you want from me?”
He must lower his head because again in some strange echo, his hair falls over my shoulders, and feeling as if the weight of a dream slows my movements, I lift my hands to catch the strands like water running through my fingers.
I’m not me; I’m not in my own time and place. I lean back against his chest and the impulse, the fleeting nascent need, scares me more than he does; but the now silent words steal fear away too.
“The wait was difficult,” he says. “And necessary. I did not want to hurt you.”
“You already have.”
Have we spoken these words before? Some variation? There is very real physical pain as I strive to push through the haze, so I stop before I start dripping nose blood onto my clothing; I don't think it’s a good idea to bleed around the Prince .
We stand in silence I don't know how long, then there’s the scuff of distant feet signaling one or both of us.
“For your mother, for mine,” he says softly, “I would spare you if I could. But this will not be denied; not even I can halt its progress any longer. The seed was planted long ago and sprouts now in the presence of rain and sun.”
From the sudden rise of tension in his body, I think he must feel the same need I do. I wait for the cage of his arms, but he remains still. His breath brushes the side of my face and if I turn my head just so, his lips would brush against me too. I don’t move.
I also don't tell him, again, that I don't understand. He already knows and. . .I think I am beginning to understand, and it is far, far too awful to consider.
“Be wary at the ball,” he says. “Hoard your anger. There are parts of me that will see it as challenge and respond in kind. If you run, you are prey. If you fight, you are to be subdued.”
The Prince slowly releases his hold on both my arms and my emotions, and his hair slips away from hands I have yet to lower. Before he walks away I hear five more soft words.
“Forgive me. And never forget.”
I turn to watch his back.
Sanity is the dream of my distant youth. I beg you, tread carefully. I do not wish to kill you. There is enough Kuthliele blood on my hands.