13. Steam and Surrender #2
“No.” His grin turned wicked as the shadows closed around us.
“But it is a corner of my castle that no one ever visits. Which makes it, by definition…” He lifted me clean off my feet, my spine meeting the spines of some long-neglected shelf, my legs winding around him on instinct. “…gloriously private.”
I caught one glimpse of the gold letters pressing into my shoulder blades before his mouth dropped to my throat and emptied my head of every coherent thought.
A Complete History of Northern Grain Tariffs. Volumes one through forty.
I would, I suspected, have profoundly fond feelings about agricultural taxation for the rest of my natural life.
What followed bore no resemblance whatsoever to the careful patience he’d shown me before.
It was fast and greedy and barely contained, the silk of my skirts shoved high, and his laces wrenched loose.
His mouth swallowed every sound he dragged out of me as he took me hard against four centuries of forgotten tax law.
One hand braced on the shelf beside my head, the other gripping my thigh, holding me exactly where he wanted me while he drove us both higher with single-minded purpose.
When I finally shattered, I had to bite down on his shoulder to keep from bringing the entire castle running, and he followed only a breath later.
My name muffled against my hair alongside a curse decidedly unbecoming of a king.
A considerable while later, thoroughly rumpled and several pins lighter in my hair, I made him swear that I could come back here.
Repeatedly.
“For the books,” I told him primly, smoothing my ruined skirts and failing entirely to look respectable. “Only the books.”
He was still laughing about it as he led me onward.
He showed me music rooms and map rooms, a conservatory gone half wild with fruit trees.
A long hall of windows where the light fell in colored pools across the floor.
And at every turn, he kept up a quiet, dry commentary.
A story about this king or that disaster, a confession that he had once gotten lost in his own east wing for the better part of an afternoon as a boy.
All of it until I was laughing more than I had in longer than I could remember.
It was nice. Painfully, dangerously nice.
The kind of nice that made a girl forget she had ever lived any other way.
And then he brought me to the banqueting hall, and the spell of the quiet day shattered into noise.
The hall was enormous, larger than the throne room, larger than any room had a right to be. What with its incredible cathedral ceiling lost somewhere in shadow, far above us, and great arched windows running the length of one wall. And it was chaos. Beautiful, frantic chaos.
Servants swarmed everywhere, hauling long tables into place, draping them in cloth the colour of deep wine, arranging towers of glassware that caught the light and threw it back in fractured rainbows.
Garlands of greenery and white blossoms were being wound up the columns.
Somewhere, unseen, musicians were tuning their instruments in fits and starts.
The air smelled of beeswax and crushed petals and something roasting, far off, that made my stomach growl despite the pastries still sitting comfortably inside me.
“All of this is for tonight?” I said faintly.
“All of this is for you,” Atlas confirmed.
“That’s no better. In fact, that’s significantly worse.” I watched a man stagger past beneath an armful of candles taller than he was. “You realize I have survived actual monsters with less terror than I am currently feeling about a dinner party.”
“It isn’t a dinner party. It is a banquet.
” His hand settled at the small of my back, and his voice dropped just for me.
“And you will be magnificent, little warrior. You ended a war these people thought would swallow them whole. There’s not a soul in that hall tonight who will not be desperate to thank you. ”
“That’s the part that terrifies me.”
“I know.” He pressed a kiss to my temple, and there was something so unbearably tender in it that I almost forgot the hundred people bustling around us. “Which is why I will not leave your side for a moment. You have my word.”
And the worst, most ruinous part was that I believed him.
Eventually, regretfully, the day caught up with us. A steward appeared at the edge of the hall with the careful, apologetic air of a man who knew exactly how unwelcome he was, and I felt Atlas sigh against my hair before he even spoke.
“Duty,” he muttered.
“Kingly duty,” I agreed, with a great deal less grace.
He walked me back through the maze of his castle himself, refusing to hand me off to a single servant, until we reached the tall carved doors of his bedchamber.
There he stopped, turned me gently to face him, and looked at me as though he was trying to memorize this version of me.
One, flushed and happy, not yet poured into something terrifying and formal.
I tilted my head up at him, fighting a smile.
“So, I take it the tour is over?”
His mouth curved, slow and wicked.
“For now.” He bent and kissed me, unhurried, thorough, the kind of kiss that made my toes curl against the cool stone floor. When he finally drew back, his eyes were dark, and his voice was rough velvet. “You, little bird, have a banquet to get ready for.”
I groaned, dropping my forehead against his chest.
“How could I possibly forget?” He chuckled at this.
“I have every faith in you.” He was already stepping back, already grinning, the maddening man, thoroughly enjoying my suffering. “Try not to start a war with the wardrobe.”
“No promises.”
His laughter followed him all the way down the corridor, and I stood there watching him go with my heart doing something foolish and enormous in my chest, until he turned a corner and was gone.
Then I pushed open the doors and stepped into his chambers, and of course, the bath had already been drawn.
I could see it through the open bathroom door, steam curling lazily up toward the high windows, the water’s surface scattered with white petals that perfumed the entire space.
And who was there waiting for me, smoothing a fold in the most beautiful gown I had ever seen laid across the foot of the bed, was a girl I recognized.
“Thalia,” I said, and the maid startled, then dropped into a quick, flustered curtsy.
“My lady. Damn it… I mean… Alex.” She corrected herself with a small, shy smile, her cheeks coloring.
“His Majesty asked that everything be prepared. I hope the temperature is to your liking. I wasn’t sure how hot you mortals like your water, so I, um.
” She gestured vaguely at the steaming bath. “I guessed.”
“I’m sure it’s perfect, thank you,” I said, giving her what I hoped was a reassuring smile as she seemed so nervous. As if she were always expecting to mess up or something, and it made me wonder what made her so nervous. Was it me…?
Or was it something else?
She was such a beautiful girl, with her pale golden skin and long chestnut hair braided over one shoulder.
She looked far more fit for royalty than I did.
But it was those large hazel eyes that kept darting to me and away again as though she couldn’t quite decide whether looking directly at me was permitted that really did me in.
Like some frightened doe, terrified of getting caught out as a fraud or something.
I wanted to ask her if she was alright. If she needed help in any way, but what basis did I have to do so? I also didn’t know what she was, as well… she wasn’t human. No one here was, so it made me wonder even more about her.
She’d helped me into a gown the morning before, all nervous efficiency, but we’d hardly spoken. Now, alone, the quiet stretched between us, and I watched her twist her fingers together in that anxious way she had.
I decided then and there that I liked her.
“You can stop looking like I might bite,” I told her, kicking off my shoes with absolutely no elegance whatsoever.
“I promise I’m the least frightening thing in this entire castle.
I once cried because I couldn’t get a dress off and had to sleep in it…
of course, I had been six at the time and sleeping at a friend’s house, but still. ”
Thalia’s lips pressed together. She was fighting it. I could see her fighting it… a smile.
“Go on,” I said. “You can laugh. Everyone else does.”
And she did.
It burst out of her, sudden and bright and utterly without warning.
A clear, musical lilt of a laugh that climbed up at the end into the most ridiculous, endearing little hiccupping snort I had ever heard in my life.
The moment it escaped her, her eyes went wide, and her hand flew up to clamp over her mouth, mortified, her whole face flooding scarlet.
“I’m so sorry,” she squeaked from behind her fingers. “I don’t… that’s not… he doesn’t like it.” I frowned at the slip-up.
“Who doesn’t like it?” I asked, knowing it couldn’t possibly be Atlas. Her cheeks turned a deeper shade, and she shook her head, telling me,
“No one… I’m sorry.”
“Hey, don’t you dare apologize,” I told her, faking a smile to mask the worry and trying to get her back at ease. “Besides, that laugh is epic, and don’t let anyone tell you any different. In fact, I think you should do it again.”
Her eyes got even bigger. “I can’t just do it again,” she protested, but she was smiling now, properly, the shyness cracking open to show something warm and quick and lovely underneath. “It only happens by accident. My mother says it’s a curse.”
“Your mother is wrong. It’s a gift.” I sank down onto the edge of the bed beside the gown. “Thalia, we are going to be friends. I’ve decided. You don’t get a say.”
She ducked her head, but not before I caught the pleased little curve of her mouth.