21. Ehmet and Hevva visit the gymnasium.
twenty-one
Ehmet and Hevva visit the gymnasium.
B y breakfast the next day, his future was officially uncertain. By luncheon, it was sealed. The dowager queen worked fast.
A missive was delivered to Ehmet’s apartments with his morning meal. A terrible way to start the day, especially since the written message was followed by his mother, rehashing the contents in shrill tones. That was two Mum-wakeups in a row, and he was tired of it. But the king understood her urgency.
The referendum had been called.
Two months.
In two bloody months, the nobles would vote on his fate. Prior certainty that the crown was destined for his head would be blasted apart, and perhaps put back together again—Uncle Yusuf and his machinations were already chipping away at the base.
That weasel.
His mother eventually departed, after a resigned Ehmet gave her permission to move forward with negotiations regarding a marriage to Lady Tahereh Nathari.
She assured him all would be well, reminded him of his many obligations, and left.
He wanted to be alone. But the duty never ended, so Ehmet force fed himself breakfast, allowed Parosh to help him dress, and went off to take part in an awkward game of shuttlecock with most of the ladies and a few of the gentlemen in residence. Avoiding both silver-haired women had been difficult, but he managed.
Finally, some hours later, he made it back to his apartments. Just as Ehmet settled in for a good brooding session, his mother came by with an update. Her ring-laden knock sounded on the door not twenty seconds after his lunch was delivered. He begrudged her entry.
With a stern voice belied by the way her hands fidgeted with her skirts, she informed Ehmet, “It is done. I met with the Earl and Countess of Appven while you were outside with our guests.” Her lips lay in a thin line.
“And?”
“Your wedding is in one month. Plenty of time to make Tahereh the queen before the referendum and ensure Appven’s interests are firmly aligned with ours.”
Ehmet expected this, he’d given his mother permission to bring the agreement to fruition. Still, he found himself frozen beside the dining table, staring at his covered meal. It all felt so bloody antiquated.
“A lovely early autumn handfasting. Won’t that be sublime?” the dowager tried a new tactic, for a split second, before reverting to her old one: “You have no choice, Ehmet.”
He sighed, recognizing how horrid it felt to be wrong . He’d made an error, that’s all. He was simply incorrect that Lady Hevva would make a good queen. Uninhibited, wild women needn’t be queens. They could, perhaps, remain friends.
Duty, that unending hill to climb, had grown higher than the Dhegur Peaks. Logic would get him through. It had to. Tahereh was to be the queen, and it would be fine . Someone quiet, and biddable. She’d do.
“If you choose to go through with this, you will resolve all of our problems.”
All of your problems, maybe. All Ehmet could manage was a nod.
“Good. Your engagement will be announced at the end of the house party. We don’t want to ruffle any feathers by cutting festivities short.”
“It’s Nekash’s birthday party.”
“No. It’s really not. ”
He couldn’t even chuckle.
After the dowager queen departed to revise her seating plan for the blasted announcement dinner, Ehmet poured himself a healthy glass of whiskey. Though he typically waited until evening to imbibe, the day called for it. Then he sat down to his meal.
Someone must have spilt wine all over the fates’ tapestry. Perhaps it was lit on fire, then crushed between a horse and a falling beam. Everything was a mess, and he was bloody miserable. Ehmet stabbed several green beans with his fork and bit down angrily. The tines tinged against his teeth, sending a painful shiver through his skull.
His food tasted like chalk.
“ M y lady. Please ,” Aylin scolded, swatting Hevva on the head as she plucked pins from her hair. “Stop moving about. Why are you so...energized?”
“I’m quite fine.” Hevva ground her teeth together in three four time, watching her jaw flex in the mirror.
“You’re not fine. I’m not sure what’s gotten into you. I didn’t think you were so passionate about lawn games.”
“I’ve developed an affinity for them.”
Aylin tutted. “Palm.”
Hevva held up a hand, accepting hairpins from her maid. Though she tried to stop twisting on the stool, to stop fidgeting was an impossibility. She was too tightly wound.
She’d won her games of shuttlecock, earning the love of each teammate she played with. All it took was willing the cork-tipped birdie to whiz straight to her partner’s racket so they might bat it back. On their returns, she called it to herself. They’d beat out every other pairing by a dozen passes. The only reason she’d finished was because she was being ignored and no longer cared to play, so she’d missed on purpose.
The problem, that should not have been a problem, was he hadn’t looked at her. Not once during any of the matches. Yes, she said she was fine on the beach the day before, but he knew she was not. That arsehole. He hadn’t even clapped when she’d swept through the guests with the Earl of Midlake, coming out on top as reigning champions.
“Hevva, stop fidgeting.”
“Sorry.” She’d been flexing her bum cheeks back and forth, left, right, left, right, bouncing upon the stool.
“You are not ready to bathe and dress for dinner. Go take a walk around the grounds, explore the palace’s solar, listen in on someone’s conversation.”
“Not in the mood.”
“My lady,” she said sternly, “I must humbly request you find something to take out that...frustration on. You’ve got me half-way to apoplexy, and Thera will surely quit her position at Stormhill if you let me die at such a young age.”
Hevva laughed, a choked sound, because while Aylin’s joke was quite funny, she was also struggling to maintain her composure and not kick a piece of furniture to bits, then spear every portrait of the king with splinters of wood. “Would you mind terribly putting my hair back to rights?”
“Not at all.” Aylin lifted a few pins from Hevva’s hand and began twisting strands.
A few minutes later, with a more casual hairstyle than she’d worn outside for lawn games, Hevva set off to explore the palace halls and attempt to rid herself of anxious energy.
She avoided the east wing with its stupid billiards room, awful library, and foolish discreet stairwell. Her wanderings led her down to the ground floor where she came upon the throne room, pictured Ehmet reclining on the velvety seat, and left. Trying her very best to ignore the existence of the king, as he had done to her on the lawn, she stormed past the wine cellar and took a sharp left down a new corridor she hadn’t noticed while drunk. A sliver of light escaped cracked doors at the end of the hall, and Hevva, like a moth to flame, went exploring.
It was a gymnasium. Empty, but recently used, the tang of sweat hung in the air. Training swords were racked on her left. Dummies stood in a line, eyeless soldiers on guard under the high windows on the far wall. Foils hung from pegs to her right, and Hevva beelined for them.
This was precisely what she needed. She took a moment to find the perfect weapon, testing its weight and length with whistling slashes. Then she stretched and spun to face the dummies. Not bothering with a mask, because they couldn’t fight back, she danced toward her static opponents.
Hevva moved through her regular cadence: lunge, slash, retreat, spin, lunge, slash, retreat, spin. Going through the motions, honing skills she’d never need in real life, was relaxing, a meditative experience. Not that day.
She found herself angry when the training dummies didn’t fight back. One even seemed to lean against the wall, effortlessly casual, unbothered by her momentum. Hevva sneered at it, and found that it, and its brethren, now bore imaginary variations of Ehmet’s face. She stomped her foot before leaping back into motion: feint, attack, spin, retreat, lunge, feint, attack.
She needed them to fight back . Too much frustration bubbled in her, unbearable annoyance at the situation that should not even be a situation with the king.
Why had she gone and met Berim? What a stupid , stupid decision.
Fueled by a need to test her skills, drain her well, go to bed, and sleep until the house party came to an end, Hevva set the dummies to spinning. First, because she couldn’t help herself, she made them do the quadrille. Tossing proper form to the wind, she chased the dancers around, prodding and smacking them with the foil.
She never should have visited his damn solarium, never should have accepted when he asked her to spend time with him and the H-children, never should have coaxed the king down to Rohilavol. She should have refused his offer to dance at the gala. She should not have gone into the royal sitting room with him. When the invitation came from Kirce, she should have thrown a fit, pretended she’d developed an illness, and refused to travel south.
Sweating, fallen tendrils of hair stuck to the back of her neck. Hevva unbuttoned her spencer with one hand while she fought off an approaching training dummy. Sick of Ehmet’s face in her mind’s eye gracing each and every one of them, she willed herself to shift focus. It worked a bit, but not so well, seeing as one became Gamil, another her mother, the third Berim, and the fourth remained Ehmet.
Hevva launched back into her routine. This would work to settle her. It had to. She could not dwell on the recreation of Rohilavol, the frozen candles, the sex, or the gods-forsaken proposal. She could not focus on the king in the billiards room with Lady Tahereh, and definitely not on the fact he refused to consider love. That was likely a result of life with his horrible father, but it wasn’t her problem to fix. She wanted a nice common boy , not a duty-laden, love-fearful, highly-titled man!
This had to work. She coaxed the training dummies faster, a whirlwind of movement, they slid around the floor on their wooden pedestals, approaching her, then rushing away. She’d fight them all, until she collapsed to the floor and her well was empty. Hevva hoped, by the time the dummies froze up again, stuck in their final positions, she’d forget Ehmet, and the entirety of the past month. Then, with a free mind, she’d enjoy the champagne, the conversation, and the dancing for these final few days in Serkath, retreat to Stormhill, and refuse to travel south ever again—except for when she had to, to vote in favor of the excellent-at-his-job-but-not-at-anything-else king.
I n the late afternoon he found Lady Hevva. Ehmet needed the help of Parosh to track her down, who thankfully went off to solicit information in the service wing. The manservant learned that the lady was last spotted in the king’s gymnasium on the lowest level.
Why is she in my training rooms?
He stomped downstairs and was relieved to come across no one, not even a member of his household staff. The gentlemen of the house party were engaged in an archery competition on the south lawn and the ladies were in their chambers, readying for dinner.
But not Hevva. If there was one thing the countess did, it was march to the beat of her own drum.
He found her, foil in hand, squaring off against a bevy of practice dummies on wooden stands. With her magic, she had them dancing across the floor, sliding around on their thick puck-like bases. In her flowing muslin day dress and her unbuttoned spencer, she looked like a lady in a bar fight. A goddess in a brawl.
Hevva lunged at one statue, parried another, twirled, jabbed at a third, and then she noticed him. The dervish of movement ceased, and the dummies slid back into their places along the far wall of the room.
Pressing the tip of her foil into the floor, she panted from exertion. “What?”
“Can we talk?”
“Of course! Why not?!” She flung her arms out to the sides, and the blunted weapon went flying, clattering against the west wall of the room. The lady didn’t even have the presence of mind to look sheepish.
Her vigor surprised him. It didn’t bode well.
Ehmet approached but hung back a few paces as he began to speak, “I’m not even sure where to begin. So, I will get right into it. I want you to know before it is announced formally at some point in the coming days...”
The rise and fall of her chest stalled as she awaited his words.
His ears rumbled, drowning out everything but the sound of his own raging blood. Of course, his thumb was at it again, rubbing against his ragged knuckle. “I am to marry,” his voice rang hollow in his ears.
“You move fast.” Her acidic words bore into the center of his soul with harsh alacrity, and he nearly stumbled backward.
“It’s a necessity.”
“Who?” she whispered.
He didn’t want to say, he really didn’t want to fucking say. But she deserved to know. The heavy hollow feeling that had plagued him for days swelled, swallowing up his very breath. “Lady Tahereh.”
Hevva sucked her teeth, bunching her skirts up into fists at her sides. “ You fucking lied to me,” she spat, face hardening into a bleak mask. A muscle in her jaw flickered, as if she had more to say but ground away the words.
“I did not, I swear to you.” Before he could stop himself, he closed the distance between them and reached up to trace her beautiful stubborn jaw.
She shoved him back—with her magic. The wooden gymnasium floor pitched beneath him, and suddenly Ehmet was standing five feet away, floundering for balance. He dropped his hand, bereft.
“Well.” Lady Hevva Tilevir straightened her spine and lifted her chin defiantly.
Well, he almost said.
“I will be leaving this day.”
“Stay?” Swallowing thickly, he tried and failed to dislodge the painful lump of emotion caught in his throat.
She ignored his asinine request. “Good day.”
Lady Hevva passed by him in a wide arc before leaving the chamber.
L ater, Ehmet found his flask sitting by the door to his apartments.
Hevva departed Kirce before dinner even began.