Chapter 30
XXX.
“Kaylay!” Alaina embedded her fingernails into my shoulder.
I roused, the urgency in her voice and the pain of her grip pulling me from the fitful dreams that plagued my night. Crashing and raised voices punctuated the darkness. I tried to leave the bed but could not extricate myself from Alaina’s hands as she held me close and lay half on my wing.
“What’s happening?” I rose on an elbow and put my hand over hers, trying to pry her fingers out of my flesh.
“We locked the doors, didn’t we?”
But locked doors would not withstand whatever came our way.
I fumbled, trying to get Alaina to release me. I needed to leave her bed, no matter what the situation. No good would come of staying, but she froze in terror, bound to me through horror and uncertainty. She had never been through this, but I had, and I needed her to let me go.
Boot heels clicked on the tile floors outside the bedroom.
“Alaina,” I hissed as I struggled to pry her from me, “please.”
But Alaina’s attention fixed upon the bedroom doors, leaving her insensible to my plea. Within moments, those doors burst inward, jambs splintering when the hinges did not give. One of them lay twisted back against a wall when the force of its recoil dislodged it from its hardware.
Guards filled the room, the firelight casting dramatic glints from their weapons.
Whatever they expected to discover on our side of the door, they were unprepared for the princess, down to her nightshift, entwined with the tsarina’s pet.
Although our tousled state suggested more than we had ever done, the guards cast doubtful glances at each other, recognizing our configuration as dangerous proximity.
Alaina clutched at the blankets, a feeble attempt at preserving her modesty, although to the eyes of all who gazed upon us, she had no modesty left to preserve as she huddled to me with the same damning ferocity.
Feathers in her sheets and on her nightshift told a tale of its own, but her aggressive hold on me illustrated to all, even those who had never repeated the gossip, the likely truth of those rumors.
No one would believe our innocence now.
“By order of Her Royal Majesty, Empress of Ilyichia, Princess Alaina, you are hereby under arrest for treason against the kingdom and the crown.”
Alaina’s grasp stiffened, and I more easily dislodged her with the pronouncement.
I pushed her behind me and set myself between her and the guards.
I did not delude myself that I could change the outcome of this situation, but I could argue for her.
I could remind them all that, if the tsarina thought to strip the princess of titles as had been done to me, the princess still maintained titles in Altania that required acknowledgment.
She needed to be treated with more care than I had been afforded.
None of them stepped forward to enact the declaration.
Maybe the guards remembered too that the last person who harmed me lost his life because of it.
“What is she said to have done?” I asked.
Murmurs rose through the ranks, and several guards stepped backward. Those who maintained their ground looked to their compatriots. No one had anticipated my interjection. None of them knew I could speak.
The leader of this group readjusted his shoulders and resumed his prior confidence. “You, creature, are not named in the warrant. This is not your concern.”
“I will not leave her,” I told him.
He nodded and then gestured another of the guards over. He whispered instructions into the young man’s ear. The second guard listened, gave a wary glance at me, and then departed the room.
Alaina put her hand on my back while we waited in our silent standoff. Eventually, she replaced her hand with her forehead. And though our wait was not of long duration, a lifetime of terror passed before the clicking of shoes accompanied by boots approached the bedroom.
“I charged you with a standard assignment,” came the well-known voice, shrill and dour as ever.
“My apologies, Your Majesty,” the head guard said before she was even in the room. “But I needed additional instruction on how you wanted us to handle your firebird.”
I had considered separating from Alaina before the tsarina entered, but that would leave Alaina exposed.
And behaving as if I had done anything wrong would send the wrong message.
As little as I liked Alaina looking weak, especially in front of the tsarina, it served her best to let me bear the brunt of the tsarina’s displeasure.
“My firebird?” But as she asked, she stepped into the room and stopped. Her gaze landed upon us, and the flickering fire revealed the rapid succession of emotions that crossed her face. When she finally regained control, her eyes narrowed. “I wondered why she mentioned you.”
“I put her up to it.” I slid from the bed, pushing blankets out of my way, and took several steps toward the tsarina.
“Why would you do that?”
“I want to leave.” Several more steps brought me to stand directly before her. “I played upon the princess’ own desire for home that I might accompany her.”
“She believed you?”
“It didn’t take much.” I cast Alaina a glance before returning my attention to the tsarina. “A few kind words on occasion, the illusion of friendship.... All resulted in the betterment of my condition.”
“You lied to me?” Alaina’s voice trembled behind me.
“I didn’t lie about one thing,” I said, not bothering to turn around to address Alaina. “I didn’t lie about how much I wished to be away from the tsarina.”
“To the point of bedding her?” the tsarina asked. “You’ll fuck anyone.”
“I fuck you, don’t I?”
The tsarina took a step back from me, too stunned to be angry. Yet. The yet brewed in the air like a storm.
“A wedding would be a fitting opening to the winter festivities.” A soulless grin spread across the tsarina’s face. She tilted her head at me. “You like weddings, after all, my dear. I will host it. And I have a beautiful palace all ready for you.”
“Whose wedding?” Alaina asked.
“Yours,” the tsarina said. “I will not harbor a whore in my court. But with you married to the monster you’ve been sleeping with, all is forgiven.”
The tsarina intended to humiliate Alaina by making her stand beside me in public ceremony. And nothing would be forgiven.
“I will have to plan the particulars. There’s always so much to do with weddings, and there’s so little time! You can join the procession through the city. And then a magical wedding night at the ice palace.”
The ice palace. The ice palace that the Royal Academy had warned her against using it due to freezing temperatures.
“We will surely die,” I said.
“Not necessarily.” She thought about it for a moment.
“If you fuck all night, you might live. But probably not.” She turned to the head guard.
“Post guards outside the windows and outside the doors. We would not want our little love birds to be disturbed now, would we? I have wedding preparations to oversee.”
The guards filed out after the tsarina departed and took their places at the doorway that led out of the apartments, closing the mangled doors behind them. Not even moments after the last guard left the bedroom did voices from other guards float up to the princess’ windows.
We had been issued a shared death sentence.
“She knew you spoke.”
I kept my back to Alaina. I could have lied. Lies came so easily now. But I didn’t want to. All I had ever wanted was authenticity.
“You told me she didn’t know,” Alaina said.
“I couldn’t have you slip and tell her that I spoke to you.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“Great good that did,” she snapped. “You should have just stayed out of it.”
I turned around to stare at her. My hands trembled. I bit back the vitriol I wanted to unleash. I could have done it so easily. What did it matter now?
“I have only ever tried to protect you,” I managed with a calm I did not feel.
“I don’t need your protection!”
“Do you know what the word ‘treason’ means?”
“Of course, I do.”
“I don’t think so, or you would understand why I stepped in. I am already damned to the cruelest fate she could imagine. I did not want that for you.”
“You could have just told me the truth.” Alaina’s voice trembled. The bed nearly swallowed her as she still clutched at blankets. “You didn’t have to lie!”
I crossed back to the bed and sat on the edge of it. I reached out for her hand, but she pulled it away.
“Yes,” I said, head bowed. “I lied to you. I have lied to you about a great many things. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve had little choice. And I will probably lie to you again.”
“I wouldn’t have told her, Kaylay!”
“I couldn’t risk it. If she discovered at any time that I spoke to you, that we conversed regularly, or that we had formed a connection beyond you keeping a pet, she would have had me chained again at her feet, and you would be, Great Holy forefend, debased in some way as viciously as I.”
A thoughtful pause stretched between us.
“Probably,” she admitted. She reached out and put her hand on top of mine. “I’ve seen her ruin the lives of her courtiers before.”
“Every lie I’ve told, I’ve told to keep others safe.
” That seemed like truth to me. I couldn’t recall lying purely for my own sake.
Usually, my mouth just got me into trouble.
“I’m not sorry I’ve done it. I would repeat every one of them.
Maybe add a few new ones, if I could do it all over again.
But I am sorry that I have had to with you. ”
“When did she find out,” Alaina asked, “that you could speak?”
“From the beginning,” which wasn’t a lie. “I pleaded with her not to keep me as a pet, hoping that I might move her to mercy. Instead, she found other purpose for me.”
“Not captivity,” Alaina mused, “but enslavement.”
I put my other hand over Alaina’s.
“She’s jealous,” I confessed. “Being found in your bed just made it so much worse.”
“How could she be jealous of us,” Alaina laughed mirthlessly, “from whom she has taken everything?”
“We have something she can never have: the regard of another. As a bitter, miserable person determined to make others as unhappy as she is, it is something she will never know. Can you imagine how much she must hate it, knowing that a monster such as I may earn the affection of another when she herself cannot?”
“You have earned it because you are not a monster,” Alaina insisted. “And she cannot earn it because she is.”
I pulled both my legs onto the bed and knelt facing her.
I took both her hands in mine. I surveyed her hands, small and slender and almost pale against my black, scaled skin.
I wanted my hands, my proper hands, to be holding hers, to experience the softness and the warmth directly.
But these were my hands, however strange and monstrous, and they would be the only hands of mine she would ever know.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “If it hadn’t been for me —”
“If it hadn’t been for you, I might have done something drastic these past months. You have been the one bright spot in my time in Ilyichia. Please do not be sorry for that. I could not bear it if I thought you regretted your time with me.”
“Never.”
“This is my fault. I should never have written home.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I assured her.
“I always thought I would face a beheading block or sword if brought to an untimely end,” she mused. “I doubt anyone has heard of death by palace of ice.” She gulped and met my gaze. “We are going to die, aren’t we?”
“Very likely.”
Alaina squeezed my hands and then released them. She sat, quiet and thoughtful, hands resting on her lap. Then she remembered I was there and redirected her attention to me.
“I’m so sorry you’re part of this, but, and this is selfish of me —”
“I would expect nothing else, princess.”
A corner of her mouth quirked up. “I’m glad I won’t be alone.”
“You won’t be alone,” I promised.
She raised her hand and placed it on my cheek, stroking it with her thumb. “You’re taking this all very well.”
“A life in a collar is no life.”
Her hand slid down my face and rested on said collar.
“Kaylay, I....”
I silently pleaded with whatever forces ruled the universe that she not say it. To be unmasked now, when we needed each other so much, would be a cruelty beyond expression.
But wouldn’t it be nice to hear it, just one more time, by someone I loved?
“Yes, Alaina?”
“I...” She faltered. Her hand dropped. “I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed to say it.”
My heart gave a traitorous little leap in my chest.
“There’s no need for embarrassment,” I assured her. “What is it?”
“I want you.” She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “And you told me that you want sometimes. I want you to lie with me.”
If I had not been hoping for a more maudlin sentiment to be uttered from her lips, I would have gauged her suggestion accurately. Instead, in the absence of what I wanted to hear, I blinked at her.
“But I do lie with you.”
“Lie with me lie with me.” She took a deep breath to gather her courage and nerve. “Bed me. Like the tsarina said.”
A thousand excuses why that would be impossible lined up, waiting for me to verbalize them, interspecies relations and potential bestiality foremost among them.
But the tsarina had also told me when I first discovered my suit of feathers that I was still a man, just in a costume I could not remove.
And the man still longed for things the bird could never attain.
Yet, here was Alaina, offering the bird the sweet physicality and a glimpse of paradise only the man had ever known.
“Why?” After the word had escaped me, I did not think I wanted to know the answer. “Surely not for the sake of novelty.”
“I’ve never had that kind of intimacy with someone of my choosing. And I choose you.”
“Even though the entire world, you included, has told me how ugly I am?”
“And I’m still a brown little twig.”
“I like brown little twigs.”
“And I like you.”
We both fell into an embarrassed silence.
“You wouldn’t regret it?” I asked.
“Never.” She took one of my hands and kissed the back of it. “Even though we’re going to be married, will you still respect me afterward?”
“I would have to respect you now first,” I teased.
“Then, my dearest Kaylay,” she whispered as she removed her nightshift, “fuck me like you don’t respect me at all.”