Chapter 31
XXXI.
Hours later, sweat and sex thick in the air, I woke to Alaina’s hair in my mouth.
Her arm across my chest, her head tucked under my chin, the heat of our proximity, and the effort of our activities invited me to return to languorous sleep even with our impending executions.
Perhaps because of it, we pushed ourselves to the brink of passion and the edge of exhaustion, unleashing our desperate need for connection beyond the rigid roles we had to play.
We laughed and teased and touched like young lovers.
And though I had been carrying the burden of grief and shame to spirit-breaking limits for almost a year, the tsarina’s decree allowed me to set it aside for several perfect hours because it didn’t matter now.
Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing but me and Alaina and our brief happiness together before everything in our worlds came to a stunning, horrible conclusion.
Freezing to death, especially with how much I loathed the cold, might have been my least preferred punishment, perhaps second only to being made to linger for another forty years, enduring the existence I had endured these past months.
And I could speak to punishment, especially of the imaginative type that undermined any sense of personal identity.
How many times had I lost the things that had hitherto defined me?
But Alaina did not deserve the fate to which she had been condemned. She just wanted to go home, where she was valued, and cared for, and loved, at least loved by more than a lowly nightmarish creature.
If I had a place that I thought of as home, I would have joined her in that fervent desire.
I was alone though. Every hope of family met with disappointment, tragedy, failure, and rejection.
I didn’t think Alexei ever thought of me now, beyond a horrifying embarrassment he would spend the rest of his life trying to erase.
My isolation made it easy to relinquish this life. But Alaina....
The Kind and Fair assured me she would live with my loyalty, and yet, putting myself between the princess and the tsarina had only worsened the situation. Perhaps the tsarina could see that I would give nothing for her when I would willingly give everything for Alaina.
Alaina snuggled harder into my arms, grip fierce. She kissed the underside of my chin though to demonstrate her wakefulness.
“We should be making escape plans,” Alaina mumbled into my shoulder, “but I don’t see any way out.”
“We are too diligently watched here to make a successful escape.” I had failed several times already without the vigilance the guards were instructed to employ now. “Perhaps we can find some flaw in the ice palace itself. There were weak spots in the plans.”
“Weak spots?” She perked up. “How do you know that?”
“Because I saw them.” And then I realized that Mikhail the Jester had seen them, not Kaylay the Bird. I added, “It’s remarkable what people say around creatures they think are beneath them.”
Alaina accepted that.
“She spoke of a procession,” she mused. “Surely her guards couldn’t keep us defended in such a crowd. Could we appeal to the people? Might they help us?”
“With the way they have been subjugated? All the pointless public executions? That’s why she arranged the winter festivities and the ice palace anyway — to distract from their discontent.
They might take more delight in seeing the downfall of nobles than become inspired to rescue us.
” But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, the implication of them chilled me with the use of “nobles” and “us.”
Alaina mercifully did not think anything of it.
“If they won’t help us,” she mused, “maybe we could just slip into the crowd and disappear?”
“Maybe you could, but I doubt that I would be able to blend into a crowd.”
“And I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“I need you to save yourself,” I told her as I rubbed my temple against the top of her head in place of the kiss I would have rather bestowed, “if indeed that’s what it comes to.”
“I refuse.”
“You have a destiny, Alaina.” And she did.
In Altania, she would be a magnificent ruler, just and compassionate and strong, schooled by the cruelty of her own captivity in Ilyichia and the example of rulership that would hopefully form her in a more effective way.
“In Altania, you are going to have a beautiful, fulfilled life with children if you wish it, and a new husband too who will know your worth and adore you above everything. As you deserve. Eventually, your time here will seem nothing more than a distant, unpleasant dream, and you will forget all about your strange Ilyichian bird.”
“I could never.” She pulled herself from my arms to roll onto her back and glare at the ceiling. “I don’t like how you talk.”
“If I ever said something you liked, then I would know something was truly wrong.”
She pushed herself up to sitting and drew her legs up to her chest. She fussed with her hair, pushing it out of her face, twisting it into a long rope, and then throwing it behind her shoulder. She stared at the blankets in front of her.
I sat up too and scooted closer beside her.
“Even if I somehow managed to make it out of Ilyichia alive — and right now that seems extremely unlikely — do you really think I could forget you, Kaylay?”
“I hope you will,” I admitted. “That would mean that you would have a full and happy life, and you wouldn’t be thinking about the past.”
She reached out and put her hand on top of mine. She traced one of my fingers with hers.
“I had another gift for you,” she admitted, “something you could have even if I couldn’t be with you during the days.
It seems a bit pointless now since we’re about to die together.
” She looked up at me, her eyes red-rimmed as if she might burst into tears with the slightest provocation. “Can I still give it to you?”
“If you wish to bestow it, even if the purpose behind it is no longer necessary, then I will receive it gratefully.” I did not dare tell her that I did not require or want presents lest she misconstrue it as a rejection. “I treasure the thought behind all your gifts.”
The corners of her mouth lifted even if she did not smile.
She squeezed my hand and then slid from the bed, taking a blanket with her that she wrapped around her shoulders.
She disappeared into her dressing room for several moments and then returned.
She climbed back into bed and knelt facing me, her hands cupped.
She opened them like a child might reveal a secret pet, like a frog or a mouse, hidden from the adults and intent on keeping it that way.
On her palm lay a golden band, the exterior design enameled in green, a thread of gold weaving through like a vine, tiny inlaid rubies serving as flowers dotted along.
“Finist the Falcon had a magic ring,” she said, “and since you insist that you are not he, I wanted you to have your own ring, even if it isn’t magic, embellished with scarlet flowers.”
I stared at the small marvel of metalwork robbed of words.
“I’ve been a little scared to give it to you,” she confessed.
“Why?”
“I worried that you might think I wanted something from you.”
She was correct. I would have.
“I hope it’s big enough,” she said. “The court jewelers regarded me like a mad woman when I told them what I wanted, but I think they did it rather well.”
Practicality swept in before I had finished processing the magnitude of such a present, almost as if to spare me from having to confront it.
“You don’t have those kinds of funds,” I said, awed and equally inclined to regard her as a mad woman.
“I had them use some of my own jewelry. And, really, does it matter now? In fact, I am more glad than ever that I did it. What use are jewels and funds and finery now? At least I can give you this. If you’ll have it.” She nibbled her bottom lip and then blushed. “If you’ll have me?”
My heart stopped beating for the same duration as my lungs stopped taking in air.
“I know she means to embarrass us,” she rushed on, “but what if we get married because it means something to us and not just because the tsarina makes us do it? I can hear all your protests without you even saying a word, Kaylay — but what about my future or my brother or my political career or any other reason this might ordinarily be an outrageous suggestion — but that would be our final act of defiance against her, don’t you see? ”
I saw. For a whole few moments of her suggestion, I had acquired some fragile, fleeting notion that maybe, truly, Alaina loved me too.
Her suggestion that we willingly do what the tsarina imagined she was forcing us to do as resistance disintegrated all that wispy hope.
It was a moral stance, a political stance, a prideful stance, meant to combat the cruelty and ridicule the tsarina would inflict. Love never entered into it.
“I am already devoted to you,” I said. “You do not need to take the vows of an absurd wedding seriously for that.”
“I may never have the children I always hoped to have, but I will marry again at least. Let me marry someone of my choosing?”
It didn’t matter if she loved me or not because I could not say no to her.
“Are you planning on making an honest bird of me then?”
“If you will let me.”
She plucked the ring from her palm and held up the perfect circle so that the light shone through it, the burnished gold like a brilliant glowing halo. She took my hand with her free one and looped the ring over my talon and pressed it past the joints. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it stayed on.
I choked out, “I’m sorry it didn’t work.”
Alaina’s face furrowed. “What didn’t?”
“We’ve agreed to wed. I have a ring, like the stories, and still, no handsome prince am I.”
“Do not apologize.” She stroked my cheek. “I am not disappointed.”
She should have been. I was.
I stared at the ring again, the weight and heft on my finger a distant memory from before the tsarina’s heartless theft. Its delicacy and expense clashed horribly with the gnarled finger on which it currently resided. It was the most beautiful ornament I had ever worn.
Tears broke free, and I wiped ineffectually at them. Alaina had answered the one plea I had been making for months — I had a wedding band. Maybe not Irena’s, but mine nonetheless. And I would die wearing this one.
“What’s wrong, Kaylay?”
What could I tell her? Last time her gift left me undone, I covered it with prickliness and ingratitude. I would not make the same mistake now. But I still wouldn’t tell her the truth, tempting though it was.
“The tsarina has deprived me of everything I might once have been able to offer you,” I said. That at least was truthful. “I can give you nothing in return.”
“I have things,” she spread her arms out to indicate the room and her finery beyond it. “I have had things my whole life. I do not need more. What you give me is more valuable than all my things put together.”
How quickly would her regard for me vanish if I told her I was the former prince she so reviled?
“I would still like to give you more than flimsy comfort and warmth.” I could offer her nothing but paltry tokens of affection, but what did those matter when her life was threatened?
Cuddling wouldn’t keep her safe. Or.... I grabbed Alaina’s arm and startled her with my action and sudden intensity. “She didn’t think this through.”
“The wedding?”
“Our deaths.”
“The Royal Academy said that this is the coldest winter Ilyichia has ever experienced, and she is going to keep us overnight in an ice construction. What other outcome is possible?”
Maybe the Otherlander had helped us. Maybe that was why Alaina had never told me that she loved me, not even in the midst of our earlier passions. Maybe the Otherlander ensured that she wouldn’t because only as a bird could I protect her. My feathers were my gift and her salvation.
“We might live,” I spread my wings out, “because I can keep you warm.”