Chapter 9 #2
She pressed her back against the window frame and stared at the ceiling.
Kalen had woken something in her that would never go away.
She had been kissed by men before. Three times, all of them in the years when she had still been trying to understand what the fuss was all about.
Each time she had felt a polite nothing, and had later understood that the nothing was not necessarily a failure in her.
She was certain that one day someone would sweep her off her feet.
It had occurred to her that perhaps that someone may be a woman, but she had quashed down that thought before it took root.
What she felt now was the furthest thing from nothing that she had ever experienced in her life.
She crossed to her washstand and poured cold water from the jug into the basin and stood with her hands in it, letting the cold bring her back to herself.
Kalen was not only unsuitable but she was a slave.
Verna should be horrified that a slave had taken such a liberty.
She was the head of one of the most powerful households in the empire, with guards on the walls and a crest on her carriages.
Even the emperor watched her land with covetous eyes.
The gulf of propriety between her station and Kalen's was a thing she was not supposed to need reminding of.
And yet.
It hadn't felt like that, not for a single moment. The horror she was supposed to feel kept refusing to arrive, and she knew, if she were honest with herself, that it was because the category simply didn't fit.
Kalen didn’t behave like a slave.
She never had, not from the moment she had risen from her knees on the auction platform and walked off it without waiting to be told.
She hadn’t lowered her eyes or deferred, instead held herself as if she was Verna’s equal.
She contradicted Verna to her face, used her name without title when she forgot herself, and stood in the amphitheatre at the end of a session in which she had systematically dismantled twenty-four trained soldiers and looked up with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had done what they came to do.
She held herself like someone important.
Wherever Kalen was from, she had not been a nobody.
Verna lifted her hands from the basin and dried them slowly.
Kalen had said, that first evening in the small interview room, that her people were hidden from the Empire.
That they had never been conquered or traded with.
That they had survived because the rest of the world didn't know they existed.
She had said it with the matter-of-fact certainty of someone stating a simple fact, with no false modesty or swagger, and Verna had believed her completely.
A community of women warriors, she had said, somewhere east of everywhere Verna had been.
She turned the silver ring slowly on her finger. It was quiet now, no heat, no cold, simply present, the way it had been for most of her life before Kalen arrived and it had begun its restless commentary.
East of everywhere.
She thought about the way Kalen moved. The fighting style that bore no resemblance to any Imperial school she had studied or witnessed.
The economy of it, the fluidity, the way it looked more like a long-practised language than a taught technique.
You didn't move like that from training alone.
You moved like that from growing up inside a tradition, from having it handed down through generations until it lived in the body rather than the mind.
What kind of place produced a woman like that?
What kind of place had she left behind, or been taken from?
She thought about the way Kalen, in the interview room on her first evening here, had watched the three moons rise over the water. The particular quality of stillness that had come over her then. Not the watchful expression she usually wore like armour, but something that looked like grief.
Verna set down the cloth and went to the window again.
Below, the vineyard rows stretched out in their orderly lines, the women moving between them with their baskets. The press house rhythm continued its steady percussion. Everything was in its place, everything operating as it should.
But now, standing in her own room with warm lips and a ring that had opinions, she was faced with a dilemma.
What to do about Thom.
He’d offered marriage to give her protection.
He would keep the emperor from her gates and let her run her estate as she always had, asking nothing in return that she was not willing to give.
Thom, who loved her in the steady, patient way he had for twenty years, and who deserved far better than a wife who had wantonly kissed a warrior woman against a stone wall just a day after she accepted his marriage proposal.
She closed her eyes.
The kiss came back to her immediately. She had rather hoped it wouldn't do that quite so readily.
Kalen's mouth and hands and the low sound she had made as she cupped Verna’s breast.
Could she marry Thom?
A day ago, the answer had been yes. A complicated yes, a reluctant yes, but yes nonetheless.
Now she stood at her window and asked the question again, and what came back was not an answer but a feeling. The sensation of what real passion felt like. God help her, she would have opened her legs willingly if Kalen had pressed her.
She could not imagine standing at an altar with Thom and making those vows while that knowledge lived in her body.
She pressed her fingers to her lips again and this time didn't drop her hand.
Below the window, one of the field women began to sing in the vineyard rows. It carried up on the sea breeze, clear and unhurried, an old song about the harvest, about things that grew slowly and were worth waiting for. Verna had heard it every autumn of her life on this estate.
Today it felt, unreasonably, like the world making a pointed remark.
She turned from the window, sat at her desk, and looked at the stack of correspondence that had arrived in the last hour. At the top was a letter from Thom's steward, confirming the availability of the officiant for the private ceremony in three weeks.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she put it to one side, face down, and picked up something else.
She would think about it later.