Chapter 6 #2
“What?” He moved away to the edge of the bench.
In some other situation, it would have amused her to see him lose his poise. But she was agitated and rash and the words spilled out of her mouth. “Vella took me to a quiet corner a few days ago and told me you were obsessed with her.”
“That’s ridiculous.” He pulled at the collar of his shirt, creasing the fine fabric.
“Have you slept with her?”
That made him pause, avert his eyes to the sky.
For a heartbeat she thought she’d crossed the line dividing his right to do as he pleased from her right to interrogate him; she thought he’d simply get up and leave.
Abandon her in her nightgown and wrap, wild locks escaping her braid, an uncouth, pitiful savage, the laughingstock of the court.
“They like to draw blood, my mother’s ladies, don’t they?” he said slowly. “They’ll stick their claws into your flesh to see where it hurts. Don’t let them do it.”
“But have you—” She tried to repeat the question, but the words stuck in her throat.
“They’ll all tell you I have, and two or three will be telling the truth.
” He frowned and it seemed to her he was genuinely digging through his memory.
“Vella? Yes, I believe I have, twice. Over a year ago, after some celebration when I was too irritable to be alone, and just before I left for Syr, when she cornered me with some wild talk about kindred spirits and I did it just to shut her up. Does that answer your question?”
“I didn’t want you to tell me the details, I just—”
“Yes, yes, you did.” He rubbed his temples.
She’d noticed he did that when he was upset.
“I’m not my brother, I don’t have to lift every skirt that passes through this court, but I’m not a hermit either.
I make mistakes, though I try not to make them with my mother’s ladies because they scare the daylights out of me. ”
It sounded almost like an apology. So she gathered the courage to ask: “And will you be making more mistakes?”
“What?” It took him a second to understand. “Does it matter to you?”
She opened her mouth to answer him and found herself mute once more. It did matter to her, she realized, but she couldn’t understand why. “I don’t know the rules of this court,” she managed to utter at last.
“Rules be damned,” Amron said. “Does it matter to you?”
His unflinching gaze lay heavy on her, and it suddenly became too much to bear.
Like that first night, she couldn’t allow him to see her vulnerable.
She turned her face away from him, gathering her wits and her dignity.
“This is a political union,” she said. “You are free to do whatever you please. I apologize for interrogating you.”
A long silence followed. And then, after an icy eternity, he said, “I understand.” He rose. “I’m going to bed. I’d prefer to be alone tonight.”
· · ·
The next day, a maid brought her the news while she was sitting in the garden with the queen’s ladies, pretending to read a book of poetry just to avoid speaking to anyone.
The sight of Vella made bile rise in her throat.
She’d spent the long hours of the previous night tossing and turning, angry at herself for swallowing the bait, angry at Amron for being so stiff, angry at the whole world.
“My lady, the Elmarran delegation has arrived.” The maid’s voice cut her reverie.
“Did my father come?” she asked, jumping to her feet, but the maid shrugged.
Abia was a barely controlled chaos, bursting at the seams. The guests had been pouring in throughout the whole week and the Seragians were expected to arrive the following day.
Some overworked clerk probably had the list of every man, woman, and child who currently resided there, but it was too much to ask of a maid.
“Never mind, I’ll go and see for myself. ”
It was late afternoon, sunny and mild. The sun descending towards the White Mountains illuminated the Bay of Abia at an angle that turned the waves into liquid gold.
Melia paused for a moment, breathing in the salty air, basking in the mellow light.
She found it strange, this absence of harshness, a place that wasn’t hostile to its residents.
Her father had always claimed that such hospitable surroundings bred weak, spoiled people.
But looking at Queen Orsiana, born and raised in Abia, as she sat on a wooden bench with her eyes closed, her face radiant in the sunlight, Melia thought that she looked neither weak nor spoiled, but peaceful and happy.
In the few precious memories Melia had of her mother, she never looked peaceful and happy.
Her young face—she was not yet thirty when she’d died—was either a tight-lipped mask of worry or a frowning grimace of displeasure.
No matter how hard she racked her brain, she couldn’t remember one instance of her parents smiling.
“My lady.” Melia curtsied. “The Elmarran delegation arrived. May I go and greet them?”
The queen opened her eyes. “Is Roderi with them? I’d like to see him.”
Hearing the queen call her father by his first name surprised Melia, but there was no polite way of asking why she’d done it. “I’ll check, my lady.”
Sensing her curiosity, the queen added, “Has your father ever mentioned we knew each other when we were children?” She shaded her eyes, looking up towards Melia. “Our fathers were friends, I think they had plans for us.”
Gentle melancholy dripped from Queen Orsiana’s words.
Melia’s father had never mentioned the friendship or the betrothal plans, and she found it very hard to imagine this pale, delicate woman among the rough red stones of Syr.
What kind of wife could she have been to Roderi of Elmar, what kind of mother to his children?
She loved Amron, that much was obvious to Melia, and she wondered what it felt like to be loved by your parent.
“I don’t think he mentioned it, my lady,” she said.
“Oh well, it was thirty years ago,” the queen said. “And it came to nothing.”
Queen Orsiana’s father was murdered in a bloody coup, which left her as the sole heiress of Larion. The king had scooped her up like a shiny prize in a shrewd political move that resulted—as far as Melia could understand—in a profoundly cold marriage.
“Don’t let me detain you with my old stories.” The queen waved her away. “Go greet your countrymen.”
Melia rushed through Abia, followed by two guards and a surly maid, but instead of excitement, her mind was filled with the questions about the royal marriage.
The image of the king with Lenka, the brutal, primeval desire he radiated with in contrast with his appearance at court, formal and distant, taking up all the space, all the air, all the sunlight like a massive oak tree.
His presence dominated every corner of the palace—except for the queen’s chambers.
An invisible wall surrounded Queen Orsiana’s world, and few men were allowed to enter it: the poets and musicians who entertained her and the little pages who served her, but no male courtiers, not even the princes.
The ladies made up for this lack of men as soon as the queen retired, flocking like sparrows around Prince Amril and his pack, but the queen seemed quite happy to be left alone.
Melia wondered if she and Amron were heading in the same direction, towards a marriage which was nothing but a formal engagement that required her to stand beside him occasionally and smile.
Although—the queen had produced two male heirs and a girl, which must have contributed to her current liberty. Melia had no such achievements.
It was a relief, in a way, because even the vaguest thoughts of children, of pregnancy, of childbirth, made Melia sick.
Her monthly blood—irregular, painful, and black on her linen rags—disgusted her.
It smelled of death and loss and grief; the chances of her body producing a life were about the same as the barren stones of Syr bursting in bloom.
Engulfed in such dark thoughts, she reached the house her father had in Abia, a small villa tucked away in a maze of narrow, winding streets and walled gardens.
She’d never stayed there and she couldn’t remember her father ever visiting Abia.
It was a relic of another time, perhaps, of the childhood Queen Orsiana remembered, of the long-forgotten friendship between the two southern lords.
“Lady Melia!” someone called to her as she stepped in, and she turned to see men in her father’s livery, red and black.
“Welcome to Abia,” she said, and they moved to reveal a dark-haired woman standing in their midst. It took Melia a heartbeat to recognize her, so out of place did she look without the crumbling red walls and empty rooms of Syr behind her. “Ferisa,” she blurted out.
She bowed. “I have a message from your father. We should talk in private.”
Melia turned to her retinue. “Go back to the palace, you don’t need to wait.
” Then she followed Ferisa into a sparsely furnished room that stank of ancient dust and winter damp.
No one had scrubbed the floors, opened the shutters to let the sunlight in, or aired the carpets and pillows to prepare for the arrival of the master.
No spark of life was ignited to wake the house up.
Wherever her father went, the fog that quenched out all liveliness followed him. Preceded him.
And Ferisa, too, in her priestly colors: dark green, gray, and black. In Syr, she blended in. Here in Abia, compared to the gaudy court opulence, she looked like a scrap of misery, a poor cousin embarrassing everyone with her presence.
Ferisa was studying her right back. “You look pretty,” she said.
Melia looked down at her dress, at the layers of sunflower-colored silk organza, at the fine embroidery studded with tiny pearls, at the amber-and-gold necklace the queen had given her, and cold unease twisted her stomach. She looked like an exotic bird.
“It’s just court fashion,” she stammered. “It’s what all the ladies wear.”
“It suits you well,” Ferisa said, and again, although the statement was shaped like a compliment, there was broken glass waiting under a layer of honey. “You look like a princess.”
I am a princess, Melia almost said, but then she checked herself. Why would she quarrel with Ferisa?
“My father is not here?” she asked.
“He’s coming tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Tomorrow was important. Crucial, in fact. “So are the Seragians,” she added guardedly.
The turbulent weeks after her wedding had been so hectic for Melia that she’d almost forgotten the reason her father had sent her there in the first place.
The Seragians, the peace treaty, and Prince Amril’s wedding all slipped her mind.
In the lively streets of Abia, in the sunny gardens of the palace, the deathly silence of Syr seemed like a bad dream.
She could have almost convinced herself it didn’t concern her anymore.
The sheer size of the court, the scope of the affairs so beyond her she might have been an eavesdropping pigeon on the windowsill, made her believe she was irrelevant.
Her father’s shadow didn’t stretch as far as Abia, and the royal circle cared nothing about Elmar’s feelings.
But now Ferisa was here, her dark fire burning, and Melia realized she’d been fooling herself. She could get out of Syr, but Syr would always be in her blood. The dark shadows of Elmar crept down the walls towards her.
“Your father wants you to help me,” Ferisa said.
She reminded her of Rovin at that moment, not because she was rough and fierce like her late brother, but because she expected Melia to obey her without question.
“Help you do what?” she asked.
“Take me with you as your cousin and companion, show me the layout of the palace, get me the schedule for the wedding ceremony.”
It was as if a stranger had stepped into Ferisa’s skin, removed the priestess, the herbalist, the friend Melia had known, and replaced her with this brusque courtier.
“Why do you need it?” she asked.
“Oh, Melia, you know what your father wants.”
This wedding must never transpire, he’d said.
That couldn’t be right. That was just her father’s grief speaking, his angry words.
In Syr, he was the master of life and death, but here in Abia?
He was a fragment of the queen’s childhood memory, the uncouth southern neighbor, the surly father-in-law no one cared about.
Melia had seen the scope of the wedding preparations.
What could Ferisa do? Melia might as well show her everything, let her believe their mad schemes could change something.
With the shutters half closed, the shadows in the room pooled inside Ferisa’s dark eyes as she lifted her hand to touch Melia’s face.
It was a familiar touch, a comforting touch.
“How is it, with the prince?” Ferisa asked.
For the briefest of moments, Melia wanted to spill it all out: the hostility of the ladies, the broken intimacy, the occasional urgent lovemaking in the dark, the inability to express—or even determine—how she felt.
But then, even though telling Ferisa everything had been an old habit, sharing details about Amron felt wrong. He wasn’t a piece of gossip.
“It’s fine,” she replied.
Ferisa frowned. “Fine? That’s all you have to say about your marriage?” Her eyes glinted with contempt. “He’s already taught you to be like him? All proper and forbidding?”
Melia opened her mouth to explain that things were different here, that the coarse manners of Syr were unacceptable…and closed it immediately. There was nothing wrong with Ferisa, she was the same as she’d always been. It was Melia who’d changed covertly, unexpectedly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, reminding herself that Ferisa was the one who knew her, the one who cared about her. The one who comforted her when there was no one else around. “I don’t know what came over me. This place changes you.”
“Resist it,” she said, and this time, her grip on Melia’s chin was firm, and she welcomed it. “Don’t forget who you are and why you’re here.”
The shape of her, compact and firm, made Melia feel safe.
“The people are so terrible here. The women are haughty and harsh. And the men are worse. Amril is a self-centered monster determined to make every woman who crosses his path uncomfortable. And the king, he sleeps with his wife’s ladies and doesn’t even try to hide it. ”
“Yes, I’ve heard,” Ferisa muttered.
“I want to go away. I want to leave this place and never look back.”
“Then we’ll do it.” Ferisa pulled Melia into a firm, sharp embrace. “As soon as our duty here is done.”