Chapter 9
Liana
The evening sky glowed purple, the lanterns in the trees spilled warm yellow light. Music whispered among the leaves and women glided through the garden, more women than Liana expected: maids in their dark aprons, Lady Celandina’s girls in their diaphanous gowns, dancers in skin-tight costumes.
The men were already rowdy when they arrived, disrupting that harmony as soon as they entered.
Laughing too loud, staggering on the grass, taking up too much space.
The women scattered like a shoal of fish before them and then gathered again, forming new patterns, breaking the men apart, muffling their chaos.
Liana stood still in the shadows, watching.
There was the crown prince, the bridegroom, the focal point of the evening.
Amril, tall and golden, larger than life, like a fairy-tale hero, followed by his clique of sycophants.
There were the high lords of the kingdom, the young ones, the fun ones, the ones who loved the prince.
There were the accidental hangers-on, the ones who had to be invited, too important to be left out.
And then there was a shadow, a gust of northern wind in the summer air, a face that made her chest ache.
The beautiful evening carried no ominous signs, no dark premonitions of war.
Liana felt foolish thinking about it. Perun had muddled her memory, dropped her at a wedding she’d never seen because she’d been nineteen at the time, too unimportant to be taken to Abia to witness the glorious finale of the most difficult peace negotiations in history.
The wedding of the Crown Prince Amril and Carevna Aratea of Seragia, where something went terribly wrong.
The little she’d heard about it from Amron was a useless mush in her memory now.
She did know, however, what followed afterwards: years and years of bloodshed, meager victories erased by staggering defeats, and death, so much death.
Liana had to get to Amron before the bloody cleaver of destiny fell on Abia, had to get him out, away from the madness, back to the relative safety of their Abia.
She wanted to run to him but she couldn’t.
He wasn’t alone, there were two dozen people between them.
So Liana smiled, poured the sweet, iced white wine, and answered dull questions, lying and deceiving the guests into thinking they were interesting.
A bearded man pulled her into his lap and she refrained from breaking his teeth, slipping out of his grasp like an eel.
A young man, hardly more than a boy, asked for a dance, and then stood staring at her face, holding her wrists in his sweaty hands.
She’d seen enough events at the palace to learn the art of light hovering, of making men feel like they had her full attention before disappearing from view.
The sky turned black and the night breeze cooled her hot skin.
It felt like an eternity, but it couldn’t have been more than an hour.
She saw Amron chat with men and women; one of the girls made him laugh, another lured him into a dance, but he slipped away from them all in his gentle, unobtrusive manner, fading into the background.
She lost him from sight for a moment and her heart stopped—she thought he’d left.
Then she spotted him alone, sitting under a tree, a glass in his hand.
She made a beeline for him this time, a huntress moving silent and unobserved through the forest of drunk men.
“Good evening,” she said softly, sitting down beside him.
“Is it?” he said. “I’m not so sure. I feel mean, and drunk.”
He was lying on both accounts. He’d never been mean and he was still on his first glass of wine. He didn’t even spare her a look.
“Still, I’d like to join you, if you don’t mind,” she said.
“Did my brother send you?”
“What?” She glanced towards Amril, on the other side of the garden, in the spotlight, his arms around a girl. “Gods, no. Not him.”
“Then why—” He turned his face to her and his words trailed off.
· · ·
Many years ago, on a night when he’d drunk more wine than usual, when sleep eluded them both, and when she felt it was a good moment for foolish questions, Liana asked, “When did you fall in love with me?”
“The moment I first saw you.” An immediate reply, without hesitation.
“I don’t believe you.” It was winter, and very cold. They were nesting among the down-filled pillows and quilts in his bed. A solitary candle burned on a nightstand, outlining his profile in gold. “You’re not the type to fall for anyone quickly. And it took you months to say it out loud.”
He laughed softly at that. “I didn’t want to admit what it was, then. And I certainly didn’t plan to do anything about it.”
“So it was just a strange itch you ignored? A flea bite where you couldn’t reach and scratch yourself?”
He turned to face her, upsetting the perfect cocoon of warmth. “Vivid, but untrue,” he said. “No, it was love. You rode out of that snowy thicket, already wary of me although we’d never met, and you removed your hood and I thought, This is who I’ll dream of every night, for the rest of my life.”
· · ·
“Oh,” Amron said, his eyes glued to her face.
Hope flickered in her heart. Some things were always true, even if he couldn’t remember them.
“I don’t think we’ve met.” He frowned. “Yet you seem familiar.”
“My name is Liana.” It was all she could say, sitting so close to him she could feel the warmth radiating from his body.
She hadn’t prepared her words in advance; she’d thought it would be easy.
She’d been talking to Amron for half her life.
But she hadn’t been talking to this Amron—this preoccupied young man, obviously attracted to her, but wary of strangers and still uncomfortable in his own skin.
The lanterns gave off a subtle golden light that warmed his pale complexion and flirted with the sharp lines of his face.
His eyes, the color of the winter sea in daylight, turned nearly black in the pooling shadows.
She wanted to touch him so desperately her fingers ached, but he hated being touched by strangers.
“Liana, I’m flattered, but you’re wasting your time.” He set his glass down, ready to flee. “You are beautiful, but I never touch Celandina’s girls.”
Of course he didn’t, damn him. He avoided courtesans because their feigned willingness burned him like acid.
Neither her beauty nor the sweetness of her smile would change that, not tonight.
He abhorred it when people took liberties with him, he despised over-familiarity, he loathed advances.
The situation slipped out of her grasp as he rose to leave.
“I’m not one of Celandina’s girls,” she said.
Any other man in that garden would probably laugh it off as a joke, but not Amron. He paused, his expression visibly cooling down. “Who are you, then?”
“I am—” I’m your wife, dammit. I’d burn the world to ashes to get to you, why can’t you see it? “I’m your friend.”
He raised his eyebrows as he sat back down beside her, and she could almost see the thoughts rearranging themselves behind his curious gaze.
He was young, but he was not na?ve. By this age, he’d already been well-versed in both fighting and diplomacy, he’d lived in every corner of the kingdom from the snowy mountains of Virion to the arid plains of Elmar, he was a courtier and a military commander.
And if he still hadn’t learned to trust his second sight, he was certainly not foolish enough to ignore a broken thread in the pattern of the world.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
She was here to kiss him and whisk him off as soon as possible, out of this place that vibrated with the low rumble of impending doom.
But Amron wasn’t willing to be whisked off, seduced, kissed in a dark corner until he moaned with desire.
No, not him. He wasn’t going to be feckless and frivolous, not even for one night at his brother’s party, while everyone around him sank into a haze of wine-fueled debauchery.
No, Amron was not going to be coaxed into kissing a strange girl, no matter how much he liked her. And he was not going to accept lies.
“I need to warn you.” She paused; she didn’t want to sound like one of those crazy prophets on the street corners, foretelling doom.
The idea of the catastrophe rolling towards them was vague in her head, she had nothing firm to grasp, no clear details to nail the story down.
Bloody Perun and his tricks. “Your brother’s wedding.
Something will go wrong and there’ll be bloodshed. ”
He blinked, weighing her words. “I don’t know what to think about you, Liana. You look like a vision, you talk like a madwoman. Is this some elaborate prank?”
“It’s the truth, I swear.”
Later in his life, Amron would hone his knack for reading people to a sharp, infallible blade. This Amron, though, was still learning how to wield it. “Why should I trust you?”
Why, indeed? She needed something true, and hidden, and shocking. Something intimate, something whispered in the darkness, his mouth touching her ear, his limbs entwined with hers. “If I tell you a secret, promise me you won’t panic.”
“Now you’re just being dramatic.”
She took a deep breath. “You have a crescent-shaped scar on your left thigh. Amril pushed you through a window when you were five, and a shard almost cut your artery and killed you. He claimed it was an accident. You know he did it on purpose, and yet you never told anyone.”
Color drained out of his face. “Who are you?” he whispered.
“I am your friend,” she said, covering his hand with hers, gentler than a butterfly landing on a blade of grass. “Bad things are coming.”
Slowly, slowly—his gaze never leaving her face—he wrapped his fingers around hers into a tight grip. “Come.” He rose to his feet, pulling her up. “Whatever you know, the captain of the guard needs to hear it.”