Chapter 56
T he next morning, we continued on as if nothing had happened, which did seem to be a special skill set we both possessed. Not that anything had happened, exactly, except that she was intentionally honest for a rare change.
In any event, the frigid moments on the balcony seemed to have shifted something for Rowan. She still rarely left bed, but was back to talking. Or, arguing, more specifically.
I took every chance I could to forcibly teach her the oldest Socairan dialect, a fact which did not go unnoticed by her. She tolerated it the same way she did everything else, by pretending it wasn’t happening.
Her boredom was making her far more restless, though, as was evidenced by her frequent talking to my cat and my soldiers. It was an especially busy time of year, with taxes coming up, and I could have sworn she was up to taking two baths a day to entertain herself.
Or maybe it only felt that way when every time I went to add a number, another maid crept by.
“Lemmikki, could you perhaps have your kilpi drawn any other time than right when I’m going over estate taxes?”
She smiled, a wicked grin that meant she was about to delight in telling me no. “Perhaps tomorrow, but I keep such a tight schedule these days. I’m afraid I have to get my bath in before my nap, which is in a strict half hour.”
It was hard to be too irritated through my relief that she was back to some version of herself, even if that version still refused to get dressed or out of bed.
In that vein, I started giving her things to do, both because she was going stir crazy and because she was going to drive me crazy if she restlessly fidgeted in bed for five more minutes.
She needed to move anyway, or the scars on her back would heal too tightly.
“Lemmikki, kertoa Kirill to bring me the trade log from the South,” I told her, frowning when the numbers didn’t make sense.
Of course, we had clerics, but I double-checked their work for instances like these.
She made a face. “Why don’t you kertoa him yourself?”
I leveled a look at her. “Because I’m busy, and you haven’t left that bed all day.”
She shrugged like that was fair, not even wincing with the movement, then went to poke her head out the door to ask Kirill for the log. Coincidentally, that meant she would be in my study for at least a quarter of an hour since she usually got caught up talking with him.
Which, of course, was in no way why I had asked her to go.
When she refused to actively learn any Socairan, though, I had to get creative. While she was sleeping, I told Taisiya not to give her anything she didn’t ask for.
The maid looked at me in confusion. “Yes, my lord.”
“By name, in Socairan.”
Taisiya actually grinned at that. “Yes, my lord,” she said with more emphasis.
Whatever games she was playing, she didn’t seem to want Rowan kept in the dark. At least, not as far as the language went.
I considered everything I knew about the maid so far. My spies told me they hadn’t yet uncovered anything about her familial ties, which wasn’t completely unheard of in Sociar, but especially not in Bear.
Still, something about her unsettled me. Between this, her oddly accented words and her near obsession with the princess, I was beginning to suspect that she might be a Lochlannian spy.
If she was, she had not imparted that to Rowan yet. I knew my captive princess by now, and I knew she would never have been able to hide that. She hadn’t lasted thirty seconds trying to conceal her cousin’s identity.
Of course, I might have been wrong. In any event, she was protective of Rowan and I wasn’t careless enough to leave any information I didn't want known out in the open.
That was enough for now.
I should have known things were going too well. Then again, some part of me had been waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And that shoe came in the form of a letter from Elk.
Kirill and Taras came into my rooms, the former carrying the missive with an expression that was just a hair too neutral. Rowan took the cream-colored envelope with a navy wax seal, a curious combination of guilt and anxiety crossing her features.
She waved her hand imperiously, and I took a breath to tell her exactly what I thought of being banished from my own quarters, but Kirill shook his head. And I shouldn’t have cared half as much as I did about the princess’s ill fated love affair, but I was filled with an undeniable sense of dread.
If Korhonan had been trying to arrange her return, Kirill would have come to me first. Though their five-minute betrothal had long since been terminated, whatever was in that letter was clearly going to upset her.
As much as her pent up energy had been dancing along my nerves, I didn’t want to return to the unnatural silence that had plagued this room before that.
I left her to her relative privacy, closing the door between the study and my room before giving Kirill a pointed look.
“Elk is in talks with Ram once more.”
“Lady Galina?” I asked, leaning against the heavy desk.
He nodded. “The princess will be upset.”
“You said he broke off whatever understanding they had in his last letter.” I directed that at Taras, who had the immense pleasure of reading most of my lemmikki’s incoming and outgoing correspondence.
“He did,” my cousin confirmed.
“But it’s always different when someone you thought you would spend your life with moves on to do that with another person,” Kirill said, sinking onto the sofa.
“Would you know?” I couldn’t help but ask. He had only ever talked about his wife.
He gave me a half smile. “Not personally, but I do talk to people.”
Not for the first time, I wondered how he managed to be the kind of person who followed me onto the battlefield and also the kind who spent hours talking to old men in his home village, who doted on his wife, who took time to consider how devastated the princess of his enemy would be over a letter from a man she was already disentangled from.
Though I supposed Rowan was more than that to him now. To all of them.
“Well, she won’t be the only one upset,” I mused aloud. “Now at least I know what Arès was hinting at. What else did the letter say?”
“More or less that Iiro believes she’s a distraction, that he loves her, but has no choice, just like she didn’t when she was taken for a blood debt, and that he’s sorry.” He grimaced.
“I suppose he can’t contradict his duke, especially when it comes to who he will marry,” Taras said charitably.
“No. But the way Iiro is with him, if he wanted to fight this, he could. It’s not like he would be put to death so long as he had that argument in private.”
A beat of silence fell in the room. I wondered if, like me, they were wondering if that was a privilege that extended to my relationship with my own duke. He loved me, in his way. He had never ordered nor condoned my punishments.
But he was volatile under the best of circumstances, and it was well within his rights to execute any one of us for stepping outside the lines.
It was a sobering reminder of the risks we were all taking now.