Princess Lysandra Verrane

By the ninth day, the herald's voice has gone to gravel, and I've never been happier.

The Great Hall of Highmere was built to humble people. Forty feet of vaulted stone. Tall windows of coloured glass. Banners of green and gold hanging like the sails of some vast, stationary ship. A carpet the colour of old wine, running three hundred paces from the doors to the foot of my dais. I sit at the end of it, three steps up, on a throne that is gilded, absurd, and upholstered in velvet: one leg crossed over the other, my chin resting on two fingertips, my father's old crown on my head, and not a thing in my expression. Ministers line the walls. Guards stand like furniture. A hundred candles gutter in the chandelier. In emerald silk, with gold at my throat and my wrists, I am told that I look like something painted on the ceiling of a cathedral.

I look like the winner. I've simply arranged for the contest to take nine days.

I was nine when I first read a treaty. At twelve, I corrected the Master of the Treasury's arithmetic in front of the whole court. At fifteen, I rewrote the northern campaign over breakfast, and the generals muttered for an hour, then used every line and took the credit, which I allowed. I've outargued every minister at my father's table and outridden every cavalry officer in the yard. I've outlasted three tutors, each of whom retired, in due course, to somewhere quiet to reconsider their lives. The court calls me gifted. The court is being polite.

So when my father rose before the assembly last spring and declared that his daughter would choose her own husband, nobody so much as blinked. How else would I have it?

And so they've come.

The Lord Evander Pell, third son of the Duke of Marrow, recited a sonnet comparing me to the sun. I corrected his scansion, and observed that the sun is also, I understand, famous for setting. The hall tittered. He bowed himself out backward and walked into a pillar.

A prince of some southern coast asked me, in his opening sentence, whether it was true that Caldaran women were "built for heirs." I asked whether it was true that his kingdom was built on a swamp. The hall did not titter. The hall roared. He left before the herald could finish his name.

Sir Garrick, who has won every tourney between here and the sea, offered to defeat any rival in single combat. I asked whether he could also defeat the grain accounts. He considered this seriously for some time, and then asked what a grain account was.

There was a man with three ships and a very small chin. There was a bishop's nephew who couldn't stop looking at my crown. There were forty-one of them, in the end, and every one of them walked that carpet as if it were a stage and I were the audience, and every one of them left it understanding, a little too late, who had been the audience.

I'm not bored. I'd like that quite clear, since the court assumes that I must be. I haven't enjoyed anything this much in years. A hall of grown men, each straining to become exactly what I want, with not the faintest notion what that is.

I haven't the faintest notion either. We shall not mention that.

It is the last hour of the ninth day. The light through the western windows has turned amber and slanted long across the flags. The herald unrolls his scroll to its end, finds nothing, and rolls it up again with a small, hopeful cough. I've already composed my closing remarks. "The Princess thanks you all, and regrets that none of you was quite..." I'll choose the least offensive, or none. It doesn't matter. I tap my fingers on the carved arm of the throne, a slow, patient, imperial drum.

The great doors open.

It's not a flourish. There's no trumpet. The wood simply swings inward, and cool air from the courtyard stirs the banners, and somebody is walking up the carpet. Not on the list. Not announced. The herald turns, and opens his mouth to give a name that he hasn't got, and nothing comes out. The ministers murmur, and fall quiet.

I stop tapping.

I don't lean forward. I'd have no one say I leaned forward. I shift my weight by perhaps half an inch, and I'd deny it under torture. I've looked at forty-one men over nine days the way you look at a dish you've already decided not to order. I find, with real annoyance, that I'm looking at this one differently.

He hasn't done anything remarkable. That's what is so irritating. He's only walked in. And yet there's a small, ridiculous, unwelcome itch under my ribs, a feeling I haven't had since I was nine and handed my first treaty: the wish to know how the sentence ends, before it has been spoken.

Don't. You're enjoying a power trip. You are not about to be interested.

I let the smirk arrive. Slowly, as I was taught by the finest instructor in the kingdom, myself. I lift my chin from my fingertips, and look down the whole length of my nose, down three steps, and down the long, wine-red carpet, at the unlisted man now standing before my throne.

"Well," I say, in the cool, unhurried voice that has ended careers. "You are late, and you are uninvited, and you have interrupted my closing remarks, which were rather good." My smirk widens. "State your name."

"This is not in the protocol," I tell the stars, and I do not stop walking.

It's past midnight, the night before my wedding, and Highmere is asleep. The corridors are dark and echoing. A single torch burns at the end of the east gallery, throwing my shadow ahead of me, long and gold and unsteady. I've sent my ladies to bed with a hot posset. I've sent the Lady Marwen, who has chaperoned me since I was six, to bed with a very large flagon of the king's best wine and a firm instruction not to wake before dawn. She understood me perfectly. She winked.

I have commanded a thousand soldiers. I have broken three treaties and written four. I'm perfectly capable of walking down a corridor.

It's the first time my hands have shaken in years.

Two months. That's how long it's been. Two months of walking the battlements at dawn and arguing about the border at supper. Two months of sparring over the war-table until the candles guttered, and riding out past the orchards to see who could get farther before the other turned back. Two months of forbidden touching, because custom does not allow it, and I'd have had any other man's hand removed. I let nobody touch me. I have never in my life been touched without having first decided to be.

I have decided. I decided on a Tuesday, in the middle of an argument about grain tariffs, and I did not tell a living soul.

The east balcony opens off the end of the gallery. I told the steward to leave him there. I told myself it was an inspection.

The night air is cool on my shoulders. There's a moon, enormous and low, and the whole city of Caldara is spread out below the castle walls, a thousand tiny lights going out one by one like candles at the end of a feast. Tomorrow, in the cathedral, before four thousand people and a bishop, I'll be wed. They say I'll be "given." I'd like it noted that I give nothing. I choose.

I find him where I told the steward to leave him.

I stop at the threshold. For a moment I stand there in my night-robe of green silk, with my hair unbound over my shoulders and my crown nowhere to be seen, and feel the unfamiliar, ridiculous sensation of not knowing what to say. I've rehearsed a speech. It was a very good speech. It began "Sir, I should like to discuss the order of tomorrow's ceremony," and it went on for four paragraphs.

It's gone. It's all gone. Look at you.

I cross the balcony in five steps. I don't hesitate. If I hesitated, I'd have to admit to something. I stop one pace away, close enough to see the moon in his eyes, and lift my chin, and wait, for a heartbeat, to see whether he'll say a word.

He doesn't. I'm very glad.

I take the last step, put one hand flat against his chest, and kiss him.

It's not a gentle kiss. I'm not a gentle woman. It's firm and deliberate and a little fierce, the kiss of someone who has made up her mind and wishes the world to know it, and it goes on for rather longer than I intended, and my other hand has found his collar and I can't remember putting it there.

I draw back an inch, breathing too fast, my eyes half closed. My heart is going like a war drum. My knees are not as steady as I'd like.

"That," I say, in a voice that is a good deal huskier than I'd planned, "was not in the protocol."

I lift my chin, and the smirk comes back, unsteady at the edges.

"Well? I should like to hear what you have to say for yourself. Do be brief."

Water. I would give half the kingdom for water.

I'm lying on my back across the great bed in the royal bedchamber, in the wreck of my own wedding night. The sheets are a ruin. The gown, which took six women an hour to lace, lies on the floor in two pieces, and I don't remember how one of them got there. The crown is somewhere under the bed, where it rolled, and I find I don't care. A single candle is still burning. My hair is stuck to my neck, my lips are swollen, there's a bruise blooming on my hip and another beneath my collarbone, and my whole body hums, a long, slow, aching note that hasn't stopped since the first time.

One round. We've gone one round. I'd like it noted that I didn't lose.

I didn't win either. I don't believe there's a word for what happened.

I've read every treatise on strategy that was ever bound. I speak four languages and read two dead ones. I can tell you the order of succession to eleven thrones, and I'd have sworn I knew my own mind to the last cobweb. No one told me it could be like this. I said things. I heard sounds come out of my own mouth that I'd have had a servant flogged for describing. My voice has gone. I can feel my thighs trembling in the cool air, quite out of my command, and I'm afraid to try to stand.

I said "water." I'd like to say I commanded it. It was a rasp, a croak, a little broken breath. He heard it, and he said he'd be back, and went. I haven't the faintest idea how long ago that was.

Wrecked. That's the word. Utterly, magnificently wrecked, for good or worse, and I've no idea which.

I try to sit up. My elbows give way. I flop back against the pillows, and a shaky, astonished laugh escapes me, and I put the back of my wrist across my eyes.

"Dear gods," I whisper, to the canopy.

I'll tell him it was adequate. I'll tell him with a perfectly straight face, and he'll know I'm lying. I'm already looking forward to it.

Beyond the door, in the cold stone corridor, there are footsteps.

Slow. Unhurried. Bare feet on flagstone. They stop outside the chamber, and I hear a small, deliberate clink: a cup, a jug.

I take my arm from my eyes. With a good deal of effort, I drag the sheet up over my breasts and arrange my hair across my shoulder. I prop myself on three pillows. I attempt, with enormous dignity, to look like a queen who has merely decided to recline.

It doesn't take. My smile arrives all on its own, helpless, lopsided, and a little drunk, and I can't do a thing about it.

"You are," I croak, to the door, in a voice like a rusted hinge, "extremely late."

I rule a kingdom. I can certainly manage this.

That's what I tell myself, astride his lap on the long leather seat of the royal carriage, with the curtains drawn tight and the road humming under the wheels. We're two hours out from the border. My gown is bunched around my waist. My bodice is unlaced to the ribs, my hair is coming down in great golden loops, and my crown is on the floor, jolting gently with every rut. The driver has been paid enough to be deaf. The outriders have been told to drop back a quarter mile. Nobody in the world knows where the Princess of Caldara is, and I've never been so thoroughly glad.

I ride horses better than any cavalry officer in the kingdom. I've ridden carriages through three wars. I'm perfectly capable of riding this.

I roll my hips, slowly, and the whole world goes white at the edges.

"Ah..." It tears out of me before I can stop it. "Hold still. Do not... do not move. I am in command of this."

My hands are braced on his shoulders. Every jolt of the carriage sends a hot, bright shock up my spine, and I learn quickly to use it: I catch the rhythm of the wheels and the rise of the road, and I ride them. The seat creaks. The curtains sway. The lamp hanging from the roof throws swaying amber light across my skin, and I can see myself reflected in the little window, flushed, wild, and magnificent.

"Look at me," I breathe. "I should like you to look. I have never in my life done anything so... so..."

I lose the word. Another jolt, and I come down hard, and a ragged cry breaks out of me, a sound I'd never make in the throne room. A hot flush spreads from my chest to my cheeks. My thighs are trembling. I'm proud of myself and terrified in about equal parts.

I've never felt so powerful and so completely at someone's mercy at the same time. And I loathe that those are one feeling.

I slow, for a moment, and lean my forehead against his. My breath is coming in sobs. My voice, when it comes, is very quiet.

"Do you know," I say, "that nobody has ever once made me forget I'm a princess." A shaky laugh. "It's most inconvenient. I'd like you to keep doing it."

The carriage lurches, and I gasp and grip tighter. The haughty smile creeps back, shaky and entirely helpless, and I lift my chin.

"Well?" I whisper. "Tell me I'm magnificent. I'm waiting."

He greeted her. That is all. Common courtesy demands it.

I tell myself so, over and over, as I walk the length of the east gallery with my spine like a spear and my face smooth as glass. The reception for the southern delegation went off perfectly. Two hundred guests. Eleven courses. I smiled until my jaw ached. I said every correct thing, in every correct tone, to every correct person, and I did not look once at the end of the long table where Princess Corisande of the Southern Reaches sat in a gown the colour of wet slate, laughing, with her hand on someone's sleeve.

It's nothing. It's a courtesy. A princess greets a Royal "husband". He was gracious, and he's always gracious, and it is not remotely my concern.

My nails are digging into my palms.

That woman. That brazen, simpering, gold-haired... slut.

I stop dead at my chamber door.

It's a word I would never use in court. I've never thought it of any woman. It arrives in my head, hot and ugly and fully formed, and I'm so shocked that I stand there with my hand on the latch, breathing hard. It isn't true. I know it isn't true. She's a clever, tiresome, inoffensive woman who has been nothing but polite. I'm being unreasonable. I'm being ungenerous. I'm being, for the first time in my life, thoroughly and completely out of my own control.

I don't care. I don't care in the least.

I push the door open. I say, in a voice like cold iron:

"Attend me."

The door shuts behind us with a heavy, final sound. I turn the key. It clicks, small and absurdly loud, and I leave it in the lock and stand with my back against the oak, my chin up, my silks whispering, and look across the chamber.

"I'd like you to know," I say, with perfect, exquisite politeness, "that I found the reception most diverting. I particularly enjoyed the part where my husband was so very courteous to the Princess of the South."

My voice cracks, on "husband." Only a hair. I cover it with a cough.

"I have never been jealous. I should like that clear. I have never wanted anything I couldn't have, and I have never lost anything I wished to keep, and I am not in the habit of feeling this... this..."

I push away from the door.

"I am extremely angry, and I'm aware that it's quite unreasonable," I say, crossing the carpet one slow, deliberate step at a time. "I'm furious at being furious. And I find that I do not wish to discuss it. I wish to..."

I stop, one pace away, and my breath is coming fast. My eyes are bright and hard and very close to something I'd rather not name. I lift both hands, and put them flat against his chest, and feel the heat of him through the cloth.

"You are mine," I say, very low. "I'd like that understood. Entirely. I shall prove it, if I have to."

I tighten my fingers in the front of his shirt, and rise onto my toes.

I have commanded armies, in a manner of speaking. I have reduced a duke to silence with a single raised eyebrow. And I am, at this moment, too shy to turn over.

It's late, and the fire has burned down to a glow. The bedchamber is dim and gold. I'm lying on my front across the great bed, in a robe of dark green silk that has slid off one shoulder, with a pillow crushed under my chin and my hair spilled across my back. One small flask of oil sits on the nightstand. I sent for it myself, from the apothecary, under a pretext so absurd that the poor man will be telling the story for years.

He is going to to put it ...there...in my butt...just like he promised.

We talked about it for hours. By the fire, in the dark, with a cup of wine going warm in my hand. I'd asked a question, and gone scarlet, and he'd answered, and we'd talked about it as I talk about everything: carefully, thoroughly, from every possible angle, as if it were a treaty. What I'd like. What I wouldn't. How slowly. How he'd stop the moment I said. I've always been better in a council chamber than in a bed, and I was pleased to find the skill transferred.

Now the council chamber is gone, and what's left is me.

I've had one glass of wine. It didn't help. My heart is going like a bird's. My hands are cold, and I keep tucking them under the pillow, then taking them out again. I'm wearing nothing under the robe. My cheeks are burning, and I've buried half my face in the linen so that nobody, in the whole kingdom, can see that the Princess of Caldara is blushing like a milkmaid.

It's absurd. I'm twenty-one. I've done far more frightening things. I've faced down a council of twelve. I've ridden a stallion that killed two grooms.

I have never in my life been this nervous.

Behind me, the floorboards creak. A door closes softly. The candle flickers, and a shadow moves across the wall.

I clench my fingers in the sheet. I turn my face a little further into the pillow, and then, with enormous effort, turn it back, and lift my chin, and speak toward the dark. My voice comes out smaller than I'd like.

"Do not laugh," I say. "If you laugh, I shall have you exiled to the marshes."

A pause, and a small, shaky breath.

"I should like you to be patient with me. I'm... not accustomed to being anything but certain." My ears are scarlet. "I'm quite sure I want this. I'm only... I find I'd like to be asked, once or twice, whether I'm all right."

I press my forehead against the pillow, and wait, as he gently grips my hips and pull it up, his palm spread me wide open and I close my eyes, nervous, anticipating and a bit scared.

I do not share. I do not lend. I have never once allowed anyone to borrow a hairpin.

I'm standing in my private solar, at an hour past dusk, with a fire in the grate and two cups of wine on the table, waiting for a maid.

It's a perfectly sensible plan. I've reasoned it through. I've gone over it forty times.

Three days ago, I opened the door of the east linen room, because the Chamberlain had said there was a leak, and I found that there was not. I don't wish to describe what I found, but I will - My lovely husband, balls deep in my maid. I'd like to not have seen it. I stood in the doorway for a long, long moment, with one hand on the frame and a feeling I can only describe as having been struck in the breastbone with a mace, and for the first time in my life I couldn't think of a single thing to say.

I shut the door. I walked back to my chamber, at a perfectly ordinary pace. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall for five hours.

He hurt me. He hurt me more than anything has in my life, and I didn't know I was that easy to hurt.

That night, I vowed to be angry at him, to let him sleep alone. But he, he was ... well too persuasive. He made me understand, over and over, with his fingers and his.... anyways, he convinced me by a route I'm not proud of, and refuse to describe. I forgave him. Not wholly. Not yet. I find that I'm weak, where he's concerned, in a manner I find entirely intolerable. And somewhere in the middle of the fury, he whispered something, which lit a fire in me. Albeit a small fire, but it was a hot idea, shocking, an idea that didn't occur to me before, and it hasn't left.

There's a knock at the door.

It's a small knock, a nervous knock, two quick raps. I smooth my gown. I sit, then stand, then sit. I fold my hands in my lap, as though I were receiving an ambassador.

"Enter."

She comes in with her eyes on the floor and her hands knotted in her apron. Wren. Twenty-three, with a thick brown braid over one shoulder and freckled hands and a chipped front tooth I've never once noticed until tonight. She curtsies, a little too deep, and stays there.

"Your Highness," she says, in a voice that's tried hard to steady. "You sent for me. Begging your pardon, ma'am, but if it's about the linen room, I'd like to say, before anything else, that it was all me, and I'll pack my bag tonight, and I won't ask for a reference."

I look at her for a moment. The poor girl is shaking.

"Rise," I say, and then, because my voice has come out like a sword, I try again, softer. "Please. Rise, Wren. Sit down. You're in no trouble."

She doesn't sit. She stands in the firelight with her hands twisting, looking at me as a rabbit looks at a hawk.

"I should say a thing first," I tell her, and I keep my chin high, because it's the only way I know how to say anything hard. "Your post is yours. Your wages are yours. Whatever you answer to what I'm about to ask, nothing in this house changes for you. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not in ten years. You may refuse at any hour, with no reason given, and I will think no less of you." I swallow. "I'm angry, and I'm hurt, and none of it is directed at you. I'd like that perfectly understood."

Her eyes come up. They're brown, and wary, and very honest.

"I'm... understood, Your Highness. I think." A small, uncertain pause. "What's the question?"

I take a long breath. I find that my hands, folded in my lap, are digging into each other.

"I have given the matter some thought," I say, with great dignity. "I find I should rather have all of this under my own roof, and on my own terms, than lose any of it. I should like to... taste... that is, I should like to try..." My cheeks go hot. I clear my throat. "I should like to try an arrangement. The three of us. If you were willing. And only if you were."

Wren stares at me. The fire pops. A log settles.

"Taste, ma'am?" she says, faintly.

"Try," I say.

"You said taste."

"I said try, Wren."

A very small, helpless, startled laugh escapes her, and she claps a hand over her mouth, scarlet, and says through her fingers:

"Begging your pardon. I've never been sent for to be shared before. I'm a bit lost for the form."

I feel my own mouth twitch, against all my best efforts.

"There is no form. I am inventing it."

She lowers her hand. She looks at the fire, and at the two cups of wine, and at me, and something in her face changes, a little steadier, a little braver, with something dry and wry behind it.

"Are you now? Or is it him?" the girl cheekily asks and I go red.

"I'd like to say yes," she continues without waiting for my response, slowly, in her plain, honest voice. "If I'm truthful. I've thought about you more than I ought, Your Highness. A good deal more." Her ears go pink.

She takes a cup of wine from the table, in both hands, and drinks half of it in one swallow. Behind her, in the dark corridor beyond the solar door, there are footsteps, slow and even, coming up the stair. I know them. I'd know them anywhere. They stop outside the door.

I rise, smooth my skirts, and lift my chin. We both look at each other and gulp.