Had there ever been another phrase to strike such terror in a man’s heart? I could’ve wished to be more clear headed, free of the dregs of the healing magic, but I’d brought this on myself and I’d withstand the storm.
“All right,” I said, helping myself to more food, acting as calm as possible. “You know I always enjoy conversing with you.”
She slammed her palms on the table, jolting the dishes and destabilizing the wine pitcher. I caught it before it toppled, setting it back carefully and eyeing her. “Stop managing me,” she ground out. The measured words might as well have been shouted.
I put down my food and rubbed my palms on thighs. “I’m not managing you. I’m doing my best to keep this conversation calm and reasonable.”
“Oh, is that so?” Her eyebrows climbed along with her tone. “You mean, calm and reasonable like when you attacked Kral?”
Setting my teeth, but keeping my jaw relaxed so she wouldn’t read that tic of mine, one she knew well, I picked up a fresh slice of bread and began to meticulously coat it with an even film of butter. Witness my manful control. “I apologize for that lapse. He goaded me in exactly the way he knew how to get to me.”
“Then it had to do with Jenna.”
Three times. Jenna’s name spoken aloud for the third time in one day.
Though I’d thought I’d left Dasnarian superstitions behind, I reflexively scanned the room, half expecting her ghost to appear, summoned by the incautious incantation. Would she rail at me? Weep, perhaps, and rightfully accuse me of having been too weak and stupid to save her?
The butter tasted sour now, the fresh-baked bread like ash. I set it aside and scrubbed my hands over my face. “Yes,” I replied. “It had to do with her.”
Ursula sat back in her chair, angling it so she could extend her long legs, crossing them at her booted ankles. “You once told me that old pains fester like unhealed wounds, that we think they’ve healed, but they’ve only scabbed over, with the pus growing in the dark. Until something happens to break them open.”
I eyed her. “There are few blows that sting more than having one’s own words flung back in one’s face.”
She smiled slightly, more a grimace of sympathy. “I know that well, as you do it to me all the time.”
I laughed a little, dry and without humor.
“That was a lot of pus I saw today,” she said.
I gazed back at her, and she refilled my wine cup, which I’d already emptied. Another bad sign. “Is this what you wanted to talk about—or is it whatever news Jepp and Kral brought?”
“Both, actually.” She had unhappy lines around her mouth. “They are … intertwined.”
I nodded, not understanding, but wondering. Kral needling me about Jenna after all this time hadn’t been a coincidence. In my experience, very little in life is a coincidence. I blame hlyti.
“I did cancel court this afternoon,” Ursula continued, “so you and I can sort all of this out. I can’t… I need to lock this part of my life down before I can deal with anything else.”
A profound failure on my part, a failure to the Elskastholrr that I caused her difficulty instead of being a solid foundation. “Which first, then—yours or mine?”
She regarded me calmly. “I’m sorry to force you into this, so your choice.”
Time to clean up my own mess, then we’d see if we had anything left in us to address whatever news Kral had brought that was dire enough for Ursula to cancel court.
“I was fourteen years old,” I told her, “and the youngest of my siblings.”
As I spoke, it seemed the formal chill of the Imperial Palace settled around us. The opulent carpets that muffled the bootsteps of the men and silenced the barefoot tread of the elegant women. The scent of jasmine and the delicate chime of jewelry as they drifted past, wreathed in colorful silk, gazes demurely averted. Mysterious and enticing.
“Six brothers,” Ursula prompted, bringing me out of the reverie.
“Yes, and three sisters. All of us born in four years to three wives.”
“Your father was a busy man—and his wives hard-worked.”
“Yes.” I splayed my hands on the table, so like my father’s. Big and blunt. The hands of a warrior, not a statesman. The hands of a brutally cruel and domineering man. “He became emperor later than he wished—having spent many years in various wars, adding to the empire for his father—and set to making heirs with due diligence.”
I lifted my gaze to hers, and raised a brow. “In Dasnaria, the emperor is not only divine, but expected to demonstrate his manly virility by producing as many children by as many women as possible.”
“Of course,” she replied softly, eyes a softer gray now with sympathy at whatever she saw in mine.
“Of course,” I echoed, wryly. “So, that number doesn’t include the multitudes of illegitimate half-siblings I have. I have no idea how many. Of the ten legitimate children born to his three wives, we are in order of birth: my eldest sister—whose name I’ve vowed never to speak aloud, but that you know—then Hestar, Kral, Inga, Ban, Helva, Mykal, Leo, Loke, and myself.”
“So many,” she murmured and picked up her wine, though she didn’t drink. “And which are your full siblings?”
“Hestar—now emperor—Helva, Leo and Loke. Those last two are identical twins.” I smiled despite my grim mood, remembering the trouble the golden twins of mischief had gotten into.
“You’re full brother to the Emperor of Dasnaria,” she mused, looking into her wine. “Does that mean anything significant?”
“It doesn’t change anything materially, no. For the most part, birth order decides the hierarchy, though the status of the mother does, too. My mother was second wife.”
“Was?”
“Died long ago.” I met Ursula’s intent gaze evenly. “My mother was named Jilliya. She was never in good health, not as long as I can remember.”
“She bore five children in four years. Even with two of them twins, that would be enough to ruin the health of any woman,” Ursula pointed out.
“True. And Hulda, first wife, had a deft hand with poison.”
Ursula’s mouth parted slightly, but she took that in, drinking a good draught of her wine. She drank less now than when I met her, which I liked to think I’d influenced, if only by helping her find other ways to unwind enough to sleep. I didn’t begrudge her the choice this afternoon. Didn’t begrudge either of us.
“So much you’ve never told me,” she commented.
I laced my fingers together into one fist, steadying it on the table. “I’m sorry for that. I’m telling you now. Everything I can speak aloud. Whatever you want to know.”
“All right.” She inclined her head. “So Jenna was your half-sister and—does it hurt you for me to speak her name? You flinched just then.”
I blew out a breath, aware it came out shaky. “No. It’s… just shocking. To hear it. So is the past tense.”
“I apologize. That was thoughtless of me. She is your half-sister.”
“Yes. My half-sister. Kral’s full sister, both of them born to Hulda. And past tense is likely accurate. She almost certainly died two decades ago. It’s a… reality I’ve never quite grappled with.” A headache throbbed behind my eyes and I squeezed the bridge of my nose between thumb and knuckled forefinger, aware of the moisture there. Soon I’d be sobbing like a toddler.
“Harlan.” Ursula sounded broken, as she so rarely did. She stood beside me and her hand covered mine. I opened my arms to her and she slipped onto my lap, all delicate bones and yielding softness. She leaned into me and I buried my face against her silky hair that looked like blood and fire, but tasted of grace. “You’re the one who’s good at this,” she finally said. “Do you want to stop or keep going?”
“The wound is open,” I replied with grim determination, “so let’s continue purging the pus.”
“All right then. So, as eldest child born to the first wife, Jenna would’ve been heir, had she been a boy.”
I smiled, brushing my lips against her forehead. The sharpest of minds—and practiced at keeping track of royal politics, much as she groused about it. “Correct. So Hestar was heir, with Kral in second place—though a close one, with his mother being the Empress. I didn’t understand much of this back then. I was a boy, the baby, and I was entirely caught up in training to fight well enough that my brothers couldn’t beat me into letting them run my life—and with the enticing prospect of bedding my first woman on my upcoming birthday.”
She laughed, sweet against me. “I can only imagine your devotion to that particular threshold.”
“Yes.” I tipped her chin up and kissed her, needing it. To my great relief, she returned the kiss, opening her mouth to me and winding her long arms around my neck. I sank into her, savoring her intensity and passion. So rarely did I have her undivided attention. She smiled at me, caressing my cheek with her rough fingers, all womanly softness for the moment, all mine. For the moment.
“I was a callow youth,” I continued, thinking back to my past self. “Self-absorbed as adolescents are, terribly spoiled as the baby of the family. When it came time for my eldest sister to be married, I was filled with excitement. There would be parties and I would get to see her, Inga, and Helva again for the first time in seven years.”
“Why so long?” Ursula interrupted with a frown. “Didn’t you all live in the Imperial Palace?”
“Yes, but the Imperial Princesses all remained in the seraglio. I spent my early years in there with them, the other wives and ladies, and my mother. Around age seven, though, the boys leave the seraglio to begin to learn to be men, and the girls stay behind.” I smoothed the line between her brows with my thumb. “It’s a strange practice, I know—and one I can’t abide now—but back then I was actually jealous of my sisters that they got to stay. The seraglio of the Imperial Palace is still one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. An enclosed world, lush and tropical, with lagoons and palm trees. We played all day and were indulged in every way. Leaving it… well, that was a cold awakening to what felt like a much harsher world. I would cry myself to sleep at night—silently, so my brothers wouldn’t hear and use it against me—missing my mother and my sisters. I felt sorry for myself.” I laughed, a bitter edge to it, for my selfishness.
“Of course you grieved,” Ursula replied, still frowning. “Ripping a child that age from everything he’s known would be terribly traumatic.”
“And yet, I was a privileged idiot because I didn’t understand that I was the lucky one. I still had no idea when seven years later my eldest sister turned eighteen and her marriage was arranged to one of our father’s favored subject kings, Rodolf of Arynherk. I was more excited for that wedding—for all my siblings to be together—than I’d been for anything in my life.” The jubilation of my younger self shamed me now. “Until I began to listen to the talk in the training yard, the way the other men snickered about Rodolf, speculating about what he’d done to his other wives, four of them, all dead young. They called him Bloody Rodolf, and the things they said about him, dark things, sexual things…” I had to stop, unable to say them aloud, especially not to Ursula, who’d suffered at the hands of a monster, too.
But she lay soft against me still, calm and understanding. “For a boy who had yet to lie with a woman that had to be shocking to hear.”
“Yes.” I wrapped my arms around her, as if I could protect her from her past, protect Jenna from the terrible things I had been powerless to prevent. “I’d had a boy’s ideals about women and sex, that it would be all about soft skin and perfume and gentle delights.”
“Like the seraglio had been in your childhood,” she murmured.
“Ah.” That hadn’t occurred to me. “I suppose so.” I tucked that idea away to examine later. “So when Inga and my eldest sister emerged from the seraglio for the first time in their lives… I learned so much that night.”
About beauty and power.
And betrayal.