“They were both astonishingly beautiful,” I remembered. “As elegant and polished as the wealth of an empire could create. My eldest sister had inherited her mother’s beauty—and Empress Hulda was famous for her ivory hair and extraordinary deep blue eyes. On top of that, my eldest sister had lived all her life indoors, with only magical light, away from the sun, so her skin was fair and unblemished, her hair only shades darker. And they’d dressed her in white silk, diamonds and pearls. She took my breath away.” I frowned. “I don’t mean that to sound…”
“It doesn’t,” Ursula murmured. “She was dazzling. Your beloved sister and the epitome of feminine beauty. You probably worshipped her.”
“I did, yes.” I rubbed my hand along her back, grateful she understood. “I was in awe of her and I wanted to save her. I warned her about Rodolf, told her she should break off the engagement. But she wouldn’t listen. I figured it was because I was only a boy and not worth paying attention to.
“She married him, and they stayed in the Imperial Palace for a week. She was always either with him”—my voice shook, and I had to steady it—“or in the seraglio where I couldn’t go. Everyone was so happy, celebrating the royal wedding. When I asked about her, everyone told me not to worry, that she was fine.
“But we had a reception for her that last night before she left on her wedding journey to travel with him to his kingdom—a party for her that she actually got to attend—a party. And, oh, Essla…” I had to pause to catch my breath. “She was so changed. He’d broken her. They’d covered her pretty skin with makeup, but I could see the bruises beneath. And her klút—her gown—covered more of her, and they’d given her gloves to wear under her wedding bracelets, but I could tell by the way she flinched, how she hunched into herself that the cur had hurt her in terrible ways.”
Ursula made a sound, and I stopped, fully aware of the parallels, how Ursula had submitted to whatever her own father expected of her. “Is this too difficult for you to hear, given what Uorsin did to you?”
“It’s not easy,” she admitted, still not looking at me. “I want to say I’m over that and it’s in the past, but we both know that would be a lie. And what happened to me was nothing like this. I want you to keep going. I begin to understand, though, how you could see so much in me, so easily.”
Not easily. Nothing about Ursula had been easy. I squeezed her reassuringly, then relaxed my hold. “I asked her if he’d hit her and she laughed. Laughed in my face, and I realized that what she’d been through was so much worse than that. I wanted her to appeal to our father, her mother, to Hestar, heir apparent. I begged her to tell them, to show them her injuries.”
“She told you they knew and it wouldn’t matter anyway,” Ursula guessed.
“How did you know?”
She shrugged a little, her cheek against my chest. “You were a sexually innocent boy of fourteen. If you could see it, imagine how much better the adults could recognize the signs. If you’d heard the gossip, then everyone knew about Bloody Rodolf. Jenna probably understood far better than you did how little recourse she had.”
“What you and my sister saw so clearly came as an astonishing blow to me. I spoke to our father, to Hestar, to Kral, and my other brothers about the situation and… they didn’t care. She was an Imperial Princess and must do her duty to the family and the empire. We all served the Konyngrr fist; a woman’s lot fell to her. She accepted it—why couldn’t I?”
“Because you’ve never had it in you to accept injustice of any kind,” Ursula replied. “One of the many things I love about you.”
I breathed in her scent and the reassurance that she could still speak so easily of loving me. So surreal to be telling this story after all the years of silence, but I couldn’t imagine anyone else I’d rather tell. Could have told, for that matter. “My sister—she told me to forget her. And she said…” The anguish knotted my throat. “She told me goodbye, and said that if I want to do something for her, to treat the women in my life well in her memory.”
“And you have,” Ursula said softly. She must have been weeping because my shirt had gone damp under her cheek. “You are the best of men, Harlan. She’d be so proud.”
I kissed her forehead, beyond grateful for those words. “But the story doesn’t end there.”
“Of course not,” she said, her voice dry now. “Because you’re you.”
I chuckled, relieved to feel my chest relax. “Well, and I was an impetuous young man with more ideals than sense. But I also was an Imperial Prince, and I used that status to bully the Arynherk guards into allowing me to join their entourage. I stayed out of Rodolf’s sight, not that he’d pay much attention to a minor princeling like me, and kept to the middle-ranking officers—intimidating them with liberal use of my father’s name and probable wrath, avoiding anyone with enough rank to know I shouldn’t be there.”
“Nicely played.” Ursula’s admiration did excellent things for my ego, even for something I’d done long ago.
“I’m surprised in retrospect that I pulled it off.”
“Youthful bravado goes a long way.”
“Very true. My sister, when she saw I’d come along, very nearly gave it all away in her panic. She wanted to protect me, begged me to go back before I was found out.”
“I can understand that,” Ursula commented.
Of course she would, being the eldest sister, always taking care of the others. “But my mind was made up and I refused.”
“Stubborn, even then.”
I let that go as true enough. “The farther we traveled from the Imperial Palace, the laxer the seraglio rules were in the noble households where Rodolf planned to overnight. In the smaller manors and keeps, it’s simply not practical or healthy for the women to live in a closed set of rooms all day, every day. That openness would work in our favor. I also knew once we reached Arynherk, I’d be dealing with people loyal to Rodolf, so if I was going to help my sister escape, then it had to be before then.”
Ursula sat up and looked at me. “You helped her to escape?”
“Of course.” I frowned, puzzled. “That was my plan all along.”
“Oh, thank Danu,” she breathed and framed my face with her warrior’s hands, kissing me deeply. “I can’t stand suspense. Tell me she escaped with you.”
“She escaped with me.”
Ursula let out a long breath. “Unreal. You are a remarkable man.”
I smoothed a wayward lock of her hair back from her temple. “Thank you, but I was mostly insanely lucky. When I look back at all the ways my plan could’ve failed…” I shook off the specter of those nightmare scenarios, some that still visited me in harrowing dreams.
“I broke her out in the middle of the night and we traveled through… a cold climate.” I hedged my way judiciously through the details I’d sworn not to reveal. “And made for a… place where we could travel out of the empire.”
Ursula settled back against me. “This is like a riddle. I’m guessing you went through remote countryside, probably crossing mountains if it was so much colder, to a coastal city where you could sail elsewhere. Smart plan.”
“Not so much. As with all plans, but especially those contrived by inexperienced fools, it went awry.” I sighed heavily. “I need to move.”
She obligingly stood, uncoiling herself with grace and a hint of the speed from her shapeshifter heritage. Taking the opportunity, she refilled our wine goblets and met me by the window with them. Handing me mine, she touched hers to it in grave salute. “To an idealistic boy who did what no one else had the courage to attempt.”
I smiled slightly, mostly to please her, and sipped, steeling myself for the next part. “We couldn’t travel as swiftly as I’d assumed. My experience had been with other men, ones properly dressed for bitter weather and skilled at riding. My sister… she had never even sat a horse before. Though I’d found outdoor gear for her, it had all been designed for men.” I swallowed some wine, grateful for the way it blurred the sharp edges of those desperate memories.
“And she’d been hurt,” Ursula supplied, gaze full of sorrow.
“Yes. The women… they used teas and a soothing smoke to ease pain. Another aspect of life in the Imperial Palace I’d been aware of but never thought through.” I lifted my wine in grim acceptance. “My sister had been drugged into a stupor and I made her give up the smoke and tea so she’d be alert for the escape.”
“You had to.” Ursula nodded crisply. “No choice there. And she did it, which speaks to her strength of character.”
If only I’d known someone like Ursula then. I could’ve used her clear thinking. “She was so brave, Essla. She never once complained, but she was in terrible pain, injured far worse than I knew, where no one could see.”
Ursula nodded, understanding, the ghost of old pain tightening her face. I nearly asked again if I should stop, remembering what she’d told me about herself, how she’d been so young, and she’d bled, telling no one. She wouldn’t thank me, though, for treating her as too fragile to hear this.
“I didn’t know until we reached the hunter’s cabin I’d been making for. We’d made it away clean and rode through the night, but morning would bring discovery of her absence and inevitable pursuit. I’d hoped to rest a few hours, then continue. But her saddle blankets…” I rubbed a hand over my face, wiping away the cold sweat. “Soaked in blood.”
“Not surprising, really,” Ursula said the words very softly, laying a hand on my arm and stroking me. “A young and virgin bride and a man of Bloody Rodolf’s reputation…”
“Yes, well.” I wrapped my hands around the goblet, holding onto it. “I didn’t know that. I wasn’t even entirely clear on how women differed from men, other than ribald jokes and improbable tales. But I had to do something. She was so pale and weak—even I could see she’d die if we kept going that way.”
“What did you do?” Ursula asked, the knowing in her eyes.
“She was ashamed, embarrassed, didn’t want me to know and certainly didn’t want her baby brother seeing her that way.” It had been so surreal, her embarrassment and mine, along with the keen awareness that her life, at the least, rode on both of us setting those niceties aside. My lovely sister, and the savagery of what he’d done to her tenderest, most intimate self.
“He’d torn her badly, in her sex, so I sewed her up. I knew enough of field dressing wounds, how to clean them, of stitches and so forth. What I didn’t know was…” I gave Ursula a look I hoped was wry, though it felt like it fell short. She only watched me with solemn attention. “I didn’t know what a healthy woman’s sex should look like,” I explained. “I didn’t know what was a natural opening and what—” My voice broke.
Ursula took my goblet, set it aside, and drew me into her arms; so much slighter than I, but strong enough to hold me as I dropped my forehead to her shoulder. “Oh, Harlan,” she murmured. “You are an incredible man, then and now. And she lived. That’s what matters.”
“She lived. And I made myself some promises that night.”
“You swore to learn your way around women so well that you would know what to do both to give them pleasure and to heal?” Ursula suggested, a wry knowing in her voice.
I lifted my head and kissed her forehead. “Yes.”
“I can vouch for your success.” She kissed me, a tender brush of her lips against mine, gentle in a way she rarely was. “What then?”
“We were extraordinarily lucky—or so I believed—and though we stayed in that cabin for days, long enough for her to heal sufficiently to at least ride, we weren’t discovered. We made it to my planned destination, and I paid for passage on transportation to leave in the morning. My sister had shorn her distinctive hair and we’d found a sympathetic blacksmith to cut off her wedding bracelets, and unchain her ring. We’d—”
Ursula held up her index finger, stopping me. She’d broken that finger a few times in sword practice or battles, and it had a crooked bent, as if it asked a question. “Cut off her bracelets, and… unchain a ring?” she inquired, a hint of danger beneath the smooth surface tone.
I sighed. She was going to hate this. “Dasnarian wedding bracelets are an old tradition. They’re jeweled and very pretty—all different designs—but traditionally they’re locked onto the bride during the wedding ceremony, never to be removed.” More like manacles than jewelry, it had occurred to me much later in life.
Ursula assimilated that with a cool and remote expression, saying nothing.
“The ring… Well, Bloody Rodolf had this extraordinary diamond ring, an Arynherk tradition, that he gave my sister to go with the bracelets—and attached to them by a chain. They all had to be cut off and the jewels were going to pay for our new lives.”
“‘Our’?” She still sounded distant, mastering her revulsion, I knew.
“I planned to go with her. My sister… she knew nothing of the world. She’d been raised very deliberately that way. I’d never thought about it—as I’d never thought about so many things back then, in my selfishness—but she’d been educated only in pleasing her husband. You know already that Dasnarian women can’t handle money or make trade transactions of any kind, by law of the empire, but my sister couldn’t even count.”
“Of course you had to go with her.” Ursula picked up her wine again and sipped, considering me, her thoughts obscure.
“And I had no wish to return to my life,” I admitted. “I couldn’t be a part of a family who did that to their own. I wanted nothing more of being an Imperial Prince and all that entailed.”
“Which is why you were so angry with me the day Kral arrived at Ordnung, and I called you Prince Harlan Konyngrr,” she noted.
“Yes.” I grimaced, acknowledging. “You understand more now why I am not… entirely rational on the topic.”
“I do.” She gazed out the window at the lovely summer afternoon, her profile sharp, her bearing so regal. “I won’t beat you up about this, but you could have explained. It would’ve helped to know before now.”
I brushed a hand over her hair, less an apology than an effort to demonstrate what I had no words to express. She gave me a sidelong look, and shook her head. “Finish it. What happened?”
“Kral found us.”
“Kral.” She pressed her lips together. “I see.”
“He tracked us. Caught me naked in the bath, my weapons on the other side of the room.”
She winced in sympathy and I knew she, of all people, would understand that level of nakedness, of powerlessness.
“He intended to escort us back to face our father, said all would be forgiven if we gave him no trouble. My sister, of course, would be returned to her husband, who owned her under Dasnarian law.”
Ursula set down her goblet and leaned against the window sill, breathing the fresh air, her knuckles white. “I’m sorry I stopped you from killing him,” she said conversationally.
“No, it’s good you stopped me.”
“Oh, right.” She gave me a lethal smile. “Because now we can go kill him together.”