Lia dazzled them, naturally. She’d elected not to forewarn the court and palace at large of her plan to make an appearance. She wanted to simply appear, as if she’d never forsaken her duties as their queen.
No fanfare, no heartfelt welcome speeches that sound like hastily rewritten memorials, she’d said crisply.
I knew what she hadn’t said—that she feared she might not have the stamina to withstand a formal affair she couldn’t easily vanish from. Though her recovery from where she’d been the day before—or, far worse, the day before that—was remarkable, she was still far too thin, her skin pale and translucent, haunted shadows in her startlingly vivid eyes.
She also had to know what an impact her changed costume would have. No more hiding for her, though the revelation might be shocking to some. Even when she’d appeared greatly altered after our wedding, she’d still been in makeup and the wig of black hair, her eyes magically disguised to look human. No longer.
Court had adjourned for the day, but the people of the palace lingered to exclaim over the vistas revealed as workers removed the boards from the windows and arched galleries, the golden evening light streaming in. Enjoying the balmy weather, people filled the battered gardens and damp salons, breaking out the wine and liquor, nibbling on dainty delights as they exchanged the most valuable currency on Calanthe: gossip.
Also, despite Lia’s determination to avoid a formal celebration, the news of her return and recovery had clearly run like wildfire ahead of us. Between her reappearance and the storm breaking, a vast party seemed to be in the making.
As I escorted Lia—Ibolya demurely trailing in our wake and Sondra stalking not at all demurely, but more or less gracefully at the rear—I watched as people glanced our way, then did a double take. First shocked into bobble-eyed silence, they then burst into whispers that grew rapidly to louder exclamations, the ripples widening out until more people came literally running to see.
Lia observed it, too, her expression smooth and remote, but her keen mind nearly audible as she filed away how each person reacted—both initially and when they thought better of it.
She graciously accepted their greetings and well wishes, ignored their subtle inquiries about her health—and their attempts to get a good look at her regenerating hand—and crisply cut those bold enough to ask blatant questions or launch into petitions. Only when Lord Dearsley approached, spine straight and chin high, the same young man escorting him with a solid grip, did Lia truly smile.
Slipping her arm from mine—as she would only use her good hand with me, even though I kept telling her the twig hand, as she called it, didn’t bother me—she let Dearsley take her hand in both of his. He bent over it, kissing the back with reverence, a fine tremor running through him. When he straightened, tears brightened his pale eyes.
“Your Highness, we celebrate Your return to Your rightful place.”
“Thank you, Dearsley,” she murmured. “I am overjoyed to be back where I belong, and forever grateful to Conrí for all his service.”
I nearly choked at the layered meaning there, and she cast me a mildly curious glance through her lashes. Her innocent expression might’ve fooled me into thinking I was the one with the dirty mind, if her eyes hadn’t sparkled with mischief. Now that I knew her tells, I could detect her wicked humor at work. Not that I had much hope of combating it.
“The storm has passed,” Dearsley said, waving at the clear skies, “and Calanthe is…?” He trailed off delicately.
She shook her head minutely. “I must travel to the temple in the morning, to retrieve My ladies and complete a few tasks I left undone.” Her face a mask of polite regret, she fed Dearsley the proper cues.
“Ah yes.” He nodded vigorously, half bowing over the hand he still held, clutching her in his palpable relief. “All else can wait for Your Highness to tend to Mother Calanthe.”
“Not all,” she corrected. “Conrí has briefed Me on the situation, and I know it’s evening, but I’d like to sit down with you—perhaps in an hour?—to discuss and review everything.”
“I’m at Your Highness’s disposal, naturally.”
The news spread through the people lingering nearby, though they pretended to be conducting their own conversations rather than shamelessly eavesdropping. A few even scribbled notes and handed them to fancily dressed children who took off running. Hopefully we wouldn’t face a mob of her admiring people at the temple.
Dearsley departed, promising to meet in an hour, and we moved on.
“Where to next?” I asked under my breath.
“I’d like to take a stroll in My gardens,” she replied as we entered the lavish, though soggy, gardens.
“Stroll?” I echoed, wondering if I could get her to sit down somewhere. She looked paler than she had, but I doubted she’d take the suggestion to rest very well.
“Amble, Conrí,” she replied in a dry tone. “It means to walk slowly, without particular direction.”
“I know what it means,” I growled, though without rancor. If she felt well enough to needle me, then that was a good sign. “I just wondered what your goal is.”
She turned down a curving path that glowed with its own light. Night was falling swiftly and fully, as it did on Calanthe, but lanterns hung in the trees, small starry lights shone sprinkled over shrubs, and people reclined around firepits in jeweled colors, or enjoyed parties in lamplit gazebos, wine and food spilling over the tables. They raised glasses to their queen, cheering her, and she inclined her head, though not waving as she would’ve before. Instead she kept her twig hand entangled in the shrouds of her filmy skirts.
“Must I have a goal?”
“You always do. Besides, I don’t see you putting off Dearsley just to stroll in the gardens.”
She laughed, and the warm sound of true amusement from her warmed me like a kiss. “To see and be seen,” she murmured. “Nothing more complicated than that.”
“Your Highness!” Lord Percy sashayed in our direction, arm linked through Brenda’s, both beaming. Percy wore a shirt like mine, though in white, and with a vest embroidered lavishly with flowers that matched the full skirt billowing beneath. In contrast, Brenda seemed to be in uniform, though of no military or guard of any kingdom that had ever existed. The top looked like fanciful chain mail, made of gold scales like a dragon would have, with metallic spikes that curled up to frame her square jaw and short silver hair.
They both bowed from the waist, Percy with a lavish flutter of his green-and-gold nails. “I must say, Your Highness, while it’s delightful to see You looking so, well, alive, I do believe Your new fashion statement has already caused a great deal of difficulty.” He cocked his head, eyeing Lia’s revealing gown with envy. “We don’t all have the figure to carry off the sexy naiad thing.”
Brenda huffed out a short breath. “Wear what you want to, Percy. It isn’t that fucking hard.”
“Well,” he simpered, flipping open a fan painted with the same huge flowers as on his skirt, “not yet. But it will be! Ooh, stop,” he exclaimed when she elbowed him sharply. Then he leaned in, speaking behind the fan. “I absolutely forgive you two for what you did to my life raft. Kara darling is adding a few extras during the repairs, to make up for it.”
To my surprise, Kara appeared then, wearing somber clothing but carrying a colorful cocktail. He lifted it in a silent toast, acknowledging us, a slight smile on his thin lips. Sondra eased around us, taking his elbow to talk with him quietly.
“So,” Brenda interjected, “any further initiatives we should know about?”
Lia glanced at me expectantly. Great. How was I supposed to know what Lia wanted me to keep secret? Though I guessed she wouldn’t leave it to me if she thought I’d screw it up.
Or she trusted me. The thought hit me with more force than I could’ve imagined. She’d made it clear, but I just hadn’t quite gotten it through my thick skull, that we’d be planning this venture together. Lia trusted me to say what I needed to. It shouldn’t have hit me so hard, but it did. Lia believed in me. Even now, when she had less reason than ever. I put my hand over hers on my arm and squeezed lightly, rewarded by the warmth in her gaze.
“There will be something,” I told them, catching and holding Kara and Sondra’s eyes, too, so they sidled closer. “Her Highness needs to visit a temple first, but upon our return, we’ll need a strategy.”
“Any hints?” Percy yawned dramatically, fluttering his fan over his mouth. “A riddle, perhaps, to enliven the otherwise dull evenings.”
I didn’t bother glancing around at the elaborate festivities. The oppressed people outside of Calanthe would likely give anything to savor just one of Percy’s dull evenings. We all had our masks, I figured, and Percy’s pose of frivolous boredom hadn’t fooled me for long.
“Is Agatha around?” I asked.
Brenda and Percy exchanged interested glances, and Percy snapped his jeweled nails. A young man wearing only a strategically placed garland dashed up and kissed Percy’s hand. At Percy’s whisper, he trotted off again—his naked behind twitching and gleaming with oil.
“It’s after hours,” Lia murmured to me. “While we’re not fully in the Night Court, the lines become … blurred.”
I yanked my attention back, realizing I’d been staring in shock. That explained a great deal. I’d known about the nighttime revels at Lia’s palace, in theory, but hadn’t witnessed them. Clearly I needed to recalibrate my head to Calanthe’s excesses, even more strange to my eye after the starkness of Yekpehr. And if it felt that way to me, after being in Anure’s fortress only a few hours, what was Lia going through?
I studied her face, still turned up to me, and saw the acknowledgment there. “It’s good to see your people happy and enjoying the delights of Calanthe,” I said, and she smiled. A soft, closed-lipped smile with sadness in it, but also gratitude, maybe.
Agatha drifted up on the half-naked guy’s arm. Kissing her cheek, he handed her over to Percy with a saucy wink. “Your Highness.” Agatha curtsied. Wrapped in a shawl as usual, Agatha nevertheless looked dressed up, too. She wore flowers in her hair, and the shawl gleamed like peacock feathers.
“I haven’t thanked you yet, Lady Agatha,” Lia said, “for your enormous service to Me.”
Agatha looked anywhere but at us. “A small favor compared with all Your Highness has done for me and mine.”
“I think we both know it was no small favor,” Lia replied gently, but she let it go, glancing at me again.
I weighed what to say. “After Lia and I return from the temple, we’ll meet to thrash out a plan, but to give yourselves time to think: I’m going back for what was left behind.”
Percy fanned himself, his expression deadly serious, and Brenda put a supporting hand on Agatha’s back. Sondra and Kara looked unsurprised but grim.
“For all of them,” Lia clarified with an arched brow.
The group contemplated that. Brenda snagged a short glass of amber liquid from a passing serving girl—also wearing nothing more than some fluttering blossoms—and drank it in one gulp. “Do we have any idea how many people that might be?” she asked, turning the empty glass with blunt fingers, glancing obliquely at Agatha.
“I don’t, not exactly,” Agatha said in a clear, thin voice, drawing her peacock feathers around her as she spoke, though the tropical night remained warm, even stifling in these gardens sheltered from the coastal breezes and lit with so many fires. “I don’t know if anyone but he knows how many there are. People die,” she added bleakly. “And he moves them around frequently, keeping them divided.”
Hmm. I’d been picturing royal prisoners all gathered in one big cell, but I could see how that kind of thing wouldn’t work long-term. And Anure would have to be sure they didn’t conspire. Even beaten and broken people begin talking to one another after a while, devising impossible plans to escape from terrible captivity. I should know. “Agatha,” I said slowly, hoping I wouldn’t spook her too much, “would you give us information on your contact there, so we can find out more?”
“Yes,” she said, eyes darting to the shadows as if someone might leap out at her. “First let me see what I can find out.”
“I’ll help. We’ll put our pretty heads together,” Percy declared, drawing Agatha between him and Brenda. “It will be fun!”
Agatha gave him such a sour look that Brenda laughed. “Your Highness, Conrí—we have a table in the grape arbor. Would you care to join us for supper?”
“Alas,” Lia replied immediately, “I have meetings. But Sondra and Ibolya can join you.”
Sondra looked startled. “I couldn’t.”
Kara handed her the cocktail, looking relieved to be rid of it. “You could,” he said darkly. “In fact, you really should.”
She looked to me with a hint of panic. “Conrí and Her Highness need me.”
“We don’t,” I replied immediately, and Lia squeezed my arm, a tremor of laughter running through her, though her composed expression showed nothing. “Go play with the other kids,” I told Sondra, grinning when she gave me a betrayed scowl.
“I’ll attend Conrí and Her Highness,” Ibolya said with quiet assurance.
“No need,” Lia declared airily. “You may be dismissed for the evening, Lady Ibolya.”
“Your Highness, I—”
“Have been on duty all on your own, nonstop for days,” Lia finished gently, but with the firmness of command. “Do as you wish, but you will not be needed by Me until morning.”
Ibolya looked like she dearly wanted to argue, but she curtsied, inclining her head.
“Come on, Ibolya,” Sondra said. “We’ve been dismissed by the grown-ups apparently. Why not get drunk with us? I bet you could stand a good drunk.”
“I,” Agatha put in pointedly, “will not be getting drunk.”
“Nor I,” Kara agreed in his gravelly voice.
“More for us!” Percy declared gaily, swishing over to take Ibolya’s arm. “The inimitable Lady Sondra is so clever. You must drink with us, Lady Ibolya, and tell us all of Her Highness’s secrets. Is the rumor true about that one little mole of Hers?”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly…” Ibolya protested as Percy led her briskly away.
“So, what was your purpose in sending them all away?” I asked as Lia surveyed the festivities.
She slid me a glance. “You seem to be under the impression that I have a reason for everything.”
“Because you always do,” I countered, “which is why I helped.”
“Thank you for that.” She chose her direction and started that way. I followed along, taking in the sights with fresh eyes. Much of the celebrating looked like the sort I’d spied on as a boy in Oriel, but here and there I caught glimpses of more. Bare skin. Sensual dances. Alcoves lit only by candles with lurid movements flickering. So odd to go from discussing a dangerous rescue attempt to this level of frivolity.
But I supposed that very tension encapsulated all that was Calanthe.
“I wanted some time alone,” Lia said, and I had to think back to what I’d asked her. “Just to look around. Without people … hovering.”
“Should I go?” I slowed my steps, preparing to be dismissed also.
“No.” She glanced at me with some surprise, eyes glittering with faceted light even in the shadowed gardens, and squeezed my arm. “You don’t count.”
As pleased as if she’d declared her undying love for me, I smiled at her. “I’m glad.”
She took us down another path, one that skirted a large, shallow lake. Small boats glided aimlessly, brilliantly lit with lamps, and groups of people reclined on them, laughing, talking, and indulging. “That looks fun,” I commented.
“Why, Conrí.” She widened her eyes and made an O of her pretty mouth. “I do believe that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you mention the concept of fun, much less an interest in a specific activity.”
“That’s not true,” I grumbled. “Sex is fun, and I’m always interested in that.”
“Besides sex. Name one thing. And don’t you dare say killing people.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I retorted, stung. Though, to be fair, that was the first thing that sprang to mind. Not fun, exactly, but satisfying to dispatch my enemies. All right, something else that sounded fun. What could I say?
“If you have to think about it this long…” Lia drawled teasingly.
“Fine. You have me.” I scowled at her and she laughed, a happy sound that did me more good than any amount of fun would. “So are those dining boats fun?”
She glanced over, a thoughtful line between her brows. “I imagine so. I’ve never done it.”
“You haven’t?”
“No.” She breathed a laugh. “You forget, wolf, that before you arrived to ravage Me, I was the virgin queen, the innocent and pure betrothed of the false emperor. If I attended evening events, they were formal affairs inside the palace salons. Afterward, I retired to My rooms, allowing this night garden to blossom.”
I understood then. See and be seen. “That’s what you’re up to. You wanted to see the Night Court.”
She glanced up at me, that new vulnerability in her face. It could be that it showed now, without the heavy makeup and jewels to mask her feelings, but I thought it was something more. The time in Yekpehr had torn away her shields and icy protections. Her body might be healing, but her heart and soul had yet to even scab over. I remembered that feeling very well—though by the time I’d escaped Vurgmun, my scar tissue was so thick I thought I’d never feel anything again.
“Is that foolish?” she asked. “I know there are pressing matters to deal with, but I thought—just until I meet with Dearsley—that I’d like to stroll the Night Court with you.”
“Not foolish at all,” I answered gravely, putting my hand over hers. “Though you deserve more than a measly hour to enjoy all that you created.”
“I didn’t create it. The traditions of Calanthe are very old.”
“But it’s all here because of you, because of the sacrifices you made.”
She flinched, ever so slightly, when I mentioned sacrifice—if I hadn’t been touching her, I’d have missed it—but she spoke before I could ask about it. “When I was … a prisoner, I couldn’t feel Calanthe anymore. Did I tell you that already?”
I shook my head. “That must have been terrible for you.”
“It was.” Her soft voice held a world of dark pain. “I was bereft in every possible way. And I kept thinking about all the things I hadn’t done.”
“I think regrets are natural, when you’re in a place like that.” We’d rounded the lake and entered a shadowed maze of tall shrubs dripping with red and purple flowers. Even here the rocks in the path glowed, and some kind of lights inside the dense foliage illuminated them from the inside. But the glow didn’t go far, even in the narrow aisles, giving the whole place a mysterious, even eerie cast. Above, the night sky shone with a glitter of stars, brighter than I’d ever seen them.
A cloaked couple passed us, bowing to their queen but moving on without addressing her, as everyone had started doing. Since we’d parted from our escort, no one had approached us, as if they somehow knew she was off duty.
“What did you regret,” Lia asked, “when you were at Vurgmun?”
In the night-muffled maze of shadows, the subtle glows soothing, making it seem as if everything spoken inside its tall walls and under that starry sky would be kept forever secret, even held with a kind of compassion, I could think back—as I almost never did—to those days of toiling in the stinking, stifling mines. The boy I’d been there, the laborer I’d grown into—they were almost unrecognizable to me now. More desperate, savage animal than a person. A monster in a human skin.
Lia didn’t need to hear that, with her own monstrosity so vividly haunting her at the moment. I’d recognized that skittish, wary way she’d looked at herself in the mirror, the way she kept the twig hand hidden in her skirts.
“You’ll laugh,” I said, “but—”
“I would never laugh,” she interrupted, voice solemn as a vow in the shrouded silence, the only other sounds the crunch of our steps on the sparkling gravel and the distant music of gaiety.
“My father would’ve laughed then,” I corrected, “but I regretted screwing off on my lessons. I was a bad kid, you know.”
She did laugh then, but with affection. “This does not surprise Me.”
“Yeah. Rhéiane … she was the scholar, but I drove our tutors crazy. And that’s when they caught me. Half the time, I’d skip out on lessons and they couldn’t find me.”
“Not at all?”
“They didn’t have your trick of seeing me through bats and bees,” I teased her, and she tipped her shadowy profile in acknowledgment.
“Where would you hide?”
“See, that’s where I was clever: I changed it up. Every day, someplace new. Unless I got caught in one of them, then I’d go back to it, because I figured they wouldn’t expect me to return to a spot they knew about.”
“Practicing your strategy even then.”
“I guess.” I hadn’t thought of it that way. “But yeah, once I was in those mines, I regretted that I’d spent more time and effort avoiding lessons than I did learning anything. Sometimes, at night, in the bunks, people would talk about books they’d read, and music and art. Or they’d debate politics or argue about the composition and uses of vurgsten—and I realized I’d never have any of that. That I’d been too stubborn and willfully ignorant when I had all the world offered to me. Instead I’d be an uneducated oaf for the rest of my life.”
We walked in silence for a few steps, Lia turning us at a four-way intersection where all the paths looked the same to me. “Do you know where you’re going?” I asked.
“Metaphorically in My life, or literally in this maze?” she replied lightly.
“Now you sound like Ambrose.”
“He has his moments. The answer is yes to both.”
“You know where you’re going in life?”
“That has never been a question for Me. My life belongs to Calanthe.” Before I could say anything to that, she continued. “And there’s a pattern to the turns in the maze, which everyone knows, even if they never come this way. The maze is here primarily to prevent anyone from stumbling into the heart of the Night Court by accident.”
“Am I going to be shocked by what I see?” I blurted out, figuring I’d better ask.
She gave me an assessing look, eyes glowing with color, like the decorative lanterns did. “You might be. Do you mind? We can turn back.”
“No way. Not after I just confessed to regretting not learning what I could when I had the opportunity.” Besides, maybe I’d get some ideas about pleasing Lia. If I could figure out how to be a better lover for her, she might want to marry me again.
“You could still learn, you know,” she offered. “It’s never too late.”
For a pained moment, I thought she’d read that thought—then I realized she meant reading and stuff. “I’d feel like an idiot.” I could just picture it, sitting there like a hulk in some schoolroom, painstakingly reading aloud from a kid’s book.
“You said you feel like an idiot most of the time anyway,” she countered.
“Good point.” We turned twice more, and I began to get the pattern now. “Two lefts, then a right, and repeat?”
“Exactly. Now you know.”
“Not that I’d come this way without you.”
“You could. The Night Court would—”
“I know, I know. You offered this before and I said I didn’t want it. Quit bringing it up.”
“No need to growl, grumpy bear.”
I laughed, a hoarse, grating sound. “I thought I was a wolf.”
“It changes moment-to-moment,” she replied. “And you’re not, you know.”
“A wolf or a bear?”
“An idiot. You’re a very intelligent man. One of the smartest men I’ve been privileged to meet.”
That struck me dumb, for sure. And humbled me. “I can’t even read a kid’s book, Lia.”
She shrugged, the movement wisping silk and the warm curve of her breast against my bare arm. “Intelligence is more than reading. Or knowing the composition of vurgsten. How many people have devised a way to infiltrate Yekpehr and rescue captives there?”
“I had a lot of help, and good luck.”
“You have a talent for picking good people, and we make our own luck.”
“You definitely sound like Ambrose now.”
She laughed, a warm purr of delight. An archway ahead glowed with brighter light streaming through blossoming vines hanging over the opening. “Are you ready?” she asked.
“As I’ll ever be.” When she gave me a dubious look, I patted her hand. “It’ll be fun.”
Laughing together, we parted the vines and stepped through into the Night Court of Calanthe.