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This was such a terrible idea, and Lily knew it. She just didn’t care. It felt too good, and everything was happening too fast. They weren’t even bothering to take their dresses all the way off. Elwyn tried to unlace the back of Lily’s dress, and Lily tried to do the same, but it took too long, and Lily didn’t care whether her clothes got ruined now. She was sure her dress would be stained in the morning, and those laces might need replaced. But who cared?
They struggled, grappling with each other and with their clothes, until Lily dragged Elwyn over to the bed, where they sank down amid the pillows and bolsters.
Elwyn made another attempt at getting Lily’s dress off, then fell back, red faced and panting. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her fingers were shaking. “I wasn’t kidding. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never done this before.”
Lily rolled over on her side and traced the girl’s mouth with her fingertip. “Never? Not even when you were a schoolgirl?”
“No,” said Elwyn. “I think I wanted to. But I thought I liked boys back then. Not that I’ve done anything with a boy, either. And yet, I think I always liked girls, at least a little.”
“You’re probably like me, then,” said Lily. “I like both. Pretty much equally, as a matter of fact. It really depends on the person.” She leaned closer and kissed Elwyn on the shoulder. “Is that how it is with you?”
“I think it must be,” said Elwyn. “Except I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this about anyone. I’ve certainly never wanted to do this so badly with anyone else.”
In the back of Lily’s mind, there was a screaming alarm bell telling her she ought to apologize, let the girl down gently, and politely excuse herself. A sexual affair was bad enough. Letting the princess fall in love with her would be unconscionable.
But then Elwyn started reaching up under her dress and said, “I want to make you happy. Will you show me what to do?”
“Oh, the gods are going to punish me so hard for this,” Lily thought. Then she pulled up Elwyn’s skirt and slowly reached down. “It’s like when you do it for yourself,” she said aloud. “You do that, don’t you?”
“Only once in a while,” stammered Elwyn in a tiny voice.
“Then you understand the general idea,” said Lily, tracing a finger slowly around and around. Elwyn was so wet, and Lily knew she was, too. They might not be able to get completely undressed, but at least they could get out of their underclothes.
“Here,” Lily whispered, once they were both free, “put your finger there. Right in the same place. Ah! That’s it. Now do what I do.” She touched Elwyn very lightly, and the girl gasped.
Elwyn did as she was told, and Lily squirmed, moaning. Lily tried to start a constant, pulsing rhythm, except that every few seconds one or both of the girls would let out a cry, or shudder, and then she would lose the spot with her fingers.
Lily stopped and took Elwyn’s hand away. “I’m sorry. We’re not going to get anywhere like this. Let me do it for you first, and then it’ll be your turn to do it for me.”
Elwyn kept thrusting her hips against Lily’s hand. That actually made things more difficult, but Lily wasn’t about to tell her to stay still. Lily loved the feeling of the hard muscles of the girl’s abdomen flexing as they brushed her forearm.
Then Elwyn stopped moving, all at once, and Lily looked at her, wondering if she had done something wrong, or if the girl had experienced the quietest, most sedate orgasm ever. Lily tried an experimental twitch with her fingertip, but Elwyn grabbed her shoulder and hissed, “What was that?”
“What was what?” Lily looked around. They were alone in the darkened room. But now that they had stopped moving, and the pounding of the blood in her ears was fading, she could hear a tiny, shuffling noise somewhere nearby. “A mouse?” she suggested.
“No.” Elwyn sat up. She pointed toward the door they had come through and mouthed, “Someone’s in there.”
Now Lily sat up, too, and both girls quickly tried to rearrange their skirts and lace their bodices back up. There was a tiny creak of hinges, and the soft footsteps—that was what the noise had to be—left the servants’ stairwell and headed across the next room—Elwyn’s outer parlor.
“Your mother?” whispered Lily.
“Maybe. Or Muriel, which would be even worse,” said Elwyn.
Lily nodded and quickly finished putting her dress back together.
Now there was a click, and a metallic scraping sound. “The glass door to the outer balcony,” said Elwyn. “Come on, let’s take a look.”
“Better than sitting here waiting to get caught,” agreed Lily.
Pulling their party masks back on, they tiptoed to the window and peered out. Beyond the railing, far below, they could see the city, with tiny pinpricks of lamplight here and there, and the reflection of the moon on the long silvery ribbon of the river. Craning their necks to the left, they saw a dark figure out on the balcony, hooded and cloaked, far too tall for either the queen or Baroness Muriel. As they watched, the figure drew a thin dagger from his belt, and then crept away.
“Holy Finster,” said Elwyn, “he’s headed for the nursery! Oh, Earstien, that’s why there were no guards!”
“Do you have any weapons?” asked Lily.
“Do I ever,” said Elwyn grimly, sprinting to her nearest wardrobe.
In moments, both girls were armed with bows and arrows and a short sword apiece. Lily tried to lead the way as they started out into the night air, but Elwyn pushed ahead of her. “This is my home,” she said firmly, “and they’re my family.”
At the far end of the narrow balcony, another glass door stood open. “That’s Edwin’s room,” said Elwyn, her voice now high with panic. “Come on!”
They sprinted to the end and looked in, bows drawn, to see the dark, hooded figure standing over the sleeping form of the little king. In one hand, the man held the knife. In the other, he had a large throw pillow. He seemed to be wavering between the two.
“Drop that knife and get away from my brother!” said Elwyn.
The assassin turned, startled. His mask had been pushed up on his head, and his hood slipped back, revealing for a second the narrow, rodent-like face of Sir William Aitken. Elwyn stretched the string, ready to put an arrow through his head. Then his hand came around and he threw the pillow right at her bow arm. It snagged on the tip of her arrow, which snapped out of her grip and went tumbling across the room. In the seconds it took Lily to get around Elwyn and point her own arrow at the man, he turned and sprinted through the nearest servants’ door.
Young Edwin, stirring in his bed, rubbed his eyes and looked up. “Elwyn? What are you doing here?” he said sleepily. “Are we going hunting?”
Elwyn started after Sir William, but Lily put a hand out to stop her. “You stay here,” she said. “I’ll go after him.”
Someone needed to stay around to protect Edwin, in case there was a second assassin. And it would be much easier for Elwyn to explain what she was doing there if Rohesia or the servants came in.
After a few seconds of hesitation, Elwyn nodded and gave Lily a quick kiss on the cheek. “Be careful, now,” she said.
The feeling of that kiss, and of Lily’s righteous indignation on Elwyn’s behalf, lasted about ten seconds. That was long enough to take her down the stairs into the shadowy servants’ corridors of the interstitial floor, where she saw William disappear down a different stairwell at the end of the hall.
“Oh, my gods,” she thought, as she jogged along. “What am I even going to do if I catch up with him?”
She had taken a number of fighting lessons from Moira and Faustinus, and she fancied she could hold her own against most amateurs. But William Aitken was a trained assassin, a desperate killer. The thought crossed her mind that she was probably going to regret this, but the alternative was going back upstairs and admitting failure to Elwyn, and Lily couldn’t stand doing that.
As she came out of the second stairwell onto the landing, she barely saw the tiny glints of light on the floor, and stopped herself. They were caltrops—nasty little barbed things to skewer the feet of the unwary. She used her bow to sweep them aside and continued on. At least she knew she was still heading in the right direction. And there he was—his cloak disappearing around a corner. And then another corner.
Suddenly they were out in the public parts of the palace, passing servants and little knots of gossiping courtiers. Perhaps out of sheer audacity, perhaps out of pure desperation, Sir William sprinted straight across the Palm Court, pushing through the ferns, jumping the tables, upsetting trays of food, and spilling people’s drinks. Lily followed after him, trying to dodge the broken glass and overturned chairs. Some people shouted at them to stop, but most of the guests, assuming this was some sort of prank, just laughed.
Lily heard one young wit say something about “the archer of love” missing “her quarry.” Idiot. For the first time that evening, Lily thanked the gods for the stupid feather mask she was wearing. At least there was a hope none of these people had recognized her.
On the far side of the Palm Court, he ducked through a little door under one of the grand staircases, and now they were back in the servants’ passages again. Down and down they went, where the air was warm and the corridors were lit with the flickering orange glow of furnaces. Clouds of steam in the air hid him from sight, but Lily could hear his footsteps, echoing away on the damp floor tiles.
“Oh, this is such a bad idea,” she thought. “I should really give up.” But she had been making bad decisions all day, and now was hardly the time to stop.