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The housemaids laid the black silk gown on the bed and, at a gesture from the queen, scurried away again.
“What’s this?” asked Donella.
“I’m lending it to you,” said her mother. “I have a favor to ask. Though, really, it’s me who’s doing you a favor, when you think of it.”
“What sort of favor?” asked Donella, running a hand over the dress. It was lovely, though the bodice seemed awfully low.
“I gather you have made no headway in your pursuit of Andras Byrne.”
Donella explained, haltingly, how she had written a story about her and Andras falling in love, though with their genders swapped. “Lauren says he hasn’t read it yet.”
Her mother sighed. “Yes, I suspected as much. That’s why I’m here to give you a little help. I’m informed that Andras is staying at the Crown and Shield, just outside the East Gate. Let’s get you into this dress, and then I’ll take you over there so you can see him.”
“What? Right now?” Donella looked out the glass doors and saw the stars coming out over the balcony railing. “Mother, it’s getting dark.”
“So I can see. Night is the best time for this sort of thing.”
“What sort of thing?” Donella asked, a lump forming in her throat. She had a bad feeling she knew where this was going.
Her mother ignored the question and paced the room, hands clasped behind her back, frowning. “I fear I may have been a trifle excessive, Donella. I saw Duchess Flora at the levee today, and she cut me completely. I may have pushed the Byrnes too far, and I would like to make sure of their allegiances before your father finds out about this.”
“And how is my putting on this dress going to help?”
“I certainly wouldn’t wish for you to do anything that might make you uncomfortable, darling, but I’m sure you could think of some ways to bring Andras over to our side. Given his mother’s current attitude toward me, we can’t do this the usual way. Flora would never agree to it. So we’re going to have to be a little more clever.” With a sigh, she went over to the big elk named Fransis and pulled the Sahasran sex manual from behind it. “That’s a terrible hiding place, dear.” Then she put the little book on the bed next to the dress. “You might want to flip through it on the ride down. It should give you some ideas.”
“Mother!” cried Donella, fists clenched at her sides. “You can’t be serious! I can’t do that sort of thing. Not with Andras, at least not until we’re married!”
“Don’t put the cart before the horse, dear. We’ll get to betrothal and marriage soon enough. Very soon, indeed, if you really put your mind to it.”
“Listen, if you want to make it up to the Byrnes,” Donella said desperately, “why not make Lauren a lady-in-waiting? You know she’d love it if you asked her.”
The queen wrinkled her nose like she’d gotten a whiff from a privy. “I know she’s your friend, but I’ve never liked that girl. Too much of her mother in her. No, this is the only option.” Then she went over and started unlacing Donella’s little green evening dress.
Donella tried to squirm away, but her mother seized the laces and pulled them tight, and Donella could hardly breathe. “M-mother!” she gasped.
“Let’s have no more of this nonsense,” said the queen. She released her grip and continued unlacing the dress. There was no way she could have seen the tear running down Donella’s cheek, but somehow she knew. “And no crying. This will be good for you, I promise.”
Soon enough, she was in her mother’s silk dress, cinched up and laced in, with her chest pushed up and nearly popping out of the low bodice. All she could think, as they went out to the stables and climbed into a small, unmarked carriage, was that this had to be some terrible nightmare.
She had always tried to understand her parents’ promiscuity and to forgive it. She tried not to let it anger her, the way it angered her brother. But she had never wanted to be like them. She could never have imagined that her mother might actually try to force it on her.
If this had been one of her romances, the heroine would have thrown herself off the cliffs of the castle hill rather than submit to this vile indignity. But the truth was that Donella didn’t want to die, not even as a noble sacrifice. And she couldn’t run away, either. Where on earth could she ever go? So the only alternative left was to do what her mother asked of her.
They rolled past the mansions of Hafoc Street, through the great market square, and past the hulking dark mass of the cathedral. And here they were at the East Gate, and then they were pulling up at the side servants’ entrance of the Crown and Shield. The lane was hidden by a row of hollyhocks from the main road, and the narrow, leaded glass windows above were all dark. By the light of a tiny brass lamp, the queen opened the door of the carriage.
“Ask for ‘Tillie,’” she said, as she ushered Donella out. “She’ll be expecting you, but don’t use your real name, for Earstien’s sake.”
“What name should I use?” asked Donella, her voice high and strained with panic.
“I don’t know,” shrugged her mother. “Call yourself Brygid Endellion or the Blessed Leofe for all I care. Use your imagination; you’re the writer in the family, after all. Remember to tip the girl so she doesn’t talk. Oh, and Donella....”
“Yes?”
“You needn’t bother coming home tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow for lunch, and I’ll want a full report.”
The girl named Tillie was a cute little red-haired housemaid who looked several years younger than Donella. But she knew her business, all the same, and she conducted Donella up the servants’ passages and back stairwells with a quiet professionalism that hinted this was not the first moonlit assignation she had helped arrange. Donella said her name was “Doris,” but Tillie didn’t seem to care one way or another. The girl took a shilling—hopefully that was enough. Then she went away, and Donella stood alone in the corridor with Andras’s door looming before her like the gates of the Void.
“I’ll explain things to him,” she thought. “All I can do is be honest.” Yes, that was it. Andras was a gentleman, and he would never allow her to debase herself, even if he wanted her. Which she rather hoped he did. The one bright spot was the thought that, sooner or later, one way or another, she would be with him. She just had to find a way to do it that preserved her dignity.
As she raised her hand to knock on the door, she heard a low moan from the other side. A low and guttural moan, followed by a wet smack, like a man licking his lips after a drink of frothy ale. “What on earth?” she thought.
There was a tiny shaft of light through the keyhole, and she bent down to peek in. Normally she would never have done such a thing, but if Andras was busy, she didn’t want to disturb him. She could go down to the common room for a while. Maybe have a glass of wine or two in order to calm her nerves.
Through the keyhole, she could see only a sliver of the room—a corner of the big bed, and a little of the window beyond. Andras sat on the edge of the bed, shirtless. She put a hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp. He was very well built, she had to give him that.
No, wait. He wasn’t just shirtless. He turned, and she saw a flash of exposed hip.
“Looks like I’ll have to owe you one,” he said, in a low voice. Was there someone else in the room with him?
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” she thought. But she couldn’t help herself. She shifted, trying to get a slightly higher angle where she could see a bit more. There was something moving now. Something sliding in and out, or bobbing up and down at the edge of her vision. It looked like hair. Very nice, blonde, curly hair, rising and falling over his lap.
Donella let out a little squeak of surprise as she realized what she was seeing. It was right out of her mother’s Sahasran manual—page three, if she remembered correctly. There was a girl in there with him, and she was sucking his...his...manhood!
The blonde head stopped moving, and Andras looked toward the door. “What was that?” he asked.
She sprinted back up the hall and down the servants’ stairway. “Oh, Earstien, don’t let him catch me here,” she thought.
He didn’t, but she knew she couldn’t stay at the inn for a moment longer. There was no point. She ran out through the inn yard and down the road to the East Gate, where the soldiers let her in after she told them who she was.
“Mother will be furious when she finds out,” she thought. “But it can’t be helped.”
She didn’t feel like going home, so she went to a little tavern near the university and settled into a high-backed booth in a dark corner. For a few minutes, she was too full of roiling emotions to even think straight, but after she’d had a couple glasses of wine, she began to sort out her feelings.
On the one hand, she was relieved. The worst hadn’t come to pass, and she still had her maidenhood, for what it was worth. But she also didn’t have Andras, either, and it looked very much as if he already had a girl in his life. Another housemaid from the inn? A whore? A girl from court, maybe someone she knew? It was hard to imagine which option was worse.
The more Donella thought of it, the more she felt betrayed, even as she realized this was entirely unfair of her. A man could hardly be expected to remain faithful to a relationship that hadn’t even started yet. And it wasn’t as if she had thought Andras was a virgin. But she felt disappointed in him, all the same. Just as she wanted to avoid becoming her mother, she had hoped to marry a man who wouldn’t share all the worst features of her father.
She couldn’t even remember anymore when she had first decided she loved Andras. She wasn’t even sure it was something she had decided. It had just happened. Maybe it had been when he asked to read a historical romance she was co-writing with Lauren about King Edmund Dryhten and Queen Maud. Afterward, he said it had taught him “more about Myrcian history than any class I’ve ever taken.” Or maybe it was that time they had gone drinking, and he had bought her whiskey on the grounds that, “Writers need the hard stuff.” Or maybe it was the way he looked after playing football in the mud.
Sometime after her fourth glass of wine, she nodded off in the booth, and she slept until the tavern owner woke her, well after dawn. “You looked like you could use the rest,” he said, and he gave her a plate of eggs on the house, as well as a cup of blisteringly hot coffee.
She was no longer angry, but the hurt was still there, and over her breakfast, she decided the only solution was to go see Andras and talk to him about it. Maybe if she heard about this girl—this mistress of his—from his own perspective, she could understand why he needed her. Maybe then she could forgive him, and forgive herself, too, for wishing so badly that the girl in his bed was her.
When she got back to the Crown and Shield, however, she discovered Andras was gone.
“Left just before dawn in a terrible hurry,” said Tillie with a shrug. “Though he remembered to pay his bill. Some of them don’t, you know.”
“Where was he going?” asked Donella.
The girl pursed her lips and folded her hands primly over her lap. A sixpence helped her find her voice again. “I don’t know for sure, but I heard him talking about it to that friend of his.”
“Friend?” Just saying the word made Donella feel ill.
“Yes, ‘friend,’” said Tillie, with a nauseating smirk. “If you know what I mean, and I think you do.”
Donella forced down the bile. “And did his...friend go with him?”
“No. Not that I know of.”
“So where did Andras say he’s going?”
“Pinburg. And he rode out of here on the Pinburg road, so that much was true, anyway.”
Pinburg meant going back to the war to serve under Donella’s older brother again. “I’ve lost my chance,” she thought miserably. She went back up to the castle, feeling as if she had failed her mother, and failed Andras, and failed herself most of all.