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“The good news is that the duke didn’t arrest me on sight.” Sir Walter lowered himself into the moth-eaten chair by Elwyn’s window and sighed.
Rada rushed over with a cup of tea for him and perched on the arm of the chair. “Oh, sweetheart, what happened?”
They were all meeting in Elwyn and Hildred’s room. Rain drummed steadily against the leaded glass windows. Hildred was by the fire, trying to stretch Walter’s cloak over a chair so it could dry.
Walter took a sip of his tea. “Well, I went to the Bocburg, like we planned, and I asked to see the duke. His grace has his own men at the gate, but there are Gramiren soldiers in the Bocburg, too. I thought I’d be arrested on the spot. Anyway, the duke gave me about ten seconds of his time, and when I explained I was here with you, your royal highness, he grabbed me by the collar and shoved me out of his study.”
“Why on earth would he do that?” asked Hildred. “The duke fought for King Edwin. I was at Atherton, but I remember hearing about the siege here.”
“He thinks you’re a fraud, Walter,” said Rada.
“He thinks you’re a trap,” said Elwyn. “He must think the Gramirens sent you here to trick him into treason.”
“Do you really think he could have forgotten me?” Walter asked. He blushed and looked awkwardly at Elwyn before continuing. “I was at about a million briefings with Alfred during the siege.”
Elwyn turned away from Walter and stared aggressively at the floor, not wanting to remember the time or man Walter spoke of. “He wouldn’t think you did it on your own,” she finally said. “Or maybe he’s that paranoid of everyone. It would make perfect sense to use you as a trap. The Gramirens are probably looking for an excuse to arrest the duke again and confiscate all his lands. I wish I could see him personally,” Elwyn continued. “Do you suppose we could get him to come here?”
“Not a chance,” said Walter. “After the siege, the Gramirens locked him in a tower. They only let him out last year. He’s still basically under house arrest in the castle. He can’t leave, and if I go back in there, I’ll be thrown in the dungeon.”
“It’s hopeless,” moaned Hildred.
“It’s nothing of the sort,” said Rada. She kissed the top of her husband’s head. “Come along, now, Walter. I’ve got the servants fixing up a hot bath for you in our room. You look like you’re half frozen.”
When she and Walter were gone, Hildred came over and slumped into Elwyn’s lap. “There’s no point, is there?” the girl said.
“We just need to think of another way to meet the duke.”
Elwyn had expected she would be going to the Bocburg that very afternoon, so she had worn one of her nicer dresses. Her stepmother had bought it for her, and it had a painfully tight bodice. Hildred ran a finger over the tops of Elwyn’s breasts, and then leaned down to kiss them. With her other hand, the girl started reaching under Elwyn’s skirt.
“I’ve been thinking,” Hildred said, in between kisses. “If there’s nothing we can do here, then maybe you and I can go somewhere. Maybe to Briddobad. Maybe to the Empire.”
“The Empire,” sighed Elwyn. She had traveled there once, as a girl. There had been a time when she dreamed of running off to the Empire with someone—with her first true love, in fact. But that seemed like a lifetime ago now. “No, we can’t give up.”
Hildred’s fingers were in her underclothes. “It’s not giving up,” the girl whispered. “We can leave Lady Rada and Sir Walter here. But if there’s no point in us being in Leornian, we ought to go somewhere we can have more...fun.”
Elwyn closed her eyes and started lifting Hildred’s skirt. Then she shook her head. “I have to keep trying. I promised my brother and Caedmon, and even if I fail here, they’re bound to succeed.”
Hildred took her hand away and sat up. She looked on the verge of tears. “What if they don’t, though?”
“They will,” Elwyn insisted, pulling the girl back down. “They’ve gone to Newshire and Wislicshire, you see, and the dukes there are definitely on our side.”
That managed to elicit a weak smile from the girl. “If you say so. I suppose we can hope for the best, can’t we?”
They helped each other out of their dresses and crawled into the bed, where they spent the rest of the morning so enjoyably that Elwyn never thought of the duke or the Bocburg again until noon.
“I really ought to try visiting the duke myself,” she told Hildred, as they dressed.
“Make Lady Rada do it,” said the girl. “I couldn’t stand it if you were arrested.”
“Lady Rada...,” Elwyn repeated. Suddenly she remembered Rada’s rings and necklaces, and she remembered what they could do. “Quick, help me do up these laces. I need to see Rada right now.”
Down the hall, Rada answered the door in her dressing gown, with a vague, dreamy smile on her face. Obviously, Hildred and Elwyn weren’t the only people who had enjoyed their morning.
“Do you have any spells in your rings that could transform me?” Elwyn whispered.
Rada told Walter to get dressed, and when he was decent, she pulled Elwyn into their room. “What sort of transformation did you have in mind?” she asked.
“Turning me into a man.”
Rada’s eyebrow went up. No doubt she was thinking of the ring that allowed Elwyn’s cousin, Donella Gramiren, to fulfill Andras Byrne’s desire for male companionship in the bedroom.
Elwyn quickly added, “Not like that. I want to get into the Bocburg as a message rider. Then I’ll transform back into myself once I’m alone with the duke.”
“That’s a brilliant idea,” said Walter. “I wish we’d tried that to begin with.”
Rada gave Elwyn one of her rings, and they practiced the transformation several times to make sure Elwyn had the hang of it. “It’s only got enough magy to do it for half an hour at a time or so,” Rada warned her. “So if you get delayed for some reason, or you can’t get the duke alone, you’ll need to get out of there.”
They quickly hemmed up a pair of Walter’s trousers and one of his tunics so they fit Elwyn. The next morning, she transformed herself, got on her horse, and rode straight up to the main gate of the Bocburg.
It felt uncomfortable to be back there again. The last time she had seen the place, she and Edwin had been slipping out the back door to the river dock while Gramiren men were getting ready to storm the castle. Some of the windows were still smashed in, and in places, the stonework was clearly new, filling the vast hole where catapults had brought down the wall.
Seeing the castle again reminded her of the siege, and of Sir Alfred Estnor, the man she had almost married. The other great love of her life. She could see the places they had met—the stables, the armory. She could see the window of the little room where they had made love the night before the final battle, and she had promised him she would be his wife. And then she had said goodbye to him down on the river dock, and he had come back up here—right here to this very courtyard—and had given his life so she and Edwin could escape.
“I can’t think about him now,” she told herself, blinking back the tears. “He would want me to be brave. So, I will be brave—for him and for Edwin. And for Hildred and Rada and Walter, too.”
As she crossed the courtyard, she saw that Walter had been right. Soldiers in black Gramiren surcoats sat on the front steps of the palace. They asked her what her business was, and they looked a bit suspicious when she said she had a message from Formacaster. “You’re not the usual fellow,” said the knight in charge.
Elwyn shrugged. “He’s sick. Can I deliver this message, or do you want to explain to the king why I had to stand here talking to you all day?”
They let her pass, and she found the duke in the library. “I need to speak to you,” she said. “Alone.”
The duke looked a bit surprised, but he sent his guards out of the room. “So, now what is this—” the duke began, but he saw Elwyn transforming herself and dropped the useless roll of parchment she had handed him. “Holy Finster!” he said. Looking around, he dropped his voice to an excited whisper. “Your royal highness! What are you doing here? How did you even get in? Is it really you?”
She explained about the ring, and told him she was at The Good Knight Inn with her friends. “I’m here to ask for your help,” she said. “We need every man possible when we take on Broderick Gramiren in the spring.”
“Ah, Flora’s plan,” said the duke, looking rather less excited now. “I’m not sure it’s very wise to trust that woman.”
“I agree,” said Elwyn. “But I trust my brother, and I trust Andras.”
The duke gave her a searching look. “Are you really going to marry Andras Byrne?”
She hated the thought of lying to this man, who was an old friend, and who had nearly lost his life and all his property fighting for her family. But if she wasn’t going to keep up the lie, there was no point in having come here.
“Yes, I am,” she said, looking him straight in the eye. “Andras and I love each other, and he’ll be a great commander.”
“I hope so,” said the duke. “If he’s not, then we’re all going to be in a lot of trouble.”
He went out and, in a very casual tone, asked one of his guards to go find Lord Aldwin, his son and heir. Aldwin was found and, when he saw Elwyn, his eyes lit up like lamps. “It’s you!” he said.
Elwyn gave him a hug. Her stepmother and his parents had tried to arrange a marriage between them before the siege, but nothing had ever come of it, partly because he was eight years younger than her, but mostly because neither of them felt much in the way of passion for the other. But he’d been a good friend and a good sport about all the clumsily-arranged dates and rendezvouses they had been forced into.
After she explained again about how she had gotten into the castle, the duke turned to his son and said, “If we’re going to do this, it has to be done fast. Go to the garrison at the city’s west gate and bring back twenty men—you know which ones we want. Elwyn and I will gather the fellows here, and when the cathedral clock strikes nine, we’ll all attack together.”
Elwyn’s job was to walk around the walls, talking to the duke’s men on duty, and making sure they had their bows and arrows with them. Whenever she ran into Gramiren men, she told them that their commander wanted them in the courtyard at exactly nine o’clock.
When the clock struck, the Gramiren men were all milling about, arguing with each other about who had called them away from their usual duties. There were only about twenty of them in the whole castle; the duke could have wiped them out any time he felt like it, but for the fact that doing so would be a declaration of war on the Gramirens again.
Elwyn’s archers turned and nocked their arrows as the duke appeared on the steps of the palace with two dozen armed men, and Aldwin came in through the main gate with twenty more. The Gramiren soldiers, seeing what had happened, quickly threw down their weapons and put up their hands. Aldwin had them bound with rope, and his knights marched them away to secure rooms in one of the towers.
Just like that, Leornian was free again. Elwyn felt both sick and as if she were about to cry.
A runner was sent to fetch Rada, Sir Walter, and Hildred, and barely half an hour after all the excitement was over, Elwyn was back at the same guestroom she had stayed in during the siege. It was almost uncanny to see the same big bed and the same inlaid side table and the same wardrobe. She found the scratch marks on one of the bedposts that she had left the night she had finally surrendered her maidenhood to Alfred Estnor. Oh, poor Sir Alfred. She had loved him; she had honestly wanted to marry him. But he had been dead more than two years now.
Hildred came in and jumped into the bed, giggling.
Elwyn shut the door and locked it. “We’re going to have to be a little more discreet here,” she said, as Hildred started tugging open Elwyn’s trousers.
“I can be discreet.” Hildred put a hand between Elwyn’s thighs.
“Mmm...I hope so.” Elwyn pulled down the trousers and joined Hildred in bed.
That evening there was a feast in the great hall to celebrate the “liberation” of the Bocburg, and the kitchen staff rose to the occasion magnificently, as they always did. There was wild boar and venison and peacock and goose, along with the inevitable trout from the river. Elwyn, who had done quite a bit of fishing from the dock of the castle before the siege made that too dangerous, enjoyed the fish best of all.
The decorations made her nostalgic, too. The grand portrait of Duke Robert’s father, Brandon Dryhten, was back in its place on the wall near the fire. He had been Elwyn’s father’s best friend, and she always felt especially nostalgic about the old duke. In addition, Dryhten and Sigor banners hung from every wall now. “I like that so much better,” said Duchess Elena. “Gray and black always puts me in mind of a funeral.” She gave Elwyn a hug. “I’m so glad you’re back, dear.”
True to her word, Hildred avoided any sort of untoward display of public affection during the feast, or at the dance afterward. But she did tag along with Elwyn almost everywhere. So much so that more than one lady asked Elwyn, in a low, confidential giggle, if Elwyn was thinking of throwing over Andras Byrne for Hildred’s brother, Rodger.
“No, I’m not,” said Elwyn, forcing herself to smile and be polite, even when she was answering the question for the third time. “Rodger Cuthing is a lovely boy, but my heart belongs to Andras.”
The story made the rounds during the feast of how Elwyn had organized the archers when the duke took the castle back, and a lot of the knights and noblemen made a point of congratulating her on her “victory.”
“It was really nothing,” she said, smiling with feigned modesty. She was quite proud of herself, actually, but she tried not to show it.
“Maybe we should make you our commander,” said Edgar Colwinn, Baron of Eacaster.
He was Elwyn’s cousin, being the nephew of her late mother, Princess Leofled. Elwyn had spent a great deal of time with her grandparents as a child, and insofar as she had ever had friends growing up, he had been one of them.
Elwyn laughed and assured Edgar that her brother, Edwin, was perfectly capable of commanding his own troops.
“Good,” said the baron. “Because I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’d rather go to the Void than serve under the Earl of Hyrne’s command again. No offense, Elwyn. I know he’s your uncle.”
“He’s not my uncle,” said Elwyn. “He’s Queen Rohesia’s brother.” It felt like another minor victory that she was back among people to whom she could say that after years of exile where explaining her exact relation to the Earl of Hyrne was more trouble than it was worth.
She danced with dozens of knights and noblemen, and she only retired to bed well after midnight. Hildred joined her there, of course.
“Do you know what someone asked me?” the girl said, as she undressed Elwyn.
“I can’t imagine.”
“They wanted to know if I’m going to be one of your ladies-in-waiting.”
Elwyn kissed her, then asked, “Did you want to be?”
Hildred pushed Elwyn down on the bed. “Maybe not. I’m not much of a lady, and I don’t like waiting.”