There’s enough cloth of gold woven into their gowns and cloaks to feed a Southerland village for the next fifty years was Yesenia’s first lucid thought when her carriage passed beyond the teeming ivory gates leading from the main road of Whitechurch into Arboriana, the castle stronghold of the Quinlandens.
Her second thought, with a startled glance upward, was They really do live in the trees. Guardians preserve me.
Her third: Only the apple-polishing Quinlandens would use the word castle.
Silver petals rained from the sky like fat drops of glistening snow, soon joined by pink and purple ones, creating a waterfall of bruised pigment under which her carriage passed. She couldn’t make heads or tails of the cloying profusion of scents, all foreign to her nose, clamoring for her attention. A trilling, melodic song played somewhere, created from a symphony of strings and drums and other noises unknown to her Southerland ears.
It seemed everyone in the capital of Whitechurch had come to Arboriana to welcome her. They filled out the right and left of the stone path, some climbing upon the gates and others hanging from them. More awaited at the end, at what the Quinlandens modestly referred to as their castle. Looking up once more, she even saw some waving from the balconies—perches, Anatole advised her. The twirling spires of crimson and gold jutting from atop each section of the citadel in the trees resembled spears at their tips. She couldn’t see the top from so close, only hints of the same design peeking through thick branches. It was then she saw the open winding staircase that wove through the center of it all.
Yesenia shifted focus to her breathing. She couldn’t look as overwhelmed as they so obviously wanted her to feel. She must rise above it, unaffected by the wantonness of their ambitious showing.
I have reached into the sand, and the sand has offered me strength.
I have submerged myself in the salt of the sea, and the salt has offered me courage.
Her carriage stopped. She went to climb out on her own, but two Quinlanden guards, donning the same wasteful gold as their masters—Southerland gold, she thought to herself, and had to resist the urge to lay hands upon her daggers—made a formal show of escorting her down the small steps. The ground was unexpectedly solid—rare stone, imported, she thought, from the Seven Sisters of the West. Only the most ruthless explorers could bring back enough marble to pave an entire road.
“Gratitude,” she murmured, shrugging them both off once she had her footing. Another look around proved more daunting, as all her earlier observations blended into a chaotic tableau. A chorus of falsettos and sopranos sang along to the music, buried within the blurred horde of colors.
She tried to spot Anatole, but he was lost somewhere in the melee ahead.
Yesenia turned toward the sound of a harpist. The girl plucked a cool song on her instrument as a little boy held it aloft for her, only his feet visible. Yesenia had just enough time to absorb what she saw before the harpist broke off to the side and left her standing face-to-face with Chasten Quinlanden.
She recognized him immediately from Termonglen, but from only several feet away, the familiarity turned to horror. His crisply defined features—a sharp jaw, aquiline nose, and eyes so chillingly blue they looked preternatural—were emphasized in startling relief, as if painted by one who had never actually seen a man with their own eyes.
“Daughter.” His glacial smile came too late. He reached for her hands but ended up cupping her wrists. His palms were as icy as his intentions, and she couldn’t retrieve her arms quick enough.
She was still too numb to react in any way but compliance.
“You have come to us just on time.”
“I’m Mariana. Lady Quinlanden. I regret that we all departed so swiftly from Termonglen, as I’d have liked to have met you then.” The woman at his side joined in with eager but practiced enthusiasm. She pressed her lips together and made a soft sigh. “You really are a lovely girl, Yesenia. I believe life at Arboriana will only make you even lovelier. Please, call me Mother, and think of me thus.”
The difference between Chasten and Mariana was not the degree of warmth each possessed, Yesenia thought, but the desire and ability to act in possession of it.
Next a young girl stepped forward. She looked like the older one, Gretchen, who was missing from the bizarre display. Yesenia remembered Gretchen would be enduring a similar trial in Wulfsgate, perhaps at this very moment.
“My name is Saoirse. I hope you’ll find Arboriana as splendid as we do, and much to your liking.”
Yesenia nodded at the civil but kind words, searching for a smile to give the young girl. It died on her face when, just beyond, she saw Aiden, the eldest, leering at her.
I await your arrival, and what it means for both of us.
Yesenia tightened her jaw.
At Aiden’s side was the wife the king had sold him, Maeryn Blackwood. Yesenia wasn’t buying the cool, dispassionate look Maeryn wore in the face of this garish display, but she was curious by it. As Anatole had said, she’d need to learn the smoothness of subtlety.
“I believe that will be my task.” Corin gave his sister’s shoulders a quick, loving squeeze and then, pivoting to the side, broke through. As in Termonglen, he wore his full ceremonial regalia, but he seemed less comfortable in it here, in his own realm. It clung to his skin like a sticky sweetness he could not wait to be rid of. “Yesenia.” He inhaled into a nervous smile. “I hope the journey was all right?”
“Pleasing enough,” she managed to say and then she was taking his arm, and everything moved synchronously. The music shifted with them, the petals, still raining, covered the ground before them as they moved up the path. She thought again of her daggers strapped at her ankles inside her boots, not because she had intention to pull them but because they grounded her, reminded her of home in the midst of such madness.
“It’s too much,” he whispered. Any quieter and his words would have faded into the melee. “I know what you’re thinking. I understand.”
“You cannae know,” she whispered back. Still, there was none she felt safer with than Corin in this new, strange world, where she would never be safe again. He was the lesser of her enemies yet still as dangerous. What if his bumbling sweetness was an act? What if he was even worse than his revolting brother, Aiden?
“Your hand.” Corin nodded downward with a hitch in his breath. Her eyes followed to see her crude bandage had bled through again on the one she’d used in her blood oath.
“’Tis nothing,” she insisted, hiding it. She nestled the other under their conjoined arms before he could comment on that too.
“That’s not nothing. When we get settled, I’ll fetch a healer—”
“I said, ’tis nothing.”
“Right.” Corin exhaled, nodding, his eyes back on the path. “Ah, well, we just did this yesterday when Lady Maeryn arrived, so I know what to expect. Our part will be quick, over before we know it. We climb to the first perch and present ourselves to the people. They scream. We smile. They scream some more. We smile some more. Then we go in. The celebrations will continue, well into the night, without us.” He bit the corner of his lip. “For our, ah, first night together.”
Yesenia wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Tell me that again?”
“It’s doesn’t mean anything,” he replied. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s just tradition.”
Yesenia felt the impression of eyes on her. She glanced to the side and caught Maeryn staring. It was not Yesenia she watched though, but Corin. Yesenia knew that look. If Aiden saw Maeryn wearing it, he’d be none too pleased.
They reached the base of the largest tree she’d ever seen. But it was not one tree, she realized as they took the first steps into the courtyard, but a half dozen, all interconnected. Even their roots had become one, trunks bowing and winding, branches swirling around branches, leaves of one tree making life upon another.
Corin escorted her up the next set of stairs, which elevated them above the throngs. When they reached the steps that would take them into the trees, Yesenia hesitated. She was ashamed of it.
“The Golden Stair,” Corin explained. “It’s not as imposing as it looks. Match my steps.”
All she could do was nod. The rest of her effort shifted to not falling through the slats of stairs covered in woven bark. She lost her footing on one and heard Aiden’s timely snicker behind her.
When it felt like they’d climbed higher than she’d ever been in her life, Corin guided her onto a platform to the left. A balcony, she would have called it, with columns wound with gold and red metals, but she understood why they called it a perch. She was a bird, on display, in a cage. Powerless.
She held her breath to fight the swoon of disorientation that seized her.
“Great people of Whitechurch! Of the Easterlands! Of the kingdom’s most blessed Reach! Please join me in welcome of our newest union as I present my second son, Lord Corin Quinlanden, and his wife, Lady Yesenia Quinlanden.” He nodded through the applause, pleased with himself, as if he’d been responsible for it and not taken off guard like the other lords. “Eat, drink, and be as merry as you like! This fete is a gift from us!”
Corin spurred her back into motion as the family unit shifted, leaving the perch. Was that really all Chasten was going to say?
They climbed higher, Yesenia becoming dizzier with every step. They exited into a room whose existence did not seem possible: a banquet hall, as large as any she’d seen. And in the trees. It was a splendor she couldn’t appreciate in her present state, but rather, she settled her fears deeper, drawing her further from who she was.
“Right.” Chasten spun toward the family. “Aiden and I have business, and Saoirse needs to pack for Oldcastle. Is not that so, sapling?”
Saoirse nodded unhappily.
“It’s only a year, dear. All your siblings went to university at your age,” Mariana said sweetly. “They’ve reserved my old apartments in Crimsoncastle, just for you.”
“Lady Maeryn and Lady Mariana will aid her in this, while you two...” Chasten twirled his wrist, taking Yesenia in. “Become better acquainted.”
Chasten left without another word. Yesenia turned toward Corin, to find something to say that might restore her some vestige of control, when a hot breath burned at her ear.
“I’ll have a more proper welcome for you later. Sister.”
“Leave her alone, Aiden,” Corin warned.
“Or?”
“Don’t you have business with Father?”
Yesenia didn’t unclench until she heard Aiden’s steps ascending the Golden Stair. “I’ll gut him like a fish, he comes near me.”
Corin grinned. “What I wouldn’t give to see that.”
“I’m serious. I’d kill him.”
“I know you are.” He glanced around the empty banquet hall. “Would you like a tour?”
“No.” Yesenia closed her eyes to steady the fresh sway replacing the last one. “I wouldnae.”
“Is it the height?”
She didn’t answer him.
“I don’t like heights myself. Curious, I know, living here all my life, but they terrify me. I rarely ever spend time on the perches.”
Yesenia met his eyes. “Never tell me things like that.”
“Sorry?”
“Your weaknesses. Never let an enemy know them.” She straightened, feeling more balanced. “Make them work for them. Make me work for them.”
Corin shot her a weary look. “I don’t think of you that way, but you’re more than welcome to think of me as you please.”
“Donnae ken I need your permission for how I think.”
“I wasn’t suggesting—”
“That’s another weakness. You’re too agreeable.”
Corin was taken aback. “You’d prefer me sparring with you? Is that how men do it in the Southerlands?”
Yesenia shrugged. “I have no preference where you’re concerned.”
“Yet you seem to have plenty of opinions.”
“Beliefs. Opinions can be changed.”
Corin tensed with a brief shutter of his eyes. “Why don’t I take you to our apartments, so you can relax after your long journey.”
“Warwicks don’t relax.” Yesenia listened to the singing, the chanting, the joy of the crowd outside. “But, aye, get me out of here.”
“Only one bed?”
Corin had braced himself for that question. All her words, questions or otherwise, felt like accusations, and he, the one guilty of her perceived aspersions. If only he could find a way to tell her they were in this together, that they had both lost out in this bargain and, as friends, could at least discover a way to endure it.
“Yeah. Sorry.” He saw her trunks had already been delivered. “I tried to have another brought in quietly. I knew it’s what you’d want. But...” He eyed the arched door to the sitting room. “I can sleep on the settee, if you like.”
“Too agreeable,” she reminded him. She perched at the end of the bed, like someone waiting for an assassin to leap out from behind a curtain. Eyes wide. Hands ticking off her thoughts against the quilt with nervous abandon.
“Is that what you really want? For me to be cruel, like my brother?”
“Why do ye ken your brother sees you as such an easy target?”
“Do you care that he hurts me?”
Yesenia’s mouth paused in search of words. She closed it without answering. “Is there anywhere I can be alone here, or is this just a more pleasing prison?”
Corin tossed a nod toward the perch. The curtains were drawn wide, and the wind whistling through the trees was peaceful. The view likely was too, but he’d have to be content with his imagination. “Out there. In the forest. Do you have those in the Southerlands?”
Yesenia’s lip curled up at the corner as she stared at him. “’Tis a real question, that?”
No topic was safe apparently. “I’ve never been there. All I know about your homeland is what’s told to me by people who loathe you.”
Yesenia rolled her eyes. She fell back on her hands, looking away from him, beyond the curtains. “We have some farther north. Near the Easterlands. We’d have more if your family would stop pushing the border, stealing land from us. I heard you want to annex Blackpool next, aye? Well, go on then. You’d be doing us a favor. ’Tis a pit and a curse.”
“I don’t know anything about any of that,” Corin insisted. “No one involves me in their scheming.”
She laughed. “Do ye ken I’d be included in anything if I hadnae insisted I be? My father forgets he has a daughter sometimes, and not three sons. That’s my doing. I wasnae born with the privilege.”
“But I don’t want that,” Corin answered, shaking his head. “That’s where you and I are different. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know the terrible things they’re planning. It’s hard enough watching them play out.”
Her laugh deepened. She dropped her head back and her dark waves tickled the quilt. “Ah, Corin, is that all there is to our differences?”
“I don’t want to be involved in their machinations. I don’t even want the name I was given.”
“Then what do ye want if not to serve your kin? Evil or nay, it’s what you were born into. What you were given. I have cause to loathe the Quinlandens, but your cause is to serve them. That’s the way of things.”
“I wanted my father to find me a bride as far from home as he could. I didn’t even care who, just as long as it took me away from Whitechurch.” He lowered his voice. “I’m sure Lord Warwick is a good man. I cannot say the same for my own father.”
Her sigh ended in a head shake bordering on disappointment. “You keep feeding me your weak spots. Ye donnae know me. Ye donnae know what I could do with them if I wanted to.”
Corin swallowed. How had the king decided these matches? There was no repairing these wounds. They’d only deepen. “You’ll do what you must, I suppose.”
“Hmm. Agreeable or sly? Do ye only want me to ken that you’re a good, honest man who’s nothing like his shit-grasping relations, or are you really so castrated?”
“I am who I am.” He threw out his hands. “And whether we like it or not, we’re married. That doesn’t have to mean what it does for others, but we’re stuck with each other, until one of us spends our promise.”
“And another thing!” Yesenia cried, pitching forward again on the bed. “Your father called me Yesenia Quinlanden. Aye, that willnae do. I’ll be a Warwick until my last breath.”
Corin looked down and sighed.
“Want me to tell him?” she asked.
“No. Better he take it out on me. He holds me in only slightly higher esteem than your family.”
Yesenia nodded to herself. “Aye, I’ll tell him. Let me be the villain. May as well play our assigned roles here.” She gave Corin a quick appraisal. “Nor do I wish to see you sulk about all night when he’s done with ye.”
A knock sounded, followed by a five-second pause. A serving girl wearing a frilly apron took one step into the room.
“Lord and Lady Quinlanden, you are both summoned for evening meal.”
“Lady Warwick,” Yesenia said to correct her.
The girl cast her eyes away, bowed, and backed out of the room.
“I’m not hungry,” Yesenia said when she was gone. “Go on without me. I’ll stay here.”
“You will not,” Corin said, his fear causing the words to fall more forcefully than intended. He was rewarded with an approving eyebrow raise. “If you want life to be livable, you’ll learn to be agreeable yourself, when to do otherwise will only invite agony. You want your privacy, Yesenia? You earn it, by serving when it matters. No one refuses a supper invite from my father.”
“You’ve only made me more determined to refuse it,” she answered with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “But I can see he has ye quaking in your little gold heels about it, and I’ll not have ye whipped for my defiance.” She stood, and he was again taken with how tall she was, as tall as him. “Well? Are we supping or are ye more keen to gape at me like you’ve just seen a Guardian in the flesh?”
Corin recovered himself and led the way.
Yesenia remembered the way to the banquet hall, for it was the only other place she’d been at Arboriana. She secreted glances to the right and left as they descended the Golden Stair, attempting to discern the rest of the strange arbor castle, while being careful not to appear too interested. At best, they’d think her moonstruck. At worst, spying.
Aye, well I’ll do a bit of that too, but they’ll not see it so easily. Anatole might think himself the superior at shadows, but a woman uniquely learns, before all else, how to make herself known and how to make herself unknown.
Until her mother died, that was all she’d done, slip about in the shadows, yearning for scraps of intrigue. Yesenia was sensitive to the low heartbeat that thrummed through the center of her household, always had been, and the not knowing had been maddening. Khoulter stopped tempering her curiosity when Lady Sancha died. His fight in the matter had died with his wife.
The cavernous room glimmered against the twilight. All the details Yesenia had missed in her initial shock of passing through the strange gallery came into stunning—sickening—relief. The chanting of the villagers celebrating outside had turned sinister. The click of Lady Quinlanden’s heels against marble were swords stabbing into ice.
Yesenia couldn’t help but wonder at the sheer excess of it all. Curtains spun of even more cloth of gold. Decorated servants in every corner, awaiting a moment of need from their lords and ladies. And the real gold, the true gold, everywhere, from the surface of the great table that went on and on to the columns, to the serving benches, and more. Was it a show for her, or was it normal for the ostentatious traitors?
“Here.” Corin subtly guided her into the seat already prepared for her. The others needed no such assistance, except Maeryn, who eyed two chairs equally as her memory seemed to evade her. Aiden shook his head, pointing exuberantly with his whole extended hand, as if dealing with a petulant child.
The chair, too, was gold, and the cold charge it sent through Yesenia’s back and limbs superseded her control in keeping others from seeing her shudder. Chasten watched her from the head of the table while a servant poured a deep-garnet liquid into his silver goblet. As he took the first sip—a tense moment, everyone hanging upon his reaction, none so more than the poor servant—he kept his eyes on her, and then still as he lowered the chalice with a reverberant but light thud atop the gold.
“That will suit us,” he said, bland and disinterested.
A cool relief settled over the gathered. Color returned to the servant’s face as he backed away and signaled to the other servants to bring more. Even Aiden appeared to shake off the effect of the prior moment, stretching his neck to the right and then the left.
Yesenia caught Corin from the side calming his breathing. He couldn’t know she was doing the same, because she would never let anyone see her the way he was letting his entire family see him now.
The food was brought out in quick but careful choreography, spirited servants dancing in and out of the room without especial notice. They operated strung high off fear, but there was pride in it. There was a hierarchy, Yesenia sensed, and these, the house attendants, were perched at the very top.
“Your feast, Lady Yesenia,” Chasten said. “You’ll adjust.” He waited for the servant to prepare his plate and then dove in without further ceremony.
His words made a sudden sense when she made a closer inspection of her meal. Everything on the table was of bright greens and ochers and yellows, things that had once possessed roots and stems. Fruits she’d never before seen but knew them for their even bolder array of colors. She noted the absence of the rich gaminess that accompanied meat.
“What is this?” she hissed, low enough for Corin but no one else.
“That is a salad,” Corin explained. “And that, stew of tubers. In your bowl is an assortment of fruits, all sweet except the bright-red one. Don’t let that startle you. It’s more of a cleanse between bites, to help you enjoy the next.”
“Where’s the elk? The rabbit? The deer?”
Corin’s face curled in horror. “Do you eat beasts in the Southerlands?”
“Anything we can catch, we can cook.”
Aiden’s voice carried. “And men?”
Yesenia didn’t meet Aiden’s challenge. She kept her eyes on Corin when she answered. “What of them?”
“Are men of the Southerlands not beasts? How many of them find their hides upon your tables?”
“The answer to that is a family secret, I’m afraid.” Her grin was quick, cutting. She looked at him. The briefest skip in his act told her she was a surprise to him. But a surprise, to men like him, was something to tame, not indulge.
“She’s not serious, of course,” Mariana said, glancing at her youngest, Saoirse, in a flick of panic. “Though the rumors are colorful enough.”
Yesenia ground her jaw. She began to grasp the depth of the smear the Quinlandens had fed their people where the Southerlands was concerned. There’d never be a place for her here. She shouldn’t need reminders, but she’d get them all the same.
“Most rumors are born in a version of the truth.”
Yesenia felt Corin tense as she spoke.
“Perhaps the origin lies in the land the king stole from the Warwicks. Making the Wastelands his prison came with its share of terrors. Cannibalism becomes necessary when men are forced to starve.”
“Oh dear,” Mariana whispered.
“Hardly men. Criminals,” Aiden said.
“Criminals of political convenience.”
“Are we wasting no time then?” Chasten sipped from his goblet. “Yesenia, accepting that you are new here and cannot yet know our customs, I will still ask you to refrain from speaking as a man would at my table.”
“Do none of your women have opinions?” Yesenia asked.
Corin sank deeper into his gold chair, presumably attempting to burrow and fall through the floor.
“Who can say? If they do, they have the good sense to keep them to themselves.”
“Well.” Mariana set aside her fork and pursed her lips. “And your journey here, Yesenia. I take it, it was pleasant enough? Even if you did pass through Blackpool.”
Yesenia turned toward Lady Quinlanden and caught Maeryn again giving Corin a dreamy look, as though she were at another table with just him.
“Aye, it was fine. I ken that means you’ve cooled your attentions on Blackpool?”
“Rumors,” Chasten replied. “And not the kind based in truth.”
“You’ll forgive me if history points to a different intention.”
Yesenia nearly jumped at the landing of Corin’s hand upon her leg. A furtive glance his way revealed a fear that surprised her. His touch wasn’t tender. It was a warning.
Mariana tilted her head to the side, wearing a pained look. “Yesenia, dear, I do hope you’ve packed sensibly.” She nodded at her with a light curl in her lip. “And that most of your trunks are not... more of that.”
Yesenia looked down at her leather jerkin and pants. “Cannae say I packed a single gown, my lady. I find them vile and ill-suited to my constitution.” She couldn’t resist adding “then, we donnae lace ours with stolen gold either, so perhaps I’ve misjudged the experience.”
“Salt and sand,” Aiden murmured, sharing a private, disdainful gaze with his father.
Mariana pulled her breath through her teeth. “I see. Well, while practical for riding, perhaps, trousers are not suitable for a woman in her daily life.” She straightened, smiling. “Not to worry.”
“You’ll tend to the matter?” Chasten asked as he delicately passed a forkful of greens into his barely parted mouth.
“Of course, darling. I thought it was implied in my response to her.”
“I assume nothing,” Chasten answered. “Not even when the implication reads as I wish it to.”
Corin’s hand fell away. Yesenia felt his apology in the way his fingers trailed, passing back to his own lap. Even sharing barbs with his family across the gold table, she’d seen how they disregarded him, as if he were a specter and not a son of the lord.
But she had no sympathy for it. He allowed it. He seemed to shrink and withdraw in their presence and thus permitted these slights. Invited them, even.
No son of the Southerlands would ever allow anyone to treat him that way.
What did surprise her was how nothing she’d said had rankled either the lord or his heir. They hadn’t silenced her. Perhaps they were encouraging her. Perhaps their encouragement was the path to the end, for her. And she strode down it willingly, even defiantly.
Channel Anatole. Subtlety.
“Saoirse, I understand you’re going to university?” She cooled her blood, found another path. As she waited for Saoirse’s reply, she noted Maeryn still wearing the same moony look from earlier, and Yesenia bristled. Her annoyance about it was incomprehensible, but she buried it alongside the rest of her anger.
Saoirse was clearly miserable. “Yes. All Quinlandens attend a full year, before maturity.”
“Only a year? I thought the curriculum lasted—”
“As long as it needs to.” Chasten cut in. “The Universities of Oldcastle are an Easterland institution. We are a guiding hand in their perpetuity. They have programs specially designed for Quinlandens. Your own children will attend them, in time.”
Yesenia’s toes involuntarily curled at the implication. Children. Chasten’s continued look sealed the point, and his next words removed all doubt of his meaning.
“Aiden wasted no time with his bride. I expect my second son will do no less.”
Maeryn at last looked away from Corin, burying her eyes in her lap.
“Corin knows only his hand.” Aiden laughed, with a mouthful of tuber stew.
A rise of defensiveness rushed within Yesenia. “A man who knows his own hand knows what he likes.”
“Oh!” Mariana exclaimed. “Dear, what had we agreed upon for dessert?”
“No dessert,” Chasten muttered. “Just like the night before. Bad for the marriage bed.”
Aiden was immune to his mother’s attempt to still the tension. “I said only his hand, saltlicker.”
“Aiden!” his mother exclaimed.
Chasten was silent on the matter.
“Aye? He’ll know a whole lot more after tonight, I ken.” Now she’d done it. They’d forced her into a corner, and again, she’d walked right into it.
Corin guided his breath through a small gap in his mouth, cheeks puffing as he did. He hadn’t touched his food in a while.
Aiden leaned over the table. “And when you’re ready to know a ‘whole lot more,’ you come to my chambers. Aye?” He mocked her.
She fantasized about freezing that look upon his face as she garroted him.
“That’s enough,” Chasten said. “These unions are decided, and we now decide to make the best of them.” He glanced beyond the table, to the purplish haze darkening outside. “We’ll adjourn here.”
Yesenia cast a forlorn glance at the plate she’d hardly touched. Corin’s wasn’t much better. He was angry with her, for failing her first test, though he’d never say it. She wished he would. She might respect him more.
Chasten rose. The others rose immediately after, and Yesenia shakily followed Corin’s lead.
He offered no further commentary, pivoting with a crisp march out of the banquet hall. Mariana followed in an almost perfect observance of the apparent two steps behind her husband, as prescribed to her as a woman. Did Mariana have opinions? If so, like Chasten had said, she must keep them to herself.
Saoirse, quiet as a mouse, had slipped out in the smooth transition from supper. Aiden guided Maeryn with a clenched hand pinched upon her shoulder.
Yesenia pressed her hand to her belly and breathed in.
“We can’t stay here,” Corin said, with a touch of panic. “They’ll be expecting us to leave the hall so it can be turned over for midnight tea.”
“Midnight tea?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. Attendees are those invited by my father, and only them.”
“We willnae be...?”
“No.” Corin outstretched his hand, pointing at the curved door leading back to the Golden Stair. “There are other responsibilities expected of us tonight.”
Mariana caught Yesenia and Corin halfway to the apartments. She stepped out from a room on the right. “May I have just a moment with your bride? I’ll not keep her long.”
Corin’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. He waited for Yesenia’s nonverbal confirmation this was all right, then nodded. “You know your way back?”
“Aye,” she said.
And then he was gone, and she nearly regretted his absence.
“Your hands, dear!” Mariana exclaimed. Her fingers flitted downward to grab hold of the wounded appendages but only grazed them. “What happened?”
Yesenia shook her head. “I’m fine.”
“They look dreadful. I’ll send a healer straightaway—”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.” She wasn’t fine. The wounds burned, one even throbbed with the start of infection, but they were her reminder to stay strong and vigilant. She couldn’t abide weakness here.
Mariana placed both of her hands on Yesenia’s face, startling her into taking a step back. “My dear. I know this all must be such a shock to you, and the life you come from.”
“I see few similarities,” Yesenia replied. Wariness spread through her. This woman was showing her kindness, but she was not Yesenia’s friend. “But Warwicks are nothing if not adaptable.”
Mariana’s nod carried on. She wasn’t listening; she was judging. “Well, you are not your father, and if your choice is to join this family with an open heart, then I will chip away at my husband so that he does not treat the daughter according to the sins of the father.”
Was Mariana showing sincerity or cunning? There was no way to know. The Quinlandens had played a long, commendable game and had won at every step. That had not happened through transparency of intention. “I appreciate that.”
“Good. I hoped you might.” Mariana crossed her filigree shawl over her bosom. “Your hips are ample enough. Brood mares, we call them here. No trouble bringing the children along, and most survive their first years if they have an easier entrance. Four will be enough, I should think, before you can take your rest and enjoy the years ahead.”
Yesenia tried not to sick up what little she’d eaten.
“You might yet be just what Corin needs. He is not what his father hoped.”
“That much is evident.” And what of his mother? What was Corin to her?
“No,” Mariana whispered, a continuance of the prior thought. “Perhaps through you, he might yet find a way to show his value. If you were to, say, allow Corin a certain access that goes against what I see you guarding so closely in your heart, he might find the path to prove himself worthy of his father’s love.”
“I donnae ken.” Ah, but she kenned. She kenned perfectly. A woman apparently divorced of her opinions was speaking to one possessed of nothing but—a young woman who had a certain access to her father’s doings and might be compelled to see through to sharing some as part of her new wifely duties.
Lie back and remember the Southerlands. Is this what ye had in mind, Aunt Korah?
Mariana’s smile blended with the shadow of the coming night. “Think on it, dear. Good night.”