“She escaped with me.”
Ursula let out a long breath. “Unreal.You are a remarkable man.”
I smoothed a wayward lock of her hair back from her temple. “Thank you, but I was mostly insanely lucky. When I look back at all the ways my plan could’ve failed…” I shook off the specter of those nightmare scenarios, some that still visited me in harrowing dreams.
“I broke her out in the middle of the night and we traveled through… a cold climate.” I hedged my wayjudiciously through the details I’d sworn not to reveal. “And made for a… place where we could travel out of the empire.”
Ursula settled back against me. “This is like a riddle. I’m guessing you went through remote countryside, probably crossing mountains if it was so much colder, to a coastal city where you could sail elsewhere. Smart plan.”
“Not so much. As with all plans, but especially thosecontrived by inexperienced fools, it went awry.” I sighed heavily. “I need to move.”
She obligingly stood, uncoiling herself with grace and a hint of the speed from her shapeshifter heritage. Taking the opportunity, she refilled our wine goblets and met me by the window with them. Handing me mine, she touched hers to it in grave salute. “To an idealistic boy who did what no one else had the courageto attempt.”
I smiled slightly, mostly to please her, and sipped, steeling myself for the next part. “We couldn’t travel as swiftly as I’d assumed. My experience had been with other men, ones properly dressed for bitter weather and skilled at riding. My sister… she had never even sat a horse before. Though I’d found outdoor gear for her, it had all been designed for men.” I swallowed some wine,grateful for the way it blurred the sharp edges of those desperate memories.
“And she’d been hurt,” Ursula supplied, gaze full of sorrow.
“Yes. The women… they used teas and a soothing smoke to ease pain. Another aspect of life in the Imperial Palace I’d been aware of but never thought through.” I lifted my wine in grim acceptance. “My sister had been drugged into a stupor and I made her giveup the smoke and tea so she’d be alert for the escape.”
“You had to.” Ursula nodded crisply. “No choice there. And she did it, which speaks to her strength of character.”
If only I’d known someone like Ursula then. I could’ve used her clear thinking. “She was so brave, Essla. She never once complained, but she was in terrible pain, injured far worse than I knew, where no one could see.”
Ursulanodded, understanding, the ghost of old pain tightening her face. I nearly asked again if I should stop, remembering what she’d told me about herself, how she’d been so young, and she’d bled, telling no one. She wouldn’t thank me, though, for treating her as too fragile to hear this.
“I didn’t know until we reached the hunter’s cabin I’d been making for. We’d made it away clean and rode throughthe night, but morning would bring discovery of her absence and inevitable pursuit. I’d hoped to rest a few hours, then continue. But her saddle blankets…” I rubbed a hand over my face, wiping away the cold sweat. “Soaked in blood.”
“Not surprising, really,” Ursula said the words very softly, laying a hand on my arm and stroking me. “A young and virgin bride and a man of Bloody Rodolf’s reputation…”
“Yes, well.” I wrapped my hands around the goblet, holding onto it. “I didn’t know that. I wasn’t even entirely clear on how women differed from men, other than ribald jokes and improbable tales. But I had to dosomething. She was so pale and weak—even I could see she’d die if we kept going that way.”
“What did you do?” Ursula asked, the knowing in her eyes.
“She was ashamed, embarrassed, didn’twant me to know and certainly didn’t want her baby brother seeing her that way.” It had been so surreal, her embarrassment and mine, along with the keen awareness that her life, at the least, rode on both of us setting those niceties aside. My lovely sister, and the savagery of what he’d done to her tenderest, most intimate self.
“He’d torn her badly, in her sex, so I sewed her up. I knew enoughof field dressing wounds, how to clean them, of stitches and so forth. What I didn’t know was…” I gave Ursula a look I hoped was wry, though it felt like it fell short. She only watched me with solemn attention. “I didn’t know what a healthy woman’s sex should look like,” I explained. “I didn’t know what was a natural opening and what—” My voice broke.
Ursula took my goblet, set it aside, anddrew me into her arms; so much slighter than I, but strong enough to hold me as I dropped my forehead to her shoulder. “Oh, Harlan,” she murmured. “You are an incredible man, then and now. And she lived. That’s what matters.”
“She lived. And I made myself some promises that night.”
“You swore to learn your way around women so well that you would know what to do both to give them pleasure andto heal?” Ursula suggested, a wry knowing in her voice.
I lifted my head and kissed her forehead. “Yes.”
“I can vouch for your success.” She kissed me, a tender brush of her lips against mine, gentle in a way she rarely was. “What then?”
“We were extraordinarily lucky—or so I believed—and though we stayed in that cabin for days, long enough for her to heal sufficiently to at least ride, weweren’t discovered. We made it to my planned destination, and I paid for passage on transportation to leave in the morning. My sister had shorn her distinctive hair and we’d found a sympathetic blacksmith to cut off her wedding bracelets, and unchain her ring. We’d—”
Ursula held up her index finger, stopping me. She’d broken that finger a few times in sword practice or battles, and it had a crookedbent, as if it asked a question. “Cut off her bracelets, and… unchain a ring?” she inquired, a hint of danger beneath the smooth surface tone.
I sighed. She was going to hate this. “Dasnarian wedding bracelets are an old tradition. They’re jeweled and very pretty—all different designs—but traditionally they’re locked onto the bride during the wedding ceremony, never to be removed.” More likemanacles than jewelry, it had occurred to me much later in life.
Ursula assimilated that with a cool and remote expression, saying nothing.
“The ring… Well, Bloody Rodolf had this extraordinary diamond ring, an Arynherk tradition, that he gave my sister to go with the bracelets—and attached to them by a chain. They all had to be cut off and the jewels were going to pay for our new lives.”
“‘Our’?” She still sounded distant, mastering her revulsion, I knew.
