His brain short-circuited at the prospect of easy, lazy mornings with her—Iris sitting in his breakfast nook, still in her pajamas, her hair still mussed from her pillow. That was hard enough to take, and he instantly made it worse by imagining stepping into a bathroom still steamed up from her shower, with the delicate scent of her soap lingering in the air.
“Of course, if you want to,” Keith said, proud that there was no croak of awkward arousal in his voice.
The Silver Council issued plenty of harsh indictments of sex outside of marriage, but the councilors also had—or were supposed to have—a staunch belief in everyone’s honor until they actually proved untrustworthy. Everyone in the community followed their lead. He and Iris could sleep in the same bed—he could even spoon her all night long—and no one here would believe that two people as good as they were supposed to be could possibly be having dirty, filthy unmarried sex.
Do NOT think about Iris and dirty, filthy unmarried sex. Or dirty, filthy married sex. Or sex at all.
He felt like he was going to choke on something.
Luckily or unluckily, Lady Marianne provided an immediate distraction that was as effective as any cold shower.
“There’s no need for that. If you must take a week before you sign the marriage agreement, you can stay here. This is your home, after all.”
Keith wasn’t sure that a weekherewould help them out at all. Their world didn’t exactly encourage openness and vulnerability. It was no way to get to know somebody.
He glanced at Iris, trying to work out how she felt about all this, but she wasn’t meeting his eyes. She’d frozen in place, her face the kind of empty mask Keith knew all too well. He used to wear that look all the time too.
It was how you looked when you were wiping all your feelings away so there was no chance the Council would quietly, patiently scold you for them. You hoped that if you made yourself into a blank slate, whoever you were talking to would just see what they wanted to see.
He knew how often he’d been miserable beneath that mask.
“Isn’t the plan for Iris to join me out in the world after our marriage?” Keith said, trying—despite his rising temper—to keep his voice as respectful as possible. “Before she agrees to live there, she deserves the chance to see how she feels about it.”
“Your concern for her comfort is admirable. But naturally, Iris will do her duty to you and to the community. She’s very conscientious, and she won’t let her opinion of the outside world distract her from her responsibilities—no more than you would.”
He realized, to his surprise, that by her standards, she was actuallydefendingIris. She felt like Keith was implying that Iris was soft and weak, because obviously that would be the only thing that would make someone not want to spend their life in a place they hated. Unicorns weren’t supposed to take their feelings into account, not when there was any danger they would interfere with higher concerns like duty.
(Keith would still agree with that, to some extent, if Lady Marianne and the other councilors didn’t considereverythingto be part of one’s duties. They didn’t just think there were times when you had to put your personal feelings aside, they thought there were almost never any times when youdidn’t.)
And—he should have guessed this, but he hadn’t thought about it—she assumed that he didn’t like living outside the community and that Iris wouldn’t either. She just took it for granted that their world was the best and truest one, and that anything outside it was full of vices and corruption.
He and Iris were supposed to honorably serve that world while valiantly resisting its influence. They weren’t supposed tohave fun.
“A week will reassure your colleagues that you haven’t rushed into a decision,” Marianne continued, like most of the world wouldn’t still consider that wildly impulsive. “There’s no reason you can’t spend that time here. It’s unconventional and inappropriate for a tribute’s spouse to leave the community before the wedding.”
Not for the first time, it occurred to Keith that their hermetically sealed world was, in a lot of ways, creepy as hell. He’d never realized that until he’d gotten away from it and started examining its values to see which ones he really wanted to hold onto.
He was tempted to say that Iris had the right to go wherever she wanted, conventions be damned. Unfortunately, for all he knew, that might alarmIris, not just Marianne. It definitely would have scared him off, back before his Marshal days.
He tried another tack. “But if we’re both here, she can’t get to know my team. They’d like to meet her.”
Marianne’s lips thinned. “Then, if you absolutely must indulge them to that extent, they can come here.”
He couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d suddenly suggested they all have a big let’s-get-acquainted orgy.
Iris looked like she was thinking the same thing. “I didn’t know the Council ever invited outsiders to visit.”
“We don’t,” Lady Marianne said, with the barest barb of sarcasm under her genteel voice. “But since we also don’t drag betrothals out like this, we’re already in uncharted territory. If Keith’s ‘team’ is so concerned about our ways, it would be best for them to see beyond any question that our world functions perfectly just as it is.”
So does theirs, Keith almost said.
But that wasn’t true. No world was perfect, not even the one he preferred to live in. Every society had flaws, and every town had its share of unhappiness. The outside world had a lot more breathing room, but it also had a lot more poverty and strife.
Besides, questioning Lady Marianne’s authority wasn’t likely to endear him to her. If anything, it would make her decide that Iris deserved a more upstanding husband. And if he wanted her to keep making exceptions for them, he needed to play nice.
Having his team visit was way better than nothing. Meeting them could still give Iris a glimpse of a friendlier, warmer life. Even if she decided she didn’t want him, she might still want options, and that meant knowing what was out there.
He didn’t think her life here was making her very happy.
