Embers
932 A.O.P.
One
EIMARILLE
First Month was guided by the Twilight Star, winter a cold blanket of snow that had settled upon Daijal well before the new year began. The forest surrounding New Haven was a winter wonderland that Princess Eimarille Rourke could barely see from her rooms in the palace through the frost-edged windows. The teacup in her hands was warm, though, and while the hour was early, the fur-lined dressing gown she’d slipped on kept away the chill.
The fire in the hearth had been urged to a full burn by a servant, its light adding to the gas lamps that illuminated her bedroom. Eimarille could hear a bustle of movement in her personal parlor beyond the door but made no move yet to leave the well-cushioned window bench.
She took another sip of her flowering tea, the dried blossom in the glass teapot on the nearby tray having unfurled when hot water was poured over it. The color of the tea was pale gold and the taste reminded her of the palace gardens in full bloom.
Eimarille ran her thumb along the delicate rim of the teacup, tracing the gold design there. She’d enjoyed a different tea as a child, but that wasn’t a flavor to be found in the Daijal court’s kitchens. If anything had been popular in Ashion, it was sneered at in her adopted country. She had made it a point over the last sixteen years to always smile politely during those arguments with courtiers. She did, after all, come from that unfortunate country, as they liked to gently remind her.
The insults through the years had always been subtle, but she’d allowed them and remembered who spoke them. Eimarille had kept her blood name rather than accept Iverson when the Daijal king had taken her in as his ward, claiming a distant kinship the country’s highest court of law had signed off on. Eimarille had learned to hate the man less over the years, if only because Innes had asked it of her.
One must make alliances of enemies, or one must dig their graves.
Eimarille sipped at her tea, thinking about the lessons the star god had imparted to her since she came to Daijal. Innes had been the breakwater all of King Bernard’s demands had crashed against as Eimarille grew up in the Daijal court, learning new customs, new politics, new beliefs, new ways to pray. Even as a child, Eimarille knew how to shape herself into who she needed to be to survive.
She’d traversed the road Innes had laid down before her, walked her way to this moment of early winter morning, a dusting of snow like a blessing on her wedding day. The streets would be cleared of snow from the palace to the star temple, where she would wed Prince Wesley Iverson under the only constellation that mattered to her.
They’d grown up together in the Daijal court, orbiting each other through the years. She’d immersed herself in her studies and then in politics while he’d earned an officer’s commission in the Daijal army that he rarely tended to. A prince had no need to command an army when he would be king one day and have generals to do that for him, Wesley always said. Such a retort was usually given right before he went off to join his friends in what fun the capital could provide such a rowdy group.
Eimarille thought it foolish not to build up those relationships and had made it a point to know the name and rank of every officer who passed through the Daijal court. She sent letters of congratulations whenever one was promoted, keeping a finger on the pulse of the military leaders and their needs. She did so not simply because Innes had told her to but because she could see their use if she could shift their loyalty toher.
Wesley might be their contemporary, but she would be their queen, and the crown outranked everyone.
Small steps down a long road, she remembered being told. Sound advice from a dead woman, Eimarille surmised with a faint twist of her lips. Queen Ophelia Rourke had made serious mistakes in the long run, and Eimarille had no desire to emulate her birth mother in that fashion, but some choices made were worth studying. In hindsight, Ashion hadn’t been a terrible learning foundation, but she could see the cracks that had brought its ruin—cracks she was determined to mend in her own way.
But to fix something, sometimes you had to break it first.
Her bedroom door was pushed open on hinges that squeaked softly, an annoyance she’d learned to ignore growing up, but a precaution Terilyn had refused to allow to be altered. Her lady-in-waiting was ever cognizant of Eimarille’s safety, and for good reason. She wouldn’t be the Blade that Eimarille cherished if Terilyn ignored her teachings.
“The servants have readied your bath,” Terilyn said.
Eimarille looked over at the woman who had been given to her on that long-ago train ride west and smiled. “Is it to your liking, darling?”
“It is to yours, and that is all I care about.”
Terilyn crossed the room on silent feet, the silk dressing gown she wore cinched tight around her slender waist. Her thick black hair tumbled loose around her shoulders down to her waist. Eimarille had undone the plait before bed last night, mindful of the sharp spikes that doubled as accessories, the design meant to harm if anyone grabbed her hair in a fight.
Terilyn had been in many fights over the years, ever Eimarille’s dangerous shadow. She bore scars on her body that belonged to Eimarille, acquired out of duty and love. Blades were notorious, after all, of being singularly dedicated to their cause. Bernard had sought to banish Terilyn only once. He’d lost a finger to Innes for that hubris, a wound blamed on a hunting accident. He was lucky it hadn’t been his head.
The tray was pushed aside, and Terilyn sat beside her. Eimarille slid her bare feet outward, tucking her cold toes beneath the other woman’s thigh. Terilyn hooked one hand around Eimarille’s ankle, callused thumb stroking over the dip in the bone there.
“Are you pleased with this choice?” Terilyn asked, her almond-shaped brown eyes trained unerringly on Eimarille. She was beautiful by Urovan standards, merely pretty by Daijal’s. Eimarille thought her fellow countrymen and women blind in that regard.
“Well enough.”
The Daijal court had been a prison as a child, but Eimarille had learned how to make it a home. Choices, no matter how inconsequential, were a type of freedom, and she’d made plenty over the years to claw back some semblance of control.
She’d been given no choice in marrying Wesley, but Eimarille had allowed herself to accept the inevitable to gain what she wanted. Better to work with what one had than to mourn a different road she’d never get to walk down. She’d chosen to appreciate the opportunities marriage to the Daijal crown prince provided, but she would never love him.
Her heart belonged to her Blade, after all.
Terilyn took the teacup from her, setting it on the tray, before gently nudging Eimarille’s legs apart. She slid between them, hands gliding up Eimarille’s legs, catching the hems of her sleeping and dressing gowns, rucking them up toward her hips. Eimarille leaned back against the plush cushions piled on the bench. She bent one knee, let her other leg hang off the side of the bench, toes brushing against the rug there.
