“Read to me,” she blurted out.
“What?” He blinked, but his fingers remained entwined with hers.
“I don’t know how to talk to you and I’m not ready to discuss how I feel. This is too much, too hard. But if you read to me for a bit before you leave, it will be enough. I like the sound of your voice.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Poetry?” he asked. “A six-tome history of Abia? A treatise on the wines of Larion?”
She chuckled against her will. “Poetry will do.”
He shuffled through the books stacked on his desk and picked a hefty tome bound in dark leather and gold leaf, well-worn from use. “Mareo’s posthumous collection,” he said. “Any preferences?”
Her education was lacking: She barely recognized the name. “Anything you like.”
He thumbed the pages and started reading in his clear baritone. The stress of the day evaporated from her limbs, leaving her heavy and pliable, her eyes half shut. He read about love and yearning and carnal pleasures, and the words ignited a small flame in her belly. When he closed the book after a dozen poems and rose to leave, she was sorry to see him go.
“That place Amril is taking you to, what is it?” she asked.
“Have the ladies been gossiping again?” he said. “It’s just a place where men go together and encourage each other to behave badly. They’ll get drunk and vulgar, and I’ll get bored.” He kissed the top of her head. “Good night.”
When he left, she blew out the candle and sat in silence for a while, breathing in the scent of the room, the beeswax polish, the leather, the subtle notes of bergamot and frankincense, the salty smell of the sea that permeated everything. Then she got up and walked to her room, expecting to find Ferisa waiting for her. But instead of the priestess, she found an unsigned note.Urgent business, it said.Meet me in the cherry orchard at dawn.
Her mellow drowsiness hardened into anxiety in an instant. Ferisa had no other urgent business in Abia but the Black Lord’s. Melia was stupid to believe that Ferisa was there for her. She was there for her father, to put into motion whatever he’d planned.
Chapter 9
Liana
The evening skyglowed purple, the lanterns in the trees spilled warm yellow light. Music whispered among the leaves and women glided through the garden, more women than Liana expected: maids in their dark aprons, Lady Celandina’s girls in their diaphanous gowns, dancers in skin-tight costumes.
The men were already rowdy when they arrived, disrupting that harmony as soon as they entered. Laughing too loud, staggering on the grass, taking up too much space. The women scattered like a shoal of fish before them and then gathered again, forming new patterns, breaking the men apart, muffling their chaos.
Liana stood still in the shadows, watching. There was the crown prince, the bridegroom, the focal point of the evening. Amril, tall and golden, larger than life, like a fairy-tale hero, followed by his clique of sycophants. There were the high lords of the kingdom, the young ones, the fun ones, the ones who loved the prince. There were the accidental hangers-on, the ones who had to be invited, too important to be left out. And then there was a shadow, a gust of northern wind in the summer air, a face that made her chest ache.
The beautiful evening carried no ominous signs, no dark premonitions of war. Liana felt foolish thinking about it. Perun had muddled her memory, dropped her at a wedding she’d never seen because she’d been nineteen at the time, too unimportant to be taken to Abia to witness the glorious finale of the most difficult peace negotiations in history. The wedding of the CrownPrince Amril and Carevna Aratea of Seragia, where something went terribly wrong. The little she’d heard about it from Amron was a useless mush in her memory now. She did know, however, what followed afterwards: years and years of bloodshed, meager victories erased by staggering defeats, and death, so much death. Liana had to get to Amron before the bloody cleaver of destiny fell on Abia, had to get him out, away from the madness, back to the relative safety oftheirAbia.
She wanted to run to him but she couldn’t. He wasn’t alone, there were two dozen people between them. So Liana smiled, poured the sweet, iced white wine, and answered dull questions, lying and deceiving the guests into thinking they were interesting. A bearded man pulled her into his lap and she refrained from breaking his teeth, slipping out of his grasp like an eel. A young man, hardly more than a boy, asked for a dance, and then stood staring at her face, holding her wrists in his sweaty hands. She’d seen enough events at the palace to learn the art of light hovering, of making men feel like they had her full attention before disappearing from view.
The sky turned black and the night breeze cooled her hot skin. It felt like an eternity, but it couldn’t have been more than an hour. She saw Amron chat with men and women; one of the girls made him laugh, another lured him into a dance, but he slipped away from them all in his gentle, unobtrusive manner, fading into the background. She lost him from sight for a moment and her heart stopped—she thought he’d left. Then she spotted him alone, sitting under a tree, a glass in his hand. She made a beeline for him this time, a huntress moving silent and unobserved through the forest of drunk men.
“Good evening,” she said softly, sitting down beside him.
“Is it?” he said. “I’m not so sure. I feel mean, and drunk.”
He was lying on both accounts. He’d never been mean and he was still on his first glass of wine. He didn’t even spare her alook.
“Still, I’d like to join you, if you don’t mind,” she said.
“Did my brother send you?”
“What?” She glanced towards Amril, on the other side of the garden, in the spotlight, his arms around a girl. “Gods, no. Not him.”
“Then why—” He turned his face to her and his words trailed off.
• • •
Many years ago,on a night when he’d drunk more wine than usual, when sleep eluded them both, and when she felt it was a good moment for foolish questions, Liana asked, “When did you fall in love with me?”
“The moment I first saw you.” An immediate reply, without hesitation.
