“I wasn’t,” he says, sliding a hand up to my breast, making me gasp. “You just didn’t believe me.”
“To be fair to me,” I say, with some effort, as what he’s doing right now is very distracting, “most of what you say comes out as a joke.”
He lowers his mouth to my neck again, and is tonguing the skin there with long, wet, sucking kisses. “It may sound that way,” he murmurs, “but it rarely is.”
“How is anyone,” I gasp, “meant to know when to take you seriously?” I gasp again; he’s moved his mouth down to my breast, and is kissing my—as it turns out, very sensitive—nipple through the thin fabric.
He pauses and lifts himself up on his forearms, and gazes at me. “There’s some sort of saying about actions and words and which means more,” he says, his eyes glittering. “If only I could recall it.”
“If you’re somehow referring to the fact that you spent months stealing cobwebs and scraps of paper from me…” I trail off, as I don’t really seem to have the ability to string a coherent, complex thought together. “You joke,” I amend, “and then you steal thingsand leave seashells and crab claws behind, and I’m supposed to take from all that that youweren’tjoking when you told me you were overwhelmed by my great beauty?”
“Are we talking or are we spending a passionate night together before the dawn breaks and the cock crows and your mother terrifies some poor bloke into breaking your curse? Because if we’re talking, we should probably put more clothes on, lest we become distracted.”
“I’d prefer the passionate night, please, but I hope you don’t mind if I ask you to take off your pants at some point. I’ve only ever seen sculptures of fully nude men, and even then they had fig leaves or conveniently arranged stumps in the way, and I didn’t learn very much.”
He laughs. “Very well; I will remove my pants and you may feast your eyes upon my manly glory while I try to answer your inevitable questions. But”—his expression turns serious for a moment—“I don’t think we should have sex.”
I’m glad it’s dark and he can’t see my blush. “Virginity is a very old-fashioned thing to get hung up on,” I say. “My sister wasn’t a virgin when she got married.”
He smiles a little sadly, and reaches up to brush my cheek. “Tandy, up until about an hour ago, you’d never even kissed anyone you actually wanted to kiss. I am more than happy staying awake all night, doing absolutely everything with you that you want to do, but don’t feel that you have to rush things, or that you won’t have an absolutely marvelous time unless we have sex. We have all night, and I’m planning to make it quite a memorable one, no matter what.”
Chapter 46
Morning comes too quickly, the light filling my little room too brightly. Beside me, Bash makes a pleasant little noise, and I tamp down the urge to close the box bed up entirely and hide until someone forces me to leave. But no; that wouldn’t do, so I push myself up and find my clothes, and give myself a thorough wash at the basin, and cast the little spells that make me feel fresh and presentable: clean hair, clean face, clean nails. I’ve got a bit of lavender and rosemary essence I boiled down a month ago as a first effort at a scent, and I dab it on my wrists and my temples. It’s a far cry from the expensive perfumes I used to wear, the same scents that swirl around my mother and sister, but it’s a scent I made myself, and it reminds me of…of home, my mind whispers, but I push the thought away.
I go digging through my clothes—and Mrs. Gooch’s, of course—wondering what I could possibly wear that won’t give my mother fits, but everything is old and soft and not remotelycourtly; the closest thing I’ve got is the traveling gown I was wearing when this whole thing kicked off. I pull it out and stare at it. I haven’t worn velvet in months, and I haven’t missed it: heavy, suffocating fabric that it is.
“S’that what you’re wearing to the gallows?” Bash asks. I glance over at him; he’s on his stomach, arms crossed, regarding me. He’s naked, and the blanket only just barely covers his lower half. I blush a little.
“I have no idea,” I admit. “Nothing’s what my parents would think of as good enough, and I can’t stand the thought of putting this one on.”
He shrugs and rolls over. “Wear whichever one makes you happiest,” he says, putting his hands behind his head and regarding the ceiling of the box bed.
“Easy for you to say,” I retort. “You wear the same clothes every single day.”
“And now you know why,” he says.
I sigh and look down at the heap of fabric at my feet.
“The gray dress,” he says. “You like it and it’s pretty.”
“How do you know I like it?”
“You always twirl when you wear it.”
I do like it, and it is pretty. But I don’t want my last memory of it to be caught up in all the other last memories. I fold it up and set it aside, and choose a green skirt with a white blouse and green vest. Then I take the stack of paper—the letters I’d written to Honey and never sent—and begin to feed them to the fire. I hear Bash behind me, dressing, moving about, and then he sits in the chair closest to me and watches me until the last sheet is gone.
“What was that?”
“As a royal personage,” I say, watching the fire flicker, “everything I write is considered part of the historical record. WheneverI would write to Honey, for example, asking for information or a book, I knew that she wouldn’t be the only person reading my letter: my parents surely would, and likely my sister, maybe a few ministers. Probably whichever sorcerer they eventually found for me. And then it’d be numbered and dated and sent to the archives.
“So I also wrote these letters. They were addressed to Honey but I suppose they were really letters I was writing to myself. Like a journal. I’ve been promising myself I’d destroy them for ages, and last night I realized that they were hardly even hidden; if Mother had started pulling open drawers, she’d have found them immediately, and then…” I look over at him. “They’d never have understood. They’ll send me straight to the College of Infirmities after the curse is broken if they ever lay eyes on what I wrote.”
He’s silent for a long moment. “Everyone deserves their secrets,” he finally says.
“I suppose. But now mine have to go back to living inside me,” I say. I can hear the sadness in my own voice. “Tea?”
“Not if you’re serving that horrifying black sludge, thank you very much.”
