The Lady Sheridan, a good follower of Rodwin, made the gracious gesture of adopting the boy as her own, but that was heroutward behavior. Behind closed doors she treated the boy as she had treated his mother, like a servant.
Thane was better looking and kinder than his brother. Because he would not be the next Sheridan lord, he was allowed a freer roam than Bertram. When he was thirteen, he encountered my sister and me playing at the edge of the Nyossa forest.
Our dresses were wet, sticking to us both from summer sweat and the river that flowed from Nyossa into our town. We had ridden one of our father’s horses out of town, past Magda the midwife’s run-down little farmhouse, and tied the dam to a tree. After picking our way past the dense twist of trees covered in vines, we had dipped in the river that glowed from the phosphorescent moss on the riverbed rocks.
“What do you do here?” came a boy’s voice.
We both whirled from where we stood next to the horse.
Thane sat on a black stallion that was worth three times the swaybacked mare we rode. He was tall for a boy our age, his face fine featured, eyes and hair dark, shoulders already broadening though the rest of him was lean.
“What doyoudo here?” I replied, willing away the red in my face. This boy had witnessed me boxed more than once in the last few winters. I was not ashamed, but I knew I was supposed to be, and I did not know how to explain that to either myself or anyone else.
The boy dismounted and walked towards us, the stallion’s reins in his hand. “My mother has complained I am underfoot. So I have left the castle for the day. I hope she has forgotten her frustrations when I return for dinner.”
It was this confession that made me relax my defenses. Everyone in town knew he was not really the Lady Sheridan’s son.
“Have you ever gone inside Nyossa?” Rowena asked, her manner more inviting than my own.
“No,” answered the boy, shaking his head and stepping even closer. His eyes flitted over both of us, and I found myself irked when he went from looking at me to Rowena.
We looked alike and yet were different. Her hair had been a brighter color as a babe and had deepened into a gold with a red hue as she grew. Her eyes were larger and brighter, a doe brown. She smiled easily and was considered the beauty of us two. I had similar features, but my eyes were a muddy hazel color, not deep enough to be brown nor vibrant enough to be green. My hair was a sort of chestnut color but was much less silken. And at our age, my body was taking on more weight, thickening everywhere, especially my hips and rear.
“They say it is a heathen place,” Thane went on. “That it is where one of the pagan Tintarian goddesses lives. Is that so?” He now stood an arm’s length from us.
I found myself taken aback by his beauty. I had never wanted anything before aside from books, freedom, and solitude. But nearing thirteen, though I did not understand it, I wanted him. I wanted to touch that face.
I thought of Una’s journal, her passage about her husband’s kisses melting her like thin metal over fire. They had disliked their arranged marriage in the beginning, but still somehow they had fallen in love.
“No,” Rowena laughed. “It is not heathen! Mother Earth doesn’t reside here, silly. That is just what Tintarians teach their children.”
Whether it was her natural charm or his being a kindhearted boy, he was not upset by her teasing. “Ah,” he said, smiling. “It is safe then.”
It was my first experience with jealousy. I burned with it.
“It is and it is not,” I chimed in. “If you know nothing of the Farthest Four, you may not know how to show the proper respect. So you had best be careful.”
Thane’s head turned to me. “Maybe you had better show me? I have always wanted to see Nyossa. But I have been warned not to enter it.”
“We can show you,” my twin offered.
“We were just leaving,” Iproclaimed.
“Meet me here tomorrow,” he replied. “Please?” he tacked on as if realizing he, though a bastard, sounded like a lord’s son—commanding, entitled.
Rowena promised we would.
After he mounted his horse and rode away, I turned to Rowena. “We cannot play with a lord’s son. We certainly cannot skinny-dip with him.”
She waved a hand at me. “Oh I think you would love to dip in the Nyossa rivers with him. You fancy him.”
I glared at her. “What does that mean?”
“I know you,” she said more seriously. “You like the look of him. You always have.”
“Always have?”
“He always casts such sad looks at you when you are boxed, and you refuse to look at him. You have always looked anywhere but at him in church.”
