The Emperor and Cole were both quiet, appearing to contemplate their dilemma. Tasia felt her hopes rise.
“Well?” the Emperor said to Cole after a moment’s silence.
Cole nodded slowly. “It does complicate matters, but… I believe I may have a solution, Majesty. May I speak to you about this again tomorrow, after the noontide meal?”
The Emperor nodded his agreement, then rose from the chair behind his desk. He waved a hand at Tasia and Cole. “Very well. We sleep for now. Tomorrow we turn our attention to this assassin. In the meantime, Cole…”
Cole got to his feet. “I will increase the number of guards around the royal family’s wing,” he said. “Especially the guards around Princess Natasia’s apartments.”
Cole gave a quick bow to each of them and left the room as quietly as he’d entered it. Tasia moved to follow him.
“Natasia.”
She turned, one hand still on the door knob before her. “Yes, father?”
“Sit a moment longer.”
She closed the door reluctantly, returned to the divan.
“I know you think I do not understand you. That I do not know how the name of ‘Dorsa’ weighs you down,” he said. “But I understand that weight better than anyone. You think that when I was Prince I did not long to escape my fate? You think I had any say in choosing your mother as my wife?”
Tasia looked down, saying nothing.
“You’ve learned, just as I learned at your age, that the name we carry on our backs shackles us as much as it elevates us,” the Emperor said. “It is fate, daughter. But you can find happiness in your fate once you stop fighting it.”
“You say you understand, but you don’t,” Tasia said. “The fate of a prince is not the fate of a princess. At least your fate was to rule. My fate is to be some lordling’s broodmare while you teach him to rule.”
His bushy brows knitted together, the first sign of his ire. “Mind to whom you speak. And you will be more than a ‘broodmare,’ as you so crudely choose to phrase it. You will be an important support and confidante to your husband.”
“I’m sorry, Father,” Tasia said. She knew she should stop at the apology, but she didn’t. “I don’t want to be a sycophantic lordling’s confidante. He’ll only marry me for your crown, or because his own father forces him into it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do,” she said emphatically. “That’s how every suitor you’ve brought before me has been. You know I speak the truth.” When her father’s brows furrowed a second time, she took a deep breath and reined in her temper. “It’s just that… the duty of a princess is to smile and charm and make the lords feel good about themselves. The only difference between an unmarried princess and a married one is that a married one is also expected to bear children.”
Instead of arguing with her this time, the Emperor gazed at her thoughtfully, stroking his beard. “There are Empresses who were considered leaders in their own right, even during their lifetimes. The Empress Adela, for whom your sister is named, comes to mind.”
Tasia scoffed. “One Empress who was named her father’s heir. In the thousand-year history of the House of Dorsa.”
“There were others.”
“Who?” Tasia demanded.
“Their names escape me.”
Tasia barked out a short laugh. “As I said: one girl-child named heir in our thousand-year history.”
The Emperor frowned. “Sometimes, it seems you wish for us all to believe that your tongue is sharper than your mind.” He pushed up from his desk with a hefty sigh. “The hour is late. Or early, as the case may be. Goodnight, Tasia.”
She echoed his sigh with one of her own. She knew he was right. There was no escaping her fate, and she might as well accept it.
“Goodnight, father.”
4
The sky was still a deep blue, but now tinged with pink, by the time Tasia finally entered her apartments. She was exhausted in every sense of the word — physically, mentally, emotionally — and ready to put the night’s horror behind her. She closed the inner door softly when she entered her bedchamber, hoping not to wake her handmaid. But Mylla was waiting for her, lying crosswise on Tasia’s bed in a thin silk night robe.
The girl rolled onto her side when the door closed, blinking awake and yawning hugely. “You’re home rather late.” Mylla waggled her eyebrows. “Or early, as the case may be. What time is it?”
“Early. Late. Take your pick.” Tasia hung her cloak next to the door, shimmied out of her baker’s girl shift and hung it as well. She turned to Mylla wearing only the rough undergarments she’d searched for so desperately at Markas’s a few hours earlier. She marveled at how much life could change in the span of three hours, at how heavy a price one could pay for simply oversleeping.
“So? How was he?” Mylla asked, then answered her own question with, “Good, I hope, if he’s not sending you home until now.”
Tasia blew out a breath, flopped down back-first on the bed beside the girl who was a year and a half her junior. “Markas is never particularly good — you know that. He’s a bore. And he’s an arrogant and stupid bore, which is all together the worst combination for a man to be.”
Mylla ran the tip of her finger down the exposed skin between the bottom of Tasia’s brasier and the top of her linen drawers. The Princess shivered.
“Then why do you still visit him every week?” Mylla asked. “When you could have just as much fun here with me, in the comfort of the palace?”
Mylla stuck the tip of a finger beneath the string of the linen drawers, then rubbed the plain white cloth between thumb and forefinger. She made a face.
“And how can you stand to wear these? They’re so rough. Don’t they itch you down there?”
Tasia wrapped her palm around Mylla’s thumb and forefinger. “Don’t tease me, Myll. Not tonight.” She took a deep breath and told Mylla everything, from the beginning, even though she was sure it was something her father would have advised her not to do. “No matter how close you come to the people around you, even the highborn, never forget that your station is higher still,” he would say. “A certain amount of distance between you and them is always necessary.”
But Tasia never kept secrets from Mylla. She couldn’t.
Mylla gasped when the Princess finished her story. “Tasia. Please tell me you’re having me on.”
Tasia let out a ragged breath, and she felt the control she’d kept tightly wound in her chest all night begin to unfurl. Mylla was the only one Tasia felt she could be completely herself with.
“How could I joke about this? It was awful, Myll, just awful.” She dropped her voice to a whisper despite the fact that it was only the two of them. “The Wise Man… he had this knife with a black iron blade — I still have it in my bread basket — and his eyes were so filled with hate, I couldn’t… I’ve never seen anyone look at me like that, like he’d do anything he could to wipe my existence into the waste bin of eternity.”