“She doesn’t look sixty,” Riccardo murmured. “Our mother is forty and already has a back hunch...”
“Mama does not have a back hunch,” Beatrice said, defending her mother’s pride in the woman’s absence. “Stop distracting me. I don’t want to trip on my skirt...”
Beatrice smoothed her hands down her veils and pressed her fingers to the hard weight of her belt beneath for courage. They approached the foot of the steps, and Queen Eva’s eyes fell on her. For a moment, she looked up into her new mother-in-law’s face. The crags and valleys of her cheeks were shadowed by the deep blue silk and thick glitters of brocade, her hair tucked behind a white band of a starched wimple. Beatrice had the vague impression of dark eyes and a bow-shaped mouth.
Around Beatrice, men and women both began to file into the church. A deep, rich tune bubbled up from within the walls, covering the sound of feet moving on the squeaky parquet. Aunt Alys hurried past Beatrice inside to get out of the cold. Riccardo drifted along with Lord Gruffydd, who walked in with the King.
Beatrice knelt before the Queen of Ammar and waited. She could not rise until the Queen acknowledged her.
The chilly air blew around them. Beatrice’s thighs began to ache while she held her pose. Finally, when none of the lords and ladies remained outside the church, Queen Eva reached out her hand.
“Take off that belt,” she said.
The sharp crack of the Queen’s voice carried the expectation of obedience. Beatrice glanced up. Queen Eva’s hand thrust out from the folds of her veil, a long, pale pointed finger at Beatrice as if it were the tip of a blade.
Beatrice faltered as the Queen’s attendants moved toward her while she tried to rise. Their hands hitched out from under their veils and reached for Beatrice, pulling up the middle-most tier of her veil to grab for the belt.
Beatrice started to resist, but she felt she couldn’t. Not here, in front of a holy place, in front of her future in-laws.
“I’ll have this melted down for you,” the Queen of Ammar said. From beneath her veil, the shadows around her eyes deepened as her brow pinched into a scowl. “It will be made into coins. Use them to buy yourself something more appropriate to wear on your wedding day.”
Queen Eva swept into the church. Beatrice followed, mortified and confused. How could anyone have seen her belt under a three-tiered veil? And what did the Queen mean by “more appropriate”? Her belt was the finest the Sanchian silversmiths had to offer—she had seen no silverwork in Ammar even approaching its quality!
Confusion curdled to anger. By the end of the hour-long sermon, Beatrice fumed. After the service, when she found herself alone again in Gruffydd’s attic, she tore the veil from her head. She yanked the heavy pocket door shut behind her. Frustratingly, it did not slam as a door should.
Beatrice looked around the little room in Gruffydd’s mansion and felt her anger turn to despair. Her half-opened embossed leather steamer trunks all across the floor, the tabletops covered with her jewelry boxes, ribbons, and bits of brightly colored fabric. She, the daughter of the Duke of Sanchia, who would bring the Golden Fleet to Ammar’s doorstep... was stuffed inside an attic, hidden away like a filthy secret.
I’m not a great lady here, Beatrice thought. She burst into tears.
A little while later, Riccardo came to the top of the steps to plead with her to calm down. He promised to buy her another belt. He didn’t understand that it wasn’t just the belt she wept for.
“I can’t do it,” she sobbed to Riccardo through the door. “I can’t be a Queen here. Take me home. I cannot marry this prince, and I cannot live here. Take me home! I can’t marry him!”
“Don’t cry, Bea—they’ll hear you,” Riccardo said. After a moment, her brother pushed the pocket door open a crack to whisper softly to her: “Come on, now. Think. You may not have to marry him... There’s no prince to marry if the son of a bitch never comes back.”
CHAPTER 3
Maertyn Blackfire watched Prince Anryniel sleep and tried to decide whether she was real or a dream that he had.
He put the cup to his lips, the swirl inside more whiskey now than tea. The share that he’d given to her had gone right to her head. She stretched out on his bed, sword still clutched in her hands.
Maertyn squinted at her. She might have been a boy, he thought. The voice had a hard edge somewhere underneath the soft, royal lilt. Her face was a jumble of pretty but off-putting features: high cheeks, pointy chin, long eyelashes. When he looked at her hair—the color of dried straw—a memory gnawed at the corners of his mind.
He did not hold on to too many of his memories. They were too loud, too vivid. Voices in the dark, the flicker of moonlight on a knife... Many voices raised in prayer.
He caught himself chewing on his thumbnail. His wife had always hated it when he did that. He replaced the thumb in his mouth with the teacup. He glanced again at Prince Anryniel and decided she had to be a dream. He’d been alone too long, that was all. So his mind made up the most interesting person it could imagine—a girl dressed in boy’s clothes and looking for all the world like someone he remembered, even though everyone who had known him was long dead.
By now, the liquor had gone to his head, too. Maertyn had more time than he knew what to do with—so he tried to drink it away. Living alone on what had been his father’s farm wedged into the side of the mountains, it was easy to fill his days with ordinary chores arranged around long, slow sips of whiskey. On some days, he finished an entire bottle before sundown. The day the Prince of Ammar killed a man in his front yard, he made it two.
Maertyn leaned his head back against the chair and dropped into an uneasy sleep. Even if the prince were real, he told himself, she said she’d be gone in the morning. He could sleep it all off—and then go back to being a lonely witch on the mountain. Witches in Ammar were better off that way.
He dreamed that his wife was still alive. That his village still hummed with the sounds of people. He could hear their voices, shouting, laughing, gossiping by the cookfires. Somehow, it was his wedding day again—the priest handed him the ritual cup for his vows. Maertyn raised the cup to his lips and tasted a whiskey he had not had in a very long time. Four Wolves, aged twenty years.
When he put the cup down, Prince Anryniel sat before him, glaring at him.
Half waking, he thrashed. Now his wife was dead, and he was not in his village but in a round room under glass with stars blazing all across the curve of the ceiling. His arms hung above and behind him, his legs manacled to bright, cold silver. Blood ran down his back in stinging lines. A woman stood over him with a curved blade in her little hand. It glittered with starlight.
You see? A high, clear voice sneered. His star is dark—destined to bring misery and woe to all who know him... Take up your crescents, children. God wills it.
When the knife came down, Maertyn jerked out of his chair, his stomach knotted up against his ribs. He made it just outside his front door in time to vomit clear bile into the snow.
It hadn’t been a dream, but memory too stubborn for whiskey to wash away. He reached a hand underneath his shirt and felt the raised marks from where the mages had cut their curse into him. Something in those hard, raised lines changed him forever that day. Cut him off from Nature that would have put lines in his face and gray in his hair. His wife had been dead for fifty years or more, and he looked no older than he had been the year that she died.