“I’m angry at you,” I whispered. “I’m supposed to be angry at you.”
But when I avoided his gaze, there I was, seen through his eyes in his drawings—beautiful, the object of such longing.
I was everywhere in this room. And everywhere I was, there was Lang.
My chest rose and fell as Lang crawled nearer, heedless of the drawings on the floor. I bit my lip.
Slowly, Lang wrapped his arms around my waist, and dropped his head into my lap.
“I’m mad at you,” I said again, my voice breaking, even as my hands fisted themselves in the shoulders of his shirt, even as the fabric caught on the stones of Torden’s ring. “I’m furious. You’ve done everything wrong.”
“I’ll take it,” Lang said. “I’ll take all your anger. All your burning. All your fire.” He looked up at me.
I swallowed, guilt and fear and hunger and dread fighting for control.
“Maybe I’ll be smart, and when I burn myself, I’ll learn to stay away,” Lang said, swallowing, and shook his head. “Or maybe you’ll be all I want to keep me warm.”
He then devisde himselfe how to disguise; . . .
Sometime a fowle, sometime a fish in lake,
Now like a foxe, now like a dragon fell,
That of himselfe he ofte for feare would quake . . .
—The Faerie Queene
6
TERYTORIYA SHVARTSVAL’D, IMPERIYA YOTNE: KATZ CASTLE
It was raining when we reached Katz Castle the next day around dusk.
An angry sky wrung itself out on the deck and the lines and the sails and the moss-gray trees on the banks. Water dripped through my hair and down the back of my neck and into my shoes, but at least my trunks were dry, wrapped in oiled cloth to protect their contents.
My radio was safe aboard, where Yu and Homer and Lang had demanded I leave it. It was inside my storybook, which I’d also left behind, per Perrault’s advice.
And the precious guns and powder in our hold were cozy and perilously dry while I stood soaked to the bone on deck.
I shook with anxiety and cold, refusing to let the sparks that Lang had struck the night before warm me.
I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust myself. I would keep my distance, and keep us focused. Lang himself had warned me what could happen if fire caught, that night we argued over a candle.
You wouldn’t mean to do anything. But a single stray spark could burn us alive.
We were a skeleton crew going ashore, Perrault, Lang, Cobie, and me. The others would remain with the ship, though. Skop and Anya had both pressed to come ashore.
“I’m the first mate!” Skop had insisted. “I should—”
“Be guarding our cache,” Lang had said in a voice that brooked no dispute. “As first mate, your duty is to the Beholder. You stay aboard. Anya, too.”
I hadn’t argued. Neither had I missed the hurt in Anya’s eyes.
I’d welcomed the prospect of a brief respite from her presence with more relief than I cared to admit.
I hadn’t known how to explain how much space I needed to heal. To forgive her for something she’d never meant to do.
Cobie and Lang reached for the oars once we were all in the rowboat. The scent of rain and river water filled my nose. Perrault huddled beneath a massive raincoat, looking forlorn. “The Neukatzenelnbogen directly overlooks the Reyn,” he said, retreating deeper beneath his coat. “At least our journey will be short.”
The protocol officer studied me, his dark eyes unsettled, white teeth gnawing on his lip. When he glanced at my hands, his brows shot up.
“Not the right hand,” he said softly, nodding at Torden’s ring on my fourth finger.
“But I thought—” I broke off, swallowing hard. I’d taken my engagement ring from my left hand and put it on my right as I dressed that morning.
Torden and I had left one another with no promises—at least, none I believed we could keep. But it felt like a betrayal nonetheless.
“Many in this part of the world wear wedding and engagement bands on their right hands,” Perrault corrected me. “I’d advise wearing it on your first or middle finger.”
“Very well.” A lump grew in my throat as I tugged the band off and slid it onto the index finger of my right hand. It fit well enough.
“There,” Perrault sighed. His eyes were troubled. “You’re officially unpromised once more.”
His words left me aching.
As Perrault nodded at me with grim satisfaction and began again to advise me in low, cautious tones, I couldn’t avoid Lang’s eyes.
He glanced down at my hand, expression unreadable, and arched an eyebrow in my direction. Guilty heat swept from my collarbone to my hairline, and I shifted and looked away.
I wondered how many more small missteps I would make before the day was out, and how much each would cost us.
I would have to be careful every minute of my stay.
When we finally docked the rowboat at a small wooden pier and heaved our things across its wet planks, I glanced around for our escort up to the castle, remembering suddenly—vividly, with a pang in my heart—the roll of a carriage over cobblestones and the English countryside, the slow trot of golden horses past Norskmen and their fields.
We stared around for a few long moments, squinting into the dripping trees. Rain pattered over the sodden fallen leaves at our feet. The path into the forest was dark, damp, and entirely silent.
The nerves that had been slowly ballooning in my chest deflated. No one was waiting for us.
Cobie sighed and seized the handle of my trunk. “Well, we’d better get going.”
The four of us tramped up the hillside, sweating and huffing and wiping rain out of our eyes as we negotiated the wooded hill and its switchbacks, its sludge, its fallen trees. Night had well fallen by the time we reached Katz Castle’s great wooden doors; Perrault was pale and clammy. Even Cobie and Lang were panting from carrying our things.
Perrault’s voice was breathless with effort. “This is not how I had hoped to present you.”
“This is not how I hoped to arrive,” I replied, for once in agreement with him. My boots and skirt were covered in mud, and my legs shook with more than exhaustion as I stared up at the high castle walls.
A wolf howled from the iron door knocker, its maw stretched wide.
I shuddered, but I grit my teeth and did not let myself be deterred.
I lifted the knocker three times, each time letting it drop so its echo could announce us.
Lang bent his head down to my ear. His breath was warm against my cold, prickling skin.
“Please,” he said. “Please let me do my job here. Please keep to yours, so I can keep you safe.”
Cover us, he was asking. Court Fürst Fritz, and don’t cause trouble.
Stand still somewhere and look pretty, he might as well have ordered me.
We waited in the rain. Water squelched in my shoes. But as before, when we’d waited beside the Reyn, no one came.
Finally, Cobie shoved on the door, and it gave. No one was standing guard. There was no one in sight at all.
I exchanged a glance with Lang. He shook his head; water coursed down his high cheekbones and his nose.
“On we go,” Perrault said, giving me a bracing nod. But the confidence was a thin facade.