“Of course I’m sure. It’s not like we’re ever really going to be safe. I don’t want to wait for something that may never come. Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. But there’s one thing.…” He shifts his feet, scratches his forehead, and flashes an awkward grin. “I feel like an administrator in the king’s palace, tidying up the books. Eager lovers never say things like this in the plays.”
“Things like what?”
He turns serious. “However free we feel right now, my situation means it would be dangerous for you if you got pregnant.”
“Don’t worry. I’m drinking buckwheat tea. It’s what Efean women do to make sure that doesn’t happen. I have no intention of interrupting my Fives career.”
“Only someone who doesn’t truly know you would ask you to do that,” he says with a laugh so genuine and sweet that I can’t imagine another boy who would have found that funny.
His laughter gives me the courage to push the gate open with a foot. We dash inside, and he pulls it shut behind us. In the gloom beyond lie trellises and bowers wreathed in vines and shielded by shrubs.
Yet now that we are here, we stand motionless, two adversaries at a loss for how to take the next step. I keep thinking there is a better move or a best move but there isn’t. There is him, and there is me, and we get to make our own choice, no matter what the people around us say, no matter if our reasons aren’t perfect. Maybe it’s partly that I’m a rebellion for him, while he’s the highborn boy who should have been out of my reach. We don’t always have the right reasons for what we do and what we want.
“I can hear you thinking,” he says, laughter still in his voice. “Jes, sometimes you just have to let yourself fall.”
“All right.” I turn so we stand face-to-face, so our bodies touch all along their length. I lean my cheek against his, and he trembles all over. My lips brush his skin, tasting his eagerness and his yearning. “I’m falling.”
Much later and much sweatier, I sprawl across a wide bench beneath a bower roof of blooming jasmine. Kal sits cross-legged beside me, a hand resting on my knee. I spider-walk my fingers up his spine.
“I could come to like that as much as running the Fives,” I say.
“My thanks for the compliment. I think.”
It’s strange to feel so purely light I might float up to the stars and eat them, one by one, like sweet hot candy. “We would need to practice more to get really good at it.”
He leans against me. “We would need to practice a great deal. Many, many trial runs.”
I start giggling and I can’t stop. Who is this giddy person I have become? I don’t even recognize her and I don’t care.
“Teach me Efean.”
“What?” The words jolt me.
“Teach me Efean. General Inarsis taught me the basic courtesies for addressing people, like Honored Sir and Honored Lady and Honored Dame. I know the numbers and names for food, things like that. But without an interpreter, I can’t talk to Efeans who don’t speak Saroese. I want to be able to ask questions and hear answers without another voice standing between mine and theirs.”
“Why do you want to talk to Efeans?” I ask cautiously.
“I would like to be able to understand what Ro is saying without worrying that the people who are translating aren’t telling me everything.”
This is not the conversation I was hoping to have. I’m not the only one who can’t stop turning Rings in my head.
“Jes, you and I both know Ro isn’t helping me because he wants me to become king. At best he knows we have to drive Nikonos’s foreign allies out of Efea lest the invaders decide to take the land for themselves.”
I’m not ready for the world to intrude. In the distance Ro is still declaiming; it’s a really long play. And I have a better idea than I ever did before of how to distract Kal.
“Very well. I will teach you Efean, although I warn you it is a much more formal and sophisticated language than Saroese, which Efeans consider blunt and crude.”
“Is that so?” He grins.
“So, taking pity on you, I’ll start with something easy, like body parts.” I touch each one as I name them in Efean. “Eyes. Nose. Mouth.”
“I see where this is going.”
“Chin. Throat. Chest…”
He touches a finger to my lips to silence me.
The crickets have stopped buzzing.
Someone is coming.
I yank my dress on. He fumbles to wrap his keldi and tug on his jacket.
Thus we are sitting primly side by side an arm’s length apart on the bench when a lamp shines into view and Mis appears, flanked by several local girls. Fortunately the night covers my flaming blush as the girls grin hugely and look Kal over with more interest than they did before, especially now that the jacket is gaping open to display his attractive chest. He tries to discreetly straighten his keldi, which he’s tied on askew. With an extreme effort, I do not lean over to lace up his jacket.
I await a lecture, courtesy of some bug my mother has put in Mis’s ear, but when she speaks, the words come out almost apologetic.
“A runner came in from a village west of here. Soldiers showed up there, searching for fugitives. Mules are being saddled as I speak.”
“Mules?” I ask. “Not horses?”
Mis sighs with a glance toward Kal, and says in Efean, “The law forbids Efean villagers from owning horses.”
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
She switches back to Saroese. “Kal, these girls will take you to your riding gear to change. I brought your extra gear for Jessamy.”
Kal gives me a secret smile before departing.
“Any other Patron lord would have me whipped for switching to Efean so he can’t understand me,” Mis adds when the others are out of earshot. She plucks at the fabric draping my shoulder. “By the way, your dress is on backward.”
I slap a hand over my face, but what can I do? Despite the seriousness of our situation, we both start laughing.
Yet as I change, more sheepish than I thought I would be at slipping on Kal’s riding trousers, I ask her quietly, “I know why we need an Efean woman to introduce us at every village, but why did you volunteer to help us reach my father? You could be killed if Nikonos gets to us first.”
A half moon casts the garden into a mass of stark shadows and pale contrasts. She picks up my dress and folds it neatly as she replies.
“When I saw Dusty taken away at Crags Fort, I swore to the Mother of All that I would learn to fight. Maybe I’ll never see Dusty again, maybe he’s dead, or cursed to a life of slavery in a land far from here. But I will not stand by while there is a hope we Efeans can take back what should belong to us.”
She pauses, as if wondering if she’s let her passionate anger reveal too much to me, the girl with the Saroese father.
“Don’t worry, Mis. I’ve figured out what’s going on. I just don’t see how Ro’s ragtag Efean rebellion can defeat well-trained and professionally equipped Saroese armies. I’m sorry. I just don’t see it.”
“Of course you don’t.” I can tell she’s disappointed in me, and it stings.
“That doesn’t mean things can’t change. I can convince Father and Kal that we need to do things differently.”