“Private, silent, and all but unused. How clever of you to find it.”
He shrugged. “When I first came to the castle I enjoyed roaming through it, discovering bits of its history. I have long kept this room as my secret—I have the only key. There are so many chambers here in the residence that even when we are full up with guests, nobody bothers with it. Even the maids do not come in.” He sat up so he could better watch her dressing. “I needed a place where I can steal some time for myself, especially when I have to exercise Count Eolair’s duties as well as my own.”
“And that is all you ever do here?” she said, then lifted her foot to pull on her hose, showing him the smooth length of her leg. “Truly, Lord Pasevalles?” Her flirtatious manner had a hint of something deeper, something Pasevalles could almost scent—a touch of desperation, perhaps.
“I promise you, Idela, you are the first lover I have ever brought here.”
“I choose to believe you.” She turned and crawled across the bed to kiss him, wearing only hose and her half-donned shift. Her curling hair draped either side of his face like the curtains on the bed canopy. She dragged her breasts slowly across his chest as their lips met.
“My mother-in-law will be furious,” she said. “But I could be a little late.”
“You should not,” he said, pushing gently on her shoulders. “Remember, one of their chief complaints with Morgan is that he is always late—when he shows up at all. Let us not remind them of his faults in his absence.”
She pouted very prettily. “I expect the man I bed to be quite mad with lust for me, not to speak with practical good sense.”
“Then you should pick younger men, my beautiful one. Remember, I am quite old and that means, I fear, a certain practicality.”
“Mmmmm.” She leaned close again to kiss him one last time, so he could feel her skin upon his, her breasts upon his chest. “You are not so old as all that, Lord Chancellor. Oh! You have made me tingle all over, all over again, dear, dear Pasevalles.”
“And you have brought something into my life that has been long missing,” he said. “But now we must both get up and attend to our duties, so that we may have this in the future. Discretion, Princess, discretion! This household is a thousand mouths and two thousand ears just waiting for interesting tittle-tattle.”
She sighed, but sat up and returned to hunting for her clothes, cast here and there in the heat of their first moments. “When will we be together again?”
“Soon, I pray. It will be difficult with the escritor and all his retinue coming tomorrow, but we will find time, I promise.”
“You had better. I am a religious woman, but I do not consider an escritor, even when sent by His Sacredness himself, an acceptable excuse for you to stay away from me.” She stood and stretched, showing him her pale ribs and belly before pulling her shift back down in mock modesty. “Goodness! I forget myself—and in front of our respectable lord chancellor, too!”
“You are truly beautiful, Highness,” he said, and meant it.
“And I am yours,” she said, without any mockery at all.
Their lovemaking had been stormy, almost angry. At times in the darkness he had felt as though he lay not with his wife of so many years, but some she-beast of the wild forest, all snarls and scratches. Afterward, they lay panting, side by side but not touching.
“Why?” he said again, when he could talk. “Tell me why?”
“I have already told you, and you know I am right. There is no other way.”
“That wasn’t what I was going to ask you.”
“What, then?” She sat up. “Sweet Elysia, it is so hot.” He heard her fumbling toward her table, then a moment later he heard the clink of ewer against goblet as she poured herself watered wine. He listened to her swallowing. How strange it was, to live in the dark! How different it made things. Even the familiar sounds made by his familiar wife were transformed into little mysteries.
“Why did you marry me?” he asked.
“What? That is a foolish question. I married you because I loved you as I loved no one else, before or since.” But something in her tone made her words seem odd and false to his ears.
“If that is true, it doesn’t explain why you are so often angry with me.” He didn’t mean to sound like a hurt child, but he knew that he did. At the moment, though, hidden by the darkness, he did not care. “When we argued earlier, you all but called me ‘kitchen boy.’ As if, despite more than thirty years of being a king, of ruling at your side, I was still a child you thought you had to instruct.”
“No, no. That’s not true. It’s not even fair.” He heard her bare feet pad across the floor, felt the bed sag slightly as she climbed back in. “It’s just . . . sometimes I lose patience.”
“As you would lose patience with a child. Or a simpleton.”
“Simon, please. It isn’t like that. Not truly.” Her hand found his in the darkness and curled within it, like an exhausted animal looking for shelter. “I love you so much that it sometimes makes me think I would go mad without you. But sometimes you don’t seem to think beyond what you can see, what you can reach. If someone tells you they mean well, you believe them. If someone fails you but tries hard, you never punish them, or even dismiss them.”
“Isn’t that what Usires taught? ‘The weakest of thee, the poorest of thee, those I love the most.’”
“Usires was not a king! He did not have the safety of all the world to consider. He was a fisherman’s son.”
“Like me.”
“By the Holy Tree, Simon, see how you do it again! These are important matters.”
“And you are saying that the souls of men, which Usires tried to save, are not important?”
She pulled her hand away. “Are you being difficult by intention because you are still angry with me?”
“Oh, am I the angry one?”
“Just now you are.”
He bit back what he would have said, and for long moments they lay side by side in silence.
“I’m afraid, Miri,” he said at last. “I’m not angry, I’m afraid.”
This time his wife’s reply was careful and quiet. “What do you mean? Afraid of what?”
“Everything. That I’m a fool blind chance has made a king. Or even worse, that I may have been destined for this throne, but I have disappointed destiny.”
She said nothing for a while. The darkness seemed as thick as treacle, covering everything. “Miri?” he asked at last.
“I fear being a disappointment to our people, too,” she said quietly. “It would be a wicked ruler, I think, who didn’t. But that is not my greatest fear. I have already seen that come true.”
Simon understood, and now it was his turn to fall silent.
“I miss him too,” he said at last.
“Every day,” Miri replied. “And the strange thing is, I don’t merely miss him in one way. I miss the clever young man who died, but I also miss the baby he was, that chortling, fat-legged cherub who used to pull my sewing box down and then sit in the middle of all those pins and needles, laughing. I miss the boy who so badly wanted to shoot a bow, and then wept when he actually shot a bird. I miss all the different John Josuas at the same time. How can that be?”
“Death is a stain,” Simon said. “It leaks into everything and taints it.”
“Aedon preserve me, I know the truth of that! Every memory, every keepsake. I could not even look at John Josua’s possessions for a long time, and still I cannot see them as anything but things he will never use again.” She laughed, short and bitter. “Perhaps that is why I sometimes dislike Idela so. Because to me she is something of his, left behind.”
Simon considered. “Doctor Morgenes once told me that, in old Khand, they would kill the king’s wives and concubines when he died, so that they could accompany him to the next life.”
“Dear Simon,” she said. “I will leave word in my testament that they are not to kill you when I die.”
He smiled, but she could not see that in the dark, so he reached out and found her hand again, then squeezed it. “And I will do the same for you, dear Miri. But you may feel free to leap into my grave, as long as it’s your own idea.”
Miriamele giggled. “Oh, how horrible we are,” she said. “What if God hears us?”
“God always hears us. But He made us, so He must know what we’re capable of. That’s probably God’s First Rule—let nothing shock You.”
After another silence, Miriamele said, “I lied to you a moment ago, Simon, but I didn’t mean to. I’m not just frightened of being a disappointment. I’m afraid for Morgan. I do not like it that he has gone away into those wild lands. I’m angry I can’t protect him.”