by Angela Boord
The musicians began to pick out a quick, rousing rhythm. Bootheels rattled on the floor as gavaros and serving women swung by each other in a flash of color. Cassis approached the dais, then held out his hand and bowed to my mother, going down low, almost upon his knee.
“Mistiri,” he said, addressing both my mother and my father, “may I request the honor of a dance with your daughter?”
My stomach tightened. My mother looked to my father, whose gaze moved restlessly from Cassis’s bent head to the silks he wore—clean sky-blue silks, dyed in Liera for sure, but the work of whose worms? He might not agree with Cassis about the status of Eterean scholarship, but one could see the thoughts working behind his eyes. He wondered if the silk was ours, and what it would mean to the worms in the trays—who were even now being gorged by feeders and guarded by gavaros—if Cassis di Prinze wore Aliente silk.
Arguments about theater were one thing—the worms, quite another.
You are not silk, my mother said, but did that mean I was more or less important?
My father inclined his head, somberly. I couldn’t tame my smile, and Cassis smiled back at me when he took my hand. His palm was damp with sweat, not soft but not hard, and he gripped me too lightly. I curled my fingers tightly around his, and he blinked again in surprise.
“I thank you, sir,” I said, and he took me into the clomping, whirling throng of dancers, finally away from my father and mother.
“I thought you would never get through them,” I said when we were well away, in the middle of things. Our arms hooked and we whirled around the floor, coming close enough together to speak only once every measure.
“Your parents guard you well,” he said. “It’s to be commended.”
A whirl away, then back.
“But surely, I’m not in any danger from you, am I? The son of such a prominent House?”
His eyes narrowed on me, as if trying to gauge my question. I made myself look innocent. Then he laughed. “Tell me, what is the proper answer to that?”
My stomach fluttered. I laughed shakily, suddenly glad that we were in the middle of a good-natured reel.
But then the dance ended and the music slowed.
Perhaps the musicians had noticed Cassis and me dancing together and assumed I was being courted rather than toyed with, as my mother thought. The glow in Cassis’s eyes seemed sincere enough to me. But perhaps I can be forgiven for conflating desire with love, an easy-enough thing for women of my station.
As it stood, the lutist began to play his slow, sweet music, and Cassis and I reached toward each other. Our fingertips touched, lightly. My fingers were soft, but his were calloused. We were forced to look at each other directly, keeping our eyes on a level at all times.
His eyes were so dark. I saw myself in them, moving through the flickering candlelight. My disheveled curls, our hands as we made our way down the line, elbows crooked, bodies never touching but close enough that my skirts brushed his leg.
His lips grew soft, and I found myself staring at them.
Then he let me go. Startled, I looked up to see a different man bowing low. I hadn’t expected to change partners, even knowing it was the way of the dance. The man—one of our gavaros—raised his palm, and I darted a glance over my shoulder to see Cassis coming up from his bow to place his hand against the hand of one of my mother’s fosters.
But he was looking at me.
In the morning, Cassis and his men left, burdened with twenty cedar caskets of silk and more than a few aching heads from the wine of the night before. Some of the serving women stood near to see them off, waving scarves. I had spent the few hours between dancing and dawn alone, still feeling the heat of Cassis’s palm against mine. My parents didn’t allow me to watch his departure, at least from the doors of our villa. Instead, I observed it all at a distance from my window, the cloud of dust raised by the horses obscuring the figures of the men.
When my mother entered my room later, I still sat at the window, staring beyond our hills at the thin, glittering ribbon of sea that lay along the horizon.
My mother snapped the curtains shut. “We are going to make overtures to Felizio di Caprine for your hand,” she said, without any greeting whatsoever.
I looked up at her, unsure I’d heard her correctly. “Felizio di Caprine is nearly twice my age and killed his first wife in childbed.”
“Felizio is of the main branch of the Caprine and will carry our silk for free if you marry him. He has better alliances with the dye merchants, and his trade contacts lie mainly west, where the Prinze have made fewer inroads.”
“The baby was too big; isn’t that the husband’s fault?” I rose and wrapped myself in my arms. “A marriage with the Prinze would only strengthen Liera. Not just our family, but Liera.”
My mother leaned forward. “This is infatuation talking, Kyrra. A Prinze makes no gestures without a knife up his sleeve. He doesn’t want you. At least not to marry.”
“You might as well sign my death warrant now, Mother, if I’m to be married to be Felizio di Caprine.”
She looked up at the ceiling. “May all the gods have pity on me for having such a stubborn daughter. Felizio di Caprine is best for you and for our House. He’ll treat you well and we won’t have to worry about words that hide daggers. Cassis will come back with our share of the profits, and that will be the end of him.”
“Mother—”
She waved my words away and strode purposefully out the door, slamming it behind her.
Dear gods, I thought, save me from Felizio di Caprine.
If I had known how casually a prayer might be uttered and the extent of the damage it might cause, I would have been more circumspect with my words. But I was named for the goddess of fortune, and so I cast my words to the wind.
And the wind took them and cast them back at me.
A fortnight later, Cassis returned with my father’s share of the money. I was out riding, surrounded by a bevy of attendants including three gavaros, both my maids, and one of our falconers, whom my father required to be present when I hunted. I hunted my own birds, two big, black-masked goshawks, but my father didn’t trust me to do it myself. They were heavy, and it was only through hunting with them that I developed the strength in my right arm necessary to accept their weight on the glove. But I could do it alone. I was even good at it, though most of the credit had to go to the birds.
I had expected word from Cassis in the intervening period and grew sullen when it didn’t come. I argued with my mother in my head, since the only times I saw her were in the company of others, at tea with the women of other hill estates, ones that had been guaranteed free of fever. We were preparing to retire to our mountain lodge, and she couldn’t be bothered with my frivolous, naive desires. She didn’t speak to me again, but I saw her sharp glances and took their meaning.
Then Cassis returned, arriving when my parents were touring the groves and couldn’t immediately be called back.
Instead, he found me.
We met near the mews. My female hawk still sat on my forearm. Blades scraped as gavaros loosened their swords behind me, and Bella gasped.
“Lady Kyrra,” Cassis said, inclining his head as his horse stamped impatiently in the dust.
The sight of him startled me into familiarity. “Cassis! Do you come on business?”
“Yes.” He flashed me a smile. “And to see you. Do you think your parents will appreciate some good news?”
I laughed, startled. “Truly? You’ll be making an offer for my hand?”
He directed his gaze to the dust. “I couldn’t get you out of my mind this past fortnight.” Then he angled his head up to watch me again and smiled.
A Prinze makes no gestures without a knife up his sleeve. I searched his face for guile but found none. Felizio di Caprine was foremost in my thoughts, anyway; my parents had sent a courier out five days earlier, riding at speed. It only seemed logical that my parents sought to betroth me before the Prinze could act, regardl
ess of how old I was.
But wouldn’t this match, Aliente and Prinze, do more for Liera?
“My parents will have no choice but to appreciate your father’s decision,” I said.
His smile became a long, thin line. “Yes. I suppose so.”
At my shoulder, Mam whispered, “Kyrra, this isn’t proper.”
“I’m chaperoned, aren’t I?” I said, without taking my gaze away from Cassis’s face. “I’m in no danger from you, am I, nesters?”
In response, he slid down from his horse and let the reins fall as he approached us. The sleeves of his shirt—indigo satin—fluttered in the wind as he held his hand up to me, where I sat astride my own mount. “I mean you no harm. I’ll make your parents see.”
In his brown eyes I saw only truth. I cannot say, with the benefit of hindsight, that I noted anything more or less in their depths. I was a girl, and he was beautiful and forbidden, and with these words, I fell in love with him. I would not have seen wickedness in him if he had worn it like a scar across his face.
When he took my hand, my fingers shook. He ran his thumb over my knuckles in a rough caress, then let me go and mounted his horse again.
As he made to turn back down the path, he said to me, “I’ll see you again, Lady Kyrra. If not this afternoon, then on the morrow. In this, I won’t be stopped.”
I thrilled to find myself with a lover who made such declarations.
I was afraid my parents would abandon Cassis when we left for the lodge. But at dinner that night, Cassis announced that he would accompany us. My parents could do nothing about it, and desperate thoughts of Felizio di Caprine flitted in my mother’s eyes.
But Cassis pledged that he meant no harm to me or my house, and my father, who abided by the old laws governing hospitality, threw open his doors to him, as a good host does to a guest. Cassis had complete freedom on the estate, could roam as he wished, could accompany us to the lodge…
And could venture into the conservatory, where I played the harp, alone, unguarded.
In truth, my serving maids should have been with me. But I slunk out while they were still attending morning chores, gave a leftover sweet cheese pastry to the young gavaro who stood at my door, and went down to the one place no one would ever expect me to go.
I didn’t like playing the harp. But I cherished being alone. I fed the lorikeet some slips of bread I’d secreted in my pockets, and I sat down to pick at the strings until someone came to take me back to my chambers. The muslin curtains swirled over the marble tiles, the hot wind doing nothing to cool my skin. I pulled at the bodice of my dress for relief.
Then I looked up and saw Cassis standing there. He didn’t smile. The lorikeet squawked and beat its wings against the cage.
“You’re unguarded, Kyrra,” he said.
My breath came fast. “I know.”
“Have your parents learned that I’m no threat, then?”
I smiled at him. “They will. But today, I’m here on my own. My maids think they hold the keys to my prison, but they don’t.”
He hesitated. “No one knows where you are?”
“Not yet. Though I imagine they’ll figure it out soon enough.”
He seemed to consider that. Then he stepped closer to me, so close I could smell him. He was a swirl of scents, musk and sweat, cedar, lavender. “If I did mean you harm, you wouldn’t send me away. Would you?”
It was a strange thing to say. A strange thing to explain now, years afterward, that I knew exactly what he meant. For a moment I felt thin, as if he had seen into me. But perhaps he had heard stories about headstrong Kyrra, who never did as she was told, whom men courted only for the worms in her father’s nursery.
“No,” I said.
He bent and kissed me.
There were footsteps in the hall soon enough. We ducked out the window into the garden, giggling like fools. We darted along the rose hedge and fetched up laughing amongst the lilacs, now green and out of bloom. Small drops of dew still hung from the undersides of their leaves. We rattled them off with our passing and streaked our silks with water.
“You were never meant to be held so tightly,” Cassis whispered to me. “Your parents should let you out.”
“Oh, it’s my fault,” I whispered back. “I disobeyed them so much when I was younger.”
“Do you regret disobeying them now?”
I shook my head. “No.”
He frowned. It wasn’t the response I’d been expecting. I drew back a little. “Have I said something? Shall we go back to the conservatory?”
He seemed almost to shake himself. “No!” he said, then more softly, “No. It’s too long to wait, to do it that way.”
I raised my eyebrow. He sighed and reached out to wind one of my curls around his finger. The gold caught the light and glistened like metal. I looked away from it and up to his face. “Do you blame me for wanting to know you first?”
“No,” I said. His finger trailed away from my hair and I shivered. “I wouldn’t have come if I did.”
He moistened his lips and leaned near me. I met him in this kiss.
It was not like the first, no innocent meeting of our mouths. He pressed his mouth down hard on mine, as if he’d better do it fast, before he lost his courage. But it awakened in me a hunger to match. At first, that frightened me and I tried to push him away. “Cassis,” I said, thinking that I hadn’t known what knowing entailed.
But he gripped my shoulders and murmured, “No, Kyrra, don’t,” his lips brushing the lobe of my ear, and though I was frightened, I didn’t want him to go away, to leave me unsatisfied in the midst of the summer heat. So, instead, I pulled him down and swallowed his kisses with my own.
His lips were hot on my neck. His calluses caught at the silk of my dress and his hands shook as he fumbled at the laces of my bodice. When he pressed his lips to my breast, I cried out and he drew away.
It was the last moment of turning back, one we both cast aside. But it hurt at the end, not what I was expecting, and I bled on my skirts and frantically tried to rub out the spot, sobbing as more blood trickled down my thighs. Cassis ran his finger through it.
“Now neither of us is innocent,” he whispered.
I moved about in a dream for the next two weeks.
The servants packed up our clothes, soaps, perfumes and shampoos, casks of wine, boxes of books, cases of flour and lard. The gavaros saw it all loaded onto wagons. My father took care of the last details demanded by the worms, and Cassis supervised his own men and spoke with my father. As a declared guest, Cassis bore certain responsibilities, and one of them was that he would not harm the householder’s property or his daughter.
But I slipped away and aided Cassis in breaking that rule.
I met him in the conservatory twice. In the garden again, once, and for only a few hasty moments, which left me smoothing my rucked-up skirts in a hurry.
The stables were my favorite. A few stolen moments were all we had, anywhere, but the excitement made up for it, that delicious rush of reckless fear and defiance, the knowledge that we might be caught any moment. That was why I liked the stables best. We only met there twice, tucked under an eave in the hayloft. But it was twice while the grooms and gavaros moved about in the yard and might have entered the stable at any moment. I bit my lip to keep from crying out at the end, digging my fingernails into his back, and he held me so tightly, I thought I would suffocate. Out in the yard, men called to each other, and below us, horses snorted and stamped their hooves.
How stiff and cold and official it would have been with Felizio di Caprine. When Cassis took me to wife, we would make love on the bed or the rug or the table, anywhere we pleased. We would rut like animals if the moment grabbed us, or make love as tenderly as if we danced the gavotte.
But it didn’t take long for me to worry that I might become pregnant, and I wondered why I had not been called down to the receiving room, to hear the official courting announced.
“Is my father
stalling?” I would whisper, in those precious few moments when I held him in my arms, after he’d spent himself. “My parents don’t trust you.”
He would nuzzle my shoulder, then roll away from me and sit up, brushing off his damask or satin and pulling taut the laces of his open breeches. “Politics is a delicate art, like dancing. Don’t fear.”
Sometimes he would touch me, other times not. The last time, I hugged myself, the laces of my bodice still half-undone. “My mother was fertile,” I said, and he put his hand on my knee and looked into my eyes.
“And that is a good thing.”
Any marriage I made, to Cassis or Felizio di Caprine, was contingent on what the conjure-women and genealogists had to say about my own fertility and the fertility of my family. It was already a black mark against me that my mother had only borne one surviving child and that a daughter, although she’d also once conceived and delivered a stillborn boy. The Caprine were in general the most fertile of Houses, a fact which infuriated the Prinze. Cassis’s elder brother had married a fertile woman but so far had produced only two daughters.
It couldn’t go on forever.
Cassis had made his way to my window after dark that night. The next day we would finally leave for the lodge; our stay at Villa d’Aliente had extended because our worms would not eat, though the silk-master coerced them with every trick he knew—harvesting the leaves only under a full moon and soaking them in the collected drops of morning dew, bringing in a lutist. But finally, the worms ate and we were going to leave.
I pleaded a headache that night and retired early. I blew out the candles and waited until the moon had risen a fourth of the way in its path across the sky, the agreed-upon time for our meeting. Then, as quietly as I could, I unshuttered my window and leaned out. Cassis threw me a rope, which I made fast to the leg of my bed.