by Anna Bright
“Thank you, Perrault.” I rose quickly and made for the door. “I’ll keep all this in mind.”
But I knew better. I would not keep the knowledge. The dread of what lay in wait would keep me.
Perrault had tried to soothe me. But I could not help imagining the tsarytsya’s eyes on me as we neared the edge of her world.
I sensed her watching as I listened out for Godmother Althea at night on my radio; it was enough to still me when Perrault took me aside during the day because he’d remembered a Yotne phrase he wanted to teach me, or a minor point of etiquette I might find helpful.
I wondered what color the tsarytsya’s eyes were. Would they be amber, the color of a wolf’s? Gray, the color of her Imperiya?
They were every color, I knew, of as many shades as she had spies. A fearful spectrum of blue to black, watching from riverbanks and castle corners.
The fear of them kept sleep from me the night before we reached Shvartsval’d. Anya rested beside me, her expression serene in the moonlight, but I couldn’t follow her.
Something about the calm of her mouth and her breathing gnawed at me. Anya’s peace aggravated the itch beneath my skin.
Careful not to wake her, I rolled out of our bed and slunk upstairs to the deck, barefoot and bare-armed in defiance of the night’s chill. It was black as pitch out on deck. Even with the thumbnail of moon overhead, nights like tonight made me understand the word Shvartsval’d—Black Forest.
The trees here stood tall; the tsarytsya’s woodcutters had not ventured this far into the terytoriya. I wondered what they’d been afraid of.
I’d expected to find Homer or Yasumaro on deck. But it was him. I froze, hand on the stair rail, toes digging into the rough wood grain.
Lang was at the helm.
I backed down the forecastle stairs on tiptoe, silent as the night, and went back the way I came.
I should sleep. I would go back to my room and crawl into bed next to Anya and stare at the ceiling for six hours if I had to.
But I stopped at Lang’s door.
I had never been in his room before. And I’d had no intention of accepting his guilty-conscience offer to repay his offense by invading his privacy whenever I liked.
Captain’s quarters, he’d said that first day, shaking his head, as if he couldn’t believe it, either.
I tried the knob, and found it unlocked.
I crossed the threshold.
Slowly, I took in Lang’s bedroom. The bedclothes were drawn up but not tucked in tidily; on impulse, I yanked them down, exposing the fitted sheet over the mattress. Then I crossed to his wardrobe door and flung it open.
Shirts and trousers were hung inside—the plain things he wore on deck and the richer clothes he’d worn at court. My fingers traced a finely woven shirt and a rough-spun pair of pants and the jacket he’d worn to every ball we’d attended in England and at Asgard.
They all smelled of him—salt. Sweat. The ocean.
I took them off the rack, one by one, and flung them on the bed.
Opposite the closet was a beat-up wooden desk with a hutch above. The desktop was clear, so I reached for the clasp on the hutch’s cabinet doors.
I wasn’t looking for anything. I was merely determined to sack the room, to lay it bare, to leave him feeling as stripped and raw as he’d left me.
I ignored the voice that said Lang’s taking the radio wasn’t what had left me feeling so exposed, that retribution wasn’t what had finally drawn me over his threshold.
The release of the catch sent a flood of papers spilling out of the cabinet, onto the floor. I jumped back, startled, then crouched to collect them.
But I stopped short when I saw myself.
I’d come searching for Lang’s secrets. Instead, I saw myself mapped in paper and ink and charcoal on his floor; myself in profile, my face up close, my figure from afar. My nose and mouth and freckles and lashes as I bent over the sink in the kitchen; my hair tangled down my back and the muscles gathered in my arms as I gardened; the elegant slip of my shoulder into the gown I’d worn to the first tournament ball in England.
My fingers left dirt smudges on the papers. I stared at them, unmoving, for how long I didn’t know.
When I looked up, Lang stood at the threshold. I had not heard the change at the helm; I had not heard anything but my own racing thoughts.
His chest rose and fell, rapid and vulnerable, as he took in the upended room and me on the floor. I gripped the papers artlessly in my fingers, held them up, a helpless gesture.
“What—?” I began.
“Don’t.” Lang’s eyes were desperate. “Don’t ask me what they are.”
I swallowed, thinking of Anya and all the rest of the crew in bed. Of the weapons in the hold, of Asgard behind us and Katz Castle ahead and my father at home, of the radio that had spoken little but silence since I left Torden behind. Of his ring on my left hand, heavy as a hammer.
With Lang’s eyes on me, I felt the weight of the night in my very bones.
Lang’s throat bobbed. He rubbed at his eyes and two fine, dark lashes fell onto his cheek.
That night we’d stood talking late in Asgard’s darkened halls, I’d taken his fallen lashes and made a wish on them.
Here, in the dark, having breached the Imperiya’s gray shadow, wishing for Torden felt foolish. Like the childish daydream of a girl who had read too many fairy tales.
Either way, I didn’t dare draw close enough to touch Lang’s face. Not here, with the two of us feeling as if we were standing at the edge of the world.
The darkest, loneliest part of my heart was certain Torden was lost to me forever.
Was it wrong to find myself in someone else’s room? Or was it wise to accept that what was behind me was past, and take what comfort came my way?
I stared down at the sketches of me on the floor and in my grip, at the longing in every line, and wondered how I would draw Lang, if the pen were in my hands, if I had his talent. I took in his rumpled dark hair, the fine bones of his cheeks and jaw and hands, the elegant bow of his lips and the upturned tip of his nose.
I would sketch him like midnight, alluring and unknown. He was every question I was afraid to ask, every curiosity that had been forbidden to me from the outset of my journey.
My heart was a field planted with so many wants it was difficult to know what needed uprooting and what I should allow to remain.
Nothing was clear. Not my desires. Not the future. Not the difference between wish and hope and expectation.
Lang wet his lips and took a step nearer, then knelt a foot or two away, the sketches a puddle of paper as wide as an ocean between us.
Trembling, I drew back. When my spine collided with his bed, I rose just high enough to sit on the mattress I’d exposed.
Lang’s ink-smudged fingers traced the drawings’ edges, touching each page as gently as if he were skimming his hands over my skin.
When he looked up at me, his eyes were pleading.
They told me he didn’t want to hide anymore.
I bit my lip as he shifted toward me, moving on his knees, kneeling before me where I sat on the bed.
“Selah,” he breathed.
I couldn’t look at him. Fear and anger and endless wanting clenched in my stomach.
“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.
We drifted forward, down darkened halls, past empty, unlit rooms, searching for signs of life. As we wandered over cracked tiles and damp carpets, I saw dusty walls marked with slightly lighter squares, as though portraits had been removed, and rooms lined with empty bookshelves. We caught voices in the distance and hurried toward them.
And then, as we rounded a corner, we found ourselves where we always did, eventually: at court.
7
The hall smelled of damp, of crumbling things.
Crowds lined the walls dressed in worn, fusty-looking clothes, their colors muted with age but not gray; apparently, customs had been relaxed this far out in the empire, as Perrault had predicted they might be. They stood three and four bodies deep in front of peeling gilt and cream wallpaper. Across the scratched mosaic floor, a dais was raised a foot off the ground. And there he was. The hertsoh, the incarnation of the tsarytsya herself here in Terytoriya Shvartsval’d.
Ten girls and a boy stood behind him.
The hertsoh was thin but handsome, probably in his midfifties. His golden-brown hair was streaked with gray, his forehead lined, his nose aristocratically arched. Clad in a wrinkled suit, he sprawled across a faded brocade chair.
Everything in this room must once have been beautiful, from the chipped mosaic underfoot to the water-damaged ceiling overhead. I imagined it as it must have been before: a clo
ud of color, of soft-eyed shepherdesses and sweet-faced cherubs, green trees and blue skies, their edges bright and gilded. As it was now, black mold crept across the faces of the girls and the angels alike, dimming the paint and the gold, and a third of the mosaic tiles were missing. Mildewed mortar filled the spaces where they had lain.
The whole room smelled of decay.
It was nothing like Arbor Hall, with its gentle scents of earth and life and growing things. I was so far from home.
I hoped Daddy wouldn’t blame me for the time I spent away from his side. I hoped he would understand I hadn’t wished to spend it in places like this.
I waited for someone to greet us, but no one had noticed our arrival. When a break came in the chatter between the duke and the courtiers, Perrault steadied himself, and stepped forward. “Hertsoh Maximilian,” he began.
I didn’t understand the rest of Perrault’s address to him or their conference in Yotne, but the duke’s blank look of irritation filled me with dread.
When Perrault finally turned back to us, his words were low-pitched and stilted. “He has no idea who we are.”
For a long moment, I struggled to speak. Were we early? Late? Who had failed to inform him of our coming? Lang and Cobie exchanged a frowning glance, and the court shifted around us, murmuring, restive. Maximilian was still speaking—barking at Perrault in Yotne, seeming to bombard him with questions.
Perrault had not quailed in Norge before the stern looks of its Konge Alfödr, but he dropped his gaze now, fiddling with a frill on his jacket. The sight of my protocol officer looking small and withdrawn as the duke berated him made me angry.
In my dread of today, I’d imagined a hundred wicked welcomes; but this, I’d not foreseen.
I stepped forward, moving around Perrault, lifting my chin even as my hands shook. “Do you speak English?” I asked.
“Of course I speak English. Why does a trespasser in the Imperiya come not speaking Yotne?” He shifted in his seat, sitting forward.