by Jill M Beene
“You are correct,” Samiris said, nodding. “But I already have someone chosen for that position.”
“And who might that be?” Lady Evanora purred, leaning forward, an interested light in her eye.
“His name is Kalan. He’s a local boy back home.”
“So you have no interest in... hooking a larger fish and taking it home with you?” Lady Evanora said, a kind look on her face. “A nobleman, perhaps? Or a soldier?”
Did Samiris imagine it, or did Lady Evanora’s eyes flicker in suspicion?
“None whatsoever,” Samiris said, feeling remarkably open and honest in the moment. “I don’t want a husband at all, but if I must take one, it will be someone easily controlled. I don’t see a nobleman or a soldier fitting that description.”
“I agree,” Lady Evanora said, then turned to face the table. “You will all get your chance to see the other... options... available to you after the Choosing season is complete. The Crown Prince’s Championship begins tomorrow, and all of the most eligible men in the kingdom will be there.”
This announcement was met with a fresh round of titters and elbows bumped suggestively into neighbors’ sides. Most of the ladies were excited, their cheeks flushed, their eyes bright. Samiris had to swallow down her irritation, stop her eyes from completing the roll they longed to perform.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Later that day, Samiris found herself sunk in a bad mood, as surely as if she were knees deep in a mud pit. Her thoughts swirled around Cyra’s abandonment, Narcise’s cruel nature, the idiocy of the entire royal court, the daftness of the Crown Prince, the stubbornness of Artem... On top of all that, Samiris was irritated that she was considered one of the Chosen.
All those ladies did was sit. They walked to their dinners, teas and sewing groups, but they did it slowly, looking like a slow-moving herd of uneven, lumbering animals. When they got wherever they were going, they settled themselves onto poufs, deeply upholstered settees, divans and velvet couches and waited patiently to be entertained. Samiris couldn’t stand it. After days of this nonsense, she was bored.
Samiris feigned a headache, certain that no one would miss her. She dressed in her old clothes, clothes that she had been wearing to breakfast in the kitchens early every morning, clothing she shoved deep in the unused chest of drawers in her bedroom so Cloris wouldn’t find them. Her comfortable breeches and tunic on, she pulled on her worn leather boots, and tied her hair back at the base of her neck, letting the length of it play down her back. She didn’t have to braid her hair into a bun; there were no forests here, no branches to tangle and twine into her hair, jerking her head back.
Confident that the rest of the Chosen were mindlessly engaged in sitting somewhere, twittering like a bunch of idiotic flutes, Samiris decided to avoid them altogether the best way that she could think of: by finding stairs and climbing up. No one dressed in a tent’s worth of fabric was excited to climb stairs to go exploring, so that’s what Samiris decided to do. She trailed down the hallway until she felt quite lost, becoming giddy with the sensation that she might never find her way back again.
Samiris let her fingers skim alongside her on the smooth limestone as she walked at a confident human pace, not the mincing, prancing, falsely-smooth gait that Cloris had been trying to prod her into. Samiris felt like a wild horse who had been captured for awhile, one that a master had tried to bring to heel, tried to tame, but a horse who had somehow gotten free of the stables, just in time, right before she learned to love captivity. She broke into a run.
The hallway became dimmer and narrower as she went, and at the end was a door that looked older than the rest, forgotten. It opened smoothly, to Samiris’ disappointment. She was hoping to find a place where she could hide away, where no one would ever chance upon her, where no servant would duck their head and avoid Samiris’ eyes while they excused themselves, somewhere too narrow for the wide crinolines of the Chosen, somewhere too dirty for Cloris, too humble for Lady Elise.
There was some dust on the floor just beyond the wooden door, and Samiris thought that it would have to do. She ducked in and pulled the door closed behind her. It was dark without the light from the hallway. There were no lit candles swaying in the air. And yet, there was some light, above her. Enough to see that she stood in a narrow stairwell, and that the steep, shallow steps wound up and up above her head.
Samiris climbed. She relished the strain of her thighs as she raised each knee high to place her foot firmly on the stairs. She felt light without the mounds of dress fabric weighing her down. She felt free. There was no one watching her, no one judging the precise position of her spoon, her back, her head, her eyes... Samiris was as she wished to be: alone, on an adventure of her own making, master of her own mind and time, with no one around to judge or snicker.
The stairs wound around and around like a spool of yarn. Samiris climbed past several small windows, no wider than two fingers and about a foot tall. They gave just enough light to keep her from tripping as she climbed on. Sweat beaded on her temples by the time she reached a small landing at the top of the stairs.
Here was another wooden door, this one much more weathered than the first, and so short that Samiris would have to stoop to get through it. She took the rusted iron ring in her hand and tugged to get it open. It was stuck; sun and rain had caused the door to swell into its door frame. The door seemed to fight back, groaning a bit as Samiris pulled it from the doorway. It scraped along the floor as it yielded.
But behind the door...pure sunlight. Not filtered through windows and past velvet curtains, not shaded away by fussy parasols for fear that fair skin would tan or freckle. No. This was the sunlight from home. Samiris stepped out and looked around.
Samiris had climbed higher than she had thought. She was on a walled walkway between two small towers. From here, she could see most of the castle below her to her right, and she could see the gardens spread out to her left like a patchwork quilt. And in front of her was a clear view all the way out to sea. The waves looked no more than ripples from where Samiris was standing. The sun warmed her face and her throat. Samiris stood, soaking it all in.
She walked to the other tower on the narrow walkway. It was larger than the one she had emerged from. Another slightly stuck wooden door, and then she was in a tower room with arched windows on all sides. A few pieces of decrepit wooden furniture were heaped into a corner, as if a servant had begun the process of cleaning and then had forgotten about the task altogether.
With the sun streaming through the open windows, and the knowledge that no one would ever find her here, Samiris thought that the room looked more precious to her than her lavishly appointed apartment. This was a space that could be her own. A place to run to, if she ever needed to get away from those gossiping idiots that Lady Elise had the nerve to call her peers.
Samiris righted an old wooden chair and sat in it gingerly, testing the strength of the joints. It groaned a little at the imposition, but it held. She could bring a book up here. She could nap without being woken. She could just sit in the sun and the breeze and the blessed silence.
She hadn’t realized it before, how much she craved solitude, silence, permission to stare off into nothing and just think without someone asking hearing inane questions. Was she alright, did she want sugar in her tea, if so, how many lumps, did she see the new shoes that Ladonna had bought, did she like them, did she know how much they cost, was she just as excited for the ball, who did she think would be there, how many dances, what kinds, how many pieces in the orchestra, and would the silk dress or the taffeta be just the one to snag the eye of the Crown Prince?
Samiris had never met a group of women who used so many words to say nothing at all. It was enough to make her want to bash her own head in with a rock, just to get out of listening.
Samiris had always thought that she was used to noise. After all, her house sat on a bluff
above the ocean. The ceaseless roar of the sea was ever-present, comforting. But the noise of this place was enough to drive her mad. Beyond the endless, vapid prattle of the other Chosen, there was the city. The distant seagull cries of hawkers in the street, the tolling bells of the various temples, the harsh clatter of wooden wheels against worn cobblestones, the low hum of a thousand different conversations like bees...
It drowned out all but the faintest boom of waves along the distant shore. Samiris wished, looking out toward the ocean now, that she could go walking along the beach for several hours. If she could just feel the ocean breeze tugging on her hair. If she could feel the grit of the sand between her toes, smell the brine and feel the mist against her face and hear the dull crash of a cresting wave and the foaming hiss as it receded again... maybe then she could feel tethered. Maybe then she would feel as if she were still in the same country, in the same world as her father and sister.
Samiris let her eyes wander to the play of pattern and color below her that was the castle gardens. They spread far wider than she had known, as if a giant had stood where she was standing now and upended a massive green paint can onto the earth. Samiris tried to discern which paths she had walked through before, which was the one where the rest of the Chosen now sat, sipping sugared tea and eating dainty sandwiches.
Samiris traced the pathway that led out from the main courtyard, following the ribbon of grey stone through the green velvet of the lawn here and there punctuated by the fountains, that from here looked like aquamarine brooches on green velvet. There was the fork in the pathway, and if she followed it right, beneath the trees she could just make out the tables set with crisp white linens and the ladies gathered around them, from this vantage point looking like a grouping of pastel-colored pigeons in birdseed. Samiris smiled, then chuckled, nearly drunk with the fact that they were all down there, and she was up here.
Samiris’ eye snagged on movement in the very back of the garden, behind a stone wall that separated a wide sliver of green from the rest of the property. It was very far away, but she thought she might be able to see someone moving in a vibrantly-colored patch of greenery far away. The kitchen garden, she thought. But it was so small... No matter. It was doubtless one of many gardens that kept the palace in food.
Samiris set about looking for a way in. She was curious, she realized, about what the kitchen gardens might look like here, compared to the one she had tended in Faro. She had heard that the curse was lighter here, but Samiris hadn’t really believed that. She thought they meant that there was so much wealth in Teymara that the curse didn’t matter as much. That had been before she had seen the grass growing, been awakened in the morning by the cacophony of birdsong that filled the palace courtyards. That was before she had seen the small but prolific yards of the narrow townhouses that lined the streets.
Things here grew better than they did in Faro. Samiris hadn’t seen a garden growing well in years. Not since she was too young and well-fed to have paid much attention. Now, she would pay attention. It was the close of summer, but there must still be some produce that hadn’t been harvested. Maybe some late-growing summer beans or some pumpkins beginning to swell.
There. A small path, no more than a break in the greenery, led up to the stone walk from the far side of the castle. The entry to the garden was near the back of the stables, and probably there was a gate. Regardless, the entrance was shaded from view by a tall hedge. You would never know it was there unless you were looking for it. Samiris told herself that the next time she had a spare afternoon, she would go looking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Samiris spent hours in the sunlight, basking in the glow and the warmth and the silence like a lizard on a rock. It was nearly time for her dance lesson when she stood from where she had been reclining, tipped back in the chair, her feet propped against the window ledge.
Samiris ran down the tower stairs, then cracked the door open to listen for any sign of movement on the other side. When she was convinced that there was no one there, she let herself out, shutting the door firmly behind her. She hurried until she had passed several doors, then she slowed. Now, if she came upon someone, they wouldn’t know which room she had come from.
The secret of the tower room was tucked away like a burning ember in her heart. She would go there every chance she got. Perhaps tomorrow she could filch a loaf of bread and a wheel of cheese from the kitchens and a tower of books from the library and stay there all day. Samiris smiled broadly, her eyes on the plush carpet beneath her feet. She rounded a corner and smacked into someone so quickly that the breath was knocked from her chest with an ‘oof’.
Artem reached out and gripped her by her upper arms to steady her, then pushed her back slightly.
“Where have you been? We were concerned...” he began.
His eyes rounded, his eyebrows raised as he looked down at her. The grip on her upper arms increased slightly.
“What in hades’ name are you wearing?” he gritted.
Samiris looked down. She had become so drenched in her own sense of freedom and exhilaration that she had forgotten that she was dressed in her old breeches, shirt, and boots.
She rolled her eyes. “What does it look like? I’m wearing clothes.”
“You can’t wear those here,” Artem said, releasing her arms so abruptly that she swayed slightly back.
Samiris was instantly as angry as she had been before she climbed the tower. She gestured toward her person with an exaggeratedly grand flourish. “Obviously, I can.”
Artem closed his eyes and pinched his nose, right between his eyes. “It’s not proper. Ladies wear dresses.”
“Why?” Samiris snapped, crossing her arms tightly. “Answer me that question satisfactorily, and I will never wear a pair of breeches again. Why? Why can’t ladies wear breeches? Why do they have to wear dresses?”
“They wear dresses to be...ladies.”
Samiris rolled her eyes. “Needless to say, that didn’t meet my threshold for sufficient explanation.”
“It’s just what’s done. Do you know what the court would say about you if they saw you like this?”
“Is this part of your job? Chief Arsehole, Captain of the Guard, and Wardrobe Enforcement?”
“It is part of my job. I’m trying to prevent a riot,” he gritted, his green eyes flashing.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure that Cloris would be at the front of it, lit torch in hand, should she see me. But don’t worry,” Samiris sneered. “With the bulk of all the clothes the ladies are wearing, it would be a very slow-moving riot.”
“It’s not the ladies I’m concerned about,” Artem muttered. Then his eyes narrowed and he looked over her shoulder, in the direction she had come from. “Where were you, anyways? They told me that you had a headache and were confined to your rooms. But your maid...”
“Aster,” Samiris interrupted.
“She admitted that she didn’t know where you were,” Artem continued, not missing a beat. “Said you’d been gone for hours.”
“I was thinking,” Samiris said, with a jaunty smile. If she were being honest with herself, she was trying to bait him. She was itching for a fight.
“Thinking?” he repeated with a frown. “For hours?”
“I have a lot of thoughts.” She crossed her arms. “I know that must come as a shock, considering most of the ladies you’re surrounded with.”
Artem narrowed his eyes at her, his jaw clenching. “Just because most ladies obey the social norms doesn’t make them idiots.”
“Tell me, Captain Trego,” Samiris said. “Does it ever get boring, having ladies laugh even when you aren’t particularly funny?”
He ran a hand through his hair ruthlessly, making his black hair stand up. “You’re insufferable. If you were a man, I’d knock you flat.”
“Now that’s an inappropriate thing to say to a lady.”
He huffed and shook his head. He took a deep breath, as if to regain his composure. His voice dropped in volume until it was barely audible. “Do not wear breeches out of your chambers again.”
“Or what?” Samiris said, propping a hand upon her hip. “You going to send me home? Please do. Or maybe you’re going to threaten me with punishment. Say...death by burning?”
Artem’s face blanched of color.
“Oh, wait,” Samiris hissed. “That’s already on the table, isn’t it?”
His voice deepened. “Where were you this afternoon, Samiris?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because you weren’t where you were supposed to be.”
“Where I was is my own business,” she said.
“I’ll find what you are up to, if it takes all the spies in the palace to do so,” he growled.
“Why on earth would you waste time on me?” Her eyes sparked in fury. “You’ve got a bevy of beautiful simpletons cloistered away, just salivating over the prospect of the Crown Prince looking their way. You and I know full well that I am not his match.”
“You still have responsibilities,” he said.
“Such as?”
“Showing up on time. Acting like a lady. Trying your best to look attractive.”
Samiris flipped her right hand in a decidedly unladylike gesture as her face twisted into a definitely unattractive scowl. “Here’s what I think about that, you big...”
Artem covered her protruding finger with his hand and stepped into her space. “Just try. Couldn’t you? The fate of our nation rests with you and your silly, stupid counterparts. You have brains and wit. Fitz is very smart. Couldn’t you try to like him, and maybe that would turn into something else?”
“I don’t dislike him,” she sighed, her anger dispersing before his earnest plea. “But love isn’t built on like alone. It demands a foundation of respect, and at least a little attraction.”