“Oh,” she said quietly. “But that is why I take precautions, you know. Because it’s what I know.”
“You were a strumpet,” he said. “But you choose me. You choose this.” He hesitated. “Don’t you?”
“You must have me reassure you, mustn’t you? Are you sure you trust me?”
He groaned. “Go, then. As you say.”
She got out of the bed and went looking in the darkness for her clothes. She pulled them on and then came back to him. She sat down and pressed into him and kissed him until they were both breathless.
Then she pulled away. “I do choose you,” she breathed, and then she fled, because if she didn’t, she would have tugged her clothes back off and rutted with him right then and there.
She wasn’t even sure why she was putting it off.
It was only that… well, with the men who’d paid for her, rutting seemed to sometimes make her more susceptible to feeling something. However, it wasn’t predictable, necessarily.
True, she could say which men she would never develop tender feelings for, and those were the men who were cruel and indifferent to her, but most men weren’t that way.
Most men came to a strumpet because they wanted something tender. They wanted the softness of a woman. They wanted sweetness. And sometimes, if she played her part too well, she felt as if she got lost in it.
It wouldn’t necessarily be the first time, but when men came back, over and over to her bed, when they whispered into her skin how good she felt or how nicely she smelled or chanted her name under their breath, she…
It just made it difficult.
She sometimes found herself wishing they’d all be bastards.
With the ones who came in and sneered at her and called her a bitch and told her to bend over and take it, she knew where she stood. It was just a transaction, and there was nothing confusing about it.
This thing with Cadon, it was…
She was climbing the steps back to her room and she suddenly stopped, all of her breath going out of her with a painful whoosh.
She wanted to cry.
She put her palms against the wall and sucked in slow breaths.
If she allowed him to do it, it would be the first time she’d been with a man and hadn’t been paid for it. It would be the first time she chose it for herself.
Her lower lip trembled.
Perhaps that’s why she’d stopped it this morning.
Perhaps she wanted it to be something more momentous that his rolling onto her in the morning and pushing himself into her.
But, no, it wouldn’t be that way with him.
He was so good to her.
She thought of his mouth between her legs and a shudder of sweetness wracked her.
I want it to be about you. Only you.
He had been serious about it, too. He wouldn’t have even sought his own release if she hadn’t insisted.
Blazes, she was in love with that man.
Tears spilled out, and she brushed them away, laughing out loud at herself. She was falling apart here, and she needed to get herself together.
She started back up the stairs to the bedchamber that had been put together for her.
However, every so often, she had to stop and remember something that he’d said to her or done to her, some way his mouth had moved or how his arms had felt around her. She wanted to spend the entire morning replaying every memory of their night together.
She was lost in reverie when she entered her room and found Sefoni there, curled up on top of the blankets.
“Oh!” said Pairce, surprised.
Sefoni’s eyes opened. She sat up right away. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep. What time is it?” She turned to the window. “Morning? Oh, no, where did you sleep? Did I keep you from your bed all night? You should have woken me.”
“No, it’s fine,” said Pairce. “I, er, slept with Cadon.” She felt heat rush to her face.
“Oh,” said Sefoni. She got up from the bed. “I’ve never been quite sure what happened with you and Cadon, or what it was that Haid hired you to do, but I’ve put things together, and am I wrong in assuming—”
“People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” said Pairce. “Your husband, the one you’re tricking into thinking has gotten you with child, certainly didn’t acquire you by honorable means, so I don’t want to hear anything about me or how I shouldn’t care for Cadon. He’s a much better man than Haid, when it comes down to it.”
“Everyone knows except me,” came a deep voice from the doorway.
Pairce turned.
Haid was there. He was dressed, complete with a neckbow. “You just went around telling everyone that you weren’t pregnant?”
“N-no,” said Sefoni. “Only Pairce, because she could give me the tea to make it so I wouldn’t have any bleeding.”
Haid lifted his chin. “Taking the tea that way is dangerous, isn’t it? I thought I’ve heard that it can make it so a woman can’t have children at all.”
Sefoni’s face fell.
“If she wants to take the risk, it’s her body,” said Pairce. “You might be angry with her, Haid, but—”
“I thought you wanted to have children,” said Haid. “It was so important to you that we made that scheme for the annulment. I thought… I thought you were so interested in being with me partly because of the child.”
Sefoni lifted her head and went for the door. She pushed past Haid and disappeared without a word.
Haid shook his head at Pairce. “Why’d she do it? Did she tell you when she asked for the tea?”
“She wants you, Haid,” said Pairce.
He gazed out in Sefoni’s wake. “No, she doesn’t.”
Pairce rolled her eyes. “Why don’t you go after her and let me get dressed?”
“What would I say to her?”
“I don’t know. Why are you asking me this? Do I look like I have any experience with marriage whatsoever?”
“I rutted with her last night,” he said in a strangled voice. “Blazes.”
“As much as I long to know these details about your sex life, Haid, I really must insist that you leave me in peace.” She pushed him out the door and shut it.
He knocked on the door. “I want to take Cadon to the Cowntess’s cell today. I’m going straight there. I’m going to bring breakfast down to him. I’d like you to be there in case he loses control. You’ll be better with him in that situation.”
She yanked the door open. “Loses control? Why would he do that?”
“I thought he might want to rage out on her,” said Haid.
“No.”
“All right,” said Haid. “Well, I’m not going to force him. You don’t have to be there if you really don’t think he’ll want to. I’ll just head down on my own—”
“You will not. Wait for me.” She shut the door in his face.
When she emerged, moments later, Haid was nowhere to be found.
Uttering a cry of rage, she raced down the steps. She found Haid with Sefoni, but the two weren’t talking about the fact that they had not, in fact, conceived a child together, but about how to get the breakfast cart they had with them down the steps.
“Oh, Pairce,” said Haid. “You’re here. I think, between the three of us, we can manage this quite nicely.”
“What part of ‘wait for me’ wasn’t clear, Your Grace?” said Pairce.
Haid turned to Sefoni. “Have you noticed she only calls me ‘Your Grace’ when she’s angry with me?”
“What’s wrong?” said Sefoni, turning to Pairce.
“And she’s angry with me far too much of the time,” said Haid. “You’d think we were the ones married.”
Pairce glared at him.
Sefoni glared at him.
Haid sighed. “Women. I’m constantly surrounded by women.” He picked up the breakfast cart all by himself and began to descend the steps.
“I’m going to strangle him,” said Pairce.
“Not if
I get to him first,” said Sefoni.
By the time they caught up with Haid, he was already serving breakfast to Cadon.
“So, I wondered about your thoughts about being around flame,” Haid said to Cadon. “Pairce seems to think you wouldn’t want to do it at all, not even to terrorize the Cowntess.”
Cadon chuckled, a low, ugly sound that Pairce hadn’t even realized he was capable of making. “I might rip her apart if you let me loose on her.”
“Oh, wouldn’t that be a pity.” Haid laughed too, a sound that was equally as ugly.
“Look, she’s horrible,” said Pairce. “No one’s disagreeing about that. But what if you kill her before she can fix you?”
“Just blow out the candle if I’m going too far,” said Cadon.
Pairce huffed.
“You don’t want me to?” said Cadon, seemingly bewildered. “Why do you care one way or another?”
“It’s only that you hate being drawn out into that rage,” said Pairce. “So, I didn’t think you would want to.”
“She destroyed me, Pairce,” said Cadon in a low voice. “She turned me into an animal. She paraded me around half-naked in front of all of the aristocracy. She forced me to fight and made money off of me. And she stole my cowntdom. Not to mention, I think she killed my father.”
“Oh, likely,” said Haid. “I’ve always suspected that as well. And blazes knows if your half-brother is really even your half-brother.”
Cadon snorted. “I wouldn’t put that past her either.”
“I realize all these things are terrible,” said Pairce. “I suppose I just don’t like having to see you that way again. It’s not you.”
“No, it’s not,” said Cadon. “And I appreciate that you recognize that.” He found her in the darkness and planted a kiss on her temple.
This did not soothe her, for whatever reason.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I TOLD YOU, I have no idea how to reverse what I did to him,” said the Cowntess. She sounded bored, and the sound of her voice like that made Haid want to hurt her just to get under her skin. “Sefoni?” he said.
Sefoni opened her hand and a small flame appeared in her palm.
Suddenly, there was a growl from Cadon and he rushed through the cell to the Cowntess.
A second later, Haid was rewarded when she screamed. “Sefoni,” he whispered.
Sefoni closed her hand and the flame was extinguished.
Now, they were plunged into darkness, and the only sound was the Cowntess’s ragged breath and Cadon’s soft, knowing laughter.
“I really don’t know,” said the Cowntess, panting, her voice high-pitched.
“Shall I have Sefoni turn on her flame again?” said Haid. “She could burn you as well, if you’d prefer.”
“No… just…” The Cowntess was still panting. “All right, look, if I do it, it will reverse it all. He’ll be scrawny, weak little Cadon again. Is that what you want, Haid Vortinen? Is that why you stole him?”
Haid’s jaw twitched.
“I thought not,” said the Cowntess.
“There’s got to be a way to retain his strength and make him capable of walking in the light,” said Haid.
The Cowntess laughed. “You’d never do anything that didn’t serve your own purposes, Your Grace. I pity that child growing in your wife’s womb.”
Haid sighed. “No point in taunting us with that, Yvain. False alarm.” He turned to Sefoni. “Love, let’s give Cadon one more go at her, hmm?”
“But I told you what has to happen!” snarled the Cowntess.
“Do it,” said Cadon.
The light flashed, and Haid saw blood on the Cowntess’s face, and he felt a rush of jagged joy. The sound of her screams was like music.
Ten minutes later, they were back in Cadon’s room, and Haid was trying to pace, but it was hard in the darkness, so he was mostly moving in a small circle.
“She just said it so I’d stop hurting her,” said Cadon.
“I think we should take her up on it,” said Pairce.
“No,” said Cadon. “I’m keeping this body.”
“When you first discovered what had happened to you, you were horrified,” she said.
“You like this body,” he said sharply.
Pairce fell silent.
Haid cleared his throat. “Uh, I need his strength. And his fighting prowess. So, it’s not an option. I’ve invested too much time and effort into him to just turn him back into some prissy cownt.”
“I wasn’t prissy,” said Cadon.
“Apologies,” said Haid.
“Always about your investment, isn’t it, Haid?” said Pairce.
“I seem to remember trying to apologize to you about this and your insisting to me that I fix him for you,” Haid muttered. “When it serves your own purposes, you want to take advantage of my obsessions.”
“I say we go back without Cadon and I burn her until she reveals how she’ll do it,” said Sefoni.
“All of you are so eager for her blood!” said Pairce.
“I don’t need her to bleed,” said Sefoni. “I’ll just sear her a little.” She let out a black little chuckle, and Haid found himself turning to her in the darkness, wishing he could touch her.
“This isn’t what we are, Haid,” said Pairce. “We don’t torture people for pleasure, no matter what they deserve. If we do this, we become her. You three don’t even want her to fix Cadon, you just want her to suffer.”
“Do you know what she did to me?” said Sefoni in an even voice.
“I don’t care,” said Pairce. “You three think you’re the only people to be abused? Let me tell you, you are not. I have stories I could lay out, stories about things done to my body, things so bad that I had to retreat into the recesses of my mind to get away from them, very bad things. But do you see me hunting those men down and trying to hurt them?”
“I’ll do it,” said Cadon in a low, lethal voice. “Tell me who they are and I’ll—”
“No, not the point.” Pairce yelled it.
Haid sighed. “All right, Pairce, you can stay on your moral high ground there and look down on the rest of us, but do it silently, if you don’t mind. However, you do have a point. We’re getting distracted from what’s important, and that’s making it so Cadon is not driven mad by the nearness of flame. What if the Cowntess really can’t do it? What then?”
“She came by the knowledge of using the living flame and human sacrifice and dark magic from somewhere,” spoke up Sefoni. “Perhaps that’s where we should focus our questioning of her, on her sources. If we find them, maybe they can help us.”
“That’s good,” said Haid. “All right, let’s go back in—”
“No,” said Pairce. “You all need to cool down. Give the Cowntess some time to think about it as well.”
“We do have people coming in today, Haid,” said Sefoni. “New servants and others delivering couches and beds and linens and things of that nature. We need to oversee these things, and they’ll all need paid.”
“Fine,” said Haid. “We’ll come back to the Cowntess later.”
TRISTANNE FELT AS if the ink from the presses had settled a sort of black dust over everything in the building that housed the gossip rag The Laironn Tattler. It was delivered daily to those who subscribed to it, printed on one sheet, and consisting of two columns, giving the latest salacious rumors about the well-to-do in Laironn.
“You’re not the first person to want to keep a story out of the press,” said the clerk at the counter. He was hardly paying attention to her. Instead, he was sorting through type pieces, putting little metal ‘A’s and ‘R’s and ‘T’s into different piles. “But we don’t do that. We don’t suppress knowledge.”
“Well, what if what you’re printing is a lie?” said Tristanne.
The clerk shrugged.
“Can you at least confirm for me that you’ve gotten a letter delivered about Gaheris Wintereth and Mairli Utherain? Can you confirm you’re
going to print it?”
“Nope,” said the clerk.
“Well, is there someone else here who can?” Tristanne wasn’t even sure why she was here. Last night, she’d slept easy, unconcerned about Mairli and her stupid reputation. And then, this morning, she’d awoken to a deep feeling of unease.
She’d tried to eat breakfast, but she hadn’t felt hungry.
So she’d left and gone walking and somehow ended up here.
“It’s just me, maidam,” he said. “I write the copy and set the type. I do have a few boys I pay to help run the press, but I’m all there is to the Tattler.”
Tristanne sighed heavily. “Well, I do have money.”
“How nice for you.”
“I could pay you not to run the story,” said Tristanne, gritting her teeth. Blaze Mairli, blaze her to the blazing blazes!
“No, we don’t take bribes,” said the clerk.
Tristanne named an amount.
“As I say, we don’t take—”
Tristanne interrupted him to name an even higher amount, a ridiculously high amount. Mairli was not worth this, and she didn’t know why she was here.
The clerk rubbed his chin. “Mairli Utherain, you say?”
“Yes, it’s very important her name not be published in this gossip rag.”
“We’re a proper newsheet, maidam,” said the clerk.
“Apologies,” muttered Tristanne. She got out a bag of gold and began to count out pieces of it onto the counter.
“Well, I’m quite happy we could come to a mutually beneficial agreement,” said the clerk. “You must care very deeply about this Mairli.”
“I hate her,” said Tristanne fiercely, pushing the gold across the counter. “She is ruining me.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I DON’T KNOW why we’re talking about this.” Cadon was several feet away from Pairce, in the tangle of the garden. It was dark outside, and it was cloudy that night, so the moon and stars were mostly obscured. Even so, it was easier to see each other here than in his room in the dungeons.
“I want a life with you, that’s why,” said Pairce. “And I can’t have one if you have to be shut up in the dark all the time. So, if the Cowntess can change you back—”
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