Liramelli brightened immeasurably at that. “That’s something else my father said. Steff is the one person we know who hasn’t been scheming for a throne for the past twenty years. We could trust him, if nobody else.”
Melissande lounged back on her sofa, one hand idly playing with her hair. “I think our little Liramelli has an attachment to Steffanolo,” she said. “She can hardly say his name without blushing and stammering.”
Liramelli rewarded her by doing both. “That’s not—that’s not true! I mean, of course, I do like him, he’s—he’s very pleasant to be around—”
Melissande sat up and spoke more briskly. “He is a perfect prospect for you in temperament and heritage,” she said. “If you like him, all the better. I think your father should petition now for you to marry him.”
Now Liramelli’s face was scarlet, but she tried to carry on as if they were merely having a political conversation about advantageous alliances. “My father wants to see an heir declared before he marries me off. He still thinks it might be Greggorio.”
“Whom you could also wed, but there would be nothing but heartache there, if you loved him,” Melissande said. “He will not be faithful to his wife.”
“Which wouldn’t bother you, I suppose,” Liramelli said a little spitefully.
Melissande laughed. “It wouldn’t,” she agreed. “But Greggorio and I would not suit. He finds me unfathomable and I find him—tedious.”
Corene was curious. “Who would you marry, given a choice of heirs?”
“Jiramondi,” Melissande answered promptly. “I like him, and we wouldn’t interfere with each other. Whereas Garameno—” She considered. “I suppose we would tolerate each other. But he thinks I am a flighty girl, which makes me want to behave badly and—you can see we would quickly wear on each other.”
Liramelli’s face was troubled. “My father says—well, of course I am not supposed to repeat it—my father says Garameno will never be emperor because he cannot produce heirs of his own.”
“According to the gossip I have heard, the accident damaged his legs but left him functional in all other areas,” Melissande said delicately.
“Yes, apparently, but there was some—some test all three nephews had to undergo. To prove they could actually father children. And Greggorio and Jiramondi passed, but Garameno did not.”
Melissande threw her hands in the air. “Oh, this is endlessly entertaining! You Malinquese and your tests! Do you not know how many bastards have sat on the thrones of the southern seas before your scientists devised their precious examinations? Kings and queens have been unfaithful since the day the first one was crowned! It does not matter if a man may sire children or a woman may bear them. Someone will always step in to make sure another child is born.”
Corene was laughing. “As I am living proof,” she said.
Melissande turned her bright eyes toward Corene. “So if you were choosing,” she said, “which of Filomara’s heirs would you want?”
She tried to close her mind to it, but the image of Foley would not be banished from her thoughts. Not a royal match, of course. But more and more, as these chaotic days unfolded, her ideal of the perfect man. Faithful. Capable. Devoted. Someone who didn’t try to control her, who didn’t want her to comform to some picture of her that he already had in his head. Someone who made the world safe for her so she could explore it.
She didn’t see how she would ever muster the desire to spend her life with any other man.
Melissande was watching her with interest, and even Liramelli—not nearly so attuned to others’ moods as Melissande—was regarding her with speculation. Corene forced an unconvincing laugh. “I would create havoc throughout the court by picking someone everybody despised,” she said. “Some lord’s bastard son or exiled nephew. Just to stir things up.”
“Yes, that does seem very much in keeping with your personality,” Melissande agreed.
Liramelli came to her feet, rubbing her hands against her trousers as if to brush away the quirks of the conversation. “Well, things will be very stirred up over the next few days,” she reminded them. “The party is only two days away!”
Melissande rose also, yawning. “It will be very exciting,” she said. “I am looking forward to it indeed.”
The two women exited, still talking idly, and Corene shut the door behind them. Then she stood there, silently, waiting until their voices faded down the hall. Another minute of silence, while she still waited—another.
Then the sound of another door opening and closing, a soft step, a quiet knock. She opened the door and gestured to Foley to come inside.
“You should always issue a challenge first, to make sure you know who’s on the other side,” he scolded as she secured the lock behind him.
She smiled at him, hoping her expression was casual, hoping he couldn’t hear the mad galloping of her pulse. “I didn’t have to,” she said. “I knew it would be you.”
• • •
The next two days no one did anything except think about the party.
For some time now, construction crews had been in evidence around the palace—in the courtyard, in the gardens, even in the grand hall and ballroom—measuring all the public spaces and assembling scaffolds and structures of mysterious purposes. Finally, as they hammered and sawed and shouted and cursed and lifted various frameworks into place, it became clear what they were creating: a detailed miniature representation of the city, with all its landmarks spread around it in minute and charming detail. A great stone basin was built and then flooded to represent the sea; small sailboats and paddlewheels were set upon it to provide rides for children and lovers. One cluster of vendors’ booths stood in for the Little Islands, and another for the Great Market. A walkable labyrinth with head-high walls represented the giant maze that led from the iron gate to the royal palace. It would be filled with entertainers who would recite stories or sing songs or tell fortunes to anyone who strolled the looping path.
“I admit, I’m starting to get excited about this celebration,” Corene remarked when she toured the grounds with Liramelli and Steff and Melissande the day before the event. “At first, you know, I thought, ‘A party just to honor Steff? How much fun can that be?’ But now that I see all the trappings—”
Steff shoved her good-naturedly on the shoulder. “You’re just jealous because no one ever threw a party to celebrate you,” he said.
“I want to see what they’ve done around back,” Liramelli said.
“Not me—I am tired and going back to my room,” Melissande said. “I want to be entirely rested so that tomorrow night I may enjoy myself for the festival.”
Steff elected to keep exploring with Liramelli, but Corene accompanied Melissande inside. They had to dodge workmen stringing banners from the high ceilings and detour past women wrapping ribbons around the banisters of the grand stairwells.
“I have two lassenberries left and I will share one with you if you want,” Melissande said, so Corene followed her down the twisting corridors to her third-story suite. She glanced back only once to make sure Foley was behind them. He was, of course, though he didn’t follow them into Melissande’s quarters.
They were barely inside the room with the door shut before Melissande said, “I did not want to say anything in front of Liramelli, but I have gotten word from my mother.”
Corene nodded, unsurprised. “She knows about the Berringese blockade? The empress’s plans to involve Welce and Cozique in this petty war?”
“Yes, and she is not happy about it. I believe she plans to summon me home—perhaps in some dramatic fashion.”
Corene raised her eyebrows, but Melissande didn’t elaborate. “Are you ready to go back?”
Melissande produced a fatalistic shrug. “It is so very complicated! My mother made it clear that if I did not secure a marriage for myself while I was here, she would arrange one for me
the minute I returned. She is convinced that marriage might make my behavior—” She thought about the right words. “Less scandalous.”
Corene grinned. “I do wonder exactly what you did that was so bad you had to be exiled.”
Melissande spread her hands. “Small romances! Nothing hundreds of women do not engage in every day! But married women, as she likes to point out, have more license in their actions. So she is busy lining up candidates for me and I’m sure she plans to have me married within a quintile.”
“Is that what you want?”
Melissande made a graceful gesture eloquent of uncertainty. “I like the idea of the freedoms that come with married life. I do not like having little say in my choice of partner. But I believe my mother and I can come to terms.”
“So we all flee Malinqua and Filomara’s grand plans,” Corene said.
“She deserves to be fled from.”
“I am sorry for Liramelli, though. I’ll miss her—and I think she’ll miss us.”
Melissande smiled. “Oh, but she and Steff will make a match of it, don’t you think? That should be some consolation.”
“I hope they will. They seem ideally suited.” Corene laughed. “Though more suited in Welchin terms. She’s elay and he’s coru. Wind and water are natural allies. But I don’t know how the Malinquese would describe them. I mean, I don’t know which one would be fire and which would be ice.”
“No, the Malinquese are so very precise and conventional in how they view the world,” Melissande agreed. “They do not allow for the subtleties that come with a multifaceted perspective. They think everything is either one way or another.”
Corene held her hands up side by side. “Flame or ice. Sun or moon. Open-hearted or closemouthed.”
“Man or woman.”
Corene dropped her hands. “Well, that is true, I suppose.”
“Nonsense, there are people who do not truly seem to be either, but just are,” Melissande argued. “And certainly just because you are one does not mean you can only be made whole by fitting together with your opposite. There are men who love men, and women who love women, and men and women who love both men and women. You would need many towers all over the city to represent anything so complex.”
Corene was starting to guess why Melissande’s mother might consider her daughter’s behavior scandalous. “Do you?” she inquired. “Love women instead of men?”
“In addition to,” Melissande said. “But how could I not? Those small hands and delicate cheeks—that soft skin—and there is something about the scent of a woman’s body—”
Corene blinked at her. “I can honestly say I’ve never given any of that a second’s thought.”
Melissande offered up her naughty smile. “You might try thinking about it,” she suggested, taking a few steps closer. “You might find it delicious indeed.”
Melissande now stood only inches away, close enough for Corene to catch the fragrance of her lemon perfume. Corene didn’t back away, so Melissande lifted a hand and placed her fingertips on Corene’s cheekbone, slid them down to Corene’s pointed chin. They were about the same height, so Corene found herself staring straight into Melissande’s night-blue eyes.
“If you’re brave enough,” Melissande said, “you can see what it feels like to kiss a woman.”
Corene smiled. “I don’t think it requires bravery,” she said. “Just curiosity.”
Melissande lifted her eyebrows in a question, and Corene shrugged slightly in response. The feel of Melissande’s mouth on hers was pleasant and warm, light pressure, soft skin, a sense of honey and satin. A moment or two, no longer, then Melissande drew back. She lifted her eyebrows again, and once more Corene responded with a shrug.
Melissande laughed. “So you did not mind it, but you did not grow flustered with excitement.”
“Is that what’s supposed to happen?”
Melissande took her arm and drew them both down to a little sofa on the side of the room. “You’ve never kissed a man, either? Now that I find truly shocking.”
“Oh, I have. A few. Mostly at parties, and mostly when they were drunk, and I didn’t mind that, either, but I didn’t—” She didn’t know how to articulate it. “But I didn’t care about it. I didn’t get breathless. I didn’t suddenly start tingling all over my body, as they say in the romances—”
Melissande was shaking with gentle laughter. “Then you’ve been kissing the wrong people—men and women,” she said firmly. “There is only one solution, of course! You must kiss many, many people—ones you know well, and ones you scarcely know at all—and keep on kissing them. I promise you, one day you will feel that tingle, that hunger. You won’t want to stop. It doesn’t necessarily mean this person is right for you, or even good for you, but at least you’ll get a taste of desire.”
Corene couldn’t stop it: Foley’s image took shape at the back of her mind. I think I’d feel that hunger if he ever kissed me, she realized. I feel it now. Something in her expression must have betrayed her thought, because Melissande’s gaze was suddenly keen and searching.
“Oh, but there is someone who stirs your blood,” she said softly. “You just have not had the nerve to speak up.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s always less complicated than you think,” Melissande assured her. “So—who? Someone at court? Not Steff, surely, or any of Filomara’s nephews. Not a woman, I suppose?” Corene shook her head. “No, then, I wonder if—” Melissande sat up straight and practically clapped her hands together. “Foley! Of course! Most excellent choice. Your first lover should always be someone who adores you.”
Now Corene was blushing as hotly as Liremelli had the night before. “Foley doesn’t adore me,” she said.
“Ah, but you adore him, do you not?” Melissande asked. When Corene only shrugged and laughed and looked away, Melissande said, “You do. I can see you do. But does he know how you feel? He is not the kind of man to make a move without encouragement. Well, he is not the kind of man to try to seduce someone he has been charged to protect. Hmmm. That might be problematical.” She tapped her chin with her finger as if trying to solve a particularly complex puzzle.
Corene laughed again, pushing herself to her feet. This conversation was wreaking severe havoc on her nerves. “At the moment, I think we have plenty of other things to focus on,” she said.
“We do,” Melissande said regretfully. “But there is always time to think of romance.”
“Perhaps tomorrow will be romantic!” Corene said as she headed for the door. “Everyone dressed in finery and wearing masks and drinking too much. So many possibilities!”
“Yes,” Melissande replied. “I am quite looking forward to it.”
• • •
Foley fell in step beside Corene as they headed back to her room, but she didn’t have much time to feel jittery at the notion that he would be following her inside, because she already had visitors at her doorstep—Nelson and Steff.
“Well, there you are,” Nelson said grumpily. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you all day.”
She unlocked the door. “I’m astonished to find Steff here with you,” she said. “I left him touring the gardens with Liramelli, and I was sure they’d be down there till midnight.”
Nelson sent Steff a quick appraising glance, but Steff only grinned. Don’t think you can hide the state of your heart from the sweela prime, she wanted to warn him—but then she realized that Nelson could read her own emotions just as clearly. It made her want to pull a scarf over her face.
Instead, she nonchalantly waved them over to a grouping of chairs and they all sat. “Anyway, I thought you spent all day with the empress, practicing your diplomatic skills,” she added.
“Part of the day,” Nelson said. “It turned out I wasn’t as diplomatic as I could have been. I told Filomara that she was at
fault for all the turmoil in her court because she should have picked a clear successor long before now.”
“Oh, she hates being told she’s done anything wrong,” Steff said. “I bet she didn’t like that.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“And it’s particularly ironic coming from you, since the primes changed their minds about fourteen times when they were trying to decide who should be the next ruler of Welce!” Corene exclaimed.
Nelson grinned. “She would have pointed that out, I’m sure, if she knew all the details.”
“Did you actually manage to accomplish anything with all your talking?”
“I think so. She’s agreed not to keep us from leaving and I’ve agreed to talk to Darien about trade sanctions against Berringey,” Nelson said. “But we don’t import much from Berringey, so I don’t know that our sanctions will have much impact. She needs to enlist Cozique if she wants to do real damage.”
“Talk to Melissande in the morning. She’s more astute than she seems.”
“I could tell she had an excellent brain,” Nelson said, nodding.
Corene let that pass. “But from what I can tell, her mother’s just as likely to break off relations with Malinqua after this little stunt Filomara has pulled.”
Nelson stretched out as if he was ready to stay and gossip all night. “You think the people in your own court are a bunch of plotters and backstabbers, and then you go out into the world and you see the same petty, jealous behavior everywhere else—writ large—even worse and with more dire consequences,” he said. But he spoke with relish, as if he enjoyed every minute he spent watching the human pageant.
Steff stirred. “But it shouldn’t be that way,” he said earnestly. “We should all try to be better people than we are. My father used to say that all the time. And kings and queens should try harder than anybody.”
“They should,” Nelson agreed, “but they usually don’t. One of the prerogatives of power is to misbehave—because no one can stop you when you do. Many an upstanding man or woman has ascended to the throne, vowing to be moral, to be honest, to be faithful—and almost every single one of them has failed. Because it is so hard to be good when it is so easy to be bad.”