Something More Than Honor: Invitation
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Genre: medieval whump, whump recovery, hurt/comfort, M/M/F romance, slow burn
Content for this chapter: references to sibling death, misogyny and homophobia, moderately explicit discussions of sex, fear of sex (also past noncon by implication), too much dramatic irony
Cat learns a secret and invites herself into her husband's bedchamber.
The frown passed from his face as quick as an owl taking a mouse, leaving blankness. He said, without relief of that blankness, “Cat, I’m not entirely ignorant of what it means to live at someone else’s pleasure. I don’t want to make anything more difficult for you.”
Chapter wordcount: 3,000
Cat had turned her chair to look out the window between stitches when she needed to relieve her eyes. The garden blazed under afternoon sunlight, and beyond the castle wall, horses cropped grass in the paddocks. The white-headed mare was among them, but perhaps Konstantin went on foot.
Between herself and her embroidery, she could admit she hoped to catch a glimpse of her husband. He’d gone out, as he did often enough, and sometimes his return took him this way. One morning when she sat here around dawn, seizing the chance to finish adorning a gown’s hem, she thought he’d seen her too.
For now, no one stirred below except her sisters-in-law. They walked the garden paths, their voices drifting up like notes of odd music. Helene knelt to pluck leaves or berries from her medicinal plants, and Maerlis tilted her head as she examined the health of a rosebush. Cat planned to pick some herbs for supper, later, but even if she hadn’t been watching for Konstantin, she felt as if her presence in the garden might interrupt. Even as they worked on their separate tasks, her sisters-in-law seemed in conversation, or duet.
Brushing her dark widow’s skirt, Helene handed her full basket to Maerlis, who set it in the shade of the bench beneath the arbor. The arbor itself offered little shade, half its branches hacked away in an overzealous recent trimming.
It wasn’t the shade they should worry about most, Cat came to reflect.
She looked at them idly, in between glances over the hills or more careful study of the unicorn taking shape on her handkerchief. She noticed when their voices dropped, when less of the music reached her ears. And how Maerlis had stepped closer to Helene. Then, how Helene’s head settled on Maerlis’s shoulder. How both women’s arms went around each other.
She forgot her needle as Helene nestled against Maerlis’s neck, which made an arch as the taller woman tipped back her head—and she was smiling. Until her lips parted, wordless. And Helene rose on tiptoes to meet them with her own.
They went to the bench, not quite stumbling. There, where the arbor once would have covered them, four hands pulled up Helene’s skirts, and Maerlis reached below them.
Cat left the solar and continued sewing in the bedroom. It seemed a matter of decency, giving them privacy, though she couldn’t deny a curious streak. Less about what they did—though the jokes at Wardlow didn’t make it sound nastier than what men did to women—so much as how it all happened.
Helene and Maerlis always got along better with each other than with Cat, but then Cat was not an easy woman to get along with. When had their companionship become this? After Damion died, Helene collapsed into bed for a week, and Maerlis with her. Grief, and exhaustion after the endless days and nights nursing him, and confusion for the future were all enough to carry two women there. But while they were there, together…they must have shared so much. To know someone in her deepest suffering and console her might create a powerful bond. Cat wouldn’t know.
She’d spent that week sleeping in the solar, or on the coldest nights, on a pallet in the kitchens, carrying down spare sheets from her chest, luxuriously soft linens Laura sent from the southwestern peninsula. With such comfort, sleeping in exile was no hardship—the servants left her be and didn’t seem to find her an inconvenience, since she rose when they did—but Cat wasn’t selfless enough to do that again, or for the rest of her life.
Yet she thought of doing it again.
Maerlis would never be a giddily cheerful woman, but her mood seemed lighter these days, now that Cat reflected on it. She sang more often as Helene’s fingers caressed the guitar strings. While Helene was often pleasant, perhaps she shone from within with more genuine pleasure. And now, in their pleasure, the women had become careless. Perhaps because the end of Helene’s mourning drew near; perhaps because after so long, passion had come to feel natural and they forgot they had anything to guard. Cat would gladly yield the garden, but what if someone else came across them? The baron’s steward or Richard himself? The idea left her clammy and sick. She could suggest they take their trysts to Helene’s workshop—however awkward the discussion, still better than her father-in-law’s response would be—but the place didn’t seem hospitable to lovers embracing with abandon. Too crowded with herbs and fragile jars and heavy mortars and sharp-scented soaking tinctures.
Nor did she want to be trapped around passionate lovers, as if a romance had room for a third, as if she wished to be near a romance. How long must they have resented her presence in this bed, or in the solar, or any time she sat at work or leisure around them when they were aching to touch each other?
She was not selfless enough to sleep in exile or have awkward discussions. Yet perhaps she was choosing a form of exile, and it would probably prove an awkward discussion.
Still, Cat climbed the stairs that evening without much dread, after her husband had come home.
He answered her first knock and appeared less startled to see her than he had last time. His smile might even be a real one, unforced, some light in his eyes. But wariness, too.
“Hello,” Cat said. “May I come in?”
Konstantin stepped back, holding the door for her. With rays from the westering sun angling through the windows, his room looked more crowded than it had when lit by candles. It might not only be due to the light. Not outright messy, and she wasn’t sure it was disorganized—like Helene’s workshop or Cat’s own corner of the solar in the middle of an embroidery project, it might be a place where you could find everything you wanted among the clutter—but far from the bare simplicity Maerlis preferred to maintain, a preference inherited from their father. The map remained on the table before the fireplace, a few more details drawn. Instead of lying neatly folded, clothes draped chests or the backs of chairs whose seats were stacked with books, inkwells, an unrolled sewing kit. Konstantin took the single empty one, its back bearing the Hartlorn cloak with its brown fur lining both beautiful and unseasonable.
Cat remained standing. “Can I sleep here?”
His eyes blinked and narrowed on her.
She blushed. “I truly mean sleep. And not just tonight. From now on.”
Konstantin didn’t sit comfortably in chairs, she’d observed, a certain curve to his shoulders and back as if he wasn’t used to the required posture. Now he rubbed a griffin-headed arm with the hand that had worn the gold marriage ring for not quite a fortnight.
“If it’s too much to ask…”
“It isn’t,” he said. “I’m just curious why.”
She could say she desired to be closer to her husband. It would approach the truth. But something in the way he looked at her meant Cat found herself saying, “I’d like to leave your sister and Helene to their own room.”
“Do you not get along?” Eyebrows swooped down in an expression almost familiar, a ghost from the first days of their marriage. “Has Helene’s sweetness gotten worse?”
“It’s not that she said Cattie one time too many and my patience snapped. There’s no strife between us, but they’re fonder of each other.”
His brows lifted. “I see.”
Did he? She hoped not. Cat didn’t want to betray them, but perhaps something slipped through in her tone, thanks to her surprise and…envy, she acknowledged and quickly suppressed. That she envied lovers was no excuse to reveal them to a man who, whatever his moments of naivete or charm, had been raised by Richard Eadinford and squired at Calister.
He seemed far too understanding to have truly understood.
Cat ran a fingertip over her own ring. “And I think people expect the two of us to…the next step. Not that they’d drive me out of the women’s chamber, but you know how they can hint. And I dislike being prompted,” she confessed. “Do you ever feel it, resistance to doing something the moment someone tells you—”
Konstantin bent his head with a brief, quiet laugh. “Yes, despite a great deal of discouragement. Perhaps if I heeded it more often…but then, I imagine you don’t often have the chance to—”
“—and here I am, prompting you.” Her face heated deeper.
He half-lifted his hand, then lowered it back to the griffin’s feathered skull. “Cat, you don’t have to do this because you feel you’re supposed to.”
“Well,” she said helplessly, “if we’re both trying not to press the issue.”
Another brief laugh, barely a breath. Cat let one out, too.
“Sit down?” he offered.
“Where?”
Konstantin’s mouth shaped a silent curse before he stood. Presumably he meant to yield the chair to her, settling himself on the bed, which offered an open surface but lay a third of the way across the room. The heir’s chamber was not small. Nor was its bed.
Cat perched on the side of the mattress opposite him, nudging a book out of the way. Only realizing, as their eyes met, what she was doing.
“I meant it about sleeping,” she said.
“That’s one of the things I’d like…to discuss. Once you’re comfortable.”
“I won’t touch you,” Cat said, “and I know you won’t touch me. So.”
His lips twitched, not with the beginning of a smile but with several false starts at a response.
The two of them had done it before: shared a room, slept chastely side by side, for a few months three years ago. They could do it again, she told herself.
“What should I do if you have a nightmare?” It seemed another thing they should discuss.
“Leave it,” he said, “if it doesn’t bother you too much.”
“Oh.”
He passed a hand over his face, but it couldn’t rub away all the weariness, the shadows inked in his expression. “It’s hard to fall asleep. And I don’t think it matters. If a nightmare’s interrupted or not. Often enough they wake me in themselves. I don’t know. It might be as…alarming for you to awaken me as to leave me be.”
Cat remarked, “This bed is big enough that you can have a thrashing nightmare without hurting me.” It was big enough for a third person to lie comfortably between them.
He winced.
She’d left last time, when he’d said she could go, because she didn’t feel able to help or comfort him. She’d been afraid of what trying to would catch her up in. Now…she wished she were able. Best of all if it were easy, helping him, but hearing how little she could do cut sharper than expected.
And yet part of why she found him so tolerable was how little he expected of her.
She thought of what Laura had written. “I think you’re in the habit of being alone.”
“I’m used to it.”
“Do you prefer it?”
His gaze met hers a moment, slid aside. “It’s…calmer.”
“I’ll try not to disrupt your calm.”
Rather than face the strained smile her words brought, Cat looked around the room. Her eyes passed over the Hartlorn escort’s cloak again, and there, against the washstand—an odd place, but a whetstone sat with the shaving blade beside the basin—leaned his sword in its silver-trimmed scabbard.
She pointed. “I suppose you could always lay that between us.”
It was a scene from one of those romantic tales, the milder versions told to children by their mothers, the more intriguing versions read late at night or related secondhand like gossip about people they all knew. Unmarried would-be lovers ensuring each other’s chastity despite their strongest temptations.
“Do you want me to?” he asked.
She’d hoped to make him laugh, or explain what he wanted. No, not that: she was all too afraid of what he wanted. Even though he’d given her no more reason for fear than if he’d already laid the sword between them himself. Good night, Cat. She might have liked to understand a little better. But for him to turn to her preference, as if it mattered—
“Why would you ask me that?” she said.
He murmured, “Neither of us has pressed for a consummation.”
“Did you expect me to?” Perhaps she should be insulted. If anything, she felt flattered. As if she wanted to be the woman he took her for.
But no lady in Loredon would. No lady in Koltas, even, despite the most scurrilous rumors of their enemies.
“In Hartlorn, maybe,” she said aloud.
“What?”
Cat shook her head. “Perhaps women in Hartlorn would do that. You’d know better, you’ve met some of them.” He looked at her rather as if she’d just drawn a sword. “The cloak,” she tried to clarify, nodding toward it.
“Was from a man,” he said. “Given because I was cold. Adam Tynae’s secondary was a woman, and his superior, but he didn’t offer any insight into their marriage practices. I wasn’t in a state to consider it.”
“She was? His superior?” It was a bit like seeing a griffin fly past the window, something from a story taking on beautiful but unnatural flesh and plumage.
“Yes. I didn’t meet Lady Crayl. But he seemed to admire her.” Konstantin’s expression softened in a way she couldn’t read.
“So Hartlorn has women who not only fight, but direct campaigns. They do well, it seems, by their kingdom’s record.”
“Better than plenty of men.” His smile wasn’t easy or broad, but it was…charming. At some angles, in certain light, he could be not only handsome but achingly lovely. A heat ran though Cat that wasn’t only embarrassment or bewilderment.
“I’ve heard they make laws, too. The lady Sovereign is—” She couldn’t continue, couldn’t say equal to her lord while in bed with him.
Still smiling, with it starting to reach his eyes, he said, “And they press to consummate marriages?”
Cat found herself smiling, too, if just for a moment. “With a virility more alarming than when they lead in battle.”
“Perhaps.” The shift of his eyebrows seemed rueful. “It’s not as if I’ve been planning for an annulment all along, Cat, or intending to leave you an untouched widow.” The angles of his face drew further down, but he continued, “I’ve been under the impression you’re…if not alarmed…cautious of my virility.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh?”
The frown passed from his face as quick as an owl taking a mouse, leaving blankness. “Having a man’s cock inside you is the sort of thing severe enough that it should come by invitation.”
It was thoughtful, almost thoughtful enough to be charming. And true. A chill twisted the remaining warmth inside her at how true. Severe was not inaccurate.
“I haven’t been sure how I’d manage it,” she admitted. “So no, I didn’t think to…usurp my place and command you to my bed.” She wasn’t sure if she lied, saying those last words, remembering the night when she touched him at the door to the solar, the music still playing inside her. She’d never be so bold. But she might have thought of what it would be like.
He said, without relief of that blankness, “Cat, I’m not entirely ignorant of what it means to live at someone else’s pleasure. I don’t want to make anything more difficult for you.”
She reached out for him, then, her hand settling over his. It was…warm, skin covering muscle and bone. Just like anyone’s hand. Larger than her own, but it didn’t grasp hers. Nor did he pull away.
Charming, that he wanted things to be easy for her. Charming even as he made it more difficult, leaving it to her to ask for something he understood would be severe. Not that he could understand the whole of it. All that she couldn’t explain—how could she claim a consummation was impossible, just after they’d agreed not to pursue an annulment? Or not impossible. Only…severe.
“So,” she said, “we’re not going to consummate this marriage tonight.”
“No.” He laughed without smiling.
“Just sleep. I should get my things.”
It was a final chance for him to withdraw the invitation—or, since he hadn’t quite invited her, to forbid her. Instead he nodded. “I can help you.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m…” His hand flexed under hers. “I know I… I’m sor—”
Her hand went to his mouth, touched his lips glancingly. She hadn’t intended even that; it might have been his own movement that led to the contact. But he didn’t move now, or make a sound.
“No need to apologize,” she said.
If anything, this seemed their most successful conversation yet. She wondered what he might have regretted saying or wished to have said.
“All right.” The heat of his breath fell across her fingertip.
Late that night, after he’d helped carry up her chests—wincing when he taxed his right shoulder, but not complaining, as sanguine as the satisfied Maerlis if not the cheerful Helene—and Cat settled into the wide bed with space for another person between them, trying to keep herself from disrupting him any more than necessary by her turning, she faced the idea of consummating her marriage. Asked herself if it was, after all, impossibly severe. Perhaps so, because imagining blood on these sheets, and what more it would involve than the sheets under her body, what it would feel like to have more than her own finger… It alarmed her far beyond any excitement. That she felt any excitement—not when facing it head on, but at certain angles, in certain lights—left her unsettled in confusion. Little easier to face was the other thing she wondered: how he had formed any opinion, much less an insightful one, into what it was like to take a man’s cock.
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