#bisexual character

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.

Next chapter

Was it that, after stymieing Haslem’s attempted advance, the Koltan lords felt overconfident? Koltas had attempted its own advance south not many years before, and after it failed, Loredon pressed on in this counter-invasion—blades swinging across the maps like pendulums. Konstantin knew better than to ask Victor about Koltas’s intentions, and Victor had the decency not to pry for any insights he’d gained while guarding the duke. Only the gods could tell how much of Haslem’s plans remained, anyway, after the disaster on the plains.

Yet Konstantin remembered what he’d heard of Ausric. A man who acted decisively, who inspired those he commanded, who lived in a grand style even on campaign—all that seemed to bear out. And one of the lords most trusted by Guilerac, commanding the keep that served as the gate into the mountains and, through the valleys beyond, to the Koltan capital.

Haslem was too ensnared to attempt that route. Even if he shifted his plans, he’d have to fight his way west into the foothills. Still, some of his maps had depicted this region in detail. Konstantin was aware of being nowhere near important enough to serve as a hostage for Ausric’s safety.

One evening when things had gotten particularly mellow, aided by good wine and Victor’s talk about his wife and their coming reunion, Konstantin risked asking if he was…concerned. About the lady and her travels, he clarified. He did intend to glean from Victor’s response something about the prospects for Loredon. Yet one couldn’t hear Victor talk about Elizabeta Ausric without becoming fond of her. Konstantin hoped she made it safely, riding under the black flag of truce, and continued in safety once she arrived here.

“She will,” Victor said. “If the gods don’t protect her, and they ought to for all the chapels she’s gilded, she’ll have me. I dare you to find a man better able to keep her secure—or more motivated. Because I miss her.” With a soft breath, somewhere between a sigh and a chuckle, he looked into the fire.

That was an answer Konstantin hadn’t considered to the question of why she returned from Guilerac so soon.

It seemed obvious now as he walked around Victor, who stood at the center of Konstantin’s tower room, as handsome as the first man Mari made and nearly trembling in anticipation of seeing her.

As he came to face him, Konstantin grinned. He brushed out a wrinkle in the fine doublet, then eyed one shoulder. A thread was loose. He almost stooped to draw his knife before remembering. That had been one of the fashions at Calister, keeping daggers in their boots or up sleeves instead of on their belts. The pressure of the sheath tied at his calf had become so familiar he’d stopped feeling its presence, or now the lack of it.

“Can I borrow your knife a moment?” he asked, tugging at the thread to illustrate why. As he’d expected of the seams holding this thick brocade together, it was too strong to snap, nor did he want to risk pulling a hole in a garment that looked grand enough to be crowned or married in.

A spark in Victor’s eyes had Konstantin half expecting him to ask, What would you give me for it? But this wasn’t a game—if anything, he was doing him a favor. In the next instant Victor drew his dagger.

Konstantin took it, careful of the blade held toward him, and sliced through the thread. “There. Thanks.” He gave the dagger back. “Otherwise I’d have had to try biting this.”

“I’m not afraid of your teeth,” Victor said.

Uncertain what to do with that, Konstantin stepped back, brushing the doublet smooth across the other man’s chest.

“Well?”

“She’ll fall in love with you, if she hasn’t already.”

Victor smiled, but something seemed evaluative in his tone as he said, “Oh, she has.”

He glanced past Konstantin to the window, though the road couldn’t be seen from this tower. Only some of the mountains and miles of forest. “Let’s go down.”

Konstantin followed him on staircases and along winding corridors, but hung back when they came to another window that offered a broader view. He didn’t want to spoil Victor’s cheerful mood by seeming to look out.

He ran a hand over his own shoulders, hoping he appeared presentable enough to meet the lady of the castle. Nothing like her husband, of course—and yet he was wearing another doublet from Victor, who’d thrown open the chests of his wardrobe to him. Many Koltan doublets still had tied-on sleeves, a fashion of the previous generation in Loredon, and leaving them off made something like a vest that was considerably lighter and cooler than the whole garment. This summer had come down unexpectedly hot on the mountains. The linen shirt he wore underneath didn’t have lace or embroidery trimming, but he could bear being dressed simply. He wasn’t that vain.

The crowd riding through the gates, when they made it to the courtyard, were gowned and caped and gloved, no more of them visible than if they came through a blizzard. Victor strode directly to a rider at the front, a tall, slender woman on a magnificent bay palfrey. She pushed back her hood, worn for shade on this sunny day. It revealed a pale face with sharp and elegant features, almost too beautiful to look at easily. Victor looked at her. He put his hands around her waist to carry her to the ground, then sank his fingers into her dark hair.

They embraced with a passion that buckled their knees, swaying against each other in the midst of horses and baggage and the women of her household. Then, with her arm tucked in his, they made their way to the steps of the great hall where Konstantin waited.

“Lillibet,” Victor murmured as they approached. She lifted her face to him and he touched a light kiss to her mouth. “How was your journey?”

“Better for ending with you, my lord.” Elizabeta said the last two words in a tone of voice that might as easily say my darling.

Victor set his palm on top of her gloved hand. “It took too long.”

“I came as fast as I could.”

“I know. It still took too long.”

The necklace at her throat, its gold tablets set with sapphires and emeralds, might have bought Eadinford outright, and it would be worth the trade. Her eyes flashed somewhere between their color, so rich and deep they were almost dark, as she returned Konstantin’s gaze. He’d always admired dark eyes, especially when they made obvious their owner’s intelligence.

She smiled, not with the melting sweetness she’d granted Victor, but in seemingly sincere pleasure.

“Here is our guest,” Victor said. “I explained in my message to you—”

“Oh, yes. You explained everything.” She offered Konstantin her gloved hand. “I ought to be welcoming you, then, if you’re a guest.”

"It’s a more pleasant way to put it,” Victor remarked.

“It is,” Konstantin agreed. At times he could forget he wasn’t one.

It had been the strangest month of his life and yet not the most uncomfortable, by far. He’d been able to rest, and keep out of the weather, and find ways to spend his time other than jumping to someone’s commands. The food was excellent and the company…

“Splendid,” Elizabeta said. Her fingers remained in his. “What have I interrupted today?”

Exchanging a glance with Victor, who gave nothing but a lift of one eyebrow, Konstantin told her, “Very little except the anticipation of your arrival, my lady.”

“My friends call me Lilli.” She took her hand back, not before squeezing warmly. Her smile didn’t show her teeth, but her coral red lips were enchanting in their curve.

She and Victor stepped into the hall ahead of Konstantin, who was relieved yet disappointed not to continue facing her. She was somewhere between him and Victor in age, and certainly aware of her beauty and the effect it had, though one couldn’t call her seductive. What she was, he reflected, watching her whisper something to her husband’s bent ear, was in love. So much so that it spilled over, rather as Victor’s joyful adoration had earlier.

Stopping midstep, she turned back. “Dora,” she called toward the courtyard.

“My lady!” a guardsman replied. In his arms he lifted a girl, six or seven years old, from her gray pony. Its tooled saddle matched Elizabeta’s, as did the child’s cloak and, when her hood slipped back, the tangle of black hair. Or perhaps that was Victor’s hair, less tamable than her mother’s.

By the time Konstantin looked from the girl back to her parents, they were halfway across the hall.

He saw Dora Ausric again that evening, sitting at one of the low tables beside a nurse who carved her meat. A hound curled on the hem of her skirt. It was a long skirt for such a small child—he remembered their mother hemming Maerlis’s up after a frightening tumble—but she might grow into it.

Elizabeta, sitting at Victor’s right hand, had changed into a brilliant gown and woven her hair with more jewels. Her voice and laughter floated, joined by his lower and no less melodic tones. Konstantin wouldn’t have blamed either of them for failing to remember his presence.

Most of the food served at the high table was tender or already sliced fine enough to leave no need for a knife. The exception was an iced cake, and without pausing in what she said to Victor—a series of unfamiliar names, perhaps ladies she’d known in Guilerac—she cut it into three slices, one for herself, one for her husband, and one she passed down to Konstantin.

“Thank you, my lady.”

She bent a little forward to speak past Victor. “I told you, my friends call me Lilli.”

“You did tell me, but that doesn’t give me permission.”

She laughed softly at first, then with more energy. “So you’ll make me say it?”

“If you please.”

He’d never spoken to anyone quite like this. He did it for the pleasure of drawing out her attention on him, and he was aware, of course, that such nonsense indirectness formed one breed of flirting. Not a skill he’d tried to develop before, having few opportunities.

Distantly, he recalled asking Catilyn for permission to seduce her. That had been too straightforward for flirtation. With a mixture of embarrassment at the memory and the caution that accompanied every rare thought of Catilyn, he snuffed it from his mind like a candle flame.

He hadn’t looked away from Lady Ausric’s face.

“Be my friend, then,” she told him.

“Gladly, Lilli.” He took a bite of the cake, tasting walnut and rosewater.

She set her knife down beside her silver plate—the hilt was silver, too, shaped like Ausric’s lion rampant, its eyes and claws set with chips of gemstone. Too ornate to handle comfortably for long, but Konstantin envied her possession of it as much as he admired it. A guest would leave his sword in the guardhouse; never his knife.

He tried to move his mind to happier ideas. A more lighthearted source of envy: the necklace, falling perfectly along the slope of her well-fitted bodice, made him wish he still had his own jewelry. She might have appreciated it—like she must appreciate Victor’s earring and signet and tonight a darker stone on his middle finger, its deep green matching both his doublet and her eyes. Fuck him, but they were an astonishingly handsome couple.

“He had worried about your safety,” Victor said.

Lilli blinked past him to Konstantin. “Did you?”

His tongue had to recall how to work. “Yes. A little. These are…strange times to travel in.”

“They are.” She offered more the idea of a frown than a real expression of displeasure. “Not so much in the north of Koltas, however. The route from Guilerac was peaceful.”

“He doesn’t need to know that,” Victor said pleasantly.

“He’s right.” Konstantin shrugged with the trick he’d learned at Calister to make it both deferent and graceful. “That might be the largest piece of news I’ve received about the progress of the war since I—arrived here. But then, I already knew the advance north had failed, on the plains. Any attempts since… I certainly haven’t noticed here. The war isn’t my problem anymore.”

“It isn’t. No need to worry about that.” Konstantin’s words had slipped, without any malicious intent, toward sarcasm, but Victor spoke as if with complete sincerity. “It’s a relief neither of our keeps lie close to the border—wherever one might argue the border should be. It will never come far enough north, or west, for Ausric to be in danger. It would have to shift a great deal south for Eadinford to…” His tongue ran between his lips. “Well. If that day comes, it could be beneficial to have a friend in Koltas.”

“And I would be grateful,” Konstantin said through a smile that he knew even then was false.

“Victor!” Lilli exclaimed. “That’s an unkind thing to say.”

“Was it?” To the air before the three of them, Victor said, “Well then, my apologies.”

She stood and began to step around him, bringing her chair with her. Chuckling, Victor slid out of her way. He raised a hand to help move the carved pine seat. They were lightweight enough, these chairs, but when she settled it beside Konstantin, the sound seemed to echo.

Lilli sat after offering her husband a kiss. “The war isn’t your problem,” she said, “but it would have been very much mine if I was ravished and killed on the way here, so thank you for your concern.”

“That would never happen,” Konstantin managed.

“It’s sweet to have both your and my husband’s reassurances.” With her wineglass out of reach, she took Victor’s. “I don’t want to tempt you to disloyalty.”

“It isn’t that I doubt Loredon’s abilities to find a way so far north.” He paid the compliment, such as it was, to Duke Haslem with a careful glance at Victor. Who seemed amused in the way he could be when he was losing at Capture. “The part I want to protest,” Konstantin said, “is the idea that our army would treat you so barbarously.”

“And so they are all honorable men?” Victor murmured and sipped from Lilli’s glass. “Miraculous.”

“I chose to believe in miracles,” she said, still facing Konstantin. “As you do—was it only concern that we’d be bogged down in mud from the spring rains?”

“Perhaps a concern that my comrades from Loredon would rob you of your jewelry. It’s glorious enough to inspire avarice.”

Even Victor laughed at that. “He used to glitter like a starling, Lillibet.”

“Not so dull-looking yet,” she said, her fingertips tracing her necklace.

Konstantin felt his face heat, and noticed Victor didn’t offer any further details of how the two of them first met. Maybe it wasn’t a story Lilli would understand.

“I’d say it’s youth and he’ll grow out of it one day, but unfortunately”—Victor tilted the glass in his hand toward Konstantin in a mock toast—“I believe he’ll always break hearts.”

He caught himself before saying to Lilli, I’m sure your heart is too strong to ever break. He couldn’t keep himself from saying to Victor, “You can tell me what it’s like, then.”

“What it’s like?”

“Growing older while leaving devastation behind you.”

“You flatter me.” He grinned, lips and teeth tinged with wine.

“If we all keep chattering like starlings, I’m sure we’ll eventually land on a happy topic,” Lilli said with perturbation that didn’t seem entirely an act. “In between the ravages of war and broken hearts… But how has it really been, here, for both of you?” She smiled between them. “I hope you haven’t been trapped too much in each other’s company.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Konstantin told her.

“Only too much without yours,” Victor said.

He rose, and the rest of the room went to their feet with him. From the corner of his eye Konstantin noticed Dora’s nurse steadying the girl as she stepped on her hem.

Lilli took Victor’s arm. As in the courtyard earlier, his hand settled over hers—now bare skin to skin. He whispered something that made her laugh, then leaned toward Konstantin.

“I trust you can entertain yourself this evening without our Capture game?”

“I’ll find something.” If nothing else, that book of romances, contrived as they were—no wonder Calister never had patience with such tales, though at least they were full of honorable men and women—waited on the table where he’d left it. But how could one begrudge Victor and Lilli each other’s company?

Victor came closer and murmured in his ear, “Not jealous, are you?”

After a night of daring comments and questions, this was one too dangerous to answer either way. No would imply Lilli wasn’t desirable, which he couldn’t imagine would please Victor. Nor would Victor like to be lied to. And if he was honest, that opened the way to another question. Of which one?

For several of the other squires at Calister, Konstantin had felt something that could be called, for caution’s sake, admiration. He’d always noticed when a man was good-looking. The presence of certain knights had distracted him from even attempting to approach the women following Duke Haslem’s camp, left him uncertain which he’d truly want to choose, and just as well. He’d chosen none of them, for a multitude of very good reasons.

How much had Victor noticed? The forfeits he asked could pass as jokes. As could the way Konstantin paid them. After flirting with Lilli tonight, he couldn’t pretend not to understand the point of it all, the nonsense, the indirection, the double meanings, was to offer a chance at denial. One reason it was so fun: you could be honest without being held to anything.

“I’m not,” he told Victor, “in any way you’d have reason to worry about.”

Victor had pulled back far enough to examine his expression. Konstantin hoped it didn’t give much away. He had, of course, been honest. Nothing he felt could possibly trouble the lord of Ausric in his keep.

Who smiled briefly. “Diplomatic.”

Lilli leaned against her husband. “Shall we depart on this sweet note?”

She offered her free hand and Konstantin bowed over it. As he straightened, she stepped forward and pressed a kiss to his cheek.

Before leaving, Victor cupped the skin she’d kissed. His palm felt as warm and almost as soft as her lips. When he let go, that was when the touch became rough: he pulled his hand away from Konstantin as if he’d just used it to deliver a slap.

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