Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,95
love him. I understand.”
“I love you too. But I never expected this.”
It was Ashlin’s turn to laugh. “Neither did I. I only wanted a friend. I’ve never had many. Which is my own fault, for being a prickly sharp-tongued bitch. Then I met you, and you should have hated me but you didn’t, and you were clever and funny and beautiful and I was so bleeding grateful—” She shook her head. “I never imagined it would turn into something more, but now it has and I don’t know what to do. I’ve seen things like this before. I know how ugly they can turn. If—If you want me to go—”
Savedra wanted to scream, to laugh until she wept; her mother and Thea Jsutien between them couldn’t have concocted so clever a scheme. All it would take was a bit of jealousy and heartache to undermine the already strained marriage and send Ashlin home to Celanor, leaving Nikos embarrassed and obliged to remarry. And he still couldn’t marry her. What would the Jsutiens offer, she wondered madly, if she sent Nikos to Ginevra after all?
It felt like she moved through water as she crossed the room and cupped Ashlin’s cheek in one hand, like trying to run in a dream. “I don’t want you to leave. But I don’t want you to be miserable if you stay, either.” The softness of the princess’s skin sent a shiver up the length of her arm. Even dyed, her hair was finer than Nikos’s, the freshly trimmed tips prickly.
Ashlin turned her head and pressed a chaste kiss on Savedra’s palm, and then a lingering one on the hollow of her wrist. “I’m not drunk enough for this.”
Savedra laughed breathlessly, though it wasn’t funny. Wine, she’d learned, was usually how the princess nerved herself for marital obligations. She thought of her parents together, their easy affection and quiet, obvious devotion, and felt a pang of grief that something so simple should elude so many.
She might have argued that it was that grief that made her tilt Ashlin’s head back and kiss her. Grief and lingering horror, the need to feel warm and safe again. She might have said that, but it would have been a lie.
This time was slower, tentative and exploratory and still awkward. The fit of their bodies was strange and unnerving, but an improvement over Savedra’s clumsy and adolescent encounter with a girl from Arachne twelve years ago. That had been the last time she’d lain with a woman, until Evharis.
“I don’t usually worry about pregnancy,” Savedra said after a long silence, “but we have to.” Pragmatism dulled the pleasant tingle in her limbs, but she couldn’t ignore it.
“There is the possibility that I’m barren,” Ashlin said, not quite meeting her eyes. “And wouldn’t that be irony fit for an opera. I could have joined a mercenary company after all, and spared everyone grief.” She squeezed Savedra’s hand as she said it.
“It could also be Nikos.” It felt like a betrayal to say the words aloud, but he had acknowledged the chance himself after the second miscarriage. In the dark, in fact, in a scene much like this. She swallowed a bitter laugh. “It’s not as though I’ve borne him any bastards to say otherwise.”
They lay quietly for a while, with the weight of secrets and costs like a blade between them.
“You should go,” Savedra said at last, because someone had to.
“I should.” The shadows hid the princess’s face, but the hurt in her voice was clear. Savedra held herself still and silent while Ashlin dressed, though she ached to reach for her, to call her back.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last, as Ashlin turned to the door.
“So am I,” the princess whispered. Then she was gone.
Savedra wanted to press her face against the pillow and cry herself to sleep. But she was too much her mother’s daughter for that. Instead she rose and opened the windows to the damp and frigid night, then turned to the bottle of brandy on her dressing table. The first glass went down her throat in a single searing gulp. The second she carefully dashed across the soiled sheets. She changed the linens herself, awkwardly hauling a fresh set across the wide bed. When that was done she ran herself a bath and scrubbed away the scent of Ashlin’s skin. Next, wet and shivering in the drafty room, she opened the doors of her shrine and lit a stick of incense to Saint Sarai.
By then dawn