“I’m just the witchbred foundling. It should be you who thinks better of me, really.”
“Is that what this is?” His voice was filled with fascination. “Have you put a spell on me?”
“I hope you’re joking.” This time she didn’t care if it sounded friendly or not.
“Put a spell on me,” he said. Suddenly she found herself swept up into the air, one of his massive arms under her knees and one behind her back. Her stomach lurched nervously as he carried her through the dark to some unknown place. Instinctively, she clutched at his neck. “Put a thousand spells on me.”
“Put me down, or I will,” she said.
But he was already putting her down, somewhere soft and prickly with hay. She felt him drop next to her. Then he was kissing her neck and collarbone urgently. The urgency was sweet and the hand stroking her side was not entirely unwelcome, but—
“Darid,” she said. Not sighed, not breathed, not moaned, but said, in a normal tone of voice. As if she were about to ask him to pass the bread.
The stroking hand paused, and the kisses stopped. She felt him looming over her, waiting. And since he was waiting, she had to speak. She didn’t know half the words for what she needed to say. They were things that nobody had ever talked about to her. “I don’t think,” she said carefully, “that I want to—” She felt him freeze, and so, quickly, she said, “No, no. I want to be here. I thought about you all day. I saw you in the courtyard this morning and I couldn’t stop seeing you.” She reached up, then, and touched his hair. Which was only fair. It was soft and very silky and the curls clung to the tips of her fingers.
He pressed his head against her hand like a cat. “I saw you, too. What don’t you want to do?”
“The thing that everybody does. The thing the courtiers do, and the thing that Gavin and Elly have to do—”
“Have to do?”
She wasn’t sure, but she thought he might be laughing. “For the heir,” she said a bit stiffly.
“Oh. That thing.” He bent his head down and she felt his forehead touch her shoulder. There was no doubt now: he was laughing. His breath came in quick puffs against her neck.
She was hurt. “Don’t laugh at me. Hardly anybody ever talks to me about it and when they do, they use words that don’t actually mean anything. The Seneschal told me I wasn’t allowed to take a lover; should I have said that I wanted to be here and I wanted to kiss you but I didn’t want to be your lover? Would that be better?”
“Why would he say that?” he said in surprise.
“Because if I got pregnant, it would be—complicated. It’s hard to explain.”
She felt him touch her cheek. The laughter was gone. “I think there are probably a lot of things about your life that are complicated and hard to explain.”
“Only a small library’s worth.”
“Lucky for me, I don’t read that well,” he said. “All right, witchbred foundling. We won’t do that thing. You’re not the first person who’s told me that, you know.”
No, she wouldn’t be, would she? Because staff girls had as much to lose as she did. Maybe more. “What words did they use?”
He chuckled and put on a thick Highfall accent, the kind staff children all had beaten out of them in their first month, so Judah had hardly ever heard it. Every word seemed to have an extra vowel thrown in. “I’ll not be having sex with ye, ye greet hulking lummox,” he said. “Put it right out of your filthy heed, aye?”
Judah was delighted. “Oh, that’s amazing. Do more.”
“It’s been a long time,” he said, in his normal voice. Which probably wasn’t his normal voice at all, she realized, as he slipped fluidly back into Highfall. “But sure, girl, if it give you a chuckle, I’ll oblige ye.”
“I love it.” Then, greedily, “And I want to hear about all these other women who wouldn’t have sex with you, too.”
“Do you?” He was laughing again, but this time she didn’t mind. “Why?”
She couldn’t say. It had something to do with the courtiers, and the way they carried themselves, like the world was a performance; it had something to do with Gavin and Elly, who were expected to produce an heir as soon as possible, and it had something to do with the black void where her