no one. She spends all her free time at the docks, drinking and gambling with the sailors. She loves their easy attitude, how little they care for the standards of the modern world. Loves the way they love so easily, where they will and for a night and then they’re gone. She meets one in particular who she fancies, and she lures him into bed with food and drink and smiles and games, and somehow they get to talking about their little problems. Mothers who worry for their immortal souls. Society that scorns and clucks its tongue at them.
“She comes up with a clever ruse to solve their problems, a masquerade fit for the opera. A false engagement and a meeting with his mother, which will satisfy his problems at home, and a deed with both their names signed at the bottom, for a little store that used to be a butcher’s shop. They agree and shake, and neither suspects it will be the start of anything other than a business relationship. Of course, they have to travel together to visit his mother, and then there’s the engagement party. She goes out and buys herself a ring, just to make it look official. A child of Ashua blesses the union to be. Somewhere along the way they become friends as well as casual lovers. And then, one day, he discovers he’s going to be king…Well, you know the rest.”
“Only you could have come up with a plot like that,” David said with a chuckle, shaking his head.
“Probably,” she agreed with a smile. “But it worked. Well, until the part where I lost the store and he found out that his mother wasn’t his mother at all…but I could hardly be expected to account for circumstances such as these.”
“It is those things we least expect that mean the most to us,” Ryan said softly, and David glanced at him with a look that implied he understood more truly what the words meant.
“Funerals are supposed to be about catharsis. We’re meant to shrug off the shackles of the past—perhaps I should have chosen a more important story,” Taya mused.
“Is there something more you need to speak of?” David asked.
She glanced at him, and saw in her mind’s eye a flash of gray eyes, the sparkle of a golden ring hidden in the palm of her hand. But the image was replaced by an actor dressed as a king, by warm brown eyes and a steady soul.
She smiled. “I don’t think there is,” she said, and the words surprised her.
“David?” Ryan said quietly. “Your turn.”
Now it was David’s turn to look surprised. He shook his head. “I’m fine.”
“Catharsis,” Ryan him reminded quietly.
David sighed, shifted, eyed Taya. He glanced around, but they were alone in their pool of shadows. Everyone was engaged in their own storytelling, in their own secrets. He took a swig from a flask that Ryan handed to him without being asked, and stared at his hands as he spoke. “Once…I thought I would be king.”
Taya had expected his story to be about Ryan, about the secret relationship they seemed to share, but she supposed some secrets were too private even for nights like this. And she had seen hints of this, rumors. It was a story she was eager to know.
“My father is the duke of House Night. Historically, many queens and kings have been chosen from our line, to wed with House Goldfinch. My great uncle was king. My cousin was engaged to wed Darren, before the usurpation. We were a family very loyal to the old line. When the false king took over we fell out of favor, but no duke can be entirely dismissed from court; they’re too powerful. So I grew up around the usurper and his family, around House Badger, the only house closer to the crown than we were, around politics and kingmaking. Jeremy and I are old friends. He is from a minor noble house, but we studied together, and we squired together for my uncle for a time.
“We were firebrands. Revolutionaries. We were vocal of our dislike, not necessarily for the false king, which would get even noble boys killed, but for the changes he was making to the balance of power in Sephria. Taking rights and privileges from the barons and knights and giving it to the dukes upsets the checks and balances necessary for honest governing. Not to mention the taxes, and the court system whose justice seemed to fall