Oramen’s absences from court had not gone unnoticed or unremarked. Just the morning before, at a formal late breakfast reception given by Harne, the lady Aelsh, to welcome her latest astrologer – Oramen had already successfully forgotten the fellow’s name – Renneque, accompanied by and arm-in-arm with Ramile, the pretty young thing Oramen remembered from Harne’s earlier party with the various actors and philosophisers, had scolded him.
“Why, it’s that young fellow!” she had exclaimed upon seeing him. “Look, Ramile! I recall that pretty face, if not the name after so long apart. How d’you do, sir? My name’s Renneque. Yours?”
He’d smiled. “Ladies Renneque, Ramile. How good to see you again. Have I been remiss?”
Renneque sniffed. “I’ll say. Most unfathomably. I declare there are those absent at the war who’re more often at court than you, Oramen. Are we so boring you avoid us, prince?”
“Absolutely not. On the contrary. I determined myself to be so ineffably tedious I thought to remove myself from our most quotidian conduct in the hope of making myself seem more contrastedly interesting to you when we do meet.”
Renneque was still thinking this through when Ramile smiled slyly at Oramen but to Renneque said, “I think the prince finds other ladies more to his liking, elsewhere.”
Renneque raised her delicate chin. “Indeed. Perhaps we are not good enough for the prince,” she said.
“Or it may be we are too good for him,” Ramile mused.
“How could that be?” Oramen asked, for want of anything better.
“It’s true,” Renneque agreed, taking a tighter hold of her companion’s arm. “Some prize availability over virtue, I’ve heard.”
“And a tongue loosened by money rather than moved by wit,” Ramile offered.
Oramen felt his face flush. “While some,” he said, “trust an honest harlot over the most apparently virtuous and courtly of women.”
“Some might, out of sheer perversity,” said Renneque, whose eyes had widened at the word “harlot”. “Though whether a man of judgement and honour would term one of those females ‘honest’ in the first place might give rise to some controversy.”
“One’s values, like so much else, might become infected in such company,” Ramile suggested, and tossed her pretty head and long flow of tight blonde curls.
“I meant, ladies,” Oramen said, “that a whore takes her reward there and then, and seeks no further advancement.” This time, as he said “whore”, both Renneque and Ramile looked startled. “She loves for money and makes no lie of it. That is honest. There are those, however, who’d offer any favour seemingly for nothing, but would later expect a very great deal of a young man with some prospect of advancement.”
Renneque stared at him as though he’d lost his mind. Her mouth opened, perhaps to say something. Ramile’s expression changed the most, altering quickly from something like anger back to that sly look, then taking on a small, knowing smile.
“Come away, Renneque,” she said, drawing the other woman back with her arm. “The prince mistakes us grievously, as though in a fever. We’d best withdraw to let the blush subside, and lest we catch it too.”
They turned away as one, noses in the air.
He regretted his rudeness almost immediately, but too late, he felt, to make amends. He supposed he was already a little upset; that morning’s mail had delivered a letter from his mother, all the way from far-distant Kheretesuhr, telling him that she was heavily pregnant by her new husband and had been advised by her doctors not to travel great distances. So to voyage all the way to court, to Pourl, was unthinkable. A new husband? he’d thought. Pregnant?Heavily pregnant, so that it was no recent thing? He’d heard nothing of this, nothing of either. She had not thought to tell him anything. The date on the letter was weeks past; it had suffered some serious delay in finding him, or had lain unposted.
He felt hurt, cheated somehow, as well as jealous and oddly spurned. He still was not sure how to respond. It had even crossed his mind that it might be best not to reply at all. Part of him wanted to do just that, so letting his mother wonder at not being kept informed, making her feel uncared-for, as she had made him feel.
Even while he was still lying there listening to the distant sounds of triumph, trying to work out exactly what he felt about the war’s victorious conclusion and puzzling over the