She bites her lip. “Maybe. But that isn’t it,” Danica Gradek says. “It is that none of them, not one, was Osmanli, and they are my revenge. They are, not Seressinis, or my raid companion, or some foolish nobleman here.”
“I see,” he says, after a silence.
“Do you?” She glares at him. “Do you?”
He shakes his head. “Probably not. Not yet. I am willing to try.”
She looks away then, towards the fire. Then she puts the wineglass carefully down beside her. She pushes herself off the ledge, stands in front of him.
“Try later,” she says, almost angrily.
She puts her hands behind his head and draws it down and she kisses him slowly. Her mouth is soft. He hasn’t expected softness.
“Try later,” she says again. “Not now.”
By then his arms have closed around her. He is ferociously aroused, hungry to taste her, made more so by feeling the hunger in her, in the way her fingers tighten in his hair.
“I wanted you on the ship,” he says, pulling back for a moment.
Her eyes are very blue. “Of course you did. Men are like that.”
“No. Well, yes, they are. We are. But it wasn’t only because—”
“Stop talking,” she says. Her mouth takes his again.
—
AND NOW, FINALLY, she does acknowledge why she’s here.
You need to try to be honest with yourself, Danica thinks, although thinking has become a challenge. But lovemaking is how she has been able to (at times) bring herself entirely into a given moment, night, hour before sunrise—not be enmeshed in the hard sorrow of memory, or imagining what might redress remembered fires.
She has never been with someone this experienced, however. The realization arrives with its own power. The young fighters of Senjan, or boys from Hrak Island, were never so . . . aware of her? Nor has she ever lain in a room, on a bed, like this. Her clothing is gone, with astonishingly little effort (she cannot recall her boots coming off, nor either of her knives). The firelight and the lamps play upon his body, and hers. His hair is reddened by the firelight, hers must be the same. She closes her eyes. She is only here, in this room. Now. It feels like a gift.
“Which would please you? My fingers or my mouth?” Marin Djivo asks, and pauses in what he is doing. That pause becomes a kind of agony. She suspects he knows it. She is sure he does. She could hate him for that, she thinks. She arches her hips, involuntarily.
She says, a little breathlessly, “Need I decide?”
And hears him laugh before his mouth returns to the great astonishment of what it has been doing to her. She hears herself say, as if from far away, “If I must choose . . . That is, if I . . .”
Not a sentence she ever finishes. She looks down at him, along the bed, his bed, exploring her, and it is as if she’s exploring herself with him in the moment. Not wrapped in sorrow, not raging. Not just now.
Danica reaches down, tugs his hair.
“Up,” she says. “Come up by me.”
And a little later she is the one who says, laughing inwardly, suspecting he can hear it in her voice, “My fingers or my mouth, a preference? Will you tell?”
“Oh, Jad! All of you,” Marin Djivo says. “Please.”
“Greedy?”
“I am,” he manages. It is mostly a gasp, which pleases her. He says, “I have decided not to . . . make distinctions . . . as to parts of your body, Danica Gradek.”
“I see,” she says.
And shifts above and on top of him, in need. She mounts him, sheathing his sex in hers. Time is running as it always runs, carrying them, carrying everyone. The silver moon will reach the window, rising through stars. Two men died violently this morning. She did not die, he did not. They are in this room, this night. He is in her.
She rides him, rising and falling, awareness of life like a pulsebeat within her, and he meets her urgency with his own. He turns her over, staying inside, and they are fire to each other, but also shelter, a place to hide tonight. And there is also tenderness before they are done and lying back on the bed, sweat glistening on two bodies, and they do see, through the open window, a silver half moon shining above the rooftops of Dubrava.
—
HE ALMOST FEELS to be in danger, lying in his own bed with a woman’s head on his chest. Not danger like this morning’s (he hadn’t even grasped that in the moment, it was over too quickly) but the sensation is real, and so Marin is unwontedly hesitant.
He says, “You said I should only try to understand later. About those you’ve killed. Do you remember?”
“I remember,” Danica Gradek says softly, not moving her head. He suspects her eyes are closed.
“I would like to. Understand.”
She stirs a little. Her hair is across his body. Her scent surrounds him.
“It isn’t later enough,” she says.
Her voice is low, satiated. Normally, he’d feel pleased with himself. Taking pleasure, giving it. He has had enough encounters with expensive women to know how to do both.
But tonight he wants to understand something that has nothing to do with lovemaking. Or, perhaps it does for her. Perhaps, he thinks, that is why she came up here. Desire cresting and fulfilled, to make something go away for a time.
He says, “You told me you were a girl in Senjan? You came there from . . . where?”
“Oh, dear. Are you a talking sort of man? After?” He likes this laziness in her voice.
“Sometimes I want to know where I am, where those beside me are.”
“Easy enough. They are beside you.” She moves her head and bites one of his nipples. He winces, tugs at her hair. She laughs, still softly.
They are silent. She breaks the stillness, surprising him. “You did lie with the other sister? You thought this morning’s attack was about her, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he says. “I didn’t know Iulia at all.”
“They made it very public.”
“I hope not. I don’t think people heard much.”
“Maybe, but they did want the attack on you to be seen.”
He’s been dealing with that thought all day. “Yes,” he says.
“You think the brother I killed is the one who bedded her?”
He is shocked, genuinely so. “What? Why would you . . . ?”
She shrugs, her head still on his chest. It is darker in the room, the fire has settled, embers. “They accuse you, they kill you, once dead you cannot deny being her lover. That becomes the story the world knows.”
Marin shakes his head. “More complex than it needs to be. She is with child by someone she won’t name, probably someone not of her class. They can’t arrange a wedding. And someone evidently did see me climbing down their wall in winter.”
“From the maidservant’s room?”
He sighs. “I had to say that. For Elena.”
“Yes,” she says. “Very courteous. The servant will be dismissed now, though.”
He hadn’t thought about that. “I will arrange a position for her if that happens.”
“It will happen,” Danica Gradek says. And then, after another silence, “Hadjuks raided and torched my village. Killed or captured almost everyone. They killed my father and my older brother, took my little brother away with them.”
“Oh, Jad,” Marin says.
“Jad wasn’t there.”
The voice isn’t lazy any more.
He says, carefully, “And so it is Osmanlis, Asharites, you have set yourself to kill?”
She moves her head up and down on his chest. She still hasn’t looked at him.
“I’m not doing very well at it,” she says.
He is trying to think of something to say to that when she glides a hand down his belly and finds the slackness of his sex. She begins, as if carelessly, to play
with it, and it isn’t slack after a little while.
“I believe you wish to say something comforting,” Danica Gradek says. “That isn’t what I want.”
Marin offers her again what it seems she does want from him tonight, and takes his own disturbingly intense pleasure doing so, seeing her respond, listening, sharing.
He sleeps after.
He is alone in the bed when he wakes towards dawn. She’s closed the window behind her and the lamps and fire are out.
When he goes downstairs later, having tumbled back into sleep again, she is gone from the house, and so is Leonora Miucci.
Drago had come for them not long after sunrise, a servant in the dining room reports. Marin had forgotten that the doctor’s widow had been summoned to Sinan Isle and had asked for Danica as a guard.
He’d meant to warn Danica about the Eldest Daughter there, how no one trusted her. And to mention the other woman they might meet. It was good, in his experience, to have as much information in advance as possible.
He is unhappy with himself for neglecting this. He thinks about taking another of their boats and going across, following them. That would be, he decides, a strange thing to do, and he hasn’t been invited.
His mind keeps circling back to last night. Unsurprisingly, on the whole.
His father offers a new thought at their morning meeting, an interesting one. It concerns the ship that has just come in and the merchants headed east. It requires, Andrij Djivo says, more reliable tidings than they currently have as to the khalif’s plans for war. Marin undertakes to see what he can discover in the city. He does try to do that, later, with little result beyond gossip and rumour. It is too early in the spring to know, everyone says.
He remains uneasy about the two women. Even walks down to the harbour at one point, looking across at Sinan. The isle is close enough that one can see the dome of their sanctuary.
Drago is there with them, he reminds himself, and there is reason to believe Danica Gradek can take care of anyone she’s asked to guard.
Still, he isn’t entirely surprised by what they learn later, and he does blame himself.
CHAPTER XII
It had often occurred to her how desperately hard it was for a woman to make her own way in the world—and how rarely it happened.
One possibility was to marry someone who went off to war and died conveniently, leaving a business, property, valuables. Widows, depending on where they lived and on their families, might shape a little freedom. Most often they were forced to marry again quickly, and not someone of their choosing.
You needed to be fortunate, and extremely determined.
She had been both, Filipa di Lucaro thought, waiting on Sinan Isle for her visitor on a springtime morning. Choosing faith, the path of the god, was no assurance of controlling your destiny. Unless you were an aristocrat and arrived at a retreat preceded by substantial gifts, the religious course left you with arrogant superiors and surrounded by frustrated women. The struggles for trivial advantage in a closed-off, overwrought retreat could create hatreds and rage fiercer than on a battlefield, and they festered like untreated wounds.
Of course, if you were truly devout, genuinely envisaged yourself as a servant of Jad, lived to comfort the sick and the grieving, to pray six times a day clutching a worn-smooth sun disk, were wrapped in thoughts of the god from sunrise to nightfall when you lay alone on a narrow pallet—well, how pleasant for you. Different assessments of what made for a good life applied to different women.
Filipa di Lucaro, Eldest Daughter of Jad on Sinan for a long time now, ruling like a queen in this retreat in the harbour of Dubrava, was not one of the devout.
She had freedom and power, both. She corresponded with the Council of Twelve—and the Duke of Seressa, privately. She received letters from around the Jaddite world: from Ferrieres and Karch and Anglcyn, from the mad emperor’s court in Obravic, or all the way west in Esperaña. She played a role in the world. She chose her own lovers. She chose whom she wanted killed—usually for Seressa, discussed in coded messages, but not invariably.
She had that dearly prized, almost impossible thing for a woman: independence.
Her only significant, ongoing trouble was that she had arrived on Sinan to find a real queen here before her. More than a queen: an empress.
She was not someone with any desire to be Eldest Daughter on the isle, or even take the vows of the god, but Eudoxia of Sarantium had been here for almost twenty-five bitter years now, and she was—there was no gainsaying it—an enemy.
Enemies could often be killed. Not this one. She’d tried.
Filipa had vivid memories of that. She’d essayed two poisons in the year after coming into power here and realizing that the older woman was going to be an impediment. Neither poison did anything at all, though both were considered infallible, one slow, one very swift.
And shortly after the second attempt had come the morning in this room when the empress-mother of Sarantium (which was no more) had told her why the poisons had failed, then told her certain other things.
It seemed that in the court of Sarantium in the last turbulent, frightened decades, when the threat of the Osmanli Asharites was matched by savage rivalries within the palace compound, it had become customary for the imperial family, even the children, to take small doses of most known poisons, to build protection against them.
There were, of course, lesser-known poisons, but the empress had made something else clear on that long-ago morning. She had, it seemed, sent out three copies of a letter, to be opened on her death. One was with the rector of Dubrava, one with the privy councillors of the High Patriarch in Rhodias, and one was in a location she did not reveal.
She had shown a fourth copy of this letter to Filipa that morning. It stipulated, in neatly written Trakesian, that if the empress-mother died it was due to poison administered by the Eldest Daughter in the retreat where she had taken shelter after the great calamity.
Further, it indicated that Filipa di Lucaro was not—as she had put forth to the world—from a good family near Rhodias, but was Seressa-born, an artisan’s daughter, and had been guided by the Council of Twelve through a long, deceitful route here, to serve as the most important Seressini spy in Dubrava.
Communications from Seressa to her, this letter went on, with precision, were routed through Rhodias or from another retreat near Seressa, appearing to discuss matters of faith and administration. In secret ink would come her instructions from the Council of Twelve. Her replies to them were sent by the same routes.
Every detail, down to the way the ink was made, had been correct.
She could remember the words Empress Eudoxia had spoken to her that morning (also a springtime): “You are a child among children if you believe your shallow intrigues can touch what Sarantium knew. When I die, however I die, you are destroyed. Take good care of me.”
“Why? Why do you hate me?” Filipa could remember asking with horror rising like a wave in a wind.
“Aside from your trying to kill me, you mean?”
No good answer to that, then or now.
The empress-mother had smiled that morning long ago. Her smile had frightened Filipa from the beginning, those bleak, enraged eyes. She had said, “I despise you for pettiness and greed. For killing because you can, not for need. And because your eternally accursed Seressa left its fleet in its harbour when the City of Cities, glory of the god, was allowed to fall.”
“I didn’t do that! I was barely out of childhood!”
“And now you aren’t, and you serve them, masked in faith. I see you clearly, I know you very well. Take care of my life. Yours ends when I die.”
So many years ago. Her life bound since that day to that of this implacable woman, locked in undying rage.
Filipa di Lucaro had reason to believe she could get that sealed letter retrieved from the Rector’s Pal
ace. Some people owed her a great deal, one member of the council wanted a night with her very much. His retrieving a document and handing it to her still sealed would be a fair price for her body and she would pay it gladly.
She even thought she might be able to have someone find the letter in Rhodias, with help from the Council of Twelve who would—surely!—not want a valuable person exposed, along with their own secrets.
But there was no true surely when it came to Seressa.
They might be childlike in intrigue for the dreadful woman in Filipa’s own rooms (always in these rooms—in an armchair in the shadows, day after day, year after year) but they might as easily disown her, dismiss her, expose her if they saw benefit in doing so.
And there was that abominable third letter, and she had no idea where it had been sent.
She was trapped, in the midst of the power and ease and pleasure of her life. And that life would come to an ugly end when a vicious old woman died.
There truly were no easy—or safe—paths to control of her own fate for a woman, even if you thought you’d found one on an isle in the bay of Dubrava.
Hatred, however, a hatred so large it filled the retreat and the isle—that you could carry within yourself.
“At least,” she had said more than once to the old, vile woman in her rooms, “my husband did not throw away an empire in slack folly, and my son did not die uselessly on the city walls. Remind me, what did the Asharites do with his head after sticking it on a spike? I confess have forgotten!”
No reply to taunting. Never. Not once. The blackness of that gaze, those eyes.
On this morning in springtime, word came to both of them that their guest had arrived. Guests, it appeared. Filipa heard the man’s name for the first time as he was presented to her. Of course she’d read about him in the letter from the Twelve. So had the other woman, that was part of their arrangement. Eudoxia kept silent, remained alive, had access to anything she wanted. The empress-mother had sent her own invitation to this man, for whatever reason. She did that. She did what she chose to do.
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