by Sacchi Green
“Only that she is said to be very beautiful,” Sam replied.
The queen understood from this that Sam knew nothing of Lucinda, for the princess had been born with a large white birthmark covering the lower half of her face, and no one had ever called her beautiful. She folded the letter and considered.
“Did my husband speak to you before giving you this letter?”
“Only to command that I bring it to you.”
She could not guess why the king would order her to perform this unusual wedding, but for her own reasons the idea appealed to her. Queen Matilda had long disliked the neighboring king to whom Lucinda was promised. When she had realized her daughter would never be beautiful, the queen had become afraid that this man would mistreat or demean her. The common woman before her might indeed make a more suitable spouse for Lucinda, the queen thought, but she had to be sure.
“What is the value of a woman?” asked the queen. “Does it lie in her beauty?”
“Beauty seems like a valuable thing,” Sam said. “It affects the way a person is seen and spoken to. But I think the real value of a woman lies in the quality of her soul, and that this would be the same for any person. After all, we are taught that the spirits beyond fight over the fate of all our souls, not only those of the beautiful.”
“What of wealth? Should a person marry for it?”
“Wealth is pleasant to have. Few would be disappointed to gain it, and some must marry or have nothing at all. For my part, I wish most of all for my husband to treat me kindly and with respect, as I have seen my father do for my mother. I would marry a poorer man if it meant receiving this.”
“And must a woman marry a man? What if you were to marry a woman instead?”
Sam could not understand the reason for these questions, but she did not want to hesitate before the queen. She answered as honestly as she could. “I have never considered the idea, but I see no reason not to.”
“Do you think you could love a woman?”
Sam thought back to the previous night and the strange way the black-clad woman had made her feel. “I believe I could.”
“Wait here.”
The queen disappeared into the depths of the palace, and Sam stood uncomfortably among the guards, wondering why she had not been dismissed. Soon, she noticed increased foot traffic in the hallway outside the room where she had been received. More time passed, and the palace began to bustle.
A guard appeared, dressed in the queen’s livery, and commanded Sam to follow him. Sam swallowed her fear and asked for an explanation, but the man refused to give one. He took Sam to lavish chambers where she spent the remainder of the day being groomed in ways she had never previously imagined possible. At last, she was dressed in finery from head to toe. The guard returned, took her by the arm, and led her to the palace chapel.
Sam caught sight of her bewildered adoptive parents in seats of honor, thought back to the queen’s questions, and realized that she was about to wed Lucinda. As guards guided her into position, she searched her heart for her honest reaction. It was certainly an honor to wed a princess, but Sam worried that she would not know how to be a spouse to Lucinda. And what if the princess had an unpleasant disposition? What if she was unhappy about being wed to Sam? Another thought of the black-clad woman flickered through her head, and a part of her lamented never being able to visit the small house beside the pool again.
Then court musicians began to play flutes and timbrels, and Lucinda appeared at the other end of the chapel. A white veil covered the lower half of her face, but Sam would have known those eyes anywhere. If this was witchcraft, she didn’t mind. Her body relaxed, and she carried out the ceremony with cautious anticipation.
Sam was in a daze by the time the wedding concluded and the celebration began. Courtiers offered the newlywed couple gifts of grains, dried fruit, and sweets. Lucinda was dressed in a cloak made of pearls and helped into a litter, which was carried by six stout men. The men held her aloft and displayed her for hours, until their strength gave out. When they put her down at last, Lucinda stepped into Sam’s arms for the first time.
To Sam, everything in the world disappeared at that moment except for her new wife. Lucinda’s thick, curly hair still smelled of roasted hazelnuts, and her lush curves fit and mingled with Sam’s muscular form.
When the princess pulled back, Sam saw they had been left alone. She bent to Lucinda’s ear. “Why am I married to you? Surely there is no shortage of princes—or princesses— who would be overjoyed to be in my position, and I am only a commoner.”
Lucinda raised one thick eyebrow, and a serious expression flashed through her dark eyes. “You’ve married me because that was my wish. But there is much we must discuss in private.”
“Who are you really?”
“I’m the woman who was born when you climbed out of the pool and looked at me.”
Lucinda led Sam to her private chambers. As they navigated the hallways, Sam planned the questions she would ask once they got there, but when they arrived, Lucinda shut the door and turned to face her, and all words fell away.
Sam traced the curve of Lucinda’s ear, ending at one edge of the concealing veil. “May I?”
“Perhaps you had better not.” Tears glistened in her eyes.
“Why?”
“The way you look at me will change. Please. Give me just one day like this. I want to see you desiring me. That playful smirk of yours. I can’t bear for it to disappear just yet.”
Sam felt her lips flatten into a serious line. She wondered what horrors lay under the veil but was careful not to reveal any worry or disgust. She thought for a moment, and then realized what she needed to say to her new wife. “I fell for your eyes, which I have seen and am seeing now. If that’s all you will show me, then I understand, and it is enough. More than enough. A blessing.” Sam dropped her hands to her sides, away from Lucinda, and waited.
Lucinda cupped Sam’s cheek. “You see? This is why I’ve married you. I can imagine no other spouse who would say such a thing to me, and truly mean it. Is it unfair if I ask you to let me see you again? You seemed unafraid last night, and I thought perhaps you would be willing now.”
Sam hesitated, and Lucinda drew back, covering her face with one hand. “I am making too many requests,” Lucinda said. “I have done nothing but ask you for favors since the moment we met.”
At this, Sam’s smile returned. She tugged gently at Lucinda’s hand so she could look into her eyes again. “If I remember correctly, it was I who began our acquaintance with a request for a favor. And now, despite your wisdom, you’ve not got the right of it. It is a favor to me for you to look at me. It is a favor for you to let me reveal myself to you.”
Sam made good on her words, undoing her clothing for Lucinda. She handled the fine fabrics lightly and with care, and as she undid hooks from eyes, she made sure to look upon Lucinda with heat in her gaze, silently promising to exercise this deftness on her new wife in the future. She shrugged herself clear of the costly garments, and to Lucinda, Sam’s body seemed even finer naked and unadorned.
“May I touch you?” Lucinda asked.
“You may do with me as you please.”
Lucinda stepped close. At first, despite her question, she touched only with eyes, her fingers too timid to bridge the gap between them. When she lifted a hand at last, she flitted it around Sam’s body like a butterfly too skittish to alight. Feeling ridiculous, she brought a fingertip to rest on the blunt tip of Sam’s broad nose.
They both froze, and then Sam laughed, and the sound freed Lucinda to gather her wife into her arms more boldly. She learned the shapes of Sam’s shoulder blades, the curve of her spine, and the solidity of her hips. She tucked Sam’s muscular buttocks into the palms of her hands, but the powerful response in her body alarmed her and she retreated to Sam’s elbows. Lucinda, however, could not resist stroking upward from there, outlining her wife’s upper arms, which were strong and thick from helping the miller.
This supposedly less intimate territory still made Lucinda’s stomach flutter. She rested the side of her face between Sam’s breasts, barely trusting her legs to hold her up. Wrapping one arm around Sam’s back, Lucinda allowed her other hand to wander to the hollow of Sam’s throat, over the point of one taut breast, along the side of her rib cage, and finally, between her legs.
“Moon above and river below,” Sam cursed.
Lucinda smiled at the reaction and petted the damp hair that grew over Sam’s pubis. She knew the pleasure her own body yielded when she explored this place. “There is a river below indeed. I feel the signs of its presence, though I have not found it yet.”
Sam widened her stance. “You seem clever enough to track it.”
“You will not be able to remain standing under the force of its waters once I make them flow,” Lucinda said. She led her wife to her bed and helped her in. Then she rubbed the top of one of Sam’s thighs, as if she were a great mill horse in need of steadying. Slowly, Lucinda parted her wife’s lower lips, revealing the extent of her wetness.
“Ah,” Sam sighed. “You’ve found it.”
“I’ve found the path that leads there.” Lucinda began a thorough examination of the territory, at first simply stroking and discovering, then later responding to the hiss of Sam’s breath and the catches in her throat. She trapped sensitive flesh between her first two fingers, squeezing lightly, tugging, and rolling.
Sam gave a full-throated cry, and her firm body became rigid and hard beneath Lucinda’s touch. Pleasure shattered off her and pounded through the room, rolling from Sam’s body in waves that Lucinda could feel at her temples. Sam gasped, and finally caught her breath. “My mother told me the pleasures of the marriage bed were not for women,” she said at last. “I’ve never known her to be wrong before, and yet I can imagine nothing sweeter than what you have done to me.”
Lucinda stretched out beside Sam, still in her clothes. She slipped her hand beneath her veil so she could inhale Sam’s scent, and shivered all over at the spice of it. “It heartens me to hear this from you. I was always told that it would hurt.”
Sam clutched Lucinda fiercely. “I swear I’ll never hurt you.”
“I know you won’t.”
“Will you let me please you, too?”
Lucinda drew a deep breath. “Soon,” she promised. “But not yet.”
Sam nodded and held her, and the two women whispered secrets to each other.
On the first few mornings after that, Lucinda started their day by asking if she could keep her veil. Sam always agreed. On the fifth morning, Sam stopped her before she could speak. “It’s your veil,” she said. “You don’t need my permission to wear it.” The agreement made, they lived together in bliss for several weeks, Lucinda caressing Sam everywhere by night and Sam righting insecurities with a lopsided smile. They fell more deeply in love each day, but they knew that trouble would return along with Lucinda’s father, the king.
“Tell him you carried the message faithfully, and you never saw any sign that it had been changed,” Lucinda implored Sam.
Sam scowled and paced the room. “You would have me risk being trapped by my own words.”
They debated and discussed endlessly, and when the trumpets signaled that King Harold had indeed arrived, they had planned no concrete strategy for facing his wrath.
When King Harold entered the palace and learned what had happened, he called Queen Matilda to him at once. He roared and raged, flinging candlesticks and tearing tapestries down from the walls. The queen handed him the letter that Sam had delivered and refused any further conversation while he exhibited such wildness. The king examined the letter and saw that, though the writing closely resembled his, it had not come from his hand. He called Sam to a private audience.
She arrived humbly, dressed in the minimum of finery appropriate to her new station, and knelt before the king.
“You are a clever forger,” the king said in a low, dangerous voice. “Your artifice has won you the bride you’ve always wanted, the one you were destined for.”
Sam glanced up in surprise. “Your Majesty, I don’t understand you. I have grown to love your daughter a great deal in a short time, but trust and believe that I never dreamed of desiring such a bride until I found myself dressed in wedding clothes.”
The king, too angry for discretion, told Sam the story of her birth. Sam’s face grew pale as she learned how she had been tricked away from her mother and nearly drowned. A muscle in the side of her neck twitched, and she clenched her teeth.
When the king had finished speaking, Sam rose deliberately to her feet. “I suppose you can have me killed for this,” she said, “but I won’t kneel to a man who twice tried to murder me through devious means. If I am to die by your hand, I will have it happen honestly. I would never have so much as breathed Lucinda’s name until you sent me here, but now that we are wed, I will love her to my dying breath.”
King Harold signaled a guard to cut Sam down, but at that moment, Lucinda, who had been listening from just outside the chamber, ran in and flung her arms around her wife. “You must run through me as well, Father. I cannot lose her.”
The guard hesitated, and the king stared. He thought of his old friend in the neighboring kingdom and that long-ago night with the barley wine. They had grown apart since then, neither the trade routes nor the daughter as attractive as they had once expected. He thought of the way Lucinda would certainly howl with prolonged grief if he did this thing. It occurred to him that this was a petty reason to spare a person’s life, but he had taken and spared lives for far less.
He glared at his daughter and her veiled, ugly face, and realized who the real forger must be. King Harold knitted his eyebrows into a stern expression. “I believe this is a forgery of a marriage, but I will give you a chance to prove that it is not. Your marriage must, of course, have issue. If you are fruitful, then I will accept you both—I will even make Sam here the crown, uh, princess. If a year passes with no sign that Lucinda is with child, however, then I must make room for a man who can give Lucinda an heir.” He gave a horrible smile. “You take my meaning, of course.”
Sam squared her shoulders. “Perfectly.” Solutions already filled her mind. She would not risk their happiness over jealousy, and Sam was certain that a tolerable man could be found to stand in for husbandly duties. She squeezed Lucinda’s hand to reassure her, and led her toward the door.
King Harold stopped them before they could escape. “Keep in mind,” he purred, “that if any man can claim the child as his own, I’ll have to punish my daughter for adultery.”
When they returned to Lucinda’s chamber, their mood was hopeless. Sam clasped Lucinda around the waist. “We’ll have a year together. Many people lack even that much love.”
“If only I could think of something to try,” Lucinda said, but then fell silent. In her excitement over her marriage, she had forgotten the small house beside the pool, and the old woman’s last request.
She told Sam the story, and called her favorite guard to the chamber. A heavy coin purse secured his assistance helping them slip out of the palace unnoticed, as it had for her many times before. “Be back before sunrise,” he whispered as they left.
The rain began again as Sam and Lucinda made their way through the woods. When they arrived at the stand of hazel trees, Sam pulled off her clothes and dove into the pool. At once, a salmon swam into her arms, bright, iridescent, and heavy. Her powerful thighs strained to lift it out of the pool.
Lucinda waited at the shore. With grim efficiency, she gutted and cleaned the fish while Sam built a fire.
Placing the fish in a heavy metal pan, she and Sam watched in silence as it sizzled.
The fish’s fat hung heavy in the air in the small house. “I am here for you whatever happens,” Sam said.
Lucinda took a small helping and lifted one bite to her lips. When she swallowed it, she cried out. Sam sprang to her side. “What is it? What can I do?�
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Lucinda turned to her wife, her eyes wide. “I saw a star being born in the night sky, so white and yet so hot. I saw its light traveling for thousands of years, and I know when it will reach us here.”
Sam frowned. “Do you feel well?”
“So far.” Lucinda took another bite. Each one brought a startling new revelation. She saw thick snakes that swam in rivers on the other side of the world. She saw the paths tracked by currents through the ocean. She saw the rivers of fire that flow beneath the surface of the earth. She took another helping and saw how people lived before kings and how they would live after them.
“You should eat this with me,” Lucinda said. “The wise woman gave me everything she knows, and I can share it with you.”
Sam patted Lucinda’s knee. “I don’t think I could hold all that. She entrusted this to you for good reason. If there’s anything I really ought to know, you can tell me about it the old-fashioned way.”
Lucinda ate until her mind was full, but much of the fish still remained. She knew she could not waste it, and so she continued eating. Since the knowledge had nowhere else to go, it spilled into her womb. Her belly began to swell.
She gripped Sam’s fingers tightly as she continued eating, whispering to her about the child she could see, a girl as wise as her mentor but as bold and lucky as Sam. Realizations lit Lucinda’s mind in bursts like fireflies on a still summer night.
She had seen the wisdom of the ages, and yet, as she took her last bite, one last small thing washed through her with greater force than the explosion at the dawn of the universe. She snapped her dark eyes open, and Sam gasped, for they twinkled with multitudes of stars.
Holding Sam’s gaze, Lucinda fumbled with her veil and tore it free. “I’m not ugly,” she said, her voice heavy with wonder.
The white birthmark that Lucinda had covered all her life was, to Sam, a thrilling unknown, a reflection of the caul that had heralded Sam’s own journey into the world. She wondered if it, too, gave luck, and which woman’s luck had brought them together. Sam touched the princess’s cheeks with both hands, kissed her lips, and stroked her chin and jaw. “You’re so beautiful.”
