“I can’t tell you,” she said. “Please stop asking.”
“Is someone blackmailing you or something?” he said, sounding like it was a joke, a ridiculous notion.
“No.”
“Threatening to hurt you?”
“No.” But Lovisa hesitated.
With a new kind of understanding, Mari became indignant. “Who is it? I’ll hurt them first.”
“That’s exactly why I’d never tell you! You’d rush off to do something stupid, and ruin everything. Good night. I’m going somewhere else.”
She tried to pull the door shut, but Mari caught it. “I promise,” he said. “I won’t do anything you don’t want, if you’ll just tell me what’s going on. I swear it, Lovisa. Please? You can’t even sleep! I’ve never seen you like this!”
Lovisa was wiping sudden, infuriating tears from her cheeks. She knew Mari kept his promises, but it didn’t matter. “I can’t,” she said. “If I did, it would endanger us both. And I wish I could, so it kills me when you ask. So will you please, please stop badgering me about it, and just let me be stressed out, and help distract me?”
“Are you protecting me from something?” he asked, incredulously.
“Shut up!”
He pulled her into the room, shut the door, and put his arms around her.
“What are you doing?” she cried, startled.
“I’m hugging you!” he said. “You’re scaring me!”
“Are you seducing me? For sex?”
“Oh, for the love of the Keeper, Lovisa,” he said, beginning to laugh. “No. I’m hugging you for comfort. Only you would ask that.”
“Why shouldn’t I ask about it directly?” she said. “Would it be so terrible for everyone to say what they mean when they do things, and what they want, and why? Wouldn’t it make things simpler, and create fewer disasters?”
“Lovisa,” he said, “now what’s going on?”
“I hate everyone who’s normal,” she said, humiliated by the tears that were soaking into his shirt.
Mari began to rock her back and forth with his hug. She buried her face in his chest, heard his heart beating. When was the last time anyone had hugged her? When did anyone ever hug anybody? Her arms reached up to hug him back and his grip on her tightened.
“What a relief I’m not normal,” he said, which made her snort with sudden laughter. No one was more normal than Mari, but it was true that she didn’t hate him. And she told herself it was a friendly hug, fond, not sexual. But her body was telling her something else too, wanting to press against him, wanting to make his body respond, because that would feel different.
“Mari?” she said.
“Yes?”
She lifted her face to his, her mouth very close. “What if we reconsidered?”
He hesitated, understanding. Then he kissed her, once, tentatively. Yes, that was better. She kissed him back.
He pulled away. “Wait. We’ve talked about this. We’re not thinking.”
But Lovisa was thinking. “I know you’re not in love with me,” she said. “You know I’m not in love with you. We’ve been through it a hundred times. There’s no confusion here. And I’m dying for a distraction.”
He let out a big sigh. “Okay.”
She took him to his bed.
* * *
—
It was nice. Interesting. Not tantalizing, but she liked being close to Mari, she liked burying her face in his neck, she liked moving with him and filling her mind with him. She trusted him. And he was attentive and patient, but also wanted her. It made her feel . . . important. It was such a strange feeling.
“It’s fine,” she told him, when he worried about her. “I’m not going to finish. It’s okay.”
Then, right about the time he was finishing, her body started wanting it. He gasped out his joy, then dropped into sleep, like someone had put a sheet over a birdcage.
“Hey,” she said, poking his shoulder, frustrated.
“What?” he said, waking up with a start, looking around in blurry confusion.
“I didn’t finish.”
“I thought you weren’t going to.”
“Well. I was indifferent at first. Now I want to.”
“Okay,” he said. And to her vast surprise, he disappeared under the covers, positioned her legs just so, and began to apply his tongue to her, so gently that her body sang out in wonderment. Wow. When did Mari get so good at these things? Who knew?
The pleasure rose slowly, became almost overwhelming, then became shattering. When it was over, she started to cry again. She hid the tears from him, confused about whether she was happy or sad.
Mari fell asleep with his face buried in her neck. Lovisa lay awake for a while, sniffling quietly, thinking, released from the grip of worry about the queen, if briefly. She wondered if they’d do it again tomorrow.
* * *
—
In the early morning, she woke to him murmuring happily and planting tiny kisses behind her ear. When she turned to him, she saw starlight in his eyes.
“Wait,” she said, immediately alarmed. “Why did you change your mind?”
“What?”
“About sex.”
“I guess because I trust you.”
“But you’re not in love with me?”
“I’ve known you all my life,” he said. “We’re still friends, right?”
“Yes,” she said carefully. “But maybe we shouldn’t do that again.”
“Didn’t you like it?”
“It was very, very nice,” she said. “But now I’m afraid of you falling in love with me.”
“Because I was kissing you just now?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I just want to have more sex with you.”
“Oh,” said Lovisa, who hadn’t thought of that. “Okay. But listen, Mari, will you promise me that you’ll be honest with me, about all your feelings about this?”
He considered the question, with that sleepy morning dopiness that made her remember that she’d known him when he was five. “Would that be a one-way promise,” he said, “or are you going to be honest with me too?”
“About my feelings about sex, yes,” she said. “Not about the stuff I can’t tell you.”
“Okay. I promise.”
“Also, when we stop having sex, promise you won’t try to isolate me socially.”
He propped himself up on his elbow and stared at her, hard. “What kind of question is that?”
“Like you did with Nev,” she said, shrugging.
“I did not!” he said. “I never did any such thing!”
“Okay, but everyone else isolated her, as a matter of course.”
“But I didn’t tell them to do that!”
“You didn’t tell them not to do it either. You saw it happening, and you could’ve stopped it with a word, but you didn’t. I need a promise you won’t do that to me. You know I’d have to retaliate, right? It would make a huge mess of everything.”
Mari was staring mulishly at the bedsheets, thinking. Lovisa knew how slow he was to offense, how hard he considered everything, sometimes tortuously, before deciding what he thought. Unlike her. She was a little ashamed of herself.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I mean, I’ve isolated her too.”
He sighed, still looking confused. “Regardless of whether you’re right about her, I won’t do that to you,” he said. “I never would. I promise.”
“Okay then,” she said. “And I won’t retaliate.”
Mari rolled his eyes. “What a lovely future we’ve planned for ourselves.”
“We’ve promised each other friendship, haven’t we?”
“Yes, I guess we have.”
“Why do you trust me, anyway?”
“I don’t tru
st you with everything,” he said, with a small smile. “But I do with this.”
* * *
—
When Lovisa woke again, her stomach hurt with emptiness and anxiety.
Tea, she thought, remembering the preventative tea against pregnancy. And then she remembered that she didn’t have any. She tried to keep it on hand, it was easy to get from the academy infirmary, but the last time she’d been anywhere near the infirmary, it had been snowing, slippery, windy. Lovisa had spent too much time shivering outside in the cold lately.
She knew a lot of girls who’d have the tea on hand, but they were gossips.
Finding her robe, she left Mari’s room, slipped through the corridors, and tapped on Nev’s door.
When nothing happened, she tapped again and kept on tapping. Finally, the door opened a crack and Nev peered out, looking annoyed and rumpled. Lovisa remembered that it was Sunday morning.
“What do you want?” Nev said.
“Preventative tea,” said Lovisa. “I’m out. Do you have any?”
Nev groaned, opened the door fully, then climbed back into bed. “In the window. It’s that bushy one on the right that looks like the leaves are dying.”
The room was dark, the pink glow of sunrise beginning to illuminate frost on the windowpanes. Lovisa couldn’t tell the plants apart. “Seriously? You have it growing in your window?”
“Like I said.”
“Are the leaves dying?”
“No, that’s just how it grows.”
“What do I do?” said Lovisa, not moving from the doorway.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never picked leaves from a plant before.”
Sighing deeply, then rubbing her face, Nev muttered, “Ledra people.” She rolled out of bed again, this time bringing a blanket with her as a cape. “Here,” she said, lighting both a lamp and her little stove, then dipping a small, bashed-up tin pot into her basin of water. “We’ll have some together.” Then she went to the windowsill and picked a few small leaves from the plant.
“Is that enough?” Lovisa asked. “For both of us?”
“More than enough,” said Nev. “People use ten times more than they need.”
“I follow the instructions on the packet.”
“The instructions are written by a merchant who wants you to buy ten times more than you need.”
“Huh,” said Lovisa, with a flash of appreciation for the merchant.
Nev dropped the leaves into a little metal strainer shaped like a silbercow that screwed closed at its middle.
“That’s cute,” said Lovisa. “Where’d you get it?”
“A woman at home makes them,” said Nev, lowering the strainer into the pot, then going back to bed. The room was freezing. Standing awkwardly, Lovisa pulled the fur collar of her robe tightly around her throat. From the bed, gold eyes peered out at her.
“Are you bonded yet?” she asked.
“No,” said Nev shortly.
I never say the right thing, Lovisa thought, then, suddenly exhausted, went to the bed and sat at Nev’s feet, not asking permission. She wondered what Nev would think if she knew Mari Devret was the reason Lovisa needed the tea. Or that Lovisa had slept with him because the Queen of Monsea was trapped in her parents’ attic, and she didn’t know what to do.
The water began to bubble, a low, comforting whisper that made her want to lie down, curl up, and fall asleep at the foot of Nev’s bed. I could sleep in Nev’s room too, she thought, with a blip of surprise. Even with her right there, annoyed at me.
Nev pushed herself up in bed with her eyes closed, back propped against the wall. When the fox kit crept out of the blankets and edged closer to Lovisa, then pressed her small side against Lovisa’s furry robe, Lovisa stiffened. It was strange to be making contact with someone’s fox.
“Would it bother you if the person I had sex with was Mari Devret?” she asked, suddenly too curious to help herself.
Nev’s eyes popped open. “No,” she said, then said nothing more, which was frustrating. Lovisa wanted to understand.
“Is that because northerners never get jealous?”
“No! Why would you think that?”
Lovisa shrugged. “Most people wouldn’t want me sleeping with their ex. I wondered if northerners cared less about those things.”
Nev looked incredulous. “Do you think we’re all the same?”
“No,” protested Lovisa.
“Isn’t your own mother a northerner? Doesn’t she get jealous?”
Lovisa suspected there was no angry, twisted feeling of which Ferla was incapable. But Ferla was a different kind of northerner; she was rich. “Probably.”
“Well,” said Nev, her voice still frosty. “It’s true that the people I know from home might have some different attitudes. For example, we’d never pay a fortune for a month’s worth of preventative tea. We’d never buy cut flowers when they grow beside our roads.”
She thinks she’s superior, thought Lovisa.
“But we have normal feelings,” she said. “Including jealousy.”
“Do you get jealous?” Lovisa asked.
“Sometimes,” Nev said, then added, almost indignantly, “Of course I do.”
The tea was bubbling in earnest now. With an expression of disgust, Nev got up and leaned over the pot, stirred it, then mixed a spoonful of some congealed amber thing from a glass jar into the concoction. She pulled two cups from a shelf and carefully poured. She handed one to Lovisa.
Lovisa sipped cautiously, her stomach still roiling. “It tastes different from what I’m used to,” she said. Much less disgusting, she didn’t say aloud.
“I added some honey for sweetness, and some ginger syrup so it’s not as hard on an empty stomach. The chemicals that prevent pregnancy can hurt the stomach wall.”
“Oh,” said Lovisa, then cursed herself for sounding interested. You make me feel like a child, she thought, still jumpy from the strange pressure of Nev’s purring fox against her leg.
The two girls sipped their drinks, not looking at each other. Lovisa didn’t know why Nev should matter to her—when Pari was dead and her parents were monsters; when the Queen of Monsea was imprisoned in the attic; when she didn’t know how to think, or what to do, or why she was always such a consummate coward. Nor did she know why she cared whether Nev minded about Mari. And why I’m always crying, she thought, furiously blinking back tears.
“What makes you jealous?” she asked.
Nev sighed. “I can get jealous if I have feelings for someone.”
“So, if you’re sleeping with someone but you don’t have feelings, you don’t get jealous?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had sex with anyone I didn’t have feelings for.”
“Do you have feelings for Nori Orfa?” Lovisa asked, suddenly concerned.
“Nori Orfa,” Nev repeated, as if she didn’t understand the name.
“I heard a rumor,” Lovisa said, not mentioning that she herself had seen Nori leaving Nev’s room. “That you have a thing with him.”
“With Nori Orfa,” Nev said flatly.
“Yes,” said Lovisa, growing impatient. “That’s his family name. The tea manor boy from your own province up north. I mean, you’re drinking that tea for some reason, aren’t you?”
Nev’s head went back and her shoulders straightened, almost imperceptibly. “That’s a nosy question,” Nev said.
“True,” said Lovisa.
“Do you have feelings for Mari?”
“No.”
“He’s extremely decent,” Nev said, “as long as you don’t mind someone with a compulsive need to be good at everything.”
Lovisa was outraged. What was wrong with wanting to be good at things? It was amazing, how good Mari was at things! Including sex! “Why did you bre
ak up with him, anyway?” she shot back.
“You’re asking a lot of nosy questions.”
“So are you!”
Nev took a few sips of tea, then stared into her cup, her expression impenetrable. “It’s hard to explain,” she finally said. “Mari thought I was always right about everything. He would’ve done anything I asked.”
“He loved you,” said Lovisa, feeling sick and mean.
“He couldn’t even see me clearly,” said Nev, “so, no, not really. And he was such a pushover that I always felt like I was controlling him. It was uneven. I was smothering in his adulation.”
“Sounds terrible,” Lovisa said viciously.
“You don’t need to be jealous,” Nev said. “He knows now that I’m not perfect.”
“I’m not jealous!”
“Good,” said Nev. “It’s probably different with you, more healthy. He could adore you, but he’s not going to forget who you are, right? He’s known you all his life.”
“He doesn’t adore me,” Lovisa said. “We don’t have feelings. I’ve been having trouble sleeping and last night he helped me fall asleep.”
“Well, that’s good.”
Lovisa jumped up from the bed, gratified when the fox kit yelped and went sprawling. She marched to the window and glared through the glass at silhouettes of trees and buildings, lined with the pink and gold of the rising sun. She couldn’t believe they were even having this stupid conversation. How did Nev get her to reveal such personal things?
“Nori never told me he had two names,” Nev said.
“What?” said Lovisa, turning back in surprise.
Nev was staring hard into her cup. Her voice was even, but low. “Especially not that his family name was Orfa,” she said. “I know plenty of people at home who work for the Orfas.”
Instantly, Lovisa understood. Nori Orfa, the wealthy tea manor boy, had pretended to be plain-old, one-named Nori from home, poor like Nev, humble like Nev, as part of his tactical pursuit of her. That was how he’d ingratiated himself. He’d probably emphasized his northern accent with her to hook her, make her feel like he was the kind of boy she’d known all her life. He’d probably talked of places in Torla’s Neck they both knew, while leaving out the names of his particular friends. It was what she would’ve done too, if she’d had Nori’s resources and her goal had been to take Nev in. There were traveling actors in Winterkeep, especially outside of Ledra, dancers, players, magicians who went from town to town, looking for audiences. Some of them were impersonators—of the Governor of Mantiper, or the richest lady in Borza, or a king from the Royal Continent. Nori was a player too, impersonating a human who wasn’t a piece of garbage.
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