The days that followed began in the same way. Each morning Froi would test himself, lying in Quintana’s bed after pleading tiredness or inventing an illness attributed to the body part important in the art of planting seeds. He would play the game of trying to work out who she was from the moment her eyes opened. Princess Indignant always, always woke in fright. She’d squint and nod and mutter, ‘There’s a man dying in Turla.’ On the other hand, Quintana the ice maiden was always cold and usually called him Fool. If his body was anywhere close or touching hers, she’d snarl, and he came to understand that the savageness appeared with her rather than the Princess Indignant, and could be witnessed in the curl of Quintana’s lips and a glimpse of slightly crooked teeth. But something always seemed able to soften her. Froi would see it happen before his very eyes. The nodding. The ‘Yes, yes, I’m trying!’ Whether he wanted to admit it or not, his heart would pound with excitement every time he saw the madness.
Princess Indignant also loved nothing more than spending her time watching the ritual between the brothers from Abroi, Gargarin and Arjuro.
‘Blessed Arjuro? Can we come visit?’ she called out from her balconette, trying to capture Arjuro’s attention with a ridiculous wave, just in case he had lost his hearing.
Arjuro ignored her.
‘Do you think he went mad in the dungeons?’ she asked.
‘Not in the dungeons,’ Gargarin said quietly.
‘Do you think he loved Lirah beyond life itself?’
Silence. Froi looked over at Gargarin, watched the lump in the man’s throat move as he said, ‘No, I don’t.’
‘I think you’re wrong, Sir Gargarin,’ she said.
‘Gargarin,’ he corrected. ‘No “Sir”.’
‘When I woke that time after Lirah took me to search for the Oracle, Arjuro was there.’
‘The Oracle?’ Froi asked.
‘We searched for her in the lake of the half-dead. Poor Lirah.’
And there was Aunt Mawfa again. ‘Oh my poor bones,’ the woman had whispered while stuffing herself with the fattiest part of the piglet that morning.
The Princess prattled on. ‘I was six, Sir Gargarin. They were all frightened because of the godspeak that was coming from my mouth. I wrote it on the wall, you know. With the blood from my wrist. My father was desperate for Arjuro to decipher it and they dragged him into the room from the prison tower and I’ll not forget his face, Sir Gargarin, when he saw Lirah half-dead on the wet ground. He fell to his knees and wept, I tell you, gathering her in his arms. As if Lirah was the most beloved of women.’
Froi saw Gargarin’s knuckles clench as he leaned on the balconette.
‘What were you doing with blood on your wrists? Why was Lirah half-dead?’ Froi asked, alarmed.
Gargarin elbowed Froi into silence.
‘I always believed blessed Arjuro would return for her, Sir Gargarin. I’ve prayed to the gods that he would. More than I’ve prayed to the gods for myself. But then they released him in my eighth year and he disappeared for so, so long.’
‘You have a good heart, Reginita,’ Gargarin said gently before walking into his chamber.
The Princess stared after him as if she was trying to determine his meaning.
‘That was actually a compliment,’ Froi said.
‘What about when you told me about my dress that morning?’
Froi didn’t want to think of what he witnessed that day.
‘Not a compliment,’ he said, contrite. ‘Being rude, I was. You’ve got awful dress sense so don’t ever believe anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. But that,’ he said, pointing inside his chamber. ‘That was the real thing.’
He saw her face flush and she held a hand to both cheeks for a moment, as though surprised by the heat. Then she disappeared inside, and Froi wondered if she went in there to cry.
And then there was Lirah. It wasn’t as though Froi was half in love with her, but there was a force at play whenever he saw her. An ache he could not comprehend. He convinced himself he liked her garden more than her and so one day he found a more convenient way of visiting her rooftop prison from the battlement of his tower. Froi would break into a run, sailing through the air, his legs eating the gap between the two towers, his arms outstretched as though they would grab him space, his grunt muted by the shouts from the other side, until he landed on the opposite battlement, almost, but not quite, securely on his feet. When he stood up, brushing the debris from his trousers and inspecting the damage to his arm, he turned and saw the combination of awe and horror on the faces of Dorcas and the soldiers on the opposite roof.
‘Are you an idiot, or an idiot?’ Gargarin hissed, watching Froi climb back down to their balconette one time.
‘The first one. I really resent being called the second.’
Thankfully, the fool Dorcas didn’t try to stop him because there didn’t seem to be orders preventing the guest of one tower leaping over to visit the prisoner of the opposite tower. And Froi noticed each time that the battlements of the fourth and fifth tower were guarded by twice the number of soldiers of any other in the palace. Froi needed to find a way inside them.
Meantime he made use of his time with Lirah, although she wasn’t much one for talking, and most of their gardening was done in silence.
‘Tell me honestly,’ he demanded on a particularly boring day in the palace when he visited three times. ‘In the how many years that you’ve had this garden, has the petunia ever survived beside the tulip?’
Sometimes, without a word, she’d relinquish a plant to him and Froi would choose the best place for it to flower.
He found out little through Lirah. She asked of Quintana each time. Over the years, the King had allowed them in the same room only once, seven years after Lirah’s imprisonment when Quintana turned thirteen and her first blood came. ‘That’s when they decided to whore her to Charyn,’ she said bitterly.
Since then, Quintana and Lirah had only seen each other from the dungeon window. The three images of the Princess on Lirah’s prison wall now made sense. They showed the first time Lirah saw her babe, the last time before imprisonment, and the one and only time they had been in a room together between then and now.
‘Were you in love with Arjuro?’ he asked.
As usual, she didn’t stop what she was doing and refused to look his way. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Because you’re both … I don’t know. Savage. Cruel.’
‘Are you trying to flatter me?’
He laughed. It was the first attempt at humour that Lirah had made. She turned to him, as though surprised by the sound.
‘Well, you both seem the kind who would find each other in a crowded room,’ he said.
Her study stayed intense until she went back to her digging. ‘Arjuro prefers men to women.’
‘Oh,’ he said, surprised for a moment. ‘Well that makes sense, come to think of it. I can’t imagine a woman putting up with that stench.’
‘Yes, well he always did have an aversion to bathing.’
‘But that doesn’t mean you weren’t in love with him.’
She wiped her brow with the back of her hand and it left a mark of dirt.
‘I can safely say we despised each other.’
‘Why?’
Lirah didn’t respond and then Froi understood. ‘Ah. You loved the same man.’
‘You could say that,’ she said quietly, and he knew that he had asked too many questions and that if he didn’t stop, she’d go back to her silence.
‘When I return home, I’ll find a way to send you lavender seeds,’ he said when the sky began to darken and he knew he’d have to leap back.
‘Lavender? In Charyn?’
He waited a moment.