Mine included. Less than an hour past, we'd been smothering our laughter atop the roof of a deserted warehouse, scrambling into our clothes. For our promenade tonight he wore the jade green velvet again, and with the coat buttoned closed I couldn't even see the splattered stains of my blood I knew had set near the waist. They wouldn't come out. I'd tried.
In my gown of silver foil print on primrose I liked to think we made a smart couple. But between the two of us, Alexandru was the beauty.
The light from the oil lamps above accented the contours of his cheeks and lips and threw long-lashed shadows across his gaze. Beneath the shadows, his eyes shone looking-glass luminous. When he smiled and caught me close because I'd stumbled over an uneven paver, I swear I heard every female around us give a low gasp.
I understood. It hardly seemed fair to unleash him upon the general population.
But we were only in the great city for a single night, and I thought perhaps Bologna could suffer that.
I heard the bronze of the fountain well before we'd come near it. Bronze is a compound metal that has less of a song than a hum, which can be soothing, especially when combined with the tranquil splashing of water.
I didn't feel soothed. I felt awake, alive, delighted. I felt so filled with wonder and joy I couldn't seem to erase the smile on my lips.
I—that little lost runt of the shire—was in Italy. With Sandu.
It was the most tremendous thing that had ever happened to me, even if there was that small, disquieting niggle in my mind that could not stop remembering the note Future Rez had left me in my old bedroom.
I hadn't told the prince. I convinced myself it was because I still wasn't sure, and I wanted to be. When the time was right to tell him, I would.
Perhaps I wasn't entirely the dragon Rez yet. She was coiled around my heart, whispering you cannot change this ending, but Honor's old ways were proving difficult to break. Honor was a woman who was running off with a man after a whirlwind courtship that had lasted both days and years, and Honor liked to be sure.
Her reply to the dragon was simply:Let me have this moment. Nothing is yet etched in stone.
There was a nude god above us and a mass of malodorous people around us—no doubt some of them pickpockets, at the least—and the light was golden, and the fountain hummed, and at the edge of the stairs to the bottom pool Prince Alexandru slipped my arm free of his so that he might take my hand instead. We stood, both of us, facing the water, following the glittering streams that jetted and fell without pause, a miracle of some clever mechanical pump work we could not see.
I rested my head upon his shoulder. I closed my eyes, so that the light turned red behind my lids.
"Will you grant me the privilege," he said, in a voice low enough for just me to hear, "of becoming my wife, Rez?"
I sighed, so happy. "No, Alexandru."
"How many more times am I to ask?"
"I'm not certain. But when I am, I will tell you. Instantly."
Then he sighed. It was a small one, without frustration. His fingers tightened a fraction over mine.
"There's a word for this in English," he mused, still soft. "I can't quite recall it. I've made you a ... a fallen woman. Yes?"
"Yes," I agreed, still smiling. "Thank you ever so much."
"It's been entirely my pleasure," he said in Romanian, and I turned my face into his sleeve and began to laugh.
The journey back to Zaharen Yce took around a week. Had I not been with him, Sandu might have flown faster, but with me on his back I could tell he was taking care to ensure my comfort.
"The last thing I want," he said one morning in some watercolor-idyllic Austrian village, as we sipped our hot chocolate, "the very last thing, is to have come all this way and gone to all this trouble, just to end up with a mate who's little more than a distant splat against the earth. All because she wouldn't hold on."
"I do hold on," I protested. "Mostly." I sent him a sideways look. "Am I all this trouble?"
"Decidedly."
"No doubt you'd prefer someone who obeyed your every whim."
His brows began to climb. "How intriguing. Is that likely?" "I don't know. I don't know the females of your tribe."
"Well, if you'd only mentioned the possibility before," he murmured, lifting his cup to his mouth. "I do wish I'd thought of it. What a lot of time and effort I might have been spared."
His tone was dry and his gaze was focused beyond mine, past the little courtyard of the boardinghouse where we planned to sleep through the day, past the neat garden of flowers and herbs and the white picket fence that defined the edge of the yard. There had been chickens picking through those flowers when we'd first arrived; they'd all scattered to the winds. Alexandru was looking at the mountains that rose in the distance, blue shadows from here, a mere promise of what was to come.
I set my cup upon its saucer, the taste of the chocolate abruptly sour on my tongue. I couldn't fathom I'd not considered this before.
He was the Alpha of his tribe. By default, he would be the greatest prize for mating. In Darkfrith every single maiden, every one, dreamed of joining the Alpha's family, even if they didn't like their choices for doing so.
How much more aggressive might they have been, all those females, knowing their chances of becoming part of the head family would be limited to the seduction of a single male?
I tried to mentally summon any of them—faces, names—and could not. I did recall a blur of voices and gowns from that one disastrous Weave to the ball, but otherwise it seemed like I'd nearly always Woven to him when he was alone.
"Sandu. What are they like? The females?"
His gaze cut back to mine, the early sun glossing his hair.
"Acquiescent? Submissive?" I persisted. "Comely?"
His mouth curved from over the rim of his cup. I narrowed my eyes.
"Well? Am I going to have to fight them or not?"
"Fight them? Good heavens. Is that how it's done in your tribe?"
"Sometimes. If the situation demands it. If there's a boy—a male, and he's been dallying about with more than one girl—sometimes it becomes a battle of dominance. The Alpha female must win."
And oh, those Darkfrith girls. Those girls with their slanting looks and pretty pouts, and figurative claws. And fangs. Sometimes the battles were physical and sometimes they were more cunning than that, whispered rumors that tailed you, hushed giggles hardly suppressed behind lily-white hands.
Girls bigger than you, relentless girls homing in on you, the powerless. Pushing you down, pulling your hair, tripping you until you wept.
I remembered Wilhelmina and the particular pitch of her laughter as she stood over me before the silversmith's shop when I was eight. How light and trilling it sounded already, just like it would when she would be older, and courted by all the boys.
That was never going to happen to me again. I would never submit again.
I sat forward in my chair. "Is that the custom in your tribe? Do the females fight over the males?"
Alexandru stared at me, his expression arrested, the chocolate cup frozen in his hand.
I kicked at him. "Tell me. How many others?"
His lips began to pinch flat; his lashes lowered. I realized that he was laughing at me. "I fail to find the humor in this," I said in frigid tones.
A babble of squawking came from the open door behind us; it seemed most of the chickens had fled inside. The hausfrau who'd taken us in poked her head out the door, her hair covered in a yellow kerchief, her eyes inquisitive hazel. Sandu sent her away again with a regal flick of his fingers.