the gully. And when Phaedra heard the horse, she cried out in alarm, dropping the bucket of water she was carrying. Lucian dismounted and slid down the slope towards her and they stood apart, facing each other, neither speaking. Once, when Lucian had returned from Alonso to argue the so-called promise between his father and the Provincaro, a cousin had asked him to describe Phaedra. He had shrugged. ‘There’s nothing about her to remember.’ Looking at his wife now, there was so much about her he couldn’t forget. Her soulful eyes. The roundness of her face. The pinch of red on her cheeks. Lucian wanted nothing more than to take her home.
It was Phaedra who walked to him and Lucian lifted her with an arm around her waist, so they were eye to eye. He wanted to go back to the first time they met. He wanted to change that one night in Alonso when he was expected to take the rights of a husband. He knew he hadn’t used force. Was careful not to. But he hadn’t acknowledged her fear of being alone with a man for the first time in her life. She was no Mont girl, unabashed and earthy and used to swimming naked in the river with the lads. He had mistaken so much for weakness, yet there was nothing weak about Phaedra of Alonso.
‘Why are you here?’ she asked quietly in Lumateran.
‘Because I couldn’t keep away,’ he replied in Charyn.
Lucian felt her study him.
‘You have a scar,’ Phaedra said. ‘On the lid of your eye. It looks as if it’s been there some time, but I never noticed.’ There was a sadness to her words. ‘Did you receive it at the hands of a Charynite?’
‘I received it at the hands of my cousin Balthazar when we were children,’ he said. ‘Or one of his ideas, anyway. He decided that we’d swing from one tree to another to save Isaboe and Celie of the Flatlands from the silver wolf we imagined in the forest.’ He chuckled. ‘It didn’t end well.’
He watched a smile appear on her face. ‘Silly boys,’ she said. ‘Brave, silly boys.’
She shrugged out of his arms, took his hand and drew him away and Lucian let himself be led until they reached a small shelter made of ferns. She crawled inside first and then he followed.
‘Is this yours?’ he asked, as they knelt before each other in the small space.
‘I share it with Her Majesty,’ she said, as if it was the most natural thing to do with the strange princess.
Lucian waited, thinking that perhaps he’d like to speak. To tell Phaedra that he loved her because it didn’t seem so hard to think the words.
‘Do you love me?’ he asked instead. ‘Because if you don’t, I’d wait until you did. I’d wait weeks and months and years.’
Phaedra traced his jaw with a finger, then his cheeks, the space around his eyes, the lump in his throat.
‘No need to wait,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I’ve loved you for weeks and months and years. When I was a young girl in Alonso my father told me about a Lumateran lad who would keep me safe and perhaps I loved you then.’
She reached for the frayed edges of his tunic and when it was removed, she traced a finger against the scars: some from the battle to take back Lumatere, some from the skirmishes with his cousins.
‘The gods drew you well,’ she said.
He chuckled softly.
‘Can I be reminded of how the gods drew you?’ he said. She nodded and he slowly fumbled with her clothing and she was naked before him and suddenly it all felt new. He copied her actions, tracing her body with a shaky finger. No scars but a small purple birthmark on her breast. A bruise or two on her body.
‘I’ve made windows in the cottage so we can see the entire mountain,’ he murmured. ‘For you.’
‘Speak Lumateran,’ she said. ‘When you speak Charyn, you sound so strangely distant. Our voices sound kinder in the skin of our own language.’
He cupped her face in his hands and he kissed her open-mouthed and he imagined she had never been kissed before, but they kissed all the same until their lips felt bruised and swollen and then she lay back and his hand found its place between their bodies and she gasped and Lucian thought he’d never heard a sound so promising.
Later, they lay talking, her head on his shoulder. They spoke all day and night as if they didn’t have time left in the world. About the cottage and its views and Orly and Lotte’s pregnant cow and of
‘I’m no better than an animal,’ Phaedra said, after talking about the man’s death.
‘And no worse,’ he said. ‘It’s what I’ve always liked about our four-legged friends. They act on what’s inside here.’ He placed her hand against his heart. ‘It’s their instinct and their need to survive. No malice, nothing.’
He brushed the back of his finger across her cheek.
‘I didn’t kill my first man until the battle to take back Lumatere. All those years of practice and my father’s pride in the great warrior I was.’ Lucian shook his head. ‘But nothing prepares you for the real thing. In practice, there was no blood spraying into my eye and blinding me and there were no sounds quite like an axe wedging itself into a man’s flesh. And in practice there was no rage for …’
He bit his tongue to stop himself from saying the word.
‘For Charynites?’ she asked.
He took her hand. ‘For the Charynite King. For his family. I wanted all of them dead. And four years on … I’m protecting her in this valley.’
‘Despite everything, Luc-ien,’ Phaedra said softly, ‘she is worth protecting.’
‘Is she as mad as she seems?’ he asked.
‘Oh, not at all,’ Phaedra said. ‘Which doesn’t mean she’s not the strangest person I’ve ever met, but those deemed mad in Alonso have no control over their minds. Quintana of Charyn has total control over everything she does.’ He noticed the smile on Phaedra’s lips.
‘I told her once that I constantly hear my mother speaking to me. Guiding me. In my head I ask her questions all the time. Quintana understood perfectly what I was talking about. “Oh yes,” she said, “They’re most helpful, the half-dead spirits are. I only wish I knew where mine came from.”’
‘Half-dead?’ Lucian asked, thinking of his own conversations with his dead father.
‘Well, Quintana says they can’t be completely dead if they live inside of you.’
Light pierced through the branches shrouding them and he held both their hands up to its illumination.
‘We’re such different shades, you and I,’ Phaedra said. ‘Strangely, you could belong to the Paladozzans and Nebians of my kingdom. You have their colouring.’
‘I belong to you and you belong to me. That’s all that counts.’
She pressed her lips to his shoulder.
‘I can take you away,’ he whispered. ‘Hide you on the mountain. You don’t have to stay here, Phaedra. I can look after you.’
She made a sound of regret. ‘We come second, you and I, Luc-ien,’ she said. ‘Our allegiance is always to our kingdoms. Without that allegiance, our people would fall.’
She placed her head back against his chest and he felt her tears. ‘This is not our time.’
‘But that will never mean I love you less,’ he said.
They slept a while and when he woke, he kissed her brow. He wanted to stay, but there was too much happening on the mountain. Isaboe would soon come for her birthing and his village would be swarming with her guards and those wanting to visit her.
He crawled out of their resting place and faced the spear first. Then he looked up and saw the strange Quintana of Charyn staring down at him with her rounded belly and savage snarl. Harker’s daughter Florenza was there as well, her face battered but her eyes defiant as she gripped her own weapon.
‘I was just with Phaedra,’ he mumbled as a means of explanation.
‘Really,’ the Princess said coolly. ‘You don’t think the whole valley heard the caterwauling?’
Lucian felt his face flush as he stood. Quintana of Charyn pressed the spear to his chest.
