"I've been invited to a feast. An early Moonlight Festival party. I'd like you to go as my guest."
"I'm sorry," she said. "My new wardrobe is not complete yet. I have nothing appropriate for feasts."
He crossed the room and lay down on the bed, folding his hands behind his head and gazing at her. "I will talk to the seamstress myself. I'll speed her up a trickle. What do you think of that?"
She had to tread carefully. He was a powerful man and a dangerous one. "I'll ask the king when he returns. When is the feast?"
"It is when I say it is. I'm not sure of the exact date, yet. It will most likely be before the king returns from his trip. I have it on good authority that he'll be delayed at the healing house."
She shot him a look.
"Oh yes, I know exactly where he is at all times. And in his absence I am in charge of the kingdom and I give you permission, Repentance, to go to a feast with me."
"If you want him to stop interfering with you ... maybe you should stop antagonizing him. How do you think he'll react when he finds out you've taken me to a feast?"
"That's no longer a concern."
She gasped. The king was wrong. The prince was going to try to kill him. Maybe one of the girls at the healing house would sneak in and kill the king. Maybe Tawnic would do it. How hard would it be to smother him in the night? There were no troopers inside the healing house.
"He's off the mountain," the prince said. "He'll never know what we do."
"Someone will tell him." Whatever the prince was playing at, she wanted no part of it. But she couldn't very well deny him on the deserted fifth floor. It wasn't safe.
She dropped the suncloth into a basket on the floor, stepped down from the ladder, and began to drag both basket and ladder toward the door.
"Where are you going?" the prince asked.
She pointed toward the hallway. "Only 102 rooms to go."
"You'll have a little break soon. I'll have a dress made up for you. When it's done, you and I will have a night out."
Not if she could help it. She would get a message to the king somehow. She turned to leave the room.
"Oh, and Repentance?"
She looked back at him.
"I don't think you should mention our little outing to Provocation, or anyone. Just in case you were thinking that you might. Remember that my uncle is old and weak. He won't be here forever to protect you."
She left her ladder in the hall and fled downstairs with her basket of suncloths. Down to the relative safety of the kitchen washroom.
She spent the next few days avoiding the prince and worrying about how she was to get out of betraying the king without calling the prince's wrath down on her head. It wasn't safe to send a message. She didn't know which servants were trustworthy. Besides, the prince might intercept a written message.
Eating alone in the royal dining room left her exposed to the prince, so she took to eating dinner, as well as lunch, with the housekeeper and tutor in the kitchen. She changed her morning routine, too, and stopped going to the fifth floor. She had no intention of being caught up there all alone. In the mornings she washed the same suncloths over and over. In between times, when she was supposed to be hanging the clean cloths on the fifth floor and taking dirty ones down, she hid out in the yak barns. She had her whole life to get the washing done. When the king came back and she told him what the prince had proposed, he wouldn't blame her for not doing the work he'd assigned. She continued to attend lectures in the afternoons. Her absence there would have been noticed. But she made sure she was never alone. Always she walked with Skoch to and from the classroom.
On Monday, the king had been gone a week. Repentance prayed he'd return soon.
After visiting Bramble, she made her way to the lake, which lay at the back side of the palace, opposite from the barns. It was full of cold, cold water, but it never quite froze because half of it lay in a cavern beneath the palace dungeons—fed by a spring that constantly flowed from deep inside the mountain.
The water, with fog billowing off its surface, was gray and cruel and cold, and that morning it fit her mood. She climbed the steps on the dock and sat down on the bench there. She was thinking about the swamp and Comfort and her little brothers when a man emerged from the fog a few feet from her.
Sober.
He jerked when he saw her and stopped at the bottom of the steps. "I'm surprised to see you here." He looked genuinely startled but quickly recovered his wits. "Do you mind company, or are you trying to be alone?"
She stood. "I was just leaving."
"You have so many friends on the mountain that you can afford to bear a grudge?" He looked up at her, not moving to let her by.
"What do you want, Sober? I thought you forgave me on the slave dock when you pronounced the blessing. You acted like you wanted to eat lunch with me when you saw me in the washroom. And then you ... you …. " tears blurred her vision.
"I did forgive you. I was surprised in the kitchen. That's all. I spoke rashly."
She knew something about speaking rashly. "You want to be friends with a whore?"
"I want to be friends with you."
She sat, scooting to one side to
