But then I go too far and imagine myself in that dress, sword at my hip, transformed, a true member of the Court, a knight in the Circle of Falcons. And Cardan watching me from across the room, standing beside the king, laughing at my pretension.
Laughing like he knows this is a fantasy that won’t ever be real.
I pinch my leg until pain washes everything away.
“You’ll have to wear out the soles of your shoes, just like the rest of us,” Vivi says to me and Taryn. “I bet Oriana’s sick with worry that since Madoc encouraged you to dance, she can’t stop you. Horror of horrors, you might have a good time.”
Oriana presses her lips together. “That’s not fair, nor is it true.”
Vivi rolls her eyes. “If it wasn’t true, I couldn’t say it.”
“Enough, all of you!” Madoc slams his hand down on the table, making us all jump. “Coronations are a time when many things are possible. Change is coming, and there is no wisdom in crossing me.”
I can’t tell if he’s talking about Prince Dain or ungrateful daughters or both.
“Are you afraid someone is going to try for the throne?” Taryn asks. Like me, she has been raised on strategy, moves and countermoves, ambushes and upper hands. But unlike me, she has Oriana’s talent for asking the question that will steer a conversation toward less rocky shores.
“The Greenbriar line ought to worry, not me,” Madoc says, but he looks pleased to be asked. “Doubtless some of their subjects wish there was no Blood Crown and no High King at all. His heirs ought to be particularly careful that the armies of Faerie are satisfied. A well-seasoned strategist waits for the right opportunity.”
“Only someone with nothing to lose would attack the throne with you there to protect it,” Oriana says primly.
“There’s always something left to lose,” Vivi says, and then makes a hideous face at Oak. He giggles.
Oriana reaches for him and then stops herself. Nothing bad is actually happening. And yet I see the gleam in Vivi’s cat eyes, and I’m not sure Oriana’s wrong to be nervous.
Vivi would like to punish Madoc, but her only power is to be a thorn in his side. Which means occasionally tormenting Oriana through Oak. I know Vivi loves Oak—he’s our brother, after all—but that doesn’t mean she’s above teaching him bad things.
Madoc smiles at all of us, now the picture of contentment. I used to think he didn’t notice all the currents of tension that ran through the family, but as I get older, I see that barely suppressed conflict doesn’t bother him in the least. He likes it just as well as open war. “Perhaps none of our enemies are particularly good strategists.”
“Let’s hope not,” Oriana says distractedly, her eyes on Oak, lifting her glass of canary wine.
“Indeed,” says Madoc. “Let’s have a toast. To the incompetence of our enemies.”
I pick up my glass and knock it into Taryn’s, then drain it to the very dregs.
There’s always something left to lose.
I think about that all through the dawn, turning it over in my head. Finally, when I can toss and turn no more, I pull on a robe over my nightgown and go outside into the late-morning sun. Bright as hammered gold, it hurts my eyes when I sit down on a patch of clover near the stables, looking back at the house.
All of this was my mother’s before it was Oriana’s. Mom must have been young and in love with Madoc back then. I wonder what it was like for her. I wonder if she thought she was going to be happy here.
I wonder when she realized she wasn’t.
I have heard the rumors. It is no small thing to confound the High King’s general, to sneak out of Faerie with his baby in your belly and hide for almost ten years. She left behind the burned remains of another woman in the blackened husk of his estate. No one can say she didn’t prove her toughness. If she’d just been a little luckier, Madoc would have never realized she was still alive.