“The one you don’t like,” I tell her, ignoring her jibe.
That makes her give a high, false laugh. “Oh, you might be surprised how some of us feel about both of you.”
“I promised you better amusements than this,” Locke says stiffly, taking my elbow. I am grateful when he pulls me toward a low table with pillows strewn haphazardly around it, but I can’t help giving Nicasia a small, antagonizing wave as I go. I pour out my thimble of liquor onto the grass when Locke isn’t looking. The piper finishes, and a naked boy, shining with gold paint, takes out a lyre and sings a filthy song about broken hearts: “O lady fair! O lady cruel! How I miss your sweet misrule. I miss your hair. I miss your eyes. But most of all, I miss your thighs.”
Locke kisses me again, in front of the fire. Everyone can see it, but I don’t know if they’re looking, because I close my eyes as tightly as they will go.
I wake in Locke’s house on a bed covered in tapestries. My mouth tastes of sour plums and is swollen from kissing. Locke is beside me on the bed, eyes shut, still in his party clothes. I pause in the act of rising to study him, his sharp ears and fox-fur hair, the softness of his mouth, his long limbs spread out in sleep. His head is pillowed on one ruffle-covered wrist.
The night comes back in a rush of memory. There was dancing and a chase through the maze. I remember falling on my hands in the dirt and laughing, totally unlike myself. Indeed, when I look down at the borrowed ball gown I slept in, there are grass stains on it.
Not that I’ d be the first to green gown her.
Prince Cardan watched me all night, a shark restlessly circling, waiting for the right moment to bite. Even now I can conjure the memory of the scorched black of his eyes. And if I laughed louder for the sake of angering him, if I smiled wider, and kissed Locke longer, that is a kind of deceit that even the Folk cannot condemn.
Now, however, the night feels like one long, impossible dream.
Locke’s bedroom is messy—books and clothes scattered on divans and low couches. I wade through to the door and pad over the empty halls of the house. Finding my way back to the dusty room of his mother’s, I take off her gown and tug on yesterday’s clothes. I reach to take my knife from her pocket, and when I do, the golden acorn comes out with it.
Impulsively, I tuck both knife and acorn into my tunic. I want some memento of the night, something to recall it, should nothing like it ever happen again. Locke told me I could borrow anything in the room, and I am borrowing this.
On my way out, I pass the long dining table. Nicasia is there, sectioning an apple with a little knife.
“Your hair looks like a thicket,” she says, popping a slice of fruit into her mouth.
I glance at a silver plate on the wall, which shows only a distorted and blurred image of myself. Even in that, I can tell she’s right—a halo of brown surrounds my head. Reaching up, I begin undoing my braid, combing it out with my fingers.
“Locke’s asleep,” I say, assuming that she’s waiting to see him. I expect to feel as though I have something over her, being the one that came from his bedroom, but what I actually feel is a little bit of panic.
I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to wake up in a boy’s house and talk to the girl with whom he had a relationship. That she’s also a girl who probably wants me dead is, oddly, the only part of this that feels at all normal.
“My mother and his brother thought we were to be wed,” she says, seeming as though she might be talking to the air and not to me at all. “It was going to be a useful alliance.”
“With Locke?” I ask, confused.
She gives me an annoyed look, my question seeming to bring her briefly out of her story. “Cardan and me. He ruins things. That’s what he likes. To ruin things.”
Of course Cardan likes to ruin things. I wonder how that could be something she only just realized. I would have thought that would be something they had in common.