“Lovisa?” said Mari. “What did I say?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re crying. You never cry.”
“I’m not crying,” she lied. “I’m just tired. Leave me alone, Mari.”
“You never told me why you’re so anxious.”
How good it would feel to tell him everything, make him share her problems. But she couldn’t. There were no solutions, and even hints would endanger him. Pari was dead.
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said.
“Shut up, Mari,” she snapped. “Just back off.” The tears were making her furious, but they were also making her sleepy. She could feel herself sagging.
“Why don’t you get into my bed?” he said. “See if you can sleep. And I’m not having sex with you, if you think that’s what I mean.”
Lovisa was far too tired to have sex with anyone now, especially someone she resented for his perfect life and his perfect behavior, his perfect heart. Clutching her favorite fox and her amethyst lady in one hand, she climbed into Mari’s bed. Her other hand felt for the new attic-room key she’d had made in the nearest amble early that morning, guessing that her parents would confiscate hers. She’d decided to keep it on a string inside her clothing always, hanging low between her breasts, where she could control who found it. Of course, it was basically useless now, and sweaty against her skin. This one had a fake purple gemstone, even sharper and scratchier than the last stupid key.
A thought touched her. If the queen was dead, why had her father wanted the key back so urgently?
“Do you need anything?” said Mari. “A drink? Do you have enough blankets?”
“Stop fussing!”
She heard him snort. Then she heard him stand and start to walk away.
“Mari?” she said, frightened.
His voice came from the other side of the room. “Hm?”
“You’re not leaving, are you?”
“I’m just getting you another blanket,” he said, returning to her, unceremoniously dumping something warm and soft onto her back. “I’ll be right here. Go to sleep.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Lovisa woke the next morning needing proof that the queen was dead.
She bumbled through her classes, carefully avoiding her mother in the halls, trying to decide what to do. She couldn’t search the house during the day because her father’s schedule was unpredictable. A nighttime search was out of the question, because of her mother’s fox.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday night that week, she ran home after dark, snuck onto the property, and watched the attic window for signs of life. More guards were on duty than usual outside the house. If the queen was dead, why would the house need more guards? But though she hid behind a tree, shivered in her fur coats, and never shifted her gaze from the window, nothing ever happened. No movement, no light. This didn’t prove anything, of course. The window was too high to access from inside, and the queen, if she lived, certainly had no lamp or candles.
Could she get to that window? It was possible to climb partly up the outer face of the house, in theory. She and Mari had mapped it as children, identifying a stone’s sharp edge where a toe could balance, a crack where some fingers could brace. Protrusions of windowsills, areas of slanting roof, et cetera. They’d never tried it, of course, just as they’d never tried the tree-to-trellis route. The climbing route stopped a floor below the window, where the face of the house became perfectly smooth.
What if there was a way to climb partly up, then do something with a rope?
It was when Lovisa found herself thinking along these lines that she would scramble over the wall again and push back to the dorm, fighting with herself, sometimes almost crying in frustration, over her wish to stop caring about whether the queen was alive or not. What did it matter? If she was alive, what could Lovisa do?
Every night, she tried to sleep in her own room; then gave up and tapped on Mari’s door. They played City, or did homework together. Then she slept in his bed, a beautiful, deep night’s sleep that her body only ever surrendered to if she was in this room, with Mari near. She woke in the morning when pink light touched her face, then opened her eyes to the sight of Mari on the rug, wrapped in blankets threaded with gold, his brown face slack and peaceful, snoring gently. In the morning light, his freckles were more noticeable.
“Okay,” she’d say, dropping her feet to the floor. “You can have your bed back. See you later.”
With a sigh and grumble, Mari would awaken. “When I’ll destroy you at City?” he’d say, smiling, his eyes still closed.
“Whatever,” she’d say, seeing the little boy with big ears and bone-thin face in that smile, the boy who’d been like a brother to her once, or like a brother was supposed to be, if brothers were allowed to be happy. Sometimes she knelt and kissed his cheek as she left the room, surprised by her rush of fondness, which felt an awful lot like sadness.
She could sleep in his room because Mari was safe. He wasn’t going to turn into a different person with no warning. Sometimes she woke in the confusion of a fading nightmare. The sight of him at his desk lit by a single lamp, the sound of his pen scratching, calmed her panic. Listening to him working, she fell asleep again.
They talked about sex sometimes, but only as a concept. They’d decided together that it wasn’t something they would do, at least not until they’d talked about it more.
“Do you remember that time at that party, when we were little?” he asked her once, grinning. “Listening to the women?”
Yes, she remembered. It had been one of the Varana parties, this one at Minta Varana’s house, maybe Ta’s sixth or seventh birthday. Mari, seeking Lovisa out, had found her in a dark library far away from the other children, where she’d been snooping on the mothers in the next room. They’d been talking about the sex they had with their husbands and wives, “and also not with their husbands and wives,” she’d whispered to Mari in a fascinated voice. “Put your ear to this wall.”
“Okay,” Mari had said, reluctantly interested, as he always was when Lovisa snooped. The acts the women had described had sounded improbable. It had seemed unbelievable, really, that grown-ups would want to do those things to each other. The children had had to run into another room before their gasps and laughter gave them away.
Mari thought the memory was funny, because of how his understanding of sex had changed. But Lovisa was more caught up on the cheating, the lying, and how childish the memory made her feel. She had the unsettled feeling that Mari’s attitudes about sex were normal and hers weren’t. Why didn’t she feel attracted to him, like a normal person would? She wanted to have sex with him as a distraction, to force her body to feel something different from what it always felt. But she knew that when Mari talked about it, he was talking about something tempting, something delicious he thought they should resist. He was talking about pleasure. And everyone on campus talked about how attractive Mari was, his fine face, his height, his popularity.