“A few,” she says with a shrug, dipping her brush into a slightly darker shade. She won’t need to do as much work on him as she did on Gisella—just enough that anyone who might recognize him won’t. She’ll add a few wrinkles to age him, darken the circles under his eyes, maybe shade his nose to alter its shape. “For as long as I could remember, I knew I was going to marry Pasquale, and I knew I had to be a virgin when I did, but even in Cellaria, there’s nothing that says I couldn’t kiss anyone. I suppose I thought of it as practice.”
He stays perfectly still as she begins to paint and powder his face.
“I never thanked you,” she says after a moment. “I know you’re nervous about this, and I don’t blame you for that. Pasquale and I have asked a lot of you. I’m grateful for your help.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t thank me, Triz,” he says. “Really. It’s nothing.”
“It’s treason,” she reminds him. “You said as much yourself. Not many would risk death for another person, even if that person is their cousin—”
“I didn’t offer for Pasquale,” he interrupts, his voice strained. “Don’t misunderstand—I would never have betrayed his confidence, but I didn’t offer my help for him. I offered it for you.”
Beatriz becomes even more aware of how close they are—close enough that the scent of him invades her senses: clean cotton, apples, and something else that is just Nicolo. She remembers how it felt when he kissed her in the corridor. She wonders if he’ll do it again now. It would be inadvisable, but she wants it more than she ever imagined she could.
She focuses on her paints, dipping a smaller brush into a bluish-violet powder. “Look up,” she says, without thinking or preparing herself for what will happen when he does, when their eyes meet and lock and the wanting grows so strong Beatriz thinks she might drown in it. She swallows and lightly brushes the color beneath his eyes, exaggerating the faint shadows that are already there.
“It’s all the more noble,” she says, forcing her voice to come out light and teasing. “To risk so much for someone you barely even know.”
“I’m not noble,” he says, his voice sharp-edged enough to fend off any argument. “If you had any idea what was going through my mind, Triz, you’d know there’s nothing noble about me.”
Beatriz picks up another brush, smoothing out the edges of some of the wrinkles she’s given him. He should look ridiculous like this, with his painted-on wrinkles and the violet half circles beneath his eyes. He does look ridiculous, Beatriz tells herself. It’s just that she wants to kiss him anyway, consequences be damned.
“Perhaps, then,” she says slowly, setting the brush aside, “we should just be ignoble together.”
Try as she might, Beatriz can’t quite banish thoughts of her mother from her mind. Even here, standing a hairsbreadth from a boy she should not be alone with, she imagines her mother’s disapproval. A hundred miles away, and Beatriz can imagine her mother’s narrowed gaze, her flared nostrils. She can hear her mother’s scalding voice in her ear.
Even you wouldn’t be such a fool as to go losing your heart, Beatriz. I didn’t raise you to flutter about with one of your own pawns so shamelessly. Just when I think you can’t disappoint me more, you find new depths to explore.
The voice shouldn’t get under her skin—especially not now that she’s decided to wreck the rest of her mother’s plans to help her sister. But it does. Beatriz isn’t sure there will ever come a time where her mother’s voice doesn’t follow her, offering up opinions she doesn’t want or need.
Beatriz tells herself that she kisses Nicolo because she wants to, because she’s wanted to kiss him again ever since the last time. She tells herself she kisses him because she wants him and he wants her and nothing else matters—just the press of lips and the touch of tongues and Nicolo’s strong, sure hands brushing over the small of her back, pulling her down onto his lap.
It’s the truth, but it isn’t the whole truth. She also kisses him because she knows she shouldn’t, because it will upset her mother if she ever finds out, because, as Sophronia once pointed out, all her mother has to do to convince Beatriz to jump off a cliff is to tell her not to do it.
The door opens and Beatriz and Nicolo break apart, Beatriz standing up and stepping out of Nicolo’s arms quicker than a bolt of lightning flashing across the sky. But not, she realizes when Gisella gives her a knowing look, quickly enough.
“It seems no one can keep their hands to themselves these days,” Gisella mutters, stepping into the room, followed a beat later by Pasquale and Ambrose, both of whom flush at her words.
What exactly have they gotten into, Beatriz wonders, though a part of her is happy for Pas, dangerous as it might be. Perhaps it should alarm her that Gisella has apparently just witnessed both her and Pasquale kissing other people, but it doesn’t. They’re all committing treason together—there’s the promise of mutually assured destruction in that.
Hastily, Beatriz grabs the powder brush and dusts some translucent powder over Nico’s face. “There,” she says quickly. “Done. Ambrose, Pas, did you get the clothes?”
Pasquale nods, his ears still red, as he drops a bundle of clothes in varying shades of gray on top of the bed. “It’s laundry day, so we grabbed a few things off the drying lines. Nearly got caught but didn’t.”
“Then let’s get dressed,” Beatriz says, eyeing the servants’ garb. “If the guards change at midnight we only have an hour to get down there.”
* * *
—
The plan, if it can even really be called that, is a simple one.
Ambrose and Pasquale ready Ambrose’s family’s boat, currently docked at the city port rather than the one reserved for royalty and nobility. It’s a small boat, but one Ambrose has sailed on his own many times to visit his family’s estate on the northern coast near the Temarin border. He told his uncle he would be doing just that so no one will think his absence for the next few weeks strange while he ferries Lord Savelle to the safety of Temarinian soil. It will be a longer trip than Ambrose has taken before, but he feels confident he can manage it.
Nicolo is the lookout, playing the part of a servant sweeping the hallway outside the palace dungeon. If he sees anyone who shouldn’t be there, he’s supposed to waylay them however he can.
Gisella and Beatriz, dressed and made up like middle-aged servants, bring dinner and wine for the guards—a duty Beatriz relieved two young serving girls of by demanding in her most princess-like tone that they forget whatever else they had to do and organize Pasquale’s bookshelves right this moment.
But as Beatriz and Gisella lower the trays they carry before the two guards standing watch over the dungeon cells, the knot in Beatriz’s stomach refuses to loosen. So much can go wrong, she knows, and if it does? It isn’t only her life on the line anymore. It’s Pasquale’s and Gisella’s and Nicolo’s and Ambrose’s. The thought makes her feel sick, but she forces herself to hold on to her bland smile and make pleasant small talk about the weather with the guards until both men drain their wine goblets. Mere seconds later, they are both slumped over, heads lolling and eyes closed.