The man didn’t have a meek or obedient bone in his body and it would no doubt be his destruction. How he’d survived slavery I didn’t know. They should have broken him.
“Don’t do it, Lia,” Con said, though I hadn’t replied, his voice rough with urgency. Always hoarse, it got more so with emotion. For a moment I wasn’t sure what he didn’t want me to do. “Don’t marry Anure.” He said it as if we were friends. As if he cared to give me heartfelt advice. “Don’t do it,” he repeated.
“I have no intention of doing so,” I answered on a quiet breath, sounding far too serious. Risky to confirm even that much, rather than laughing in his face. This man could betray me. Somehow, though, I didn’t think he would—and he seemed so … distressed that I hadn’t found it in myself to deny it the way I should. I needed to counter his assumptions, however. Sometimes retreat is the better part of valor.
I stepped back, smoothly moving away from him, the silk of my gown cool now where his burning hands had been.
“I have no immediate plans of marrying His Imperial Highness.” I was repeating myself, reaching for my usual poise on the subject. “Our engagement has been extended due to numerous extenuating circumstances.”
“His other wives?” Con sneered it, but I thought that might be reflexive, because the eyes that studied me so intently held no contempt. Instead he seemed to be trying to read my mind, to ferret out my strategy. An uncomfortable sensation.
“That’s one reason.” I could confirm that much, as it was common knowledge. “There are several barriers to our eventual blessed union.” My standard words sounded false and empty even to my ears. Con had me thoroughly rattled; it would be wisest to end this interview and withdraw. But I couldn’t quite make myself do it.
“I don’t believe you mean that,” he said slowly, studying my face, which I knew revealed nothing, as I had it smooth and composed. I lowered my eyes, in case he could read something in them. “Why this farce?” he asked, sounding so much as if he cared that I wanted to give him a true answer. He did possess a certain charisma despite his rough manners. No wonder his people had followed him. Something about him made me want to share my secrets and rest in the comfort of his strength and determination.
Which I could not do. He thought our goals aligned, but they didn’t. I didn’t know how he’d retained the optimism that he could beat Anure, when I knew with absolute certainty that it couldn’t be done.
“I do what I have to,” I replied. “I do what I must to protect Calanthe.”
“I understand that,” he said, coming closer again, the wolf stalking. “But you have other options.”
“Like what?” I demanded, half incredulous, half desperately wanting to know if there was an exit from this trap I hadn’t been able to find.
“Marry me instead.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it again without speaking. At a total loss for words as I’d never been in my entire life. And not only because of the mortal offense he’d just offered.
He returned my stare, golden eyes wide with the same shock I felt, as if he hadn’t expected those words to come out. Startling, impossible, earthshaking words. The round garden seemed to spin in circles, dizziness swamping me, and if not for the rigidity of my corset and other garments, I might’ve sagged. Despair and delight. Wonder and horror.
The girl in me, long since buried under the weight of the crown, might have wept.
Once there had been a bright path for her, the girl I could’ve been. In another world, another time line, she would’ve had a compelling man propose marriage to her in a garden. She might’ve had many suitors, her choice of partners. A chance at—if not exactly normal—a marriage of minds and bodies.
No longer. Just one of the many things Anure had destroyed. Because I couldn’t scream my rage at the injustice of it all, I laughed.
I burst out laughing at the great cosmic joke. Of course, it only made it more pointed that my potential husband in a marriage of state brought a woman who was mostly likely his lover with him to my court. Never mind that I’d had to make him my prisoner to please my most loathed enemy. Really, it was all too absurd to bear.
Once I started laughing, I found it nearly impossible to stop, though hurt and fury flashed across Con’s face. But he didn’t stomp off to nurse his wounds. Nor did he join in my laughter like a smoother courtier might, pretending to find my amusement his. He simply waited until I, gasping for breath and clutching my constricted ribs, managed to quell the hysterical laughter. When I was done, he gave me an expectant look, as if still waiting for an actual answer. I searched for a reply, realizing my outburst meant I could hardly fob him off with something bland.
Settling on the simplest reply, I shook my head. “No.”
“Why not?” he shot back, hard on the heels of my denial.
I wanted to throw up my hands at him. To blister him with a setback that would peel his ears from his head. Fool. Incautious rebel. He could never understand the compromises a woman like me had to make.
Instead I paced over to the orchids wending up the old fruit tree nearby. They shimmered with delicate colors in the dappled shade, undulating along the trunk and limbs, perching on twigs like exotic birds that might take flight on ruffled petals.
“Did you know orchids can’t live on their own?” I asked, though I knew it was a rhetorical question, as Con could hardly know anything about the flowers that grew only on Calanthe. “They take their nourishment from the trees, perhaps from the rain and the very air. But they cannot be planted. They’re not like other flowers. Beautiful, fragile, they exist on nothing, dependent on everything.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Con, who watched me with a furrowed brow. A dark and threatening man, one who’d killed without remorse. One whose actions had condemned him to death. A king of nothing. And yet he seemed to be the solid tree to my epiphytic flower.
“Interesting,” he said, eyes on me and not the blossoms, “but is there some point you’re making?” He ground out the words as if they hurt his throat. For all I knew, they might. I had no idea what kind of damage caused him and Sondra to sound like that.
“We are all what we’re born to be, Con,” I replied. “I can’t marry you—even if I wanted to—because I’m engaged to the emperor. You are legally a slave, a fugitive, and a prisoner bound to answer for war crimes, among other charges. Even without those truths, I’m queen of Calanthe and duty-bound to marry to make heirs for my realm and you’re a landless man with no title, no bloodline you can claim. There is no world in which we’d marry.”
Even that girl I might’ve been had the world been different would have turned away such an offer. In truth, in that other world, we would never have met.
“There is that world,” he insisted. “If Anure hadn’t made his conquests—”
“But he did.” I cut off that line of speculation. “The past doesn’t change.”
“The future does change,” he countered, “and only if we change the present. Marry me and we can change the world together. I think you hate Anure as much as any of us. Don’t martyr yourself. Use your power as queen of the last independent kingdom in all the empire to end his blight upon the world.”