Lavender and Cold Ash

The latch on the north bedchamber fit crookedly. The wood was swollen by the damp rising from the moats, exhaling that cellar chill that refuses to leave even when you drag three coarse woolen blankets up to the hearth. The room smelled of burnt tallow and old lavender, the kind the maids stuff into bags of rough linen to hide the fact that the hunting tapestries are rotting at the corners against the slate wall.

Lucian didn't wait for Cecelia to cross the threshold. He shoved the door with his shoulder, dragged his heels across the floor, and let himself drop onto the wooden bench in front of the dead fireplace.

"Damn St. Eligius wax," he grunted, pulling at the shaft of his left boot until the leather gave way with a dull snap. "It gets between your toes and feels like cold lard."

Cecelia didn't answer. She had her arms raised in front of the tarnished mirror, pulling the pins from her hair one by one. There were six brass needles with black glass heads that had been driven into her scalp before the vespers bells had even finished tolling. As she pulled the fourth one out, she felt the blood begin to circulate through the back of her neck again in a warm, annoying throb.

The bone-handled dagger was still there, pressed against her groin beneath the three layers of stiff petticoats, grazing her skin with every step she took.

Lucian tossed the other boot into the corner. He was wearing a gray wool stocking with a clean hole at the heel where his skin peeked through, reddened by the friction. He leisurely scratched his instep, stretched his arm toward the side table, and grabbed the red clay pitcher. He poured a dark stream into a pewter goblet with a battered base, one of those cups that wobble on the wood because their bottom is sunken.

"Want some?" he asked, lifting the glass without looking at her.

"It smells like vinegar."

"It smells like rotten cloves and old honey," he corrected after taking a long drink, wrinkling his nose with a gesture that deepened the creases on his forehead. "Roland thinks that if you throw enough cinnamon into bad wine, it tastes like a ducal harvest. In Naples they would have thrown the pitcher at his head for being pretentious. Or in any decent tavern."

He stared at the empty cup for a second before refilling it.

"Your brother Roland doesn't drink this," Cecelia said. She lined up the six pins on the dresser, laying them out in an exact row like cutlery before service. "He drinks plum brandy in a silver pitcher. My aunt told me before we got into the carriage."

"Your aunt talks too much and looks too little."

Lucian stood up, unbuttoned the hooks of his vermilion velvet doublet —the wide-shouldered doublet they had hurriedly fetched from Roland's wardrobe for the ceremony— and tossed it without a second thought onto the cedar trunk.

Cold.

She is nine years old and her mother is still alive and the kitchens of Varenne smell of toasted flour on October mornings. She is sitting on a low stool peeling chestnuts with a dull little knife that only bruises the skin, while the women sing a harvesting tune she will never quite learn. Her mother puts a warm hand on her shoulder, carrying that scent of rosemary and clean grease clinging to her skin, and says nothing. She says nothing because the house is still standing and there are still no debts to be paid with bodies.

Cecelia blinked. The reflection in the mirror only gave back the slate-gray walls and the whitish frost climbing up the joints of the stained-glass window.

"If Roland comes down from the east tower before midnight," she said, turning slowly while rubbing her wrist where the silver ink pulled at her skin like a fresh nettle burn, "he's going to find us here like two capons waiting for the slaughterer's knife."

"Roland isn't coming down before midnight. He's busy convincing himself he's a statesman while he polishes off the second bottle and drafts decrees that no one will read until the rooster crows."

"You made a deal with him."

"I made a deal to survive dinner, which is already quite a chore for a Tuesday."

Lucian took another drink. A dark drop slipped down the corner of his lips, but he didn't bother to wipe it away; he let it dry by itself on his two-day stubble.

"You're a cynic," she murmured.

"I'm second in line, which is just a longer and more tedious way of saying the same thing."

"They promised me Roland was a man of his word."

"Sometimes loyalty is simply choosing who we prefer to lie to us during dinner."

Silence.

The north wind battered the window with a dry hit of salt spray and sleet. Cecelia walked over to the trunk. The velvet of the doublet was warm from Lucian's body, but it retained that cloying perfume of pressed flowers that palace tailors used to mask the sweat of princes. She turned it over to hang it on the back of the chair so it wouldn't crease against the moldy wood.

It was heavy. Far too heavy for a simple woolen garment with a taffeta lining.

As she folded the right lapel, Cecelia's fingers brushed against a rigid lump sewn between the interlining and the bottom hem. It wasn't the metal of a dagger. It sounded like the dry crackle of vellum folded into four parts, sealed with brittle red wax.

And she recognized it instantly.

The sealing wax didn't bear the rampant lion of the imperial crown. It bore the two crossed ears of wheat over the river: her father's personal signet, the Duke of Varenne.

Cecelia pulled at the loose thread of the hem with her teeth. The seam gave way with a small tear. She unfolded the parchment in the sickly light of the tallow candle, her hands completely steady as she read the tight, meticulous handwriting she had seen so many times in the family estate's ledger books.

It wasn't a dowry.

It was an official safe-conduct addressed to the provost of the court guard, dated three days before the wedding journey. In it, her father stipulated the exact quotas of rye that would leave Varenne in exchange for a single irrevocable clause: the immediate delivery of Lucian de Valois to the empire's bailiffs as a scapegoat for the grain revolt, guaranteeing that the duchy would be cleansed of all suspicion of sedition.

Her father had sold him out.

Cecelia lifted her eyes from the paper. Lucian was still standing with his back to her, barefoot, rubbing his tired eyes in front of the empty pewter goblet, waiting for a dawn that had already been paid for down to the last penny.