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The unfinished girls sent to the Clarisse de Monfort School for Young Ladies all go to bed at a respectable hour.
“You shall,” its mistresses tell them, “Burn enough candles in your own households. And possessing dark circles before you must deal with gala preparations, your children, or your chatelaine’s insistence that you oversee the tradesmen’s bill, is unseemly.”
The girls all share rooms until they are past eighteen. The Duke de Ghislain visited the University at Val Royeaux while they toured its libraries.
“I shall die, I know it,” says Alouette, clutching at her own nightdress.
Lavina rolls her eyes. “He didn’t even see you.”
“Beast! He did. Those eyes, right through the crowd. He looked at me and I just blinked. Useless. You were there, Josephine – you saw.”
“I mostly saw Sidonie’s regards to her lover,” Josephine demurs. The risqué title should distract her friend, and does cause a good deal of giggling and eye-widening around the dormitory. She thrills a little, both at the memory—this was the sort of book her mother had often locked away for fear they would appear too much the Antivan reprobates, a definition known to change by topic and week—and at the ease of re-directing conversation.
She did see the Duke de Ghislain. She felt the energy he brought to a room against her skin. Attractive in the way of fast talkers and those who easily laugh. His arm drawn through a taller, vivid woman with full lips and stern lines, who could walk armed anywhere in Val Royeaux. A mark of a Knight Enchanter, the wealth of silver in her clothes picking up slanted light from the ancient glass windows.
“If I were to conceive a tendresse,” she says, the pleasure in a shared secret warm enough that it was worth a little embarrassment, “It might not be for His Grace. He was not the only one in the room, after all.”
“Oh,” Lavinia breathes, eyes sparking. “Yes. The First Enchanter. Those legs, and the way she can just look at a person. They’re calling her Madame de Fer. It fits so well, no? I didn’t think you were the sort who likes being frozen, Josie, but I suppose a pash is a pash.”
“That’s—” Josephine shakes her head. “Do you have to be crude?”
Crude is not quite what she means, but words are difficult after midnight, no matter how many tutors drilled Orlesian into all the Montilyet children. She wants to say that she thinks the youngest enchanter to the imperial court knows how to weave masks from raised eyebrows and air, but Alouette is giggling, and Lavinia staring into space, her smile absent.
“I heard,” says Alouette, “That the Duke bought so many peonies for her that no one from Orlais to Tevinter has a bloom to spare, even for Celene. Heaps and heaps of them, he brought, right into her tower like a tale.” She sighs. “No one ever brings me flowers. And that is so romantic.”
“They will, you chit,” Lavinia says, rolling her eyes. “Though, you know, I think the library smelled of peonies when they left.” Her lips twitch. “All a bit excessive, if you ask me.”
A pillow strikes her in the side of the head. “No one asked you,” Alouette says. “Josie’s right. Madame Vivienne is splendid.”
Josie lays back, smiling through there banter. She falls asleep imagining piles of peonies. Two people with eyes only for each other, limbs entwined as the air fills thick with crushed greenery and open petals until their skin is powered from broken stamens, sticky with sex and scent. She sees the the woman’s head thrown back in pleasure behind her closed eyes, and shifts in her bed, blushing and aching with quiet.
Josephine greatly prefers her second outing as Antivan Ambassador to the Imperial Court to her first. The music is better, for a start, the warmer weather at Halamshiral kinder to viols than the unseasonably chilly garden fete had been. She lets herself think of the skirling strains of it winding through her own shadow, catching on the gold thread in her hair ribbons. A silly fancy, but it keeps her back straight, the dark blue domino—leather, of course. Antiva’s best and still stifling indoors—easier on her face. She allows a marchpane apricot to dissolve on her tongue.
She does miss Leliana. The things that wretch might do with the ragged ends of Elise de Firelle’s conversation and unfortunate sandals. But she last saw her friend with hectic eyes and new bow callouses, a love mark still fresh on her throat. Josephine has never been enough of a Bard to know the name of powerful Leliana’s benefactress, which is an uncomfortable sort of relief.
Be careful, she thinks, sending her thoughts into the nearest shadowed corner.
“Ambassador Montilyet. You do look well.”
Josephine looks up into a smile and a mask that might be made from the moonlight outside the palace walls. She bows. “Madame Vivienne.”
Cool fingers raise her chin. “Do forgive me for not approaching you sooner, my dear. I did mean to congratulate you on your appointment.”
She does not flush, and that delights her, almost undoing the effect. Josephine lets herself smile. “Always good to see if these things stick, my lady,” she says. “It is a large responsibility, and no one would expect you to waste your time on someone who ran screaming from the room.”
Vivienne laughs. “Were you tempted?”
“Orlais is made of temptations, Madame.”
“Well put,” Vivienne says, taking Josephine’s hand and bowing over it before drawing away. “You’ve done quite well for yourself. I’m sure we shall see each other again.”
Done well a glorified merchant, clinging to nobility with careful fingernails, Josephine thinks, rueful. She wonders how the First Enchanter might an Ambassador of stronger standing. Perhaps they’d even be invited to tea.
Flaky pastry reminds Josephine why bodies exist. It shatters in her mouth, breaking through weeks of white-tinged exhaustion, making her forget nightmares and cracked lips and poor skin, the risk of too much powder coming away in sweat. She does her best not to close her eyes. She might moan.
Besides, she reminds herself, swallowing and sure to offer Vivienne equal share of the marvellous gift. She is in the middle of a story.
“Edmond was sure to inform his lover of this new development,” she says. “And, as no one is more aware of the less savoury branches of the Blanchard family tree than the baron himself, or more eager to be in the Marquise’s good graces and avoid her scrutiny....”
Josephine smiles. It is not wrong to be pleased with this, and it was worth every cramp in her wrist and time spent squinting at bylaws and old correspondence. “I received a letter from Baron Blanchard three days ago,” she concludes, watching as Vivienne’s eyes widen briefly in delight. “He very generously offered the Inquisition free passage, with no prompting at all.”
“Oh, bravo!” Vivienne says. “Darling, you are a delight.”
As if allowing the Blanchards to dictate terms were in anyone’s best interests. She imagines Inquisitor’s Adaar’s face at the idea of it.
(“I’ve been robbed better by real fucking bandits. This is just sad.”)
“I only do my job,” she says. She turns the tray. A headache is breaking through the sugar again.
“An appreciation for competence has nothing to do with kindness,” Vivienne says, “and you, my dear, play with a deft hand.”
She does not know when her hand starts to shake, but she marks when Vivienne notices it. A final, loud loss of control over the pastry tongs. Tea splatters, white spots in front of her eyes and mortification in her throat, thicker and worse than bile.
Not enough sleep.
Vivienne’s concern touches her. She prickles from it. Wants to shiver and laugh a little, that this woman sees her tattered state seems more worried about her body than the dangerous, loose threads. She swallows. “I have had some trouble.” The words are easier than she wanted. She should keep this close.
“Since when?”
“Since Haven.”
Since smoke and screaming and Adan, wild eyed, telling Adaar to hurry—hurry—and crying out before the pots of liquid fire were quite done exploding. Since dead soldiers and too many lists, Josephine watching supplies dwindle and hopes fray, Leliana and Cullen at each other’s throats. Since Adaar staggered back to them through the snow, her swearing as deep and thoughtless as a heartbeat.
A canny look. “Nightmares?”
Foolishness. She should not still have these thoughts. Has no need of a physician—“But you must!”—when so many are—
—When Vivienne leaves, Josephine takes the time compose herself, drawing her spiralling thoughts close and brushing the thought of crumbs from her hands. The light from the gazebo is still good, filtered green but strong enough for writing, and she still has Yvette’s accounts to reconcile, and news from Markham to file.
The door opens and Josephine puts down her pen. Vivienne is still smiling, a triumphant look to her raised chin, and is holding something in careful hands. She slides in next to Josephine. Glass glints, dried leaves neat at the bottom of a jar. There is a sharp scent. Newer, clinging to the edges of mint from her soap, along with the warmer, lingering traces of honey and rum from the canelés.
“One leaf to cure a headache,” Vivienne says, stern. A herbalist’s concern and the gesture of a friend. “Two for sleep as swift relief.”
“Darling,” Vivienne says over her cards. “If we played for true wealth, you would beggar me.”
Josephine examines the small pile of royals on her side of the table, rather delighted by the irritated scrunch to the other woman’s face. It’s unstudied and open, and it’s as much a gift as the game itself. “I would never treat my friends so?”
“And your enemies?”
“Should not be noticing such things,” Josephine sniffs. “Shall we try one more hand.”
“Not for gold,” Vivienne says, sipping at a cup of mint tea and grimacing to find it lukewarm. They have played a long time. “That does grow tedious. What other favours should I bestow?”
Josephine does not swallow her own tongue. “You might win, Vivienne.”
“I might,” Vivienne shrugs. “Sera might also come to me for lessons in elocution.”
Josephine covers a laugh with her hand, standing and surveying the books on the other woman’s shelves. Most are magical in nature, gold leaf flaked, titles twisting in too many syllables, a few still carrying scorch marks or traces from dirt from wherever they’ve been scavenged, their cared-for disarray showing Vivienne’s respect for them more than clean, empty spaces. There are a surprising number of herbals. And one slim volume in heart’s blood red.
“What are you doing, my dear?”
“Choosing your forfeit. Shuffle the cards, if you please?”
Vivienne laughs harder than Josephine expects when she sits back at the table, Sidonie’s regards to her lover in hand.
“I forgot I had that,” she says. “It’s banned by the chantry, you know.”
“It’s also beautiful,” Josephine says, cheeks burning, but she keeps her eyes on Vivienne’s face. “Like a lot of banned things. Unless—” oh, she is thoughtless. “Unless the Duke de Ghislain gifted it, and—“
Vivienne’s hand covers hers over the book. “Hush, darling,” she says, the flash of sadness tempered by a slow, true smile. “No fear, Bastien was not the only one prone to erotic gifts.” Her eyes dance. “This one, I believe, was my own. To myself. As is only right. I’ll be sorry to lose it.”
“Then win,” Josephine challenges.
In the end, Josephine quotes the poems as she quits the room. ‘You happened,” she murmurs, half laughing at her own daring. “I was happened to, my love. Cracked…’
“Sidonie’s regards,” Vivienne says, shaking her head from the now empty table, “Were fervent things. Goodnight, my dear.”
One leaf for a headache. Two, for dreamless sleep.
Josephine does not need Vivienne’s gift in the weeks the Inquisitor travels to Emprise du Lion. The tales of red lyrium are frightful, Vivienne’s few letters (always a surprise, always a reason for Leliana to mutter low and evil about a waste of good birds, until she sees Josephine smile over them) telling of desire demons and altogether too much snow.
There is the odd, waspish comment about Sera and Adaar’s tedious indiscretion, and Josephine does not quite know how to say, any clearer than she has already, that Vivienne’s concern for her honour is misplaced. Even if her mother had not written extolling Ortranto’s many virtues (most of which belonged in an account book), Adaar’s sudden reticence and withdrawal of confidences stung only for so long as it took her to see how much easier the other woman was in Sera’s presence. And Vivienne’s outrage on her behalf is a very pleasurable sort of ache, like eating new-cured cinnamon. She shouldn’t indulge. But it feels safer at a distance.
While they are away, Josephine builds. Lavender is easy. Marjoram. Embrium. Clean lines and fresh earth. It is a delight, persuading new glass out of Serault, cut to careful measurements. She reads about humidity and hydraulics and wishes she’d paid more attention to the glass houses her mother had made. Orchids were, her mother said, showier than rubies, and slightly cheaper.
A part of her wants to fill the greenhouse with peonies. With trailing honeysuckle and glory-hued clematis and a world of deep scents and her heart on her sleeve. She stands in the new-built midst of it, sweat drawn up slowly at her lips and throat, between her breasts and thighs where they touch, and lets the fantasy build and break away, until she no longer feels strong hands tangle in her hair, no longer imagines the taste of mint and lyrium in in her mouth as Vivienne kisses her, presicise and teasing until a groan, a muttered plea, the close of teeth would make her fierce.
Josephine imagines it all, solitary.
When she leaves the greenhouse, she is calm. There is no point imagining impossible things, but they bring joy all the same. She hopes her friend will like her gift.
You happened to me
and I am split with it
drawn down, slow.
Press me close
Light looks worth eating.
You happened. I am
happened to, my love
cracked ground filled
with rain and body
with time and you
trace all the marks
you made
before you looked at me
and I ate the light.