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After hours of negotiation, for the sixth day in a row, the last thing Irene wanted to see was her fiancé or his horrible Eddisian family. So early into their relationship, he already displayed both a frightening understanding of her character and a complete inability to learn from his past mistakes, as well as his previously misused goat-footed guile, all of which he demonstrated by bringing his cousin in through Irene’s window while she was desperately trying to fit a few hours of sleep around ruling a kingdom.
She pulled her nightshirt around her. “What is this?” she said, softly enough that her attendants would understand they could pretend to ignore her.
The candle at her bedside—his fault—illuminated enough of his face for Irene to catch his wink. “Behave,” he told both of them, or perhaps no one in particular, kissed his cousin Eddis on the top of her head, said “I’ll be back in an hour” just loud enough for Irene to hear, and dropped through her windowsill into the pre-dawn shadow.
“I will ask once more,” Irene said. “What is this?”
“I’m sorry,” said Eddis, and Irene could almost hear an attendant sigh from behind the door. “Gen—well, he thinks this”—she waved her hands expressively at the room—“will all go better if you and I get to know each other.” She stomped across the room and awkwardly, presumptuously, perched herself on a small blue chair. Irene had kept that chair mostly because it was beautiful, and she didn’t sit in it enough to be bothered by how deeply uncomfortable it was.
“And so he bundled up his queen,” said Irene, too sharply to be a joke and too dryly to be anything but, “and stole her across the rooftops of my castle in the middle of the night.”
The pinch between Eddis’s eyebrows smoothed and she said, otherwise completely unrepentant, “well, that is what he does,” in such a droll, unbearably likeable way Irene actually almost smiled. “And I’m not his queen anymore anyways,” she added, and Irene no longer wanted to smile.
“So he thinks by stealing queens he can steal not just peace, and a crown, but my islands off the coast as well?” She folded her hands. “Make your demands, Eddis, but do not expect I will not return in kind.”
Eddis’s face was so open. “That’s not what I’m here for.”
“So what does Eddis want in my bedroom at this late hour?”
She flushed immediately, wishing she hadn’t said it that way, hadn't mentioned the bedroom, but Eddis barreled on.
“To get to know my future cousin-in-law,” she said, and then added, “and in that spirit, feel free to call me Helen.”
In the morning, when Irene entered the negotiation room and Eddis smiled at her, Irene wondered if she really meant it.
She stayed up the next night until Phresine brought her warm milk boiled with lemon leaves and honey, not because she didn’t want her sleep interrupted but because the wedding planning was cutting into the time she usually spent reviewing her barons’ tax evasion attempts, and it had to be made up somewhere. He was still finding ways to steal from her.
Eddis visited her again the night after, bearing a gift of honeycomb wrapped in wax paper.
“Gen told me you like sweet things,” said Eddis, licking honey off her fingers while Irene jealously washed her own off in a bowl of water. “I’m glad he—”
“Get out,” said Irene.
Eddis did not. She pled an inferior climbing ability and waited for him to fetch her back, staring at the wall. Irene resolutely ignored her and weighed the merits of forcing a foreign head of state out her bedroom window and starting another war.
“What if, instead, we gave you this area? It's notable for having the best apiaries in Eddis—”
Wedding planning ended early.
“I want my bedroom windows barred again,” she told Relius.
“Given… the state of things, I would advise against it,” he said. “He’s unpopular enough as it is, and the guard and the Eddisians are already looking for a reason to quarrel.”
She gritted her teeth. “How close are the plots you’re tracking to succeeding?”
Relius traced a pattern on the paper closest to him. “Not very. Though they could be more so, if someone happened to gossip about the guards on his rooms…?”
“I’m not even sure he sleeps there,” she said regretfully. “No, it’s better if he stays alive.”
Later, that same night, Eddis apologized. “We’d discussed the apiaries as an option, but I honestly didn’t think it was going to come up,” she said. “And last night, I didn’t mean to…”
She waved her hand, face flushed and painfully earnest. “I wasn’t making fun.”
“Making fun,” Irene said cooly. Her hand fisted in the side of her dress, just outside of where Helen should be able to see. She’d had a second chair brought in, because she was tired of meeting another queen sitting on the side of her bed. Eddis’s chair—the chair Eddis always sat in—was uncomfortable anyways.
“I didn’t mean to antagonize you,” Eddis said.
“I know what ‘make fun’ means,” Irene snapped. Something about Helen’s—Eddis’s—brown eyes make Irene feel young again, like she was waiting for Teleus to reach for his crossbow.
Eddis nodded. “This is why I wanted to get to know you, not as queens, but as new family.” It was supremely naïve of her to expect the two could ever be separated, but it was Eddis. The gods blessed her with everything but beauty, and even then they gave her a magnetic, charming face and a steadying confidence.
“I thought he was the one who thought this up.”
Eddis’s face dimpled at her, briefly, and then she continued, ignoring her comment. “When I do antagonize my newest cousin, I want you to know it’s on purpose.”
“Some would say it is unwise to provoke your neighbor.”
Irene’s skin prickled under Eddis’s measuring gaze. “You don’t have much family, do you.”
Irene’s pedigree and family history was hardly a secret, but Eddis said it in a way that sounded like she meant something else.
“No,” she said shortly.
“Hm,” said Eddis. “Well, maybe I can start teaching you what it’s like.”
One of her newest attendants was styling her hair before bed when Penelope quietly told Irene she had a guest waiting in the bedroom, and would she like Penelope to offer her some tea, or perhaps watered wine? Or bring her to one of Irene’s sitting rooms?
From then on, there were often cookies on the table by the two chairs, waiting for Eddis.
Eddis was excellent at filling the quiet. It should have felt like anxious chatter, or even a political opening, but all her stories were carefully personal, revealing nothing not common knowledge and neatly clear of anything from their increasingly bitter international politicking. He never stayed.
Irene should have ignored her. Insisted she leave Irene alone. She found herself instead responding to Helen, commenting on her stories or wide-ranging literary analysis, though when she tried to think of something to share in return, her teeth felt weighted together and all she could think of was her barons.
“How do you have the time to read all of that?” Irene asked one night.
“Well,” said Helen, unperturbed by being interrupted. “There’s not much to do in winters in Eddis except read and weave and wrestle. And have sex, though that could be considered wrestling.”
Irene wanted to squawk at that, but she made herself speak evenly. “Surely having—sex—gets quite boring quickly.”
Helen shot her a bemused look. “You’d be surprised. And for those that do find themselves bored with their husband or wife, well, there’s always someone else’s.”
“But inheritance—!” started Irene.
Helen shrugged. “It works out. Besides, half the time, it’s a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, and there’s no issues there.”
Helen was having a joke at Irene’s expense, and true to her word, Helen had let her know it. “Women can’t lie together,” said Irene, unaccountably relieved and unaccountably disappointed. “There’s nothing, to, well.”
She trailed off, very aware of Helen’s dark brown eyes, her amusement. “They manage,” said Helen.
Irene paused, trying to imagine what that might look like, and immediately flushed and stopped. “I’ve never heard of that happening before,” she snapped, haughty.
“Oh, it happens,” Helen said, eyes twinkling.
“In Eddis, maybe.”
“If it makes you happy to believe that, dear Irene.”
Before Irene could find a response, Eugenides was there to take Eddis away.
Irene summoned Galen. “I want you to run your tests for common poisons.”
He carefully listened to her symptoms, muttering as he drained blood from the crook of her arm. “And you only experience this at night?”
“Not every night,” she said. “Only when… Eddis and I talk, some nights. I only feel it around her.” Galen frowned thoughtfully. “I would of course ask you to communicate with her physician as well, in case something is targeting both of us,” she added, unaccountably upset at the idea.
“Do you experience these… symptoms only at night, or any time she is near?”
Attolia stared at him for a long moment, thinking. “Yes,” she said finally. “And when I think of her, even.”
Galen set down the roll of bandaging, frowning even more deeply.
“You know what this is,” she said.
He tapped the edge of the bowl with his fingernail, disturbing the blood. “No,” he said, hedging.
“You have an idea.” One of the guards shifted behind her, armor creaking. “Galen, you will tell me.”
He coughed uncomfortably. “It…” He leaned in towards her and quietly continued, though the room was still enough every one of her guards could surely hear. “It sounds rather like, well, lovesickness to me, my queen.”
Her mind emptied. All she could feel, all she could think of, was her straight-backed spine and the rigidity of her chair. She barely heard Galen’s uncomfortable laugh and something about the ridiculousness of it.
“You will test for poison,” she said, interrupting him. The guards closed ranks around her as he left.
Galen’s tests came back clear. There was no poison.
They signed the treaty the same day.
Irene was in bed when Eddis visited. It was such a shockingly early hour she had to nearly order her attendants to leave her alone.
“Irene?” said Eddis, eyes glittering in the light of Irene’s lonely candle. Irene had never given Eddis leave to call her by her name, but neither, she remembered uncomfortably, had she spoken when Eddis had done it anyway.
Eddis took another step forward, peering at the bed. “Attolia?”
“Why are you here?” Attolia said finally. There was such a look of relief on Eddis’s face Irene wanted to throw something breakable.
“You’re awake,” Eddis said nonsensically. “Are you feeling alright?”
Attolia pushed herself to sitting. “I’m perfectly well, so you can leave.”
Eddis frowned. “Did I do something? I thought you’d be happy with how today went.”
“Yes, we both got acceptable outcomes, so you can stop pretending and start remembering we aren’t friends.”
Eddis sat on the side of Attolia’s bed. “No.”
“No? You’re in my bedchamber.”
“This wasn’t to get an edge,” she said. “I visited you because I—I like you.”
Attolia laughed. “Don’t lie to me. What is there to like? I’m cruel and heartless and stealing your most beloved cousin away from you and the first time we met, I delighted in scaring you, in watching your face and knowing I wasn’t alone anymore—”
“And relentless, and determined,” interrupted Helen. “You care so much, and you’re funny, when you let it show, and—”
“I have wronged you,” said Irene, dizzy.
“You are a queen,” said Helen. “A queen of a different sort than I. You have had to be. Gen has wronged me. I have wronged Gen. He will wrong me as Attolis and I him as Eddis. That does not change that I love him.”
Irene stared for a long time. “You mean to abide with me,” she said finally, using an old word that sometimes meant something like haunt. “Whatever I do, you will not let me alone.”
“I do not want to be a curse,” Helen said gently. “Tell me to leave, and I will.”
Helen’s shoulders were loose, relaxed, but Irene realized Helen’s hand was gripping the blanket, almost out of view.
She is scared, Irene realized.
And then: She is scared because she means what she says.
Irene’s thoughts became distant. She could not think any further than those two thoughts, than the soft sound of Helen’s breath and a coil of hair coming loose and the distant sound of a guard calling the hour.
“If you leave,” she said finally, faintly, “will you come back?”
Helen exhaled, smiled. Irene could not read her face, but on someone else, she thought it might be a look of relief. “Yes. I will. I swear it. Whenever I can, I will come back.”
Irene touched Helen’s hand and felt a vein jump beneath her fingers. “Then go, or rather, stay until Eugenides returns.”
The coil of hair finally freed itself from Irene’s hair. Helen lifted her hand from under Irene’s and tucked it back. “No need,” she said. “There is a great deal to climb in Eddis.”
And then Irene was watching Helen, silhouetted against the window, as Helen turned and smiled over her shoulder at Irene, and then was gone into the early dark.