Chapter 6: Torvald's Boots

Ysmera did not go back to the feast.

She said something to the little girl, she could not remember what, and handed her to a nurse.

Then she climbed to her tower with her hands shaking for the first time in three years.

Papa says Mirelle is my real mother.

Of course he did.

Aldous believed it was true, and he was teaching it to a child who had no idea she was the queen's.

Ysmera stood at her window in the dark and pressed her knuckles to her mouth.

A knock sounded at the door.

"Go away," she said.

"Majesty, it is Torvald."

She closed her eyes.

"Come in."

He had left his boots on the landing, as riders did before a queen's room.

He came in on stockinged feet and shut the door behind him.

He was thirty-two now, broader through the shoulders than he had been, with a gray thread in his black beard.

He still wore his riding leathers from the roost yard, and he smelled of smoke and cold air.

"I saw the child speak to you," he said.

"Then you saw everything."

"I saw a queen walk down the steps with a hundred men laughing for her and not for him."

He stopped three paces from her.

"I wanted you to know that, tonight."

She turned.

He stood with his scarred hand open at his side, and he did not look at her like a captain.

He had not looked at her like a captain for a long time.

She knew exactly how he looked at her.

"Come here," she said.

He crossed the floor in two strides.

She took his face between her hands and kissed him.

It was not gentle.

She had waited three years and a hundred feasts, and her mouth was hot and hungry and furious.

He made a rough sound against her lips and caught her waist.

"Ysmera," he said, and it was the first time he had ever said her name.

"Again."

"Ysmera."

She dragged him backward across the room, tearing at the laces of his jerkin.

He pulled her closer by the hips until she felt how hard he already was against her belly.

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