Edge of Power

  Like most girls of her rank in the western highlands, Kathlyn had imagined her mounting ceremony in a variety of different ways over the years.

  As a young girl she’d dreamed about it, imagining that it would be a grand affair, filled with those she loved there to witness her debut into a society she had always imagined she would be an integral part of. Those dreams had focused more on the pretty white dress and the dancing to follow, the feasting and laughing. It had seemed like such a treat to get to have a party, thrown into the middle of the more dour work of the palace.

  As she’d grown older, she’d seen so many actual mounting ceremonies herself that it had grown increasingly difficult to convince herself that it would be quite what she had imagined. Even so, she’d longed for hers, because it would mark her passage into full womanhood. And it would provide her with the first step toward the rest of her life, whatever that might look like.

  She’d never cared what it looked like, as long as it wasn’t here. A brand-new tyrant would at least be different from her father. And that had been all Kathlyn had focused on after she’d watched Athenian kill her mother, straight on through to when she started bleeding at nineteen: getting the hell out of here, no matter how unsavory the alternatives. Doing her compliant duty seemed like a small price to pay for a six-month reprieve from her father’s court and all his mind games.

  More recently, she’d just wanted to get the ball rolling. She was less sure that she’d actually enjoy a winter marriage, but she didn’t really care about that anymore. She wanted to be a part of the world instead of the world’s oldest virgin princess, locked away in her father’s palace like a relic.

  And yet now that her mounting ceremony was finally upon her, she knew too much. Kathlyn had no idea how anyone suffered through the sort of sex she’d seen on display on the mounting stage over the years.

  Oh, a lovely thrust, well done, the crowd murmured when a man stepped into place after oiling himself, fiddled around a moment, and then slammed himself inside the girl splayed out before him in her white dress—hard enough to clearly get all the way in, yet without making her yelp or flinch.

  You can always tell when a man can’t quite figure it out, her father’s wives had muttered behind their hands last summer, as they’d all sat around watching a nobleman’s daughter do an exemplary job of remaining serene while the man who’d bid on her got sweatier and more frustrated with each successive and unsuccessful jab at his target. She’s suffering so prettily, bless her.

  It had never occurred to Kathlyn that both sides of that coin were brutal. She’d always concentrated on what the girls looked like. Were they quiet and calm and good? Or emotional and silly and bad? And afterward, during the feast, did they seem buzzing and giddy—indicating they’d come through their transition with flying colors and the blood to prove it? Or were they more subdued and glassy-eyed, which could either mean that they hadn’t been found as lovely and virginal and sacrificing in their surrender—or that the man had been judged incompetent and they’d had to endure it. The latter wasn’t their fault and wouldn’t follow them into their winter marriages like the former, but it had always seemed so disappointing.

  How had she never spared a moment to think about the whole point of the ceremony? The part where a man would stand there and penetrate her in front of a crowd while she did her best to look as if she was lost in contemplative prayer?

  But she knew how. Penetration had always been a fuzzy word. A lot like virginity. People said the words a lot. Kathlyn said them herself. But until Wulf, she hadn’t had the slightest idea what either one of them meant. Not really.

  It had been a week since that night with Wulf, and she kept expecting all of the sensation that had washed through her then—and all the next day—to go away. She expected to feel like herself again. To slide back into whatever normal was now, here on the other side of ruined.

  But if anything, it all grew more intense. She woke at every noise in the night, gripping the slender, wicked blade he’d given her in her fist as she waited for someone to come into the dark of her bedroom. She worried that it was one of the guards, at last, come to claim what they thought was theirs, now it was rumored she’d given it away.

  Kathlyn was afraid every sound was the guards. But really, she hoped it was Wulf, because she was sure he would know what to do about all the unwieldy things that sloshed around inside of her. He’d known how to put them there. She was sure he’d know how to take them away again, too, so she could breathe again.

  Day after day, she only wanted to breathe again—

  But there was never anyone there.

  Which meant Kathlyn had a lot of time to lie awake and think about dangerous things like sex. Or the fact that everything she’d ever been told about raiders appeared to be a lie. Or, if she was remembering those hot, harsh things he’d said to her in her living room correctly, the fact that there were women in this very palace who were experiencing the kind of sex that she’d experienced that night all the time. Meaning, not compliant in any way.

  But they were courtesans and Kathlyn had been taught her whole life to believe that they didn’t count. Something, she could admit, she hadn’t examined too closely until now. But sex wasn’t what she’d always expected it to be. Even her own mother had told her to expect the pain that everyone agreed sex brought. And instead, it had been . . . overwhelming. It had rocked her, down deep inside where she’d thought there was nothing but old grief and enduring loss. He had rocked her, shaking her foundations and changing her. Utterly.

  And the strangest part of all was that she didn’t feel ruined. She didn’t feel dirty or spoiled or tainted. She felt new.

  It was an easy jump from there to wonder if anything in her world was what she thought it was. If any of the things she’d been taught to believe in all this time had any basis in truth whatsoever.

  The first thing she’d noticed, the day she woke up and wasn’t a virgin for the first time in her life, was that she woke up in the first place. God didn’t smite her down sometime after she drifted off to sleep. There was no concerned ring of disappointed priests at her door, howling out their bitter prayers for her wayward soul. She’d been taught her whole life that to give away what didn’t belong to her, to waste her maidenhead on a man who could not add to her father’s wealth or consequence, was a terrible sin. It was the very height of immoral selfishness.

  Kathlyn had always taken that to mean that ruin was visible. Therefore she should have been marked with her shame, as promised by the long line of priests and older women who had taken it upon themselves to teach her what virtue was over the years. Kathlyn was sure that someone had to notice so basic and fundamental a change in her. The priests had promised that no unvirtuous woman could ever hope to fool the faithful.

  Sins leave their mark, they’d assured her in dire tones.

  Kathlyn had inspected herself in her mirror, but she’d seen no new marks. No signs or stains or scars. There weren’t even any more pleasant marks that Wulf might have left behind, maybe with that wonderfully rough beard of his, which annoyed her. She didn’t want sin to stain her, she didn’t think, but some wicked part of her thrilled to the idea that he might.

  And then she’d thought about what her attendant had told her. She knew that Terryl had only been trying to help her. And had. Every time she thought about the way Wulf had slid inside of her, so thick and deep and inexorable, she wondered how it would have been if Terryl hadn’t snipped away her maidenhead to ease that passage. But as the days passed, and the prospect of her bloodless mounting loomed before her, Kathlyn wondered why she’d believed every single thing Terryl had told her. Without question.

  And why she’d believed everything everyone had ever told her, also without question, all her life—especially when it was to her own detriment.

  It was the whispers that told the real truths, she realized. She’d heard—and not quite heard, because they were never too loud—these whispers all her life. That was
how Kathlyn had heard about the tea some of the women drank in the mornings, especially the winter wives who didn’t much like their winter husbands or want to stay too long in her father’s kingdom. That was how she’d learned about certain poultices that took the swelling of black eyes and other bruises down, because no one was kind to women who were so deficient in their duties that their men felt compelled to strike out at them—so better to hide it. And that was where she’d heard stories here and there across the years, about certain women who had gotten away with mounting ceremonies that everyone agreed should have been far more embarrassing for all involved.

  No better than she had to be, that one, one of the wives had said with a sniff. And brazen enough to take to the stage like an untouched virgin anyway.

  More power to her, another had replied. She deserves to get away with it if the rumors are true and her virginity was stolen.

  That’s what she’d like you to believe, the first had retorted, but believe me, there was no theft going on in the back hall near the kitchens last summer. Night and day while he was visiting. Yet there she was, dressed all in white and stained with blood to prove it, as innocent as a baby.

  That was how Kathlyn found herself in the stews a few days before the night of her mounting ceremony. She’d never gone down into the lower levels of the palace before, but it wasn’t as if she didn’t know where the stews were located.

  How liberating that life as you know it is over, she told herself briskly, trying to make herself believe it. Maybe now you can do something with it.

  She wore the same cloak she’d worn to Wulf’s cell that first night, but she didn’t make the same mistake this time and wear those stretchy little not-quite-there clothes beneath it. Who knew what might happen this time? Maybe she’d end up parading up and down the whole of the gorge for all the kingdom to see, and if that happened, she’d really prefer to keep her breasts to herself. This time she wore a simple little fitted shift made from the sort of microwool she used as a nightgown. It had a modest collar and fell just below her knees, covering everything she could possibly want covered. It wasn’t the sort of thing she would wear around the palace, golden and rustling and announcing her father’s eminence with every step, but it was markedly more demure than a stretchy bit of see-through fabric.

  She waited late into the morning before she set out. The aristocratic men who, presumably, were the courtesans’ companions all night long, were rarely seen before midafternoon in these winter months. They stayed up all night, playing their card games and drinking too much and betting on everything—pursuits Kathlyn considered in a bit of a different light these days. Because if they added courtesans to those games, the whole tenor of them changed, didn’t they?

  Kathlyn shook her head at herself as she slipped down the first set of shadowed stairs she encountered. The trouble with realizing that she’d been naïve about one thing was that it had a domino effect. And instead of worrying over her impending ruin and what that would mean for her and who would take advantage of it—and how—she drove herself crazy trying to figure out exactly how many things she’d accepted as fact based on absolutely no evidence.

  Pretty much everything, was her conclusion.

  Including the idea that if she so much as met the gaze of one of the palace’s courtesans, she would be infected and dragged down to their level.

  It was time to find out firsthand.

  She didn’t know exactly where she was going. She held her cloak close as she walked deeper and deeper into the bowels of the palace. Down in the scandalous levels, everything was different. No gold and marble and precious jewels. Far fewer lights and narrower halls.

  Everything down here was dark, she thought as she wandered down one hall, then up another. Dank and too close. There were sounds she couldn’t place coming through the walls, suggesting they were much too thin. A rhythmic, moaning sound here. Something crackling and talking, like an old screen, there. It smelled vaguely of mildew in some spots, and she was sure she could hear leaking water in others. And she opted not to look too closely into the grimy shadows to see if the scrabbling sound she heard was rats.

  Kathlyn shuddered. She followed the dim lights that beckoned her further and further along, wondering if she’d ever find her way back. The hallways were dim and depressing, lined with broken and unpainted doors. Inside were squalid little chambers that were no better than cells, most of them with trash and other detritus thrown here and there in careless piles on the bare floors. Thin mattresses were tossed in corners and dirty-looking people huddled in the center of them, looking cold and exhausted even as they slept.

  Kathlyn felt chilled to the bone, and more so with every step. Two floors up the rooms overflowed with furs and gold, thick rugs to take the chill away and fireplaces every three feet. You’d never know it, down here.

  She knew instantly when she located the hallway that housed the higher classes of courtesans. The walls were painted white, making them feel instantly brighter with the same few lights. There were no questionable smells or sounds from the shadows, there were only arched doorways with pretty fabrics hanging down as nominal doors. Kathlyn could smell incense and fragrant oils. As she moved down the center of the hallway, she could see into the rooms as she passed them. There were lights in different colors, blues and purples, making many of the rooms seem mysterious. Suggestive. There were multicolored pillows, strewn here and there on actual rugs, as if to suggest that the whole of the room was a bed. The beds themselves were plush and deep and sometimes high, and there were women asleep in most of them. None of them looking dirty or cold.

  Following a hunch, she made her way down to the end of the hall where only one door stood. No arched and fluttering entry on this one; it was a big, solid door and if Kathlyn wasn’t mistaken, it even boasted a lock.

  She could only think of one courtesan powerful enough to command this sort of placement. Biyu herself. Kathlyn ignored the apprehension twisting her inside of her, reminded herself why she was doing this in the first place, and knocked.

  There was no reply, so she knocked again. Then once more, and was about to give up and try something else—like waking up one of the other women she’d seen through the fluttering hanging fabrics—when she heard the faint noise of someone moving around behind the door. She went stiff, no matter how she ordered herself to relax. There was the sound of the lock being thrown, then the door was flung open. Not cracked, suggesting that the inhabitant was in any way fearful of who might be standing there, but thrown wide open as if she had nothing and no one to fear.

  Down here, Kathlyn thought, she likely didn’t.

  And then, for the first time in her life, she stood face-to-face with Biyu.

  Courtesans were supposed to hide their faces from all the good, pious people—and yet somehow, everyone knew what Biyu looked like. What surprised Kathlyn was how much prettier she was when she wasn’t wearing her usual hood up around her face, keeping so much of herself in shadow. Not doing a single thing to conceal herself, in fact.

  “You’re so much smaller than I thought you’d be,” Kathlyn blurted out before she could think better of it.

  Biyu was tiny. She was as delicate as she was small, wrapped in something silky that she was making no particular attempt to keep from falling off her body in different places. Her hair was the glossiest black Kathlyn had ever seen, straight and full as it fell to her shoulders, and her round, lovely face with high, flat cheekbones could as easily have belonged to a young woman as an old one. She appeared ageless. Even sweet when she smiled—but Kathlyn could see the sharp intelligence in her tilted dark eyes, one of the only signs of the power she wielded. That and the way she stood there, utterly devoid of anything even remotely apologetic or respectful. As if she was the person with rank, not Kathlyn.

  “Princess Kathlyn herself,” Biyu murmured in what sounded like pointed and very likely feigned astonishment. “To what do I owe the honor? At this hideous hour of the morning when everyone down he
re is usually asleep?”

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” Kathlyn said automatically, aware as she spoke that clinging to courtesy in a situation like this was absurd. More than absurd. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. Whatever makes you feel safe, she told herself derisively. “I can come back at a more convenient time, if you like.”

  Biyu laughed, a lilting sound that was both musical and edgy. “You’re the princess, girl. It is my great joy to wake up at your convenience, of course.” Her gaze was considering. “Let me guess. You want a tour guide through the stews to check out your future home.”

  While Kathlyn processed the fact that she’d come right out and said something like that, bold and clearly unafraid, Biyu reached into a pocket in her wrapper. She pulled out a little pipe and lit it, sucked on the pipe stem a moment, then blew out a billowing cloud of smoke between the two of them.

  Kathlyn coughed. She assumed that was what Biyu wanted. But she was also fascinated, because she’d never seen anyone smoke up close before. It was the sort of thing laborers did, off in the distance. Or it happened outside at various celebrations and feasts, in the corners of gardens where the more disreputable gentlemen lurked and Kathlyn had always known better than to go.

  “I don’t want to waste your time,” she said when she stopped coughing. She waved the worst of the smoke away from her face and smiled at the other woman. “I just wanted to ask for your help.”

  Biyu stared back at her for a moment, a faint smirk playing around her impossibly perfect lips. “My help? I had heard—everyone has heard, you understand—that you are not quite the pristine little innocent we’d all been led to believe. A nation mourns, etcetera. But to lower yourself to ask one such as me for help?” Kathlyn felt Biyu’s shock was exaggerated. Greatly. “Your father would have a stroke.”