Edge of Power

  Wulf thought she was soft. But she knew, deep down, that what he really meant was weak—and more, she knew she was. Because every time she looked around, all she saw were the wives in the courtyard handling all these things that tore at her and made her wish she could lie down for a year or so and never get up again. The separations from their families and their homes, whether they wanted it or not, winter after winter. These strange lives they lived, confined to courtyards and hidden away and only trotted out as currency between their fathers, their brothers.

  And still, they laughed. They ate and drank and sometimes danced in the center of the courtyard. Their lives were full. There were the few children around who everyone helped raise. There were stories to tell about the gentlemen who loomed large over everything they did, information to impart and rumors to pass on. They comforted each other and feuded with each other as if what really mattered was which of them was a certain husband’s favorite. Maybe it did matter. Maybe it would matter to Kathlyn, too, if she ever had a husband.

  But she couldn’t stop thinking about Wulf, no matter how she tried, and she really didn’t think that the women in the courtyard had the kind of sex she’d had. She didn’t think they’d found themselves so altered afterward. So emotional and raw. Or if they did, they’d learned to hide it. Stuff it down where no one could see it. Until they forgot it was even there—because it didn’t matter. What a woman felt had no bearing whatsoever on what she was required to do.

  What Kathlyn would be required to do, too, once her father finished playing these games with the raider king. Either he would decide to let Wulf negotiate with him and Wulf would disappear back into myth and legend across the seas, or he’d have Wulf killed. Leaving him with ample time to punish Kathlyn through the application of awful, punitive winter husbands. She might be disgraced and ruined, but she was still her father’s daughter. Men would still jockey for her and compete to bid on her. They’d just treat her a whole lot worse once they got her, knowing she was “dirty.”

  Maybe, she thought now as her pulse sped up, it would have been smarter to drink that tea.

  It was hard to imagine what it would be like to stand here in this dress at last, her life finally beginning, with her virginity still intact and a real, true mounting ceremony to survive tonight. And yet she’d watched so many girls go through it and she didn’t think all of them were doped up on special tea. Most of them had kept their calm. They’d looked the way an aristocratic girl was meant to look up there on the stage. Quiet. Accepting. Perhaps a little contemplative, but always elegant, no matter what the man mounting them did.

  It occurred to Kathlyn that maybe that was why virginity was necessary. Because if there was any preparation whatsoever, if the girls had any idea what they were walking into, they would lose their minds. If they were in shock, they were docile. Easily managed and unlikely to act out.

  Not unlike cattle.

  And now you’re thinking like a courtesan, a sly little voice inside her that sounded a lot like Biyu’s pointed out. Or a raider.

  “Your escort is here, Princess Kathlyn,” Harissa told her then, appearing in the door to the bathroom suite. “It’s time.”

  And then she smiled so pointedly that Kathlyn wondered what expression she’d had on her own face. And when, exactly, she’d lost the ability to control it. But of course, she knew when. It was right around the time she’d learned that she couldn’t necessarily control her own body, either. Not with a raider king’s hands all over her, making her wet and slippery and hot, as promised.

  The way he would again very shortly, she was very much afraid. Out there on a stage where everyone could see that she was not only a fallen woman, but she liked it.

  Her heart started kicking at her, an intense and almost uncomfortable beat.

  Kathlyn walked out into her living room and found her blood brother standing there, dead in the center. Straight and tall, wearing the uniform that marked him head of their father’s guard, that same severe look on his face that he always wore these days. Did she imagine that it was more set and grim than usual?

  The truth was, she couldn’t tell. Her brother was nothing if not distant and unreadable at the best of times.

  “N’kosi,” she murmured as a greeting, keeping her voice even. Pleasant. Light and airy and polite.

  He was almost ten years older than her, the oldest of her father’s sons and Athenian’s heir, and Kathlyn had always seen him as more of a secondary parent than a sibling. The truth was, he encouraged it. The last three conversations she remembered having with him had been at grand celebrations: last fall in Great Lake Cathedral City over the border in Utah, last June down on the Arizona coast for the solstice, and last March right here in the palace at the equinox. All three conversations had involved his comments on her behavior. He’d told her to smile more. To stand up straighter. To watch how much time she wasted in chatter with the other princesses when she should have been making her rounds through the packs of gentlemen. She’d thanked him for his concern, and that had been that.

  Of course, in their family, that qualified as sentimental affection.

  N’kosi’s dark gaze traveled over her, from her hair to the white dress to the gold slippers on her feet.

  “You look innocent and pure, exactly as you should,” he said, his voice low. And something like pained, she thought, which was better than accusatory. “How did you let this happen, Kathlyn? How did you slip like this?”

  “It’s nice to see you, too,” she murmured, keeping her polite smile welded in place.

  “You know better than anyone how important it is to stay above reproach,” N’kosi gritted out. “Ruin isn’t a joke. You can’t undo it. The whole palace is alive with the whispers. The stories.”

  “The lies,” Kathlyn supplied. She ran her hands down the smooth, soft fabric of her dress, bright white and beaming with the goodness she supposedly lacked now. “Maybe you’ve forgotten that that’s what they do best here.”

  “They never did it to you.” He took a step toward her, then stopped, as if he thought better of it. Or maybe he thought her kind of ruin was contagious. And after all, she reminded herself with a touch of bitterness, her brother was an ambitious man. “He expects this raider to brutalize you. He picked him specifically as a punishment. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  He looked uncomfortable then, which make Kathlyn feel . . . off balance. Her blood brother was never anything but in control. Of himself. Of the men under his command. He wasn’t one of the lesser, conscripted guards. His squadron was tasked with protecting the king. He was known throughout the western highlands for his steady hand and ferocity in battle.

  His blood sister’s mounting ceremony should hardly have registered.

  “Is that a trick question?” Kathlyn shook her head. “If I don’t know what it means, then I’m a remarkably silly virgin who’s about to have a very rude awakening. If I do know what it means, you might as well escort me straight to the stews and wash your hands of my wickedness. Is that it? Are you trying to decide which version of idiotic I am?”

  N’kosi’s jaw tightened. His skin was darker than hers, with a ruddy undertone, and she’d always thought it made him look far more regal than she ever did. Just like their mother. Even now, as he stared at her as if he’d never seen her before.

  Not the way their father had, as if he was delighting himself with images of how best to torture her. At least she had that to be grateful for.

  “I’m trying to help you,” he said quietly. After a moment. “If you say you’re not ruined, that those are lies, I believe you. I expected something like this to happen a long time ago. Our father does as he likes because he has no fear of consequences, but the price he set on your maidenhead has always been too high. Of course it would lead to petty jealousy and attempts to ruin you.”

  That sounded perilously close to criticism of their father, which was itself viewed as treason. And Kathlyn hated that she couldn’t tell if her bro
ther was speaking his heart or if this, too, was a trap. She didn’t dare take a risk.

  “Our father cannot be swayed once he’s made up his mind,” Kathlyn said. Carefully. She studied her brother’s face. “You’ve participated in mounting ceremonies before.”

  “I have.”

  In fact, she’d witnessed at least two, though much as she tried, she couldn’t recall the specifics of the act itself. Both had been with daughters of lesser noblemen here inside the kingdom, both hoping that an alliance with the future king would heighten their prospects on the marriage market. And all Kathlyn could remember were the parties afterward.

  “Did you hurt them?” Before he could answer that, she continued. “Were you trying to hurt them?”

  N’kosi shifted then, which Kathlyn thought was telling. He stood guard for untold hours. He could make like a stone pillar if he chose.

  “Sometimes,” he said after a moment, “it’s necessary to cause pain swiftly so that there is less pain later.”

  She hoped her face didn’t show him anything. “You did, then.”

  “Not every man is our father,” N’kosi said, with a certain impatience. And the hint of a man she didn’t know flashing in his dark eyes. “Not everyone finds pleasure in hurting others. This is what I wanted to talk to you about. There are two schools of thought about good mountings.” He was standing stiffer now, as if he’d regained his equilibrium. “Some say it’s better to go in hard. It’s a quick pinch of pain, that’s all. And then, if you know what you’re doing, by the time you’re finished you can make her forget it ever hurt at all. Others simply get it done as quickly as possible, so as not to cause any undue pain.”

  “And still others, I am told, revel in the pain.”

  N’kosi shook his head. “Is this what passes for discussion in the wives’ courtyard? Terrifying girls before their mountings? What possible good can come of that?”

  “If it helps,” she said, wanting to extend some kind of olive branch, though she didn’t know why, “I’m not afraid.”

  “I am,” her brother gritted out, his flare of temper shocking Kathlyn. “I have no idea what this savage might do to you. Raiders aren’t exactly known for their polite manners.”

  She felt something inside of her flip over at that, then warm. “You’re worried about me.”

  N’kosi scowled at her. “I can’t help you with this. Any of it. There’s nothing I can do.”

  Kathlyn opened her mouth to say the sort of things she usually said. Light, airy. Dismissive. But everything was different now. She supposed there was the possibility that maybe N’kosi was different, too. That maybe he was one more lie she’d believed because that was how things had always been, and there was no point hoping for better.

  But she was tired of all these lies.

  “Did you come here to help me?” she asked.

  He straightened the cuffs of the crisp white shirt he wore. His uniform, with the bright accents to show he was the head of the guard.

  “What kind of question is that? I’m your brother. I would have taken a more active role in your life but you never seemed to need it. You’ve been perfect since you were a child.” He inclined his head slightly. “You’ve had to be, of course.”

  “So have you,” she pointed out quietly.

  “If I could have spared you this, I would have,” N’kosi told her then. “This is what he did to her, setting her up and then—”

  But he didn’t finish that sentence. He didn’t have to.

  For a moment they only looked at each other, and Kathlyn thought that possibly, it was the first time she’d seen her brother. Really seen him. Not as the king’s fierce heir, who’d climbed his way to the top spot in the palace guard and proved his worth daily. But as the only other person who knew what it was like to grow up a child of King Athenian’s once most favored, then cruelly murdered wife. Their father had other sons, but none of them had distinguished themselves the way N’kosi had. Most of them still had their own mothers here to try to get in a favorable word with the king when necessary, and some whispered that was what kept them soft. Entitled and occasionally petulant. N’kosi and Kathlyn had never had anything but their supposed perfection, and part of that was pretending they hardly remembered Lady Gertrix. Maybe keeping their distance all this time had helped them maintain that fiction.

  “I miss her,” she said, her voice thicker than it had been before. Too revealing, she knew, but she didn’t try to stop it or hide it. “Tonight, I really miss her.”

  N’kosi smiled, but it was the kind of smile that made Kathlyn’s chest hurt.

  “I miss her all the time,” he said quietly. He moved closer to Kathlyn, then reached out a hand to grip hers. “She would have loved to walk you into your mounting. She would have been so proud.”

  Kathlyn looked down at her brother’s hand, so big and strong, and tried to keep herself from tipping over that edge into what ifs. What if they’d had a more normal upbringing, with a mother who’d lived and was even now a fixture of the courtyard, agitating for her son and scheming for her daughter? What if she and N’kosi had been less concerned with trying to be perfect and more concerned with taking care of each other? What if, what if—and it all ended in nothing.

  “I was angry at her for a long time,” she confessed in a whisper. “Why did she provoke him? She knew what would happen. She must have known.”

  “She knew,” N’kosi said. It occurred to Kathlyn, not for the first time, that he’d been only a little younger than she was now when their mother had died. He’d known her not only longer, but as an adult. He squeezed her hand a little tighter. “There are some sacrifices that are worth making. But she didn’t die in vain, Kathlyn. I promise you. And she isn’t forgotten.”

  His grip on her hand was intense enough to make her frown as she gazed back at him. But she ignored it. “Why did we accept so easily that he—”

  N’kosi cut her off with a sharp squeeze of his hand over hers.

  “Never here,” he said, so softly she was more reading his lips than hearing his words. “Never where anyone can overhear you. It’s not safe.”

  Kathlyn barely had time to grasp the implications of that when there was noise outside the door. It was opened, and two of the palace guards she knew served in her brother’s squadron looked in, then nodded at him.

  N’kosi dropped her hand and offered her his arm, stiff and formal once again, because it was time to walk her out into her fate.

  And Kathlyn was ruined. She could hear the whispers as N’kosi led her out of her rooms and through the courtyard. She could hear that high-pitched, deliberately snide giggling that always meant a few women were talking badly about someone else, as they fell into the usual procession behind her. In this case, she was clearly their target. She imagined she should feel that cut at her a bit more keenly than she did.

  Her life as she’d known it was effectively over, as she’d been coming to terms with since that day in the throne room. Her father was throwing this mounting ceremony at a time that could only be called shameful. Embarrassing. It was before the equinox, so that meant only people in the stronghold could attend. And fathers only did such things when there was something to hide or hush up or try to hurry through.

  But nothing was being hidden in this case. Athenian was giving her to a raider. Deliberately.

  The most famous virgin princess in all the western highlands, handed over to a brutal savage for her mounting. It would have been a scandal for that alone. Add all the rest to it, and it was a sucking pit of despair.

  Or it should have been. Everyone from the most notorious courtesan in the kingdom to her own blood brother were at pains to tell her how dire her situation was.

  But Kathlyn just couldn’t get past the notion that she was lucky.

  Under normal circumstances, she’d have had no idea what she was walking toward tonight, out of the courtyard and through the galleries, then on into the grand hall. She’d have been busily dreaming about he
r upcoming party and the fact she would soon become a woman at last. She’d have been scanning the crowd and hoping it was big enough to honor her father and prove her worth, that so many wanted to witness her transition.

  And even though this ceremony had a cloud hanging over it—or perhaps because of that cloud—it looked as if the entire kingdom had turned out tonight. The galleries were packed solid. The mounting stage had been set in the very center of the great hall, with the usual seats for the king and higher-ranked nobles on raised platforms all around, and Kathlyn watched as the women she knew filed into their seats on the far side of the flat, round stage that afforded everyone a view from all sides. She looked at the crowd, recognizing far too many faces.

  Any one of these men she’d always found creepy, or too familiar when no one was around to watch their hands, or cruel behind their eyes, could have been the one her father picked for this. Any one of them could have been the man chosen to shove his way inside of her, make her bleed, and then thrust into her repeatedly, right here. While she would have no choice but to lie there as quietly as possible and take it, no matter how she’d disliked them over the years.

  Several of those men met her gaze and she knew, she knew, that they were imagining that exact same scenario themselves. If her life hadn’t taken such a strange detour, she would have been standing here waiting for the opportunity to suffer beautifully with one of them, no matter how her skin crawled.

  But she was lucky, because she already knew what Wulf was like. She already knew how it felt when he was inside of her.

  She already knew exactly what she was in for tonight. What she couldn’t tell was whether that was a good or bad thing. Would it have been better to know nothing? Or was she as hampered by what she knew as so many other girls were by what they didn’t?

  N’kosi stopped in the center of the hall, the stage behind him and their father in his usual raised chair before him. It was normally a father’s prerogative to present his daughter and the maidenhead she’d saved for him to the king, but even Athenian couldn’t present her to himself. Some part of her was surprised he hadn’t tried, or skimmed over the presentation to shame her further.