Outside of the sitting room, a pair of young men were awaiting them. Once they were out of Louis’ earshot, having bowed by the doorway, one of them scraped his throat.
‘His Highness the Duke of Bourrac wishes to offer you two bedchambers,’ he said rather formally, though he obviously had a country drawl to him. ‘Though due to the suddenness of your visit, Your Majesty, my lord, currently one of the cabinets adjoining the bedroom is still being readied in case it would be necessary.’
‘A cabinet?’ Katherine asked. ‘Well, I don’t suppose we are expecting visitors through the night, and if we are, then I recall my room has a sitting room.’
It was the middle of the night by now, and Freyza could think of little else but to sleep. He followed the servants, making sure to walk slightly behind Katherine as he was used to doing with Louise in Souchon Palace.
‘Very well, my lady,’ he said.
‘Besides, we’ll be leaving early in the morning, Master Freyza even earlier than myself, so I believe it would be better to begin winding down.’
Their rooms were next to one another, with to the other side a cabinet to his room and a sitting room to hers. These rooms, with a similar layout as those Freyza knew the guest wing of Souchon Palace to have, were meant for diplomats. He chuckled at the thought of knowing that this rather unimpressive, nearly ancient castle would be the temporary home for any diplomat, though he himself now fit the description well.
‘Well…’ Katherine sighed as the door was opened before her. ‘I suppose now is the time to thank you for your service. I’m glad I didn’t have to be stuck in a carriage on my own.’
‘Oh, you needn’t say,’ Freyza said, waving it off. ‘It is an honor to have been in your presence, as it always is an honor to be in your presence.’
She smiled softly and pressed her head down in a single nod. ‘Speak to me in the morning, will you? So I know you’re safely on your way.’
He could barely even look at her. ‘I will,’ he said. ‘Good night.’
‘And to you,’ she said.
----------------------------------------
The room itself was rather simple. The castle in Bourrac was ancient, and thus despite the warmth of the recent weather, Bourrac was cold. The freezing sea air also carried salt, salt which took every opportunity to attach to the stone and weather it. There were no panes in the windows. The sea roared in Freyza’s ears.
He had not brought much but a spare shirt and a few adjustments for the weather, so he was pleased to find his bed loaded with furs, and the fire crackling softly. The bed itself was cradled in the embrace of an inky blue canopy made from velvet, which he imagined he would have to close to have any chance of warming up sufficiently to fall asleep. As he unraveled his turban and brushed out his hair with his fingers, his reflection in the large standing mirror caught his eye.
He looked much worse than what he had hoped. His beard looked unruly and excessively curled from the moisture in the air, and in his eyes he saw an expression of pure exhaustion. As he unhooked the first hook from its eye, after which perhaps twenty-five would follow to undo his doublet, he decided to keep his eyes off of his reflection for now. Beginning to feel himself get so drowsy that he threatened to fall over, he swiftly made his way to bed.
Once there, between layers of soft wool and beneath so much fur, he struggled to find the rest to sleep. The air was cold, and the wind howled madly due to the altitude and proximity to the open sea. He turned over from his back to his side, then flopped over to his stomach. Despite being so comfortable, his heart was racing. The last few hours had felt surreal. Over and over he conjured up the image of Katherine’s knitted sleeve discarded on the bench of the carriage, felt again and again the weight of her legs in his lap.
It was not a happy covetousness, and Freyza felt very little ease with the knowledge that his longing for her was not one-sided. There was more to it than simple desire to him, but there was no reason to suspect that Katherine’s disposition was anything more than that. He looked up to the hours in the carriage that he would have to spend on his own, on his way back to Souchon Palace. Alone for good.
He looked up at the canopy of his bed, tracing each fold of navy-blue fabric with his eyes, to soothe him into dumbly falling asleep. With each blink, the spiderweb of pleats grew fainter and fainter, and for a fragile moment of calm exhaustion, he felt himself drift off…
Until a door opened, likely down the hallway, with such a heavy thud that it shook him awake immediately. Then, laughter from down the hill, somewhere in a Massouric tavern he would never visit. The sounds had started and never again halted.
He turned again, trying to find a comfortable way for legs to fit within the grooves of linen and feather, growing less easy by the moment. Not just mental restlessness claimed him, the day in the carriage had battered his back and neck, and he was eager to stand upright again.
Fine, he told himself. Walk around, then try again.
Freyza got up out of bed and breathed hot air against his freezing fingers before throwing on the clothes of the day previously and slipping into his shoes again. For a moment, it felt empowering to him. He took his cloak from its spot, wrapped it around himself, and headed out.
It was quieter than he thought it would be from the sounds that kept him up. There was an eeriness to it. Where he had first heard Ilworthian whispers in the hall, they were now deserted. Only in the staircase leading down to the central hall of this ancient place was there any remaining light that did not come from the moon. Perhaps it would bear guards, or remaining courtiers unable to find sleep. Best to take another route.
The other way he went, walking down the moonlit hallway until a large window faced him. There were no panes, and the wind blew up the edges of his cloak and whipped it against his stocked legs. He neared it, then peered down the cliff that followed it and instinctively had to hold the edge of the window not to dazzle himself, sleep drunk after all, to fall in.
Unlike his own footsteps, which had been hurried and careful, scared to wake anyone, he heard others now: slow, dragging, with seemingly a train of fabric behind them.
‘Pondering the end?’ asked Katherine, her voice shooting through the silence like an arrow through game.
Freyza looked up, rubbed his eyes, and saw her there, rather far down the hall, with a goblet in her hand, sauntering his way. Her hair was loose, red waves from her braids falling down her form in disarray, and she was wearing a robe over top of a shift. She was wearing house slippers rather than shoes.
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‘No,’ Freyza admitted, looking down at his own attire which juxtaposed against hers. ‘I can’t sleep.’
Katherine reached the edge of the hallway and predictably, also briefly looked down. ‘Me neither. My God, you’ve chosen a cold place to pause.’
‘You’re shivering,’ he said, almost sighing when he saw how the cold blew right through the dainty silks and linens she was wearing, that formed around her frame in the relentless wind. ‘Let me give you my cloak.’
‘No,’ she said, but he already unfurled the knot in the tassels and lay it over her shoulder. As she pulled it over her chest, their hands knocked against one another, and his landed briefly on her clavicle.
He withdrew quickly, but in his mind, the harm had been done. ‘Why… why can’t you sleep?’ he asked, not so much unaware of the answer as he was attempting to talk over the ever-growing hunger neither had acknowledged nearly a year since they met.
‘I went out to get a nightcap,’ she said, then scraped her throat. ‘I’m feeling rather jittery. You’re aware I’m leaving for good, right?’
Freyza nodded solemnly. ‘It hadn’t been confirmed to me, but…’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Likely will never set foot on Massouron again. It’s been my home this year — and moreover, it’s been my first home where I was expected to stay a long time. As spare, it was unlikely I’d stay in Norbury Lake for my whole life. The convent, I sure as hell hoped to leave. Then when I ascended, it was assumed I would marry Henri and go back and forth Souchon and Norbury Lake. Maybe even rule just out of Massouron. But alas, Master Freyza… all of our attempts to reason were futile. Now I stand here, petrified in the cold, clutching a glass of wine in my sorry hands…’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, meaning it truly but finding it hard to find the correct tone. The rest of his confession of devotion died on his lips.
‘It’s strange to me that I spent such a long time trying to fit in with the Chavanets that I never considered the possibility I’d be thrown out on my arse,’ she continued.
He ached at the pain in her voice, and as he looked down, to where she had crept closer to him, found himself looking into the half-drunk wine. ‘It’s all so unfair,’ he agreed.
She suddenly looked up at him. ‘And you’ve always been the most kind to me,’ she said. ‘The most generous, accommodating, unintentionally hilarious at times. I mean it, Freyza. I wish—’
Katherine inhaled and closed her eyes. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I caught myself on the precipice of saying something foolish.’
‘What?’ he asked. ‘I’m just a stranger now, aren’t I? I’ll go to the grave with whatever foolishness you wished to tell me unsaid.’
‘The gist of it is that I wish I’d learned earlier that I enjoyed your company so much,’ she said.
Immediately, he wished she had not said it. There would be no sparing them from the terror that was the truth, when it came time for her to leave in the morning. The more that was left unsaid, the less there would be to mourn.
‘Thank you,’ he said, offered a painful smile. ‘That’s not so foolish.’
‘Isn’t it?’ she asked.
His eyes were glued to the horizon, which was ever-so-slightly lit up just above the shimmer of the moonlit sea. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said. Suddenly, the spell of the sea broke, and he looked over at her again. ‘It’s not foolish to me. It shames me to say, however, that from the moment we met, I’ve given you much thought. Had I been a bolder man, you would’ve perhaps found out much earlier.’
‘Is that so? And tell me, what would have been so different if you were a bolder man?’
Freyza smiled shyly. ‘It is hard to imagine, because I am not a bolder man.’
‘Oh, please. You’ve got me here all to yourself. Surely you can summon up a little imagination.’
A moment passed during which he gazed up at the sky and licked his dry lips. ‘I suppose… Well, perhaps the first thing I would have done is invite you to see my homeland. I think you would have liked it.’
Katherine laughed. ‘Very forward, are you not? And what would I have seen there? Or would we simply spend time at your home?’
A blush crept up his lips. ‘And who is forward now?’
‘Oh, I am completely innocent, I assure you. I’m only putting myself in a man’s shoes. Imagining what a man might imagine. Or are you saying you do not find me desirable?’
‘That is not a serious question…’
‘But it is. How could it not be?’
‘You are a noble queen. It would be strange for a man not to find you desirable.’
Kathy pursed her lips and leaned forward. ‘So your answer is that I am, then?’
He inhaled deeply and slowly released his breath, trying to find his balance once more. ‘I do not think you have seen things such as exist in the Sbai Empire. There are dunes of sand. There are palaces greater than what you would find here — and they do not belong to kings, either.’
‘Do you have a palace?’
‘Not yet.’
Katherine made a face. ‘Oh, but you will? I suppose that is the idea then. You take me to the Sbai Empire and I shall have a much better life in a bigger palace?’
Freyza could not help but laugh at the absurdity of it, though the idea of it made him travel inward into thoughts of things that could not be. ‘Nevertheless, you would like it, I think.’
Katherine leaned in close enough until he could feel her breath on his face. ‘Perhaps you can still take me one day.’
He gulped, lowering his eyes, barely able to hold her gaze. ‘It is… very… beautiful…’
‘Like me?’
Freyza’s gaze dropped to her lips, and Katherine’s breath hitched, her fingers tightening on the edges of the cloak. His mouth opened as if to respond, but no sound followed. Her remark hung around them, a playful challenge he would not so easily find the courage to answer to.
His heart hammered against his ribcage, louder than the wind sweeping through the corridor.
Katherine tilted her head slightly and chuckled, studying him with an intensity that made him feel as if they had been lovers in a past life and had run into one another again, against the will of some higher being. Make one a lowly Sbaian slaver, make the other the Queen of Ilworth. Marry them both unhappily, curse them with each other’s presence, just out of reach at all times.
The scent of her skin so close to him smacked the last bit of coherence from him. ‘Well?’ she prompted, her voice softer this time, somehow more earnest.
‘Yes,’ he said at last, his voice weighted, ‘Like you. Though that’d be insulting — to say like you, it means there is anything that would compare. There isn’t.’
The faintest smile curved her lips, and her eyes softened. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it?’ she asked. ‘Stop resisting, I beg of you.’
So he did.
The kiss came fast and with a desperate intensity, his lips crashing against hers as if the weight of a year’s restraint had finally worn their decorum thin all at once. She gasped softly into his mouth, her free hand sliding up to tangle in his hair, and he found her waist with tentative reverence. She was flush against him.
When they finally broke apart, Katherine caught her breath, her eyes wide and searching his face. Freyza looked back as though he could scarcely believe what had just happened.
‘Not here,’ he said when Katherine meant to lean in again.
Katherine’s eyes flared. ‘Would you look at that?’ she chuckled. ‘What an exciting development. Not here? Soon you’ll be inviting yourself into my chambers.’
If there were any days left, he added in his thoughts. ‘Or mine,’ he said. ‘I still have a fire going. Got some gin to waste. If you want me to… I mean, that goes without saying, right? Just—’
Mischievously she pressed a kiss just below his ear, then climbed upon her tiptoes, and whispered, ‘Say less.’
Though the awkwardness had made way for giddiness, they soon reeled it in, given that the echoes travelled far and no part of the guests’ bedrooms were very far from the others. When they reached his door, he quickly undid the lock, and waited just at the threshold. Katherine stepped in, turned to him, and before he had even taken his first step into the sad little room he got to call his that night, she was already beginning the work of the many hooks and eyes that were threatening to come between her and his body.
‘This was really inevitable,’ Katherine mumbled as she stepped back, synchronised with him stepping into the room.
Freyza sighed and held her chin in his hand. ‘I suppose we made a valiant effort of resistance for as long as we could’ve.’
He softly knocked against her forehead with his. ‘If I ever can, I’ll have you knighted,’ she hummed, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and joining them just beneath the curve of his skull. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much determination in a man.’
Freyza rested his hands lightly at her waist, holding her as if she might disappear if he would mishandle her. Then, he felt within himself a bit of unrestrained courage come up, a trait he would not have attributed to himself under any normal circumstances. ‘It is rather odd,’ he began, ‘How I spent a full calendar year, every moment of it, pretending not to desire you. How tiring that has been. Now, at its curtain call, I find myself unable to keep the façade.’
‘You’ve already surprised me tonight,’ she said, mischievously brushing her nose against his, her smile widening, ‘I didn’t think you had it in you.’
His lips twitched upwards. ‘Neither did I.’
She laughed softly, unhooked the last closure from his opulently decorated doublet, and averted her eyes to the inky blue of the canopy bed. ‘Let’s see if we can surprise ourselves again.’