The Heir, Ruti expects, will take a room with Orrin. She brings her bags into the right room and surveys the wide bed. It could fit four, maybe five women in it, and she supposes that it’s meant for multiple guests. Kimya and Ruti will fit in nicely.
But the Heir follows her into the room, eyeing the bed and then the little chair expectantly. “I’m not sleeping on the floor,” Ruti says at once, looking at her askance. And then, because she can’t help herself, “Aren’t you going to share with your future consort?”
Orrin and the Heir both look scandalized. “She’s the heir to the throne,” Orrin says from the doorway, scowling at Ruti.
“I can’t share a bed with a man, even one I intend to marry.” The Heir casts an eye on the bed. “There’s space for us all in there.”
“Is there?” Ruti’s stomach flips, something within it fluttering to the point of distraction.
Yawen offers them a few ornate bands that fit around their necks.
“If you wish to travel unmolested through Rurana, you will need to look the part,” Yawen says, smiling at them. “And my wife sent you some cloaks as well. No need to attract attention in the grasslands. From Maned Ones or … others.” Her eyes flicker over them, and the Heir thanks her graciously and offers her more coin. She refuses it. “Consider it a gift,” she says, her eyes lingering on the Heir for a moment. “I think we are all best off if you blend in on your journey.” There’s a note of significance in her voice, a hint that she might be aware of whom she houses tonight, and Ruti says so as they prepare for bed.
“Word must have spread all the way here that I’m missing,” the Heir says. She’s fully clean again, in the set of clothes they’d washed in the river, and she climbs onto the bed and beneath the covers. Kimya curls up beside her in the center of the bed, and Ruti tries to feel relieved at that. “They might suspect, but they don’t know.”
Kimya signs her trust for the woman who speaks her language and a dismissal to any new paranoia. “We’ll be gone soon,” Ruti agrees, “and the Regent won’t think to search the woods for a guest house made of metal.”
She climbs into the bed gingerly, tucking her feet in under the blanket. The Heir tugs at it. Ruti yanks it back. There is plenty on the other side, and the Heir is just provoking her. It’s easier to be annoyed with the Heir than to feel any other way toward her, and Ruti gives her a dark look and holds on tightly to her side of the blanket.
It’s a mistake, though, because they both really do have too much blanket and neither will give up any, and so they’re both pressed up against Kimya as she rolls over and falls fast asleep. When she’s out, Ruti realizes suddenly that she is barely more than two handbreadths from the Heir, only Kimya their border, and she takes in a ragged breath.
She wants.…
Never mind what she wants.
The Heir’s eyes are on Kimya, brown and alive as the wood of the trees in the wall behind them, and they regard her in silence for a long moment before the Heir says, “Are Markless capable of love?”
Ruti is taken aback, unsure of whether or not she’s being insulted. “I love Kimya, don’t I?”
“No. I mean.…” The Heir looks frustrated. “As Yawen spoke of. The sort of love that joins Bonded. If you aren’t Marked, then does that mean you have no capacity for love?”
This isn’t an attempt to insult, then. Just sheer curiosity from the Heir, who has little insult in her lately. Ruti shrugs. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Not much time to fall in love in the slums. I’ve wondered sometimes about some of the allies who stay together from childhood. I think anyone can fall in love,” she points out, and it pains her to add, “You and Orrin did it outside of your bonds, too.”
The Heir’s eyes close off from Ruti’s again, as they do whenever she brings up Orrin. “If you are capable of love,” she says slowly, “then what separates you from the Marked beyond the blank space on your palm?
“We are told that Markless can’t love.” Ruti bristles, and the Heir says, “But we are also told that every soulbond ends in marriage, that a woman will always bond with a man. Perhaps Adimu is right. Perhaps we over-care for tradition. Perhaps tradition is not truth.”
“Perhaps,” Ruti whispers. It’s strange, the way tiny snatches of goodness from the Heir seem to take hold of Ruti and consume her, burn her alive from inside without leaving so much as a scratch. She yearns suddenly to take the Heir’s hand, to clasp it in hers and trace the pattern of her half moon mark. She yearns suddenly to lift Kimya and move her behind them, to move closer and—
She sucks in a breath. “Or perhaps they’re all right, Your Highness,” she says, playful instead of longing.
The Heir sighs. “Stop,” she says, scowling at Ruti.
Ruti smirks at her, the mood shifting. “I thought you liked reminding me that you rule me,” she says, a hint of a taunt in her voice.
The Heir’s scowl intensifies. “I offered you my name,” she says. “I don’t gift that lightly.”
Ruti takes another breath, processing that statement. I don’t gift that lightly. She had seen the Heir’s name as another challenge, another mocking invitation that Ruti had been determined to eschew. Now she hesitates, thinking back to the interaction with renewed understanding.
It had been a gift from the Heir. An offering, not a challenge. Her name, gifted to Ruti, to use as though they truly are equals. And in this moment, lying in a bed with the other girl and seeing the quiet hurt that had come with Ruti’s dismissal of her gift, it is suddenly impossible to think of her only as the Heir anymore. The Heir is an impersonal, distant role. It hardly defines the inimitable Princess Dekala. “All right,” Ruti says.
“All right, what?” Dekala presses, and Ruti almost contemplates adding a Your Highness to it again. She likes the way that Dekala’s eyes flash when she’s angry, the little bolt of cold ice that comes with it. Never fire. Always ice, cold as a winter’s wind.
But she stops short of baiting Dekala right now. “All right,” she says simply, and Dekala lets out a little huff.
“All right,” she says, her voice devoid of any amusement, and rolls over, away from Ruti. “Goodnight, Ruti.”
It’s the first time Ruti’s slept in a bed in days, and she luxuriates in the simple, smooth suppleness beneath her, stretching out and tucking herself deep into the blanket. “Goodnight, Dekala,” she murmurs, and she hears nothing from Dekala, no intake of breath or low laugh. But the wind blows across her face, gentle and cool, and Ruti is at peace.
In the morning, Kimya has squirmed over Ruti to her favorite place at the edge of the bed near the window, a lump beneath the blanket, and Ruti and Dekala have somehow breached the space between them in their sleep. Ruti’s arms are wrapped around Dekala, her face buried in Dekala’s shoulder, and Dekala’s hands have burrowed in Ruti’s hair, holding her close. Her face is peaceful in slumber, and Ruti stares up at her, struck with a yawning desire that she can never speak aloud, with the drowning sensation of Dekala’s fingers against her skin and hair.
She takes in a shaky breath and disentangles herself from Dekala, her heart racing.
The grasslands are vast and endless. Day after day, their company rides through even land with few shifts in elevation, surrounded by swaying green and yellow grasses that look undisturbed moments after their animals pass through them. Cautious horned beasts feed in the grasses ahead of them, but they scatter and flee whenever they spot an intruder.
Ruti’s eyesight begins to blur, hazy from too many days with little change in their surroundings. They follow the path of the setting sun and the stars to be sure that they aren’t moving in circles, but it still feels as if they’re meandering in place, never finding their way out of this savanna. The Ruranan band around Ruti’s neck sits heavy and thick, a sheen of sweat collecting beneath it, though it looks like tasteful jewelry on Dekala’s slender neck. The cloaks that Yawen gave them are warm and rough, and they remind Ruti of the material sold in the Merchants’ Circle back home.
On the third day, they begin to see a few parties moving past them in caravans, paying them little notice in their new Ruranan attire, but the land is so exposed that Ruti is itchy with constant paranoia. Anyone can see them, and the donkeys—perfectly suited for the mountains—move too slowly on flat land. When they sleep, her dreams are unsettled, and she awakens in a cold sweat more than once a night, certain that the Regent has found them.
On their sixth day riding through the grasslands, they encounter their first Maned One. A female without a mane, actually, and it’s so silent that they don’t catch it until it’s leaping onto Kimya’s donkey, claws outstretched. Kimya slips off and runs, a smaller target for the Maned One, and Dekala slides off her own donkey and grabs a stick as though she’s about to fight off a Maned One with nothing more than that.
Ruti yanks Kimya onto her donkey and chants as she crushes an herbal offering between her fingers, calling on the spirits to subdue the Maned One and make it docile. The spirits yield to her song and the Maned One pauses, confused, short of devouring the donkey. Ruti sings more, the Maned One’s head falling in sleepy concession, the spirits thrumming through Ruti—
A bolt of energy sparks from Orrin’s fingers and chars the Maned One in a matter of moments, taking the donkey with it.
Ruti whirls around. “What are you doing?” she demands. “I had it under control!”
