“Kuduwaí,” Dekala says, her eyes on the flame, and Torhvin nods gravely. “It is … it’s beautiful,” she says at last. The Regentess lets out a little squeak of excitement. Torhvin smiles at Dekala, and Ruti can’t bear to watch anymore.
She stands up. The table’s attention is fixed on Dekala, and no one pays Ruti any mind when she slips away from the table and into the palace, walking swiftly through the main hall and past the stairs. She wanders aimlessly through the gardens for a long time, Dekala’s face when Torhvin presented her with the warming lamp still swimming through her mind. Dekala is lost to her, though she’d never had her in the first place. Still, Ruti has memorized the feel of Dekala’s lips on hers, of secret smiles and quiet conversations and their hands brushing together. She shouldn’t, and yet … she can’t seem to stop.
She cuts through a pathway that will take her back into the palace when she encounters the subject of her brooding. “Dekala,” she says, taken aback. It’s dark out now, the drums long gone from the front courtyards, and Dekala is alone. Her bodyguard is a few turns back, lurking on the path a polite distance away.
“Ruti,” Dekala says, and she looks startled, then expressionless. They stand in silence for a few moments, Ruti drinking in Dekala’s face with a hunger she can’t sate. “You shouldn’t be wandering out here. There are too many strangers in the court tonight.”
Ruti bites her lip. “I can handle myself.”
There is another silence, this one more protracted than the last. Dekala stares at Ruti, and Ruti can’t read her expression anymore. Ruti says, her heart thrumming again, “So Torhvin has three witches. I guess that’s better than one you won’t talk to, isn’t it?”
Dekala’s eyes narrow. “I will talk to whomever I please,” she says sharply. “I have more important matters on my mind than a … a Markless witch who won’t let me be.”
Ruti swallows, a lump in her throat. Dekala hasn’t called her Markless like that since before Ruti tried to run away weeks ago. “I was here first,” she retorts. “I’ve been here since you were staring doe-eyed at Torhvin’s gift to you as though you might marry him on the spot.”
Dekala sneers at her. “It was lovely. I like lovely things.” Her eyes unexpectedly sweep over Ruti. Ruti shivers, feeling Dekala’s gaze like a tangible thing. She lifts her head to meet Dekala’s gaze boldly, capturing the embers within and holding them.
Her fists tighten, her heart clenching with the same force as her fingers. “Is that what I was to you?”
Dekala’s eyes are icy. “Did you think you were anything more than that? Did you think I might fall in love with you?” she says, her voice cutting, and Ruti can only glare back at her. “We were alone on a boat in the middle of nowhere. I take my beautiful distractions where they come.”
Ruti laughs, a breath that is somewhere between desperate and furious, and Dekala demands, “What?”
“So you do think I’m beautiful.” It’s the single most foolish thing she could blurt out right now, short of telling Dekala about feelings, but Ruti is made foolish by Dekala’s presence, whether it’s hurtful or kind.
Dekala’s eyes glint, hard but uneven like chipped stone. “I have always thought that you are beautiful,” she says, and Ruti hesitates, lost in the wealth that statement brings with it. Dekala reaches out, the tips of her fingers brushing Ruti’s skin. She is lost for a moment in her own thoughts, drifting away as Ruti gazes at her and drinks in her touch. When she speaks, it is distant. “And I will never love you.”
Dekala’s words fall over her like cold water, washing over Ruti to remind her exactly of what this is. “I don’t love you, either,” Ruti shoots back, and it’s instinctive, fighting back as she always does. It’s only once she says it that she can feel the lie in the words.
Dekala’s eyes narrow, her fingers stiff on Ruti’s skin, and Ruti wants to push her, to demand more from her, to press her against a tree and kiss her again. Instead, she takes a step forward, her heart quaking and her skin burning with the need to do something, and Dekala doesn’t move. She awaits Ruti’s approach, and Ruti takes another step forward.
Abruptly, she is hit around the center by a blow that bowls her over. At first she thinks it’s Dekala’s bodyguard, attentive at last to protect her from Ruti. But the body on her is too small, arms wrapping around her instead of shoving her, and she twists around, Dekala forgotten, and gasps out, “Kimya!”
Kimya beams at her, her skin a deep brown from days spent under the sun, and she begins to sign a flurry of information all at once. Ruti struggles to follow her explanations, her heart settling into warm affection that fills every loss she’s been experiencing for days, and she laughs.
Behind her, coming up the path from the back entrance to the Royal Square, is Orrin, looking no worse for the wear, and Ruti can’t even muster up the resentment to hate him right now. “Thank you,” she says, and a second voice echoes that from behind her.
“Thank you,” Dekala repeats, and she smiles at Kimya and Orrin, a warm look for each of them that she had once reserved for Ruti as well. And Ruti, made warm in Kimya’s embrace, feels that loss return like a hollowness within her, devouring the joy around it into a miasma of sorrow.
With Kimya back, the Royal Square is a little less lonely, and Ruti’s restlessness is more muted. Kimya tells her with ever-moving hands the story of an uneventful trip back, Orrin bad-tempered and worried but dutifully paying for passage down the River Somanchi back to Zidesh’s capital city. Kimya had been more concerned about them than about herself, and she’s exuberant to know that both Dekala and Ruti are safe.
“Prince Torhvin is her soulbond,” Ruti tells Kimya dully. It’s the next day, and they’ve sneaked down to the kitchens together. Kimya is inhaling everything in sight while the cooks pass her more indulgently. “He’s been aggressively courting her since we got back.”
Kimya signs a questioning gesture that somehow involves the word love. Ruti scoffs. “Please,” she says, but her stomach wrenches and she can’t eat anything else set before her.
Torhvin continues to try to enamor himself to Dekala, who isn’t so readily charmed. At dinner that night, he has another of his servants present Dekala with a chain that gleams golden. “To match your sash,” he says, and it doesn’t escape Ruti that the style is Ruranan, the sort of necklace worn around the neck of the queen of his kingdom.
Dekala accepts it and lets Torhvin put it on. When she turns to grant him access to her neck, her eyes catch Ruti’s. They lower immediately, but Ruti first catches a glimpse of Dekala’s expression, her gaze hollow.
When she turns back to Torhvin, she’s smiling, her lips thin. “Thank you,” she says. “It’s hardly necessary.”
“Oh, I think anything that might win you over is necessary,” Torhvin says, flashing her a white-toothed smile. Dekala’s thin smile grows a little sharper, Ruti thinks, a little more unhappy.
Ruti looks away from them, her eyes catching on the servant who had brought the gift forward. There is something in the way she stands, in the way that all of Torhvin’s servants clasp their hands together and smile at the crowd. They look afraid, she realizes at last. But what is there to fear here, when Rurana and Zidesh are at peace?
Orrin glowers at Torhvin from behind Dekala’s chair, and for the first time ever, Ruti shares a glance with him and feels as though they might be in perfect alignment. There is odd suspicion in his eyes too, as they flicker back to the attendants, Torhvin’s female bodyguard standing with them.
At the end of dinner, Dekala retires to her rooms and Ruti follows her. There are no conversations in the hall anymore, not even between Orrin and Dekala. Dekala has distanced herself from everyone, and they can only follow.
Still, Orrin lays a hand on Ruti’s shoulder before she can follow Dekala into her quarters. “Wait,” he grunts, and Ruti turns, letting the door slip closed behind Dekala.
“I’m not going to advocate to her for you over Torhvin,” Ruti says at once. “I don’t think you’re any better than he is.”
“And I don’t think she values your opinion at all,” Orrin counters, glaring at her. It stings, even from Orrin. “I don’t want your help with that.”
Ruti’s eyes narrow and she remembers their shared glances at Torhvin’s servants. “What, then?”
“There’s something about Torhvin’s attendant,” Orrin says. “The woman. There is a sense of.…” His brow furrows. “I don’t like it,” he says finally. “Did you sense it, too?”
She hadn’t noticed the attendant as much as the servants, who still give her the oddest sense that there’s something awry. But she can work with this. With Orrin, who is still unbearable but is the lesser of two evils here. A foolish man will always be less dangerous than a clever one. “I want to talk to the servants,” she says. “I think they can give us answers. But they haven’t been around except at dinner. Torhvin wanders the palace with the Regent and his bodyguards but never them.”
Orrin jerks his head. “I will find out where they are staying,” he says. “I agree you should speak to them. They’ll … they’re more likely to trust you than me.”
Ruti barks out a laugh. “Because I’m such a proper, unassuming lady?”
Orrin gives her an odd look. “Because they’re Markless,” he says, and Ruti falls silent, staring at him. “Haven’t you noticed?”
