The Cursewright's Vow

Chapter 4: The Princess's Suitor, Part 4

 So it went for many weeks. Once or twice a fortnight, when Tacen's caravan company was visiting the capital out of Gallowsport or on its way to Cavis Cove and other cities on the Torchlight Coast, a courier would appear at her apartments with a message bearing the hart horns and a time. Carala was mildly pleased that Tacen was wise enough to employ a different courier every time: over the weeks she saw everything from painfully shy boys even younger than Casimir to adolescent maids totally awestruck by being in the Chalcedony Palace and meeting an Imperial princess to scowling old men who looked as if they would be thoroughly unimpressed even by the Emperor himself. 

She wished he had some more clandestine way to contact her, but since she didn't dare send a messenger to the caravan company's office on Glassmere Street and knew no other way to contact him, she simply hoped the messenger companies he employed were discreet. A foolish hope for the capital, but it was the best she could do. Every time she found herself more and more deeply tempted to go up to his rooms when he asked her, but she never assented, and he never did more than to smile, kiss her cheek, and make some sly joke about his status, or her status, or how important it was to obey the Graces.

Still, she had to admit her behavior with him had become ever more brazen. When his hand had found its way under her skirts, and even under her smallclothes, a man's rough fingers skating against the shape of her sex for the first time in her life and eliciting a gasp so sharp it was nearly a cry, her own fingers instinctively clawing hard at his shoulder (Tacen seemed to mind that not a bit), she was sure she must have gone mad; that she had finally gone too far. But then she remembered Ralessa's taunt: Do you think he never tumbled a chambermaid in his father's castle? She remembered Lorith Gallis's cutting words to his brother, overheard in the banquet hall the last time his family had visited Talinara before the engagement had been secured: I saw you and your men go to the Lady's Slipper, Deni. Did you pay for them or did they pay for you? And there were her brothers and sisters -- it was madness to think any of them had been perfectly behaved before they'd been shipped off to their various duties around her father's kingdoms.

So Carala didn't resist when Tacen touched her, and even allowed herself to touch him in the same fashion, laughing slyly into his mouth as he hissed his own pleasured gasps.

But she never went up to his rooms. That ultimate act she held back. Part of it was for sheer practicality: if she fell asleep in his rooms and was noticed missing from the Chalcedony Palace the next morning, there would be the blackest depths of the pit to pay. Her father's household guard comprised some of the most skilled and intelligent soldiers in all the Anointed Realms, drawn from as far as the Gates of Ismene and the Scorched Desert and the edges of the Straits of Twilight. Carala had no doubt she would be found within the hour after she was missed, and when she was found Tacen would face the hangman if he were lucky, and she would be shipped off to a cloister in the Chalk Hills or some even worse place. Assuming, of course, her father didn't mount her head on a pike like her poor siblings. Carala's relationship with her father was complicated, to put it mildly, but she suffered no illusions about what little mercy he possessed.

(In fact, Somilius Deyn III would never have executed any of his children for such a minor indiscretion as bedding a commoner, certainly not if that child had been promised to a barely significant house as the Gallises of Marhollow. The children he had executed or assassinated had been guilty of far graver offenses than that. He likely would not even have shipped her off, though Carala could have expected to hear clever and exceedingly cruel insults about her lack of propriety for the rest of her days every time she was in his presence. She was, however, entirely correct in her belief that Tacen would be fortunate if the worst he suffered for laying his hands on the Emperor's daughter was execution, and given the reaches of Somilius Deyn's imagination, his fate would likely have been far, far more colorful.)