Islands in the Sky

4.5

Cassa had awoken the morning after the wedding to find that all her servants had become strangely giggly.

She hadn’t quite expected that.

She had risen quietly that first morning, at dawn, as she always did, and left her new husband asleep in her bed. She gone out into the main room of her chambers, and run into a flock of giggling servants.

She had stood there, looking at them, a little too surprised to say anything. And they had begun teasing her, asking her how she felt now she was a woman, and all the rest of the nonsense things people said. Cassa had smiled, but didn’t reprimand them, because it was probably useful to let them have their fun. It was best to be gentler with the private chambers servants, Cassa thought, and to let them speak to her a little carelessly. It was best to be their friend, and to have their loyalty, because otherwise she would wake one night with a crowd of assassins in her bedchamber.

She tried to be their friend, as much as she could, and being teased a little about her wedding night was not an especially awful thing to undergo.

She let them talk for a while, doing her utmost to ignore their words, and not listen too closely to the details they imagined. She didn’t bother pointing out that by the standard of womanliness they were using she had been a woman for years, because she had actually checked that she didn’t especially enjoy what they spoke of before she had decided that she didn’t enjoy it. She didn’t bother saying so, though, because she knew it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. They really just wanted to tease her. She let them for a while, smiling a little, then sighed, and told them not to make so much noise in case they disturbed Willem. She had chased them out, and dressed herself, and then gone to look for Konstantin to find out if a married woman could still practice with her daggers.

Apparently a married woman could. Konstantin had been waiting for her in the courtyard, as he always was.

He had seen Cassa, and grinned, and opened his mouth to speak.

“Don’t,” Cassa had said, firmly. “Just don’t. I cannot stand it from you too.”

Konstantin had nodded, and not said a thing.

“Thank you,” Cassa had said. “Now can we start?”

They had exercised for a while, and then practiced Cassa’s fighting, and that morning, thinking of bedchambers and new husbands, Cassa had asked if they could concentrate on fighting with bare hands and feet, and on choking and twisting and throwing people to the floor. Konstantin had nodded, agreeably, and had seemed to understand what Cassa was thinking. They had practiced, and he had been almost gentle, and not tried too ferociously much to choke her.

“I’m not with child,” she had said, irritably. “Fight me.”

Konstantin seemed surprised. “I’ll fight you when you are,” he said. “No fear of that. But that was not why I was gentle. I was thinking to attack you as an ordinary person would, not a trained assassin.”

“An ordinary person,” Cassa said. “Why?”

“A husband. A member of a tower-named family.”

“Oh,” Cassa said, and understood. He was thinking of husbands too. “Thank you,” she said.

Konstantin shrugged.

“You had better not, though,” Cassa said, to change the subject. “If I was with child, and you injured me, my grandmother would have you flayed.”

“She would,” Konstantin said.

“I know.”

“And you also,” Konstantin said. “Actually. For risking an heir.”

“Oh,” Cassa said again. “Yes. That’s true.”

“Warn me,” Konstantin said, and sounded almost worried. As if his world had suddenly changed.

Cassa almost wanted to tease, or argue, to ask if he actually imagined it was impossible for that to happen before her wedding day. She didn’t, because it would just embarrass both of them.

“I shall,” she said instead. “But I don’t imagine it will be soon.”

Konstantin had nodded, apparently uncomfortable with that topic, and had spent a while showing Cassa how to break fingers free from her neck by twisting them instead.