The Shadow Queen
“Girls don’t need packhorses, you brainless ass,” Cassidy snapped. “We’re perfectly capable of carrying our own packages. You’d know that if you spent any time talking to women.”
“There weren’t many women in those camps, and there certainly weren’t fancy shops. We were there to fight, to protect Dena Nehele, to escape being enslaved by a Ring of Obedience and made useless to our people. So I don’t have town manners, Lady. I didn’t need them in the mountains, and Talon didn’t waste time teaching me anything I didn’t need.”
He saw her effort to pull back, to assess. And he saw something he hadn’t expected—and didn’t want: pity.
“My apologies, Prince Theran,” Cassidy said quietly. “I didn’t realize you had such a difficult life.”
“I had a good life,” Theran snapped. “I survived. A lot of men didn’t.”
He took a mental step back, regaining control of his temper with effort. They didn’t like each other. So be it. He didn’t care if she understood him. Gray was stupid in love with her, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had to tolerate her as best he could because Gray and that damn contract with Sadi chained him to her.
“Are we going to town or not?” he asked.
Cassidy looked away. “Yes. Give me a few minutes to change clothes.”
“I’ll get the pony cart and meet you at the front door.” Because he needed air and open space.
Because standing here in her suite, he had the odd sense that something delicate was being weighed down by their words and feelings—and was about to break.
I survived. A lot of men didn’t.
The words circled round and round in her mind.
Cassidy didn’t want to get into a serious discussion, and Theran’s stiff posture as he drove the pony cart into town didn’t invite small talk. So she kept silent and absorbed the look and feel of the land during the short ride into town.
I survived. A lot of men didn’t.
Those few words told her more about Theran Grayhaven than she’d learned in the past few weeks.
No, he didn’t want pity. He wasn’t the only boy who had been taken into the mountains to be trained to fight. He wasn’t the only boy who had been hidden from the Queens who had been corrupted by Dorothea SaDiablo. And there had been other boys who had suffered far more than he had.
Gray, for instance.
But she saw his quest for a Queen differently because of those words. It hadn’t been as simple as having a Queen who knew Protocol and the Old Ways of the Blood. It had been about having a Queen who could dazzle, who could restore the heart in men weary of fighting—men who might be asked to fight some more in order to restore Dena Nehele and then keep it safe from the Blood in the rest of Terreille.
The Queen was the heart of a land, its moral center.
Theran had needed a heart he could believe in without reservation. He hadn’t found that. Not in her.
That was something she was going to have to think about. But not today. Today she would be a visitor from Kaeleer who was being given a tour of her host’s home village. Today she would be Cassidy instead of a Queen.
Tomorrow was soon enough to think about who she would be in the days ahead.
As they entered the town of Grayhaven, she reviewed a mental list of what she could use against what she could shop for with a man trailing along. Yesterday she would have dragged Theran into shops that were bound to make most men uncomfortable. Now she considered which kinds of places her brother, Clayton, had gone into without balking; she figured those probably wouldn’t discomfort Theran either.
“Any particular place you want to go?” Theran asked, sounding like he’d bitten into something sour.
“Like tends to gather with like, so every town has communities. I would like to ride through the town and see as much of it as possible, but, for now, I’d like to see the shops where the court usually makes purchases.”
She’d made an effort to keep her tone “interested visitor” instead of Queen. He eyed her for a moment, as if he knew something had changed, but he wasn’t sure what.
“All right,” he finally said.
The shopping district had several carriage parks—plots of land where conveyances could be left while people were going about their business. Each park had a couple of youths who kept an eye on the horses and would even deliver a carriage if its owner didn’t want to walk back and claim it.
Since that took care of the pony cart, Cassidy was quick to suggest walking and wondered why Theran hesitated.
She didn’t wonder long. The men who recognized Theran nodded in greeting, then jolted when they saw her and realized who she must be.
“I gather the Blood here don’t make a distinction between a formal and informal visit?” Cassidy asked, stopping in front of a shop window. She wasn’t paying attention to the merchandise; she just wanted a moment to ask Theran about this behavior.
Which was when she focused on a movement close to the window and caught a glimpse of the proprietor’s face before the man rabbited out of sight.
Theran placed a hand on her elbow and tugged her away from the window.
“What . . . ?”
“That particular shop caters to men.”
“So?”
“Let’s just say you were staring at things that most ladies pretend don’t exist.”
Which made her sorry she hadn’t been paying attention, because she had no idea what he was talking about—and she was certain he wouldn’t let her go back and look.
“What distinction?” Theran asked.
“What was in that window?”
He shook his head.
“If ladies aren’t supposed to know about it, why were those things in the shop window?”
“Formal and informal,” Theran said, getting that Warlord Prince turning stubborn tone in his voice.
Fine. She’d just make note of the shops nearby and she’d come back with Shira one day soon.
“When a Queen is going about her own business in her home village, she’s treated like everyone else.”
“I doubt that.”
“All right, she might get a little extra attention from the shopkeepers, but the people we’ve passed . . . I don’t know how to respond to them.”
“They don’t know how to respond to you either,” Theran replied. “I don’t think any of them has experienced an ‘informal’ visit from a Queen.”
“The Queens declared Protocol to go shopping?”
He stopped walking. Since she didn’t want to upset anyone else, she focused on his shoulder.
For the first time since she’d met him, she saw genuine amusement.
“We’re standing in front of a bakery,” he said. “You won’t cause a scandal if you look in the window.”
She knew her face was turning bright red, but she dutifully shifted positions so she could look in the window.
“I can’t say for a fact,” Theran said, “but I don’t think any Queen has walked around this town informally in years. Might not be Protocol in the strictest sense, but the Queens didn’t walk among the people casually.”
“They’ve never done that here?”
“Not since Lia.”
He frowned so fiercely after he said that, Cassidy ended up giving him a nudge with her elbow.
“If you keep glaring at those pastry things, you’re going to turn the sweet cream sour,” she said.
Oh, the expression on his face when he focused on what was in front of him!
His eyes slid sideways and looked at her. “Maybe we should buy a few, just to save other folk from that soured cream.”
“Maybe we should,” she agreed too politely.
Boy. Bakery. Memories of Clayton, the time he’d gone into a bakery with a fistful of coins and no parent to hold him back.
Ah, well. Theran wasn’t eleven. Surely he had enough self-discipline to avoid eating himself sick.
When they entered the bakery, she wasn’t sure if the baker was going to fawn or faint, but they walked out with a box of treats that Theran was more than happy to carry.
The morning was turning out better than he’d expected—although he probably shouldn’t have eaten that last cream-filled pastry. But, Hell’s fire, he’d always had a weakness for the damn things, and it had been a long time since he’d eaten one with any enjoyment.
Twelve years, as a matter of fact.
A boy who was hunted couldn’t afford to have weaknesses—or habits that people noticed and would share for the right price.
There had been a handful of villages near the Tamanara Mountains that had been considered safe ground. Places where the rogues would get supplies, visit lovers or whores, collect news. Armed camps of a different kind, where people were trusted because they were loyal to Dena Nehele rather than the puppet Queens.
But everything has a price—including information about a boy with a weakness for cream-filled pastries.
Except, at fifteen, the lure of a woman proved stronger than the lure of a box of treats.
A young whore, not that much older than he was, who was willing to show one of the “brave fighters” some pleasure. He and Gray had slipped away from their escort—something that would have earned them a few licks of a strap if they’d both come back that day—so that he could romp with the girl. But he’d wanted that damn box of sweets too, so Gray went alone to the bakery they visited every time they came to that village, even though sweets of that kind didn’t have much appeal for him.
That too was known. Which was why the Queen’s guards who caught Gray coming out of the bakery were sure they’d captured Theran Grayhaven.
Gray still screamed when he saw one of those pastries, which was another reason it had been so long since Theran had tasted one.
None of which excused him from eating himself stupid this morning.
Still, Cassidy wasn’t a torturous companion on a shopping trip. He’d caught a few wistful glances from her as they passed shops where, given a choice of going in or being whipped, he’d take the whipping, but she hadn’t insisted on going inside.