IV.

i want your love and i want your revenge

you and me could write a bad romance

i want your love and all your lover’s revenge

you and me could write a bad romance

The candlelight’s warm dance of light and dark plays across the bed. Roran is almost lost in it. He is nearly asleep with his head on Birgit’s midriff, and she is playing idly with his hair.

At eye level is one of her more intriguing physical features—a tattoo of a flower. It might have once been someone’s crude rendering of a poppy, but now it’s a misshapen outline of what could be any flower. Her body must have changed under it, skin stretching, and with it the ink.

“Where’d you get this?” he murmurs, tracing it lightly with his forefinger.

He feels her sigh. “Robert inked it before we returned to Tierm. After—you know. I still had nightmares about it, and he told me the only way to make them stop was to reclaim my body for my own. So. He helped me pierce my ears and inked that design.” Her hand comes over to tangle with his questing fingers.

“Why did you choose a poppy?” Roran asks.

She seems pleased that he guessed what it was supposed to be. “My ma used to grow poppies in her garden, when I was growing up. I thought they were the most beautiful flowers in the world. Even when the petals went brown and fell off, they stood up tall and straight with a crown of thorns about their heads.”

“Symbolic.” Symbolic of a woman who, when her youth and beauty and innocence were taken from her, still stood proud and straight-backed. A woman who ruled both herself and others with unwavering dignity.

“Exactly.”

Roran is silent for awhile, then asks, “What happened to Robert?”

“Killed in a duel the night Robin was born,” Birgit murmurs. “Some stupid drunken quarrel. It went too far, too fast. His opponent only lost a hand.”

“I think he was in love with you,” Roran says quietly.

Birgit sighs. “I thought so too sometimes. If he had spoken, perhaps we would have—but he never said a word, and I kept our relationship professional.”

“He inked this flower on you, here,” Roran says, stroking the intimate skin across her hip. “How professional was that?”

She shifts under his touch. “In retrospect, not very. Can we not talk about him anymore?”

“All right,” Roran says, moving to kiss the tattoo instead. She wriggles and tells him to stop teasing.

“Tell me one more thing?” he asks, raising up to look into her eyes.

“Maybe.”

“Tell me who your lover was.”

She grins. “Once I made love to the King of all the land.”

“Oh really?” Roran continues to tease her with his fingertips, causing her to groan. “Once? I think it was more than that.”

“All right, thrice then. In one night at that! I think, sir, you are trying to kill me.”

“Who else?” he demands, suddenly filled with a jealous curiosity.

“Other than my husband, no one,” she tells him, as serious as she can sound when breathless. “I have had no lover save an illusion of revenge these ten years.”

He pauses, and though she writhes against him, he feels he must understand. “Then you never—?”

“No,” she says firmly. “It’s been a good long while since I’ve had anyone at all. I merely meant to tease you—‘twas your imagination invented some sordid affair.”

“And all this time, you were thinking of me?”

“Oh don’t get me wrong,” Birgit says, “I hated you most of the time. Could have killed you in your sleep, were you near enough. But, yes, I thought of you… all the time. I say revenge was my lover, but that’s too general—you have been my bedfellow on all those cold nights, when I could think of nothing else would put me to sleep.”

She rolls them over, putting herself on top, and grins down at his expression. “Why, King Roran, unused to having women fantasize about destroying you before they go to sleep at night?”

“What revenge, exactly, did you intend for me?” Roran asks. He’s not sure he really wants to know the answer—what if it’s a blade between the ribs while he sleeps?

“I dreamed of wrecking your marriage,” she confesses. “It was once the thing that mattered most to you, so I thought it would kill you to take it away. Imagine my surprise when I came here and found my work already done.”

Roran sighs, his hands slipping from her body. “We’re hammering the last nails into its coffin now, aren’t we?” He thinks back to a time when he really did love Katrina, and wonders how it all could have gone so terribly wrong.

In an effort to turn him from that line of thought, Birgit bends to kiss him. Under the curtain of her hair, it’s just the two of them in the dark—and she whispers against his mouth, “I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

***

It was once the thing that mattered most to you.

Birgit’s words haunt Roran as he goes about his business the next day. In the dark of the night—in the candlelit shadows—loving Birgit had consumed his mind until nothing else mattered. But with sunlight streaming through the windows of his private study, he’s forced to examine his choices more closely.

He never thought he’d be the type of man to have a mistress. Never would have dreamed it’d be Birgit, who was old enough to change diapers when he was still soiling them. When he became king, twenty years old and alight with idealistic fervor, his wife was the only woman in the entire world.

He’s still not sure when that stopped. It died out so gradually that he didn’t notice until their fourth child was on the way, but he supposes it must have been over by the third year of their marriage. Their relationship was based on dreams and physical attraction, neither of which age well without a deeper connection behind them. He and Katrina were never friends. In fact, they hated each other until adolescence kicked in and that annoying, whiny redhead from the butcher shop suddenly had breasts.

Roran lets his head fall forward to rest on the ledger currently open in front of him. “I am a fool,” he mutters to himself. “A thrice-curst idiot.” And the acts of idiocy just keep piling up, he thinks bitterly. First I fell in love with a stupid woman—then I was fool enough to marry her. Now I’m an adulterer. What next? Will I steal a dragon and rename my council “the Forsworn”?

“Sire?”

He lifts his head. Helmstad, his assistant (or, more accurately, his glorified errand boy) is standing in the open doorway.

“Yes?” he asks, daring Helmstad to comment on his un-regal behavior.

“Your daughter is here to see you,” the man says, his face blank.

“Oh. Right.” He did summon her this morning, and in his turbulent mental state had forgotten. “Send her in.”

Helmstad steps out, and a moment later, Crown Princess Palencara nervously creeps in. She’s got her ma’s face, pale and fragilely pretty, and the round eyes that take up half of her face are a lighter golden-brown like Katrina’s. But her hair is all her pa’s, dirt-brown and wildly curly, tumbling to the small of her back. She’s had it done up nicely to see her royal pa—he knows for a fact she usually wears it in braids.

“Hello, Cara,” he says, trying to smile in a nonthreatening way. He sees them so little now, it’s small wonder she should be nervous to see him. “How are you?”

“Very well, thank you,” she says, sounding just like her etiquette mistress. He tries not to make a face at her formality.

Thankfully, she drops it and raises those wide scared eyes to his. “Papa, have I done something wrong?” she asks.

“What? Oh. No, of course not.” Good gods, if they think that being summoned to see their pa means they’ve done something wrong— “I simply thought it would be nice to spend some time with my daughter. You and I don’t see each other very much.”

When Cara doesn’t answer, he forges on. “When do you turn ten?”

She blinks at him. “Next month. The solstice.”

Of course. How could he forget? The night Katrina gave birth to their first child, people danced in the streets to celebrate the longest day of the year. Upon the news of a daughter being born to the new king, Baldor and Albriech had gone up to the highest tower and set light to some of Orrin’s latest inventions: cylinders of powder that, when touched with fire, shot straight up into the sky and exploded into a shower of exquisite sparks.

Roran had thought that night the most magical of his life. It was raining diamonds made of fire, the people were happy, he was in love, and his newborn daughter was squalling her lungs out in her mother’s arms. When they put the child in his arms, he crooned some nonsensical love song and danced her around the room like a fool.

The other births had been progressively less exciting. When Andrin, the youngest son, was born, he was allowed to hold him for a few moments while someone recorded the name—Katrina’s grandfather’s name—and then he was pushed out of the room by the midwife. The worst part was that he hadn’t really even cared about the whole process anymore.

It’s not too late, he tells himself. Birgit showed you that. It’s never too late to change things.

Rising from his desk, he approaches his daughter and holds out his hand. “Come with me,” he says gently. “To blazes with my work—let’s go for a walk in the garden. I want you to tell me everything about your life that I’ve been missing.”

(watch your heart when we’re together

boys like you love me forever)