CASSIA HAD SEEN THEM. She had endured her first glimpse of the Hesperines. That must surely make the rest
easier.
She stared into the darkness above her bed and listened to the fire crackling to sleep beyond her
open door. At last she heard the swish of slippered feet. Perita shuffled through the hearth room,
kicking aside rushes as loudly as possible on her way to the corridor.
Their unspoken bargain worked well. What the handmaiden was not present to learn, she could not
report to the king or be punished for withholding. What the bastard daughter knew regarding the
handmaiden and Lord Hadrian’s guard, she kept to herself. Their sleeping arrangements
accommodated their truce. Perita had a pallet in the dressing room, Cassia had her bedchamber to
herself, and Knight provided the excuse they needed to dispense with the custom of handmaidens
sleeping by their ladies.
Whenever Cassia was fortunate enough to have a disinterested handmaiden, she always hoped that
one would last awhile. She had lost count of how many the king had assigned her, then replaced in the
years since her nurse had died. Spying on the king’s daughter was a taxing occupation.
Cassia got up, shivering in nothing but her underlinens and long woolen tunica. The bed creaked as
Knight flopped down beside her, and she leaned close to him. She would take a warm dog over a fire
any day.
Best of all, Knight’s role as her bodyguard had always meant the king never put soldiers at her
door. A liegehound to keep her alive and a handmaiden to observe her were all the resources the king
deemed necessary to expend on Cassia.
By the faint light that shone through her doorway, Cassia tugged her practical green dress over her
tunica and shouldered her oilcloth gardening satchel. She wrapped herself in her wool cloak, which
was much simpler and more serviceable than Lord Adrogan’s lambskin monstrosity. On instinct she
hunted for a kerchief, but none came to hand. No matter. Who would be there to see her hair
uncovered?
No one but the Hesperines.
Together she and Knight padded out of her bedchamber, through the hearth room and into the
narrow corridor beyond. It was easy to recognize where she was. The king had put her in unfamiliar
chambers suited, such as they were, to a young lady, but the rooms that had been hers as a girl were
just in the next hallway.
It was strange how everything looked exactly as it had when she was seven. But the palace had not
changed in over a thousand years. Why should it have done so in the years that had changed her from
child to woman?
Despite how little time she had spent in her own rooms then, childhood memory came powerfully
to her and served her well as she found her way through the high, remote wing of the palace where
she had stayed, then as now. Her life right after her time here was a blur to her, but Solorum was
graven deep in her memory. Emotion was a sharp chisel. A tool she no longer had use for.
Only once did she halt, when Knight came to an abrupt stop in front of her and straightened, his
ears pricked. She withdrew into the dimness against one wall, and he leaned against her legs to stay
her. In the adjacent corridor, a tall shadow reached into a pool of torchlight, and a man staggered in
its wake. He was soon gone, along with the reek of ale and a woman’s scent oils. A sure sign the
festivities to welcome the embassy had drawn to a close—except for the private dinner the
Hesperines would hold afterward.
Cassia found her way through side doors and servants’ corridors until bare floors and stained
brown rugs gave way to thick, plush blues and finally to intricately woven golds. She stood in the
forbidden halls of the queen’s wing. A name that meant little now, when there was no queen, nor the
promise of one in a beloved princess.
Cassia could not afford to hesitate here in the corridor. She could not allow any thought of the past
to distract her from her task. Nor would it serve her to dwell on what lay behind the door at the end of
the hall. Why should she be so aware of the king’s presence there and of his soldiers who watched
through the night? The king should not seem like a hunter with his bow drawn, ready to let fly an
arrow at any moment, just because she came so near the door that led to the king’s wing. Now that she
was at court, she must learn to endure being near him. She had chosen this, and she must face the
consequences.
But once she began to move down the hallway away from that door, her walk hastened to a run.
Knight lengthened his stride beside her. She made it around the shelter of a corner.
And there above her, up a short flight of stairs, was the door that had once always been open to
her. A rounded arch, a mahogany panel whose sinuous carvings of flowers and birds tried to gleam in
the blurry moonlight from the thick glass windows in the walls above. Solia’s door.
The metal ring handle bit Cassia’s hand with cold. Slowly, warily, she inched the door toward her.
A brief groan hinted what noise she could expect once she opened it fully.
She reached into her gardening satchel, careful not to cut her hand on her spade, and felt around.
Her fingers halted on smooth ridges of carved wood. No, she could not pause. She had work to do.
Cassia pulled out a rag and a bottle of expensive scent oil. She doused the cloth in the foul stuff
and went to work on the hinges of the door. She oiled, then tried the door, listened, then oiled again.
The bottle was half empty by the time the door swung open with nothing but a soft, low complaint.
Cassia stared into the dark.
Knight walked in ahead of her, disappearing into the gloom. When his sniffs quieted and his tail
thumped the floor, she followed him in. She eased the door shut behind her and listened to it seal
away the corridor outside.
Dust weighted her breaths. A wisp of blue in the dark ahead of her was moonlight, sneaking in
beneath a wayward curtain. Using that to orient herself, she envisioned the layout of the room. Knight
snuffled, and she followed the sounds, hands out before her.
She found him sitting on the rug where he had slept as a pup. She felt its familiar texture beneath
her slippers. How many forbidden nights had they spent in these rooms, squatting like waifs in the
temple on the benevolence of the golden-haired goddess who had dwelt here?
Cassia must think. Not feel. Ha. Never feel. She put out her hands again and groped her way
through the cold, dark hearth room, from one familiar piece of fine furniture to the next, until she came
to what she knew was the outside wall. The intruding moonlight was right at her feet. A heavy drape
hung before her. She slid it aside, and the light shone on her through translucent blue birds and green
glass leaves. The greatest luxury in the queen’s wing was this window over the garden door, a stained
glass roundel the size of a platter. Cassia tried the door handle. Not even locked. The king was
deterrent enough.
It took the rest of the bottle of oil to undo some of what weather had wrought upon the door in the
intervening years. Cassia held her breath and grimaced as it opened on whimpering hinges. It didn’t
matter. It could not matter. This was the princess’s inner courtyard. No one could even see into it,
except from these very rooms. No one could hear through the massive walls of the king’s wing. Cold
air welcomed her outside.
Cassia stood fixed and confronted the sight of what had become of Solia’s garden. The princess’s
fountain was dry, reduced to cracked tiles, dirt, and nettles. The annuals were long gone, the
perennials tangled remnants beneath rampant weeds and an army of king’s wort that must have
somehow invaded from the kitchen gardens. The few stalks that survived would never turn into
flowers come spring. The bed she and Solia had planted together was just one casualty among many
in that havoc.
Cassia knew no one could see her, but she kept to the edges of the courtyard where juniper trees
badly in need of pruning stood between her and the palace looming above. The ivy still held sway on
the walls, and its leaves brushed against her as she passed.
At last she spied the long fall of ivy nestled in the corner of two walls where wood peeked out
between the leaves instead of stone. A sigh escaped Cassia.
With the flora as her only witness, she slid under and between years of vines. The ivy shivered
around her as Knight forged through behind her. She opened the hidden postern just enough for the two
of them to slide through. As soon as they were inside, she shut the door securely behind them and
hastened into blackness.
The low tunnel stretched ahead of them, through the depths of ring after ring of walls that stood
between the royal chambers and the grounds beyond the palace. One hand on the crumbly wall was
enough to guide her, and Knight’s presence was enough to keep the rats scattering before them.
Her legs ached by the time they reached the end of the tunnel. Moisture trickled down the walls
here, nursing a thick growth of moss that promised they neared the fertile outdoors. She reached
forward and a little above her head. A slanted panel of moldering wood, bound together by rough
iron, greeted her hands. She could see the door that led out in the torchlight of her memory.
As long as the Hesperines were guests, the human residents of the palace were not to walk the
grounds after nightfall. The king had made himself clear. But walks on the grounds after dark,
especially alone, had always been forbidden to Cassia. Hesperines were hardly a deterrent in
comparison with the king’s injunction. A stroll through the royal forest was the least of the
transgressions she would commit before the night was through.
“Come, my Knight,” she whispered, violating the silence within the walls. “Let us trespass.”
She gave the door a great heave and let them out onto the Hesperines’ feeding grounds.