“And here I thought you had started to hate me a little less,” Gisele remarked.
“It’s just that—I can’t sleep with other people in the room. I would so much like privacy, just for a night.”
Harwin’s frown was as heavy as mine. “Yet one of them must act as chaperone so that no one takes advantage of you in the night. If you do not want your stepmother, then Dannette must stay with you.”
“Oh, let her have the room to herself,” Dannette said. “You don’t need to worry about Darius accosting her in the middle of the night, but even if he did have such plans, you’ll be there to thwart him.”
“Yes, Harwin, please, let me have the room.”
Dannette laughed and patted me on the shoulder. “You don’t have to plead with him. We’ll just apportion the chambers as we like. He can hardly force us to rearrange to his taste unless he wants to bodily carry us from bed to bed.”
Gisele and I both laughed at that, though Harwin looked embarrassed. “I am merely trying to make sure the princess is treated with the utmost care,” he said.
Now Dannette patted him on the arm in the same friendly fashion. “And maybe you’ll find that Olivia likes you better if you don’t always make such a fuss,” she said.
Darius swept through the front door, totally drenched and unrelentingly cheerful. His boots left wet footprints all the way down the hall. “Isn’t this fit for royalty!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never stayed at a place so elegant! I like traveling with the queen.”
“Harwin chose it,” Gisele said with a laugh. “Not I.” Darius rubbed his hands together to warm them. “Then I like traveling with Harwin! Who’s hungry? I imagine the dinner here must be outstanding.”
The meal was excellent—and Harwin paid for everyone’s dinner, not even bothering to use Gisele’s vouchers. I know, because I saw him do it. My room was splendid, heavenly, regal, private, and I even took a real bath in a hammered tin tub. I tumbled into bed and lay in the middle of the mattress, stretching my arms and legs as wide as they would go. I had peeked inside the other two rooms, so I knew that Gisele and Dannette had to share a bed, but Darius and Harwin each had his own. I imagined this would be the best night of sleep any of us had managed so far.
The morning brought sunshine and clear skies and all of us smiling at one another around the breakfast table. “I want to ride with Darius today,” I said, for Gisele had been right yesterday. Sitting in the coach with her was not doing much to acquaint me with my betrothed. “Dannette, you can ride with Gisele. It’s much more comfortable than the back of the wagon.”
“I’m happy to do so, unless the queen prefers solitude.”
“The queen prefers any company that is good-natured,” Gisele retorted.
“Then Dannette is the one you want,” Darius said with a nod. “There’s not a mean bone in her body.”
Scandals. Accusations in the dead of night. They must not have been crafted from cruelty, then. “Then we’re all satisfied,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Harwin was not satisfied, I could tell by his expression, but soon enough we were on our way. As before, Harwin took the lead on his bay gelding, followed by the carriage, followed by the wagon. After yesterday’s extraordinarily comfortable coach ride, travel in the wagon was even more torturous, but I was determined not to complain.
“How much farther to your grandmother’s house?” I asked as we set out.
“About a day and a half.”
“Have you sent her a note? Is she expecting us?”
He laughed. “She knows that I might drop in on her at any time, so in some sense she is always expecting me, but she will be quite astonished to see you.”
I smiled. “She didn’t think you would marry a princess?”
He rubbed the back of his hand along his jaw. “She didn’t think I would ever marry,” he said. “I have never been particularly interested in the notion.”
“Oh, with your blond curls and your handsome face, you must have had girls falling for you wherever you went,” I teased.
He laughed. “I didn’t say I wasn’t interested in women,” he corrected. “It’s all the things that belong to marriage that haven’t appealed to me.”
I was a little deflated at that. “What don’t you like about it?” I said.
“I’m not very good at staying in one place,” he explained. “Even after a couple of nights, I’m itching to move on. The wagon broke down once just as I was leaving a small town, and it took a week to get it fixed. By that third day, I felt like I’d been shackled in a dungeon for a year. No sunlight, no fresh air. It was an awful time.”
“But Darius,” I said. “Once I’m queen, I’ll need to stay at the palace, conferring with councilors and—well—ruling the kingdom.”
“Yes, but not all the time,” he said eagerly. “Wouldn’t your subjects like it if you traveled around the country, meeting them in the towns and villages where they live?” He fluttered a hand over his shoulder. “We’d travel in something much finer than this, of course. We’d have a carriage like your stepmother’s, and we could travel for weeks.”
I thought it sounded both exhausting and impractical, but I didn’t like to say so outright. Surely once we were married, Darius would see that he would have to give up parts of his old life. He would see how many responsibilities he must assume once he was king. “Well—that does sound delightful. I’m sure I would enjoy getting to know my subjects that way,” I said, and was rewarded with Darius’s blinding smile. “Perhaps we can take a honeymoon trip all around the kingdom,” I added. “People will line up in every small town to greet us—”
But he was shaking his head. “No, no, for our honeymoon we should go to Liston and tour the diamond mines,” he said. “You can pick the very stone you want from the bones of the land itself, and I’ll chip it out for you and polish it by hand.”
I yielded to a moment’s worth of romance at the picture, but then—“Isn’t Liston very far away?” I asked.
“Two thousand miles,” he said with a nod. “Depending on the weather through Amlertay, the journey could take six months each way.”
“But I can’t be gone for a year!”
He looked surprised. “Why not?”
“I have to be ready to rule if something should happen to my father!”
“He looks pretty healthy to me.”
“Even so! He could fall off a horse—or be felled by an assassin—or devoured by wolves—”
“Wolves? At the palace? His fighting dogs, maybe, but not wolves.”
Perhaps I was too enamored of the idea of someone getting eaten by wild animals. “The point isn’t how he might die. The point is that if something happens to him, I must be available. We must stay within the kingdom for our honeymoon, I’m afraid.”
He was silent for a moment, something so rare for Darius that I feared he was angry. I was relieved when, finally speaking, he sounded disappointed instead. “Maybe I should go to Liston by myself one last time before we get married.”
Now I was bewildered. “But that would mean we wouldn’t be able to marry for at least a year. And I wouldn’t see you that whole time.”
He nodded. “I know. But I can’t bear the thought that I’ll never see Liston again.”
“Surely you will,” I said, having no real idea how to answer that. “Surely we will work it all out.”
At that I, too, lapsed into silence. We watched the road ahead of us, lost in our own thoughts, and I imagined we were thinking about two very different futures.