And She Sits On A Sapphire Throne, PG-13
Jul 12, 2013 6:40:03 GMT 10
ubiquitous, Seek, and 1 more like this
Post by rainstormamaya on Jul 12, 2013 6:40:03 GMT 10
Title: And She Sits On A Sapphire Throne
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: n/a
Summary: Cricket and her betrothed take a break.
Notes: Written belatedly for Cass’s birthday, on the prompt Roald/Shinko, ‘it was late when we made our way’. *snuggles* I hope you like it, hon! Beta’d by Lisa.
I would like to specially note that this fic follows Shinko’s point of view, and I therefore tried to colour it with her Yamani background. I am not an expert on the Japanese history and culture TP apparently drew on for the Yamanis, and I am a fallible human being: if I have been Unintentionally Gross, please let me know, so I can fix it.
Shinko eyed her betrothed. “You have a plan,” she observed.
Roald grinned. There was a faintly reckless, desperate look lurking behind his careful expression, which was fair enough for any twenty-year-old who’d spent the day politely wrangling with nobles over the navy tax alongside Gareth the Younger. Sir Gareth was an indefatigable, rigorous and precise gentleman whose indefatigability, rigorousness and precision made him hard to work with, and even Roald’s sense of duty couldn’t make him like it – or stamp out the desire to rebel the moment he was free. “I do have a plan,” Roald acknowledged.
Yuki looked up from her seat on the other side of Shinko’s drawing room and caught Shinko’s eye. Shinko nodded slightly, and Yuki cut herself on the steel-ribbed shukusen she was cleaning and announced her intention to seek medical care immediately, a request Shinko was pleased to grant. Shinko waited until the door had swung shut behind her, then looked at Roald.
“She could have asked me to fix it,” Roald said mildly, but the curve of his mouth told her that he knew Yuki had cut herself deliberately, and that her excuse to visit the healers had just as much to do with a profound desire to spend time with Neal as it did with her discretion.
“Is your name Nealan of Queenscove?” Shinko enquired, and got a brief laughing glance from Roald. “Tell me about this plan.”
“It’s something I’ve done before, several times,” Roald said. “Often on summer evenings like the one I think we’re about to have – still warm, but with an edge of coolness, and that lovely golden light.”
Shinko waited patiently.
“It’s not just me; my father did it as a boy and Lianne does something similar. There’s no risk to it, not really. And I thought you might like to join me.”
“You have yet to tell me what I might like to do,” Shinko reminded him. Roald was buzzing with nervous energy; she could see the suppressed excitement in his stance and expression. This was odd, for someone who came nearly as close as Keladry did to behaviour acceptable in Yamani eyes.
Roald took a deep breath. “Sometimes I put on a glamour and plain clothes and walk down into the city.”
Shinko gave this due consideration.
“I made one for you – a glamour, that is,” Roald said. “I was always good at them. Do you have any plain clothes? Not Court dresses. I could put a glamour on one of those, too, but you might be more comfortable in clothes you know are your own.”
Shinko nodded. “I do. Your mother insisted I should have at least one simple dress.” She did not mention that Thayet had also attempted to persuade her into ordering a set of tunics, shirts and breeches, but that Shinko had not felt sufficiently comfortable with any of the styles now current to select one of them. The loose, flowing style Sir Alanna and Queen Thayet had popularised twenty years ago would have been acceptable, but they were long out of fashion. Shinko had seen Lalasa and Thayet plotting alterations to such a style that incorporated Easterners’ idea of Yamani influences and some modern Tortallan touches, and had felt vaguely ill. She’d pleaded a headache and Yuki had escorted her away while Haname, an unseemly gleam in her eyes, had joined the dressmaker and the queen in their plots.
Shinko tore her mind from irrelevant memories. “Yes. I have just the thing.”
“Would you like to come with me?”
As ever, when it came to her, Roald was slightly tentative and very careful. The hopeful look in his blue eyes touched her deeply, and reminded her that however ambivalent she felt about a stroll into Corus, he clearly loved the idea, and she would enjoy seeing that – she knew how little he indulged himself, and how much he cursed himself for not being on active service. Moreover, she had seen little of Tortall that wasn’t neatly packaged and presented for her by courtiers. Shinko firmly believed that this was an unacceptable level of knowledge for anyone who would one day be queen of any country, let alone one as complex and confused as Tortall.
She might even enjoy the walk for its own sake, Shinko told herself.
She smiled for Roald before she let the silence stretch too long. Easterners needed more distinct cues to understand your feelings than Yamanis: she remembered that from her childhood with Keladry. “I would like to come with you.”
“Yuki and Lady Haname,” Roald began.
“-will not pose a problem,” Shinko finished effortlessly. “Yukimi is a romantic and Lady Haname is playing chess with Sir Myles, who may or may not be asking careless questions about the emperor’s new laws and Haname’s correspondence with her family. I should not care to hazard a guess.”
Roald grinned, and took a small silk pouch from his pocket, from which he retrieved a silver chain with a single clear stone hanging from a simple pendant. “I bow to your superior knowledge. Here’s your glamour – try it on, see what you look like, if you like it.”
Shinko took the necklace from him. “Of course. Where shall I meet you?”
“In my grandmother’s garden,” Roald said. “By the fountain. In perhaps half a bell’s time?”
“Certainly,” Shinko agreed.
Roald gave her a short bow and a dazzling smile, and departed. Shinko looked at the necklace in her hand, and decided that agreeing to Roald’s crazy idea had been a good move. She couldn’t remember seeing Roald smile so much at any time in the last month.
Fortunately for the palace décor, Shinko’s neck and Yuki’s life, Shinko heard Yuki returning from her errand and whipped the necklace off just before Yuki entered the dressing room, thereby avoiding a nasty incident of mistaken identity. Shinko looked exactly nothing like herself in her plain dress, a simply cut cream linen garment patterned with small grey sprigs of leaves and trimmed with the same fabric in a pale pink band defining her waist and edging the cuffs of the three-quarter sleeves, and wearing a glamour that made her look slightly older and more assured, with a more golden, lightly freckled skin tone, rounder face, wider eyes, delicate snub nose and very dark brown hair rather than black. The uncharacteristically Tortallan style of her hair didn’t help. It was drawn off her face and caught up in the complex but practical knot Lianne favoured and had taught her to do, embellished with a pink silk ribbon bought for her by Vania (“because I know you like pink! You do like pink, Shinko, don’t you?”).
Even with Shinko’s own face restored to her, Yuki momentarily looked as if she did not recognise her. A variety of subtle expressions chased themselves across her face, and she closed the door to Shinko’s dressing room carefully behind her.
“What mischief has this Eastern prince dragged you into, my lady?” she asked, in their own tongue, the tone as polite and formal as Shinko was ever likely to hear from her.
“We are going for a walk,” Shinko said, sounding slightly defensive even to herself. “In Corus. By ourselves.”
“There will be talk,” Yuki remarked.
“As much talk as you lingering over your healing for the sake of the healer?” Shinko enquired, and got merely a minute flicker of one eyebrow from Yuki. It was not the same, of course, and both Shinko and Yuki knew it. Shinko was a princess. “Roald has made provision for that.” She slipped the chain over her head again, careful not to disarrange her hair.
If Yuki had been Tortallan she would have gasped - Shinko suspected that twenty years hence, after decades of marriage to her exuberant healer, she would gasp – but instead her eyes just widened slightly. “Yama preserve us,” she said, in a voice that even Haname would have accepted as perfectly level and composed. “Prince Roald is a thorough man.”
Shinko glanced into her mirror. “I suppose.”
“You will need a new name,” Yuki pointed out, a glitter in her eyes that said she was enjoying this rather more than was seemly. It was very fortunate, Shinko thought, that Haname was not present. “The glamour will be no use if he calls you by your true name. There are not so many Yamani ladies in Corus, and your face is not so well known to the people of Tortall that they will not think that any Yamani lady may be Princess Shinkokami.”
“I will not need a new name,” Shinko said. She had already thought of this. “I will need an old one. I should like to be Cricket again.”
She had put off that name when Keladry had left the islands. As a young lady of twelve, she had already been much too old for it. It reminded her of a happy time in her childhood, and now that she was cautiously, hesitantly allowing herself happiness once more, perhaps it could make the occasional return.
Yuki’s eyes softened. “When should I expect you back, Lady Cricket?” she said, slipping into increasingly unaccented Common.
Shinko had also thought of this. There had been a certain amount of time available to her for thinking as she struggled with the dress: Thayet’s definition of a simple summer dress included the ability to put it on without a maid’s help, but Shinko hadn’t worn it since she’d tried it on to check that it fitted and suited her months previously, and was unfamiliar with the catches and ties that held it in place. “I expect to be back in time for supper. If by some chance I am not, you shall say that I am feeling a trifle indisposed, and have gone to sleep, particularly requesting that you do not wake me.”
Yuki nodded. “What would you like me to tell Haname?”
“Whatever you please,” Shinko said. “Only, please, Yuki – not too scandalous.”
Yuki’s eyes crinkled at the corners, and a smile twitched at her lips.
Shinko allowed her eyes to drift upwards in a universal expression of disbelief, and left the room. She didn’t want to be late.
She encountered few people on the way to Queen Lianne’s garden, all of them maids or footmen, none of whom seemed to notice her. Of course, they were paid not to take undue notice of anomalies that didn’t threaten the palace’s security, and one young woman in a pretty dress was hardly such an anomaly. Moreover, Corus had an increasing population of Yamani merchants, some of whom held considerable social rank in Tortall and were received by Tortallan nobles, so it wouldn’t be entirely surprising to them to see a young Yamani woman, dressed well but not in the very latest fashion or in a particularly exotic style. But Shinko couldn’t avoid the suspicion that Roald had woven a little something extra into the glamour, something to make it harder for people to notice her. As Yuki had said, he was a thorough man.
Shinko made it to the fountain as the palace bells began to ring, and there, staring pensively down into the fountain’s laughing waters, was a man who was and was not familiar. He should have looked entirely different to her: he was the same shape and size as Roald, but gave the impression of being slightly more muscular – the pale blue tunic and light brown breeches he wore would have been looser on Roald. He was more tanned, his eyes were brown, and (most strikingly of all) his hair was bright red, and yet the way he carried himself was all Roald, and his smile when he turned to look at her was the dazzling Conté smile she knew far too well.
“Red?” she said, by way of introduction.
“I always liked Sir Alanna’s bright hair,” Roald explained. He bowed. “Ma’am, I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure. Tomos Harkness of the King’s Own at your service.”
Shinko bowed back to him, deeply amused. “Cricket noh Fukui,” she said. “Shall we?”
Roald offered her his arm ceremoniously, as he’d done many times before, on Progress and at balls and feasts held in Corus. It felt different this time, now that they were alone, but Shinko did not show it.
“I promised to be back for supper,” she said.
Roald nodded. The Tortallan meal was taken quite late in the evening, usually, and it was only the fourth bell past noon now. They had four hours to play with. “I thought we might walk down to the playhouse by the river and see the new play that’s on; I’m told it’s worth watching.”
“What is it about?”
“It’s called No More Yielding But A Dream.” He took a key from his pocket and let them out of a small side-gate which gave out onto a wide cobbled road. “Neal tried to explain the plot to me, but lost me entirely at the second set of lovers. He did say it was good, though, and his taste in plays is much better than his poetry.”
“I shall take your word for it,” Shinko said a little dubiously, and looked around her at the people strolling past. Some looked busy and purposeful, others completely at their leisure, like her and Roald. The yellowish stone the palace and many of the surrounding buildings were made of shone in the summer light.
Roald led her through the city, her hand still tucked formally into the crook of his elbow. They passed through more wide streets with large townhouses - nobles’ or rich merchants’, Roald explained – and some civic buildings, including a few small and carefully-kept shrines, although they had no cause to go through the district where the temples clustered. Roald paused at one of these to light a stick of incense.
“The gods have seemed close to Tortall in late years,” he explained in an undertone. “Closer than in my grandfather’s time. Sir Alanna is beloved of the Goddess, that much anyone knows, and the king’s luck makes him seem a favoured man, but with the wars, famines and plagues we have suffered, who’s to say that there isn’t a god who really dislikes Tortallans, too?” He set the stick of incense in the shrine’s incense jar, and closed his eyes for a moment in apparent prayer.
Shinko contemplated the shrine silently. She was a daughter of the Isles, where worship of the Great Gods was not strong: her sacrifices and prayers had been made to Yama and the Wave-Walker. But things were different here. She selected a stick of incense and held it out to Roald. Courteously, he lit it with a pinch of blue fire too small for anyone else to see, and she put it next to his before the triple image of the Goddess and composed a prayer.
Let us make each other happy, O Goddess, she thought, and let our hands be steady enough to hold Tortall’s future. And if we cannot have both, then let us have the last.
It was poorly phrased, she criticised herself as she and Roald continued on through the city, but at least it was sincere.
They were passing through less evenly paved streets now, ones with smaller houses, taverns and shops that sold more than expensive merchandise for a selective few, but were still – to Shinko’s assessing eye – well-to-do and respectable. They passed Keladry’s dressmaker’s shop, large and prosperous in a prosperous street and full of fashionable-looking customers. Shinko made a note to tell Keladry of this; Keladry was always pleased with news of Lalasa.
“We’re being watched,” she said. The itch at the back of her neck told her it was true: Shinko did not ignore her instincts.
“Undoubtedly,” Roald said calmly, tensing a little. “Who by?”
Shinko let her eyes sweep casually over the street. “The… lady… in green.”
Roald glanced in the same direction. “Ah, the flower-girl?”
“I imagine so.” Shinko bit the inside of her lip, restraining automatic embarrassment.
“My Uncle George is a terrible meddler,” Roald said, apparently irrelevantly. “I have no secrets from him.”
“But he won’t interfere?”
“He disapproves of my father’s parenting and the rules of propriety, so no. Not unless we are in real danger.”
“We aren’t, though.”
Roald looked sheepish. “Plays are perfectly respectable. Actors and actresses seldom are. And playhouses are often built in slightly insalubrious areas.”
“Tomos,” Shinko said severely, remembering his chosen name in the nick of time. She was not concerned, of course; even in a light summer dress she had successfully concealed three separate knives on her person, not including her unusually sharp hairpins. Nonetheless, she resented the idea that she might be obliged to use them while out on a pleasantly illicit sojourn with her betrothed. Besides, her dress was new and light-coloured; blood stains would be hard to explain away and would ruin the cloth.
He laid his hand over hers briefly, and she had to exert all her remarkable self-control to keep from jumping. “I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t think you were completely safe.”
Shinko silently accepted this, allowing herself to be escorted into the playhouse.
The play was good – funny, a little rude, romantic and vivid. Shinko found herself caught up in the players’ vitality, the way they seemed to live their roles, and by the characters: the endearingly hopeless lovers, the mischievous inhumanity of the fae and the sternness of the fates dictated by ancient Imperial Thanic laws Shinko strongly suspected the playwright had made up. She also noted a strong resemblance to Jonathan and Thayet in the portrayal of the Duke and his prospective Duchess, and wondered who the four confused lovers were meant to represent. The discomfort of the wooden seat and the crowded audience were completely forgotten for two enchanted hours.
“If all Tortallan plays are like that, then I like Tortallan plays,” she told Roald as they filed out of the playhouse.
“I’ll take you to more, then,” Roald said, smiling, “so you can judge,” and subtly barged into a large citizen who was in Shinko’s way.
He was very protective of her, Shinko thought with a burst of affection. One day he might even realise that she could protect him just as well.
The walk back to the palace was just as pleasant as the walk to the playhouse had been. It was still very light outside, but some citizens in the lower streets had lit brightly coloured lanterns and strung them from balconies and along shop-fronts, and people spilled out of taverns onto wooden tables at the side of the streets, laughing and joking. In the higher streets no such undignified or unrestrained display was permitted, but Shinko saw the lights and heard the music of more than one small party. It was almost as if Tortall could forget it was a nation at war – but then she noted the relative lack of men in the streets, and the number of people with visible injuries, old and new, and wondered how long it would take the marks of three wars in twenty-five years to be smoothed away. Perhaps war had become a Tortallan way of life, as much as assassination was a Yamani political tool.
Shinko looked Tortall in the face, and appreciated what she saw – and that she did not yet understand it, not as she would like to.
They had no trouble slipping back into the palace, and they parted in the gardens, at the same place where they had met. Roald kissed the back of her hand and her palm, and Shinko could only respond with a helpless smile and a slight squeeze of his fingers, but the look on his face told her it was enough. She walked back to her rooms feeling as if she were aglow, although common sense and a grasp of her own ability to conceal her feelings told her she was not, and when she got there only Yuki was waiting for her.
She was reading something and annotating it, looking deeply amused. Shinko suspected Nealan of Queenscove’s poetry.
“Lady Cricket,” Yuki said, looking up. “How was your walk?”
“Enjoyable. We saw a play – No More Yielding But A Dream.”
“I hope it was to your liking.”
“Very much so.” Shinko took off her necklace, feeling the subtle reversion back to her own features and relishing it as much as she had enjoyed being Cricket for an evening. “How was your evening?”
“Peaceful,” Yuki replied. “Lady Haname has not yet returned, and has, in fact, acquired a supper engagement with Sir Myles and his wife. Queen Thayet sent a page to invite you to an informal family supper. I said you were feeling a little indisposed at the moment, but if you felt well enough you would certainly go.”
Shinko nodded. “When?”
“When the bell strikes eight.” Yuki looked a little worried. “You have only a little time to change your dress.”
Shinko looked down at her dress and considered it. “The page said it was an informal supper?”
“With particular emphasis on the word informal, yes.”
“In that case, I shall not change my dress. It is not necessary.”
Yuki nodded. “As you wish.”
Shinko paused. She knew that Haname and Yuki took care that one of them was always with her, as much to protect her as to maintain their chaperonage, and if they could not be with her – as at small, informal family suppers – they were in her rooms, where they would be easily found. But this was Tortall, and the rules were different, and she had three knives in her dress and some unacceptably pointy hairpins (all of which would have to be removed before entering the royal presence). She could look after herself in this safest of places and protocol permitted her to do so. Moreover, Yuki liked people. She would be tremendously bored on her own.
Nealan of Queenscove would be around, wouldn’t he? If not, he would quickly alter his plans so that he was available to see Yuki. Shinko knew him that well.
Flush with romantic sympathy, Shinko made up her mind. “Yuki, I will not require your assistance this evening. You are at liberty to visit any of your friends that you please.”
Yuki looked momentarily surprised. “Your highness-”
Shinko looked at her. After Prince Eitaro and his wife had left, she had clarified some things with Yuki and Haname, including an order to keep honorifics to a strict minimum. Yuki would always treat her as her liege-lady: Shinko saw no problem with that. But because of her father’s disgraces she had not been raised to expect extraordinary rank, and among her closest companions, she preferred a degree of informality more strictly reared princesses might abhor.
“Shinkokami,” Yuki corrected. “Should I not be here, in case you need me?”
“I am not going to need you,” Shinko said patiently. “And I consider it high time that you enjoyed some leisure.”
She left unspoken the fact that she and Haname and Yuki would have to lead more separate lives one day – Haname and Yuki would marry; they would all have their own apartments and lands, husbands, children, their own particular cares to occupy them – and swept into the dressing room without leaving Yuki time to argue.
She tucked the glamour necklace Roald had given her into a small compartment in her jewellery box, and selected instead a more sophisticated piece sent to her the previous Midwinter – delicate pink tourmalines in a complex gold Carthaki setting, accompanied by a note in Empress Kalasin’s own hand: a gift for my newest sister, with the hope that you and I shall meet one day. Shinko knew the royal family would recognise it; she had opened the gift from Carthak at the same time as they had opened theirs, and it had been much admired. She put it on and watched herself in the mirror as she unpinned and combed her hair before pinning it up again in a simple style, adding in the pink ribbon she’d worn earlier and applying minimal face paint, as suitable for a family supper at which none of the women were likely to be wearing more than a little lip colour in the Eastern style. The necklace suited her. Jasson, endearingly awkward around her but incurably truthful, had told her that Roald wrote to his sister weekly; for Kalasin to have chosen so well, Roald must have described her in great detail. Perhaps he had even included a picture of her. Of course, Shinko didn’t know this was true: it was just as likely that the Carthaki ambassador had described the heir apparent’s betrothed to the emperor in his letters. But she preferred the idea that Roald had written to his perfect oldest sister about her.
She left her rooms and found Yuki immediately outside, talking to Nealan. Roald stood by, listening; he alone showed no surprise when she opened the door, and he smiled at her as soon as he saw her.
“Your highness,” Nealan said, starting like a cat in water and bowing very correctly.
Shinko suppressed her amusement and gave him a gracious nod. “Squire Nealan. I wish you a pleasant evening.”
Nealan went slightly red about the ears and his eyes darted sideways to Yuki, who disappeared behind her fan. Roald grinned appreciatively. He had obviously completely recovered from his appalling day with Sir Gareth if his sense of humour had made a return.
“My thanks, your highness,” Nealan replied, flourishing courtesy unimpaired. “I hope you will not consider me too forward if I wish you the same.”
“Thank you, Neal, off you go,” Roald said cheerfully, giving his friend a meaningful look.
Nealan disappeared promptly. Yuki threw Shinko a laughing glance, gave the slight bow Shinko had deemed appropriate for their changed circumstances, and followed him.
Shinko caught her betrothed’s eye. He shook his head slightly and raised his eyes towards the Divine Realms, and Shinko felt herself in perfect accord with him.
“I thought I would escort you to supper,” he said, and offered her his arm. “If you have recovered from your indisposition.”
“You are always thoughtful,” Shinko said, laying her hand on his arm. “And thank you: I have.”
Yuki had once told Shinko that it was said she and Roald would have the politest marriage ever, and implied that Tortallans considered that a slur – or at least far from flattering. As she walked decorously down the hall with the same man she’d secretly explored Corus with, under a different face and assumed name and without guards, Shinko considered it a compliment. She saw nothing wrong with a little good manners.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: n/a
Summary: Cricket and her betrothed take a break.
Notes: Written belatedly for Cass’s birthday, on the prompt Roald/Shinko, ‘it was late when we made our way’. *snuggles* I hope you like it, hon! Beta’d by Lisa.
I would like to specially note that this fic follows Shinko’s point of view, and I therefore tried to colour it with her Yamani background. I am not an expert on the Japanese history and culture TP apparently drew on for the Yamanis, and I am a fallible human being: if I have been Unintentionally Gross, please let me know, so I can fix it.
***
Oh, the summer night/Has a smile of light/And she sits on a sapphire throne.
― Barry Cornwall
― Barry Cornwall
Shinko eyed her betrothed. “You have a plan,” she observed.
Roald grinned. There was a faintly reckless, desperate look lurking behind his careful expression, which was fair enough for any twenty-year-old who’d spent the day politely wrangling with nobles over the navy tax alongside Gareth the Younger. Sir Gareth was an indefatigable, rigorous and precise gentleman whose indefatigability, rigorousness and precision made him hard to work with, and even Roald’s sense of duty couldn’t make him like it – or stamp out the desire to rebel the moment he was free. “I do have a plan,” Roald acknowledged.
Yuki looked up from her seat on the other side of Shinko’s drawing room and caught Shinko’s eye. Shinko nodded slightly, and Yuki cut herself on the steel-ribbed shukusen she was cleaning and announced her intention to seek medical care immediately, a request Shinko was pleased to grant. Shinko waited until the door had swung shut behind her, then looked at Roald.
“She could have asked me to fix it,” Roald said mildly, but the curve of his mouth told her that he knew Yuki had cut herself deliberately, and that her excuse to visit the healers had just as much to do with a profound desire to spend time with Neal as it did with her discretion.
“Is your name Nealan of Queenscove?” Shinko enquired, and got a brief laughing glance from Roald. “Tell me about this plan.”
“It’s something I’ve done before, several times,” Roald said. “Often on summer evenings like the one I think we’re about to have – still warm, but with an edge of coolness, and that lovely golden light.”
Shinko waited patiently.
“It’s not just me; my father did it as a boy and Lianne does something similar. There’s no risk to it, not really. And I thought you might like to join me.”
“You have yet to tell me what I might like to do,” Shinko reminded him. Roald was buzzing with nervous energy; she could see the suppressed excitement in his stance and expression. This was odd, for someone who came nearly as close as Keladry did to behaviour acceptable in Yamani eyes.
Roald took a deep breath. “Sometimes I put on a glamour and plain clothes and walk down into the city.”
Shinko gave this due consideration.
“I made one for you – a glamour, that is,” Roald said. “I was always good at them. Do you have any plain clothes? Not Court dresses. I could put a glamour on one of those, too, but you might be more comfortable in clothes you know are your own.”
Shinko nodded. “I do. Your mother insisted I should have at least one simple dress.” She did not mention that Thayet had also attempted to persuade her into ordering a set of tunics, shirts and breeches, but that Shinko had not felt sufficiently comfortable with any of the styles now current to select one of them. The loose, flowing style Sir Alanna and Queen Thayet had popularised twenty years ago would have been acceptable, but they were long out of fashion. Shinko had seen Lalasa and Thayet plotting alterations to such a style that incorporated Easterners’ idea of Yamani influences and some modern Tortallan touches, and had felt vaguely ill. She’d pleaded a headache and Yuki had escorted her away while Haname, an unseemly gleam in her eyes, had joined the dressmaker and the queen in their plots.
Shinko tore her mind from irrelevant memories. “Yes. I have just the thing.”
“Would you like to come with me?”
As ever, when it came to her, Roald was slightly tentative and very careful. The hopeful look in his blue eyes touched her deeply, and reminded her that however ambivalent she felt about a stroll into Corus, he clearly loved the idea, and she would enjoy seeing that – she knew how little he indulged himself, and how much he cursed himself for not being on active service. Moreover, she had seen little of Tortall that wasn’t neatly packaged and presented for her by courtiers. Shinko firmly believed that this was an unacceptable level of knowledge for anyone who would one day be queen of any country, let alone one as complex and confused as Tortall.
She might even enjoy the walk for its own sake, Shinko told herself.
She smiled for Roald before she let the silence stretch too long. Easterners needed more distinct cues to understand your feelings than Yamanis: she remembered that from her childhood with Keladry. “I would like to come with you.”
“Yuki and Lady Haname,” Roald began.
“-will not pose a problem,” Shinko finished effortlessly. “Yukimi is a romantic and Lady Haname is playing chess with Sir Myles, who may or may not be asking careless questions about the emperor’s new laws and Haname’s correspondence with her family. I should not care to hazard a guess.”
Roald grinned, and took a small silk pouch from his pocket, from which he retrieved a silver chain with a single clear stone hanging from a simple pendant. “I bow to your superior knowledge. Here’s your glamour – try it on, see what you look like, if you like it.”
Shinko took the necklace from him. “Of course. Where shall I meet you?”
“In my grandmother’s garden,” Roald said. “By the fountain. In perhaps half a bell’s time?”
“Certainly,” Shinko agreed.
Roald gave her a short bow and a dazzling smile, and departed. Shinko looked at the necklace in her hand, and decided that agreeing to Roald’s crazy idea had been a good move. She couldn’t remember seeing Roald smile so much at any time in the last month.
***
Fortunately for the palace décor, Shinko’s neck and Yuki’s life, Shinko heard Yuki returning from her errand and whipped the necklace off just before Yuki entered the dressing room, thereby avoiding a nasty incident of mistaken identity. Shinko looked exactly nothing like herself in her plain dress, a simply cut cream linen garment patterned with small grey sprigs of leaves and trimmed with the same fabric in a pale pink band defining her waist and edging the cuffs of the three-quarter sleeves, and wearing a glamour that made her look slightly older and more assured, with a more golden, lightly freckled skin tone, rounder face, wider eyes, delicate snub nose and very dark brown hair rather than black. The uncharacteristically Tortallan style of her hair didn’t help. It was drawn off her face and caught up in the complex but practical knot Lianne favoured and had taught her to do, embellished with a pink silk ribbon bought for her by Vania (“because I know you like pink! You do like pink, Shinko, don’t you?”).
Even with Shinko’s own face restored to her, Yuki momentarily looked as if she did not recognise her. A variety of subtle expressions chased themselves across her face, and she closed the door to Shinko’s dressing room carefully behind her.
“What mischief has this Eastern prince dragged you into, my lady?” she asked, in their own tongue, the tone as polite and formal as Shinko was ever likely to hear from her.
“We are going for a walk,” Shinko said, sounding slightly defensive even to herself. “In Corus. By ourselves.”
“There will be talk,” Yuki remarked.
“As much talk as you lingering over your healing for the sake of the healer?” Shinko enquired, and got merely a minute flicker of one eyebrow from Yuki. It was not the same, of course, and both Shinko and Yuki knew it. Shinko was a princess. “Roald has made provision for that.” She slipped the chain over her head again, careful not to disarrange her hair.
If Yuki had been Tortallan she would have gasped - Shinko suspected that twenty years hence, after decades of marriage to her exuberant healer, she would gasp – but instead her eyes just widened slightly. “Yama preserve us,” she said, in a voice that even Haname would have accepted as perfectly level and composed. “Prince Roald is a thorough man.”
Shinko glanced into her mirror. “I suppose.”
“You will need a new name,” Yuki pointed out, a glitter in her eyes that said she was enjoying this rather more than was seemly. It was very fortunate, Shinko thought, that Haname was not present. “The glamour will be no use if he calls you by your true name. There are not so many Yamani ladies in Corus, and your face is not so well known to the people of Tortall that they will not think that any Yamani lady may be Princess Shinkokami.”
“I will not need a new name,” Shinko said. She had already thought of this. “I will need an old one. I should like to be Cricket again.”
She had put off that name when Keladry had left the islands. As a young lady of twelve, she had already been much too old for it. It reminded her of a happy time in her childhood, and now that she was cautiously, hesitantly allowing herself happiness once more, perhaps it could make the occasional return.
Yuki’s eyes softened. “When should I expect you back, Lady Cricket?” she said, slipping into increasingly unaccented Common.
Shinko had also thought of this. There had been a certain amount of time available to her for thinking as she struggled with the dress: Thayet’s definition of a simple summer dress included the ability to put it on without a maid’s help, but Shinko hadn’t worn it since she’d tried it on to check that it fitted and suited her months previously, and was unfamiliar with the catches and ties that held it in place. “I expect to be back in time for supper. If by some chance I am not, you shall say that I am feeling a trifle indisposed, and have gone to sleep, particularly requesting that you do not wake me.”
Yuki nodded. “What would you like me to tell Haname?”
“Whatever you please,” Shinko said. “Only, please, Yuki – not too scandalous.”
Yuki’s eyes crinkled at the corners, and a smile twitched at her lips.
Shinko allowed her eyes to drift upwards in a universal expression of disbelief, and left the room. She didn’t want to be late.
She encountered few people on the way to Queen Lianne’s garden, all of them maids or footmen, none of whom seemed to notice her. Of course, they were paid not to take undue notice of anomalies that didn’t threaten the palace’s security, and one young woman in a pretty dress was hardly such an anomaly. Moreover, Corus had an increasing population of Yamani merchants, some of whom held considerable social rank in Tortall and were received by Tortallan nobles, so it wouldn’t be entirely surprising to them to see a young Yamani woman, dressed well but not in the very latest fashion or in a particularly exotic style. But Shinko couldn’t avoid the suspicion that Roald had woven a little something extra into the glamour, something to make it harder for people to notice her. As Yuki had said, he was a thorough man.
Shinko made it to the fountain as the palace bells began to ring, and there, staring pensively down into the fountain’s laughing waters, was a man who was and was not familiar. He should have looked entirely different to her: he was the same shape and size as Roald, but gave the impression of being slightly more muscular – the pale blue tunic and light brown breeches he wore would have been looser on Roald. He was more tanned, his eyes were brown, and (most strikingly of all) his hair was bright red, and yet the way he carried himself was all Roald, and his smile when he turned to look at her was the dazzling Conté smile she knew far too well.
“Red?” she said, by way of introduction.
“I always liked Sir Alanna’s bright hair,” Roald explained. He bowed. “Ma’am, I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure. Tomos Harkness of the King’s Own at your service.”
Shinko bowed back to him, deeply amused. “Cricket noh Fukui,” she said. “Shall we?”
Roald offered her his arm ceremoniously, as he’d done many times before, on Progress and at balls and feasts held in Corus. It felt different this time, now that they were alone, but Shinko did not show it.
“I promised to be back for supper,” she said.
Roald nodded. The Tortallan meal was taken quite late in the evening, usually, and it was only the fourth bell past noon now. They had four hours to play with. “I thought we might walk down to the playhouse by the river and see the new play that’s on; I’m told it’s worth watching.”
“What is it about?”
“It’s called No More Yielding But A Dream.” He took a key from his pocket and let them out of a small side-gate which gave out onto a wide cobbled road. “Neal tried to explain the plot to me, but lost me entirely at the second set of lovers. He did say it was good, though, and his taste in plays is much better than his poetry.”
“I shall take your word for it,” Shinko said a little dubiously, and looked around her at the people strolling past. Some looked busy and purposeful, others completely at their leisure, like her and Roald. The yellowish stone the palace and many of the surrounding buildings were made of shone in the summer light.
Roald led her through the city, her hand still tucked formally into the crook of his elbow. They passed through more wide streets with large townhouses - nobles’ or rich merchants’, Roald explained – and some civic buildings, including a few small and carefully-kept shrines, although they had no cause to go through the district where the temples clustered. Roald paused at one of these to light a stick of incense.
“The gods have seemed close to Tortall in late years,” he explained in an undertone. “Closer than in my grandfather’s time. Sir Alanna is beloved of the Goddess, that much anyone knows, and the king’s luck makes him seem a favoured man, but with the wars, famines and plagues we have suffered, who’s to say that there isn’t a god who really dislikes Tortallans, too?” He set the stick of incense in the shrine’s incense jar, and closed his eyes for a moment in apparent prayer.
Shinko contemplated the shrine silently. She was a daughter of the Isles, where worship of the Great Gods was not strong: her sacrifices and prayers had been made to Yama and the Wave-Walker. But things were different here. She selected a stick of incense and held it out to Roald. Courteously, he lit it with a pinch of blue fire too small for anyone else to see, and she put it next to his before the triple image of the Goddess and composed a prayer.
Let us make each other happy, O Goddess, she thought, and let our hands be steady enough to hold Tortall’s future. And if we cannot have both, then let us have the last.
It was poorly phrased, she criticised herself as she and Roald continued on through the city, but at least it was sincere.
They were passing through less evenly paved streets now, ones with smaller houses, taverns and shops that sold more than expensive merchandise for a selective few, but were still – to Shinko’s assessing eye – well-to-do and respectable. They passed Keladry’s dressmaker’s shop, large and prosperous in a prosperous street and full of fashionable-looking customers. Shinko made a note to tell Keladry of this; Keladry was always pleased with news of Lalasa.
“We’re being watched,” she said. The itch at the back of her neck told her it was true: Shinko did not ignore her instincts.
“Undoubtedly,” Roald said calmly, tensing a little. “Who by?”
Shinko let her eyes sweep casually over the street. “The… lady… in green.”
Roald glanced in the same direction. “Ah, the flower-girl?”
“I imagine so.” Shinko bit the inside of her lip, restraining automatic embarrassment.
“My Uncle George is a terrible meddler,” Roald said, apparently irrelevantly. “I have no secrets from him.”
“But he won’t interfere?”
“He disapproves of my father’s parenting and the rules of propriety, so no. Not unless we are in real danger.”
“We aren’t, though.”
Roald looked sheepish. “Plays are perfectly respectable. Actors and actresses seldom are. And playhouses are often built in slightly insalubrious areas.”
“Tomos,” Shinko said severely, remembering his chosen name in the nick of time. She was not concerned, of course; even in a light summer dress she had successfully concealed three separate knives on her person, not including her unusually sharp hairpins. Nonetheless, she resented the idea that she might be obliged to use them while out on a pleasantly illicit sojourn with her betrothed. Besides, her dress was new and light-coloured; blood stains would be hard to explain away and would ruin the cloth.
He laid his hand over hers briefly, and she had to exert all her remarkable self-control to keep from jumping. “I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t think you were completely safe.”
Shinko silently accepted this, allowing herself to be escorted into the playhouse.
The play was good – funny, a little rude, romantic and vivid. Shinko found herself caught up in the players’ vitality, the way they seemed to live their roles, and by the characters: the endearingly hopeless lovers, the mischievous inhumanity of the fae and the sternness of the fates dictated by ancient Imperial Thanic laws Shinko strongly suspected the playwright had made up. She also noted a strong resemblance to Jonathan and Thayet in the portrayal of the Duke and his prospective Duchess, and wondered who the four confused lovers were meant to represent. The discomfort of the wooden seat and the crowded audience were completely forgotten for two enchanted hours.
“If all Tortallan plays are like that, then I like Tortallan plays,” she told Roald as they filed out of the playhouse.
“I’ll take you to more, then,” Roald said, smiling, “so you can judge,” and subtly barged into a large citizen who was in Shinko’s way.
He was very protective of her, Shinko thought with a burst of affection. One day he might even realise that she could protect him just as well.
The walk back to the palace was just as pleasant as the walk to the playhouse had been. It was still very light outside, but some citizens in the lower streets had lit brightly coloured lanterns and strung them from balconies and along shop-fronts, and people spilled out of taverns onto wooden tables at the side of the streets, laughing and joking. In the higher streets no such undignified or unrestrained display was permitted, but Shinko saw the lights and heard the music of more than one small party. It was almost as if Tortall could forget it was a nation at war – but then she noted the relative lack of men in the streets, and the number of people with visible injuries, old and new, and wondered how long it would take the marks of three wars in twenty-five years to be smoothed away. Perhaps war had become a Tortallan way of life, as much as assassination was a Yamani political tool.
Shinko looked Tortall in the face, and appreciated what she saw – and that she did not yet understand it, not as she would like to.
They had no trouble slipping back into the palace, and they parted in the gardens, at the same place where they had met. Roald kissed the back of her hand and her palm, and Shinko could only respond with a helpless smile and a slight squeeze of his fingers, but the look on his face told her it was enough. She walked back to her rooms feeling as if she were aglow, although common sense and a grasp of her own ability to conceal her feelings told her she was not, and when she got there only Yuki was waiting for her.
She was reading something and annotating it, looking deeply amused. Shinko suspected Nealan of Queenscove’s poetry.
“Lady Cricket,” Yuki said, looking up. “How was your walk?”
“Enjoyable. We saw a play – No More Yielding But A Dream.”
“I hope it was to your liking.”
“Very much so.” Shinko took off her necklace, feeling the subtle reversion back to her own features and relishing it as much as she had enjoyed being Cricket for an evening. “How was your evening?”
“Peaceful,” Yuki replied. “Lady Haname has not yet returned, and has, in fact, acquired a supper engagement with Sir Myles and his wife. Queen Thayet sent a page to invite you to an informal family supper. I said you were feeling a little indisposed at the moment, but if you felt well enough you would certainly go.”
Shinko nodded. “When?”
“When the bell strikes eight.” Yuki looked a little worried. “You have only a little time to change your dress.”
Shinko looked down at her dress and considered it. “The page said it was an informal supper?”
“With particular emphasis on the word informal, yes.”
“In that case, I shall not change my dress. It is not necessary.”
Yuki nodded. “As you wish.”
Shinko paused. She knew that Haname and Yuki took care that one of them was always with her, as much to protect her as to maintain their chaperonage, and if they could not be with her – as at small, informal family suppers – they were in her rooms, where they would be easily found. But this was Tortall, and the rules were different, and she had three knives in her dress and some unacceptably pointy hairpins (all of which would have to be removed before entering the royal presence). She could look after herself in this safest of places and protocol permitted her to do so. Moreover, Yuki liked people. She would be tremendously bored on her own.
Nealan of Queenscove would be around, wouldn’t he? If not, he would quickly alter his plans so that he was available to see Yuki. Shinko knew him that well.
Flush with romantic sympathy, Shinko made up her mind. “Yuki, I will not require your assistance this evening. You are at liberty to visit any of your friends that you please.”
Yuki looked momentarily surprised. “Your highness-”
Shinko looked at her. After Prince Eitaro and his wife had left, she had clarified some things with Yuki and Haname, including an order to keep honorifics to a strict minimum. Yuki would always treat her as her liege-lady: Shinko saw no problem with that. But because of her father’s disgraces she had not been raised to expect extraordinary rank, and among her closest companions, she preferred a degree of informality more strictly reared princesses might abhor.
“Shinkokami,” Yuki corrected. “Should I not be here, in case you need me?”
“I am not going to need you,” Shinko said patiently. “And I consider it high time that you enjoyed some leisure.”
She left unspoken the fact that she and Haname and Yuki would have to lead more separate lives one day – Haname and Yuki would marry; they would all have their own apartments and lands, husbands, children, their own particular cares to occupy them – and swept into the dressing room without leaving Yuki time to argue.
She tucked the glamour necklace Roald had given her into a small compartment in her jewellery box, and selected instead a more sophisticated piece sent to her the previous Midwinter – delicate pink tourmalines in a complex gold Carthaki setting, accompanied by a note in Empress Kalasin’s own hand: a gift for my newest sister, with the hope that you and I shall meet one day. Shinko knew the royal family would recognise it; she had opened the gift from Carthak at the same time as they had opened theirs, and it had been much admired. She put it on and watched herself in the mirror as she unpinned and combed her hair before pinning it up again in a simple style, adding in the pink ribbon she’d worn earlier and applying minimal face paint, as suitable for a family supper at which none of the women were likely to be wearing more than a little lip colour in the Eastern style. The necklace suited her. Jasson, endearingly awkward around her but incurably truthful, had told her that Roald wrote to his sister weekly; for Kalasin to have chosen so well, Roald must have described her in great detail. Perhaps he had even included a picture of her. Of course, Shinko didn’t know this was true: it was just as likely that the Carthaki ambassador had described the heir apparent’s betrothed to the emperor in his letters. But she preferred the idea that Roald had written to his perfect oldest sister about her.
She left her rooms and found Yuki immediately outside, talking to Nealan. Roald stood by, listening; he alone showed no surprise when she opened the door, and he smiled at her as soon as he saw her.
“Your highness,” Nealan said, starting like a cat in water and bowing very correctly.
Shinko suppressed her amusement and gave him a gracious nod. “Squire Nealan. I wish you a pleasant evening.”
Nealan went slightly red about the ears and his eyes darted sideways to Yuki, who disappeared behind her fan. Roald grinned appreciatively. He had obviously completely recovered from his appalling day with Sir Gareth if his sense of humour had made a return.
“My thanks, your highness,” Nealan replied, flourishing courtesy unimpaired. “I hope you will not consider me too forward if I wish you the same.”
“Thank you, Neal, off you go,” Roald said cheerfully, giving his friend a meaningful look.
Nealan disappeared promptly. Yuki threw Shinko a laughing glance, gave the slight bow Shinko had deemed appropriate for their changed circumstances, and followed him.
Shinko caught her betrothed’s eye. He shook his head slightly and raised his eyes towards the Divine Realms, and Shinko felt herself in perfect accord with him.
“I thought I would escort you to supper,” he said, and offered her his arm. “If you have recovered from your indisposition.”
“You are always thoughtful,” Shinko said, laying her hand on his arm. “And thank you: I have.”
Yuki had once told Shinko that it was said she and Roald would have the politest marriage ever, and implied that Tortallans considered that a slur – or at least far from flattering. As she walked decorously down the hall with the same man she’d secretly explored Corus with, under a different face and assumed name and without guards, Shinko considered it a compliment. She saw nothing wrong with a little good manners.
I adore the way you have written their relationship, and the way you highlight the ways that their life is so different, and yet that they are completely accepting of it. And the start is just so cute! 
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!