A Throne for Sisters

It seemed so cynical now, going to the court to snare the attentions of some rich man, or inveigle her way into the good graces of some noble friend. Compared to what she was feeling now, that all felt cheap and tawdry.

“What are you thinking?” Sebastian asked, reaching up to touch her face. Sophia had a brief moment to reflect that it must be strange, living your life having to ask that. Mostly though, she thought about how perfect his skin felt against hers.

“Just that I still can’t quite believe this is happening,” Sophia said. “I mean… I have nothing. I am nothing.”

She saw Sebastian shake his head. “Don’t ever say that. The war might have taken your home, but you’re still… you’re amazing, Sophia. I saw you at the party, and it was like you were the sun standing among dim stars.”

“Wasn’t it your brother who was supposed to be the sun?” Sophia joked, but then put a hand on Sebastian’s arm to stop him as he started to answer. Partly because she didn’t want to go there, and partly because she could feel that Sebastian didn’t either. “No, don’t. I don’t want to talk about Prince Rupert. I’d rather hear about you.”

Sebastian actually laughed then. “Normally, it’s the other way around. The number of times I’ve had women come up to me just because they want to get closer to my brother, you’d think I was his pimp or his procurer.”

Sophia could feel the note of bitterness there. She guessed that it was hard being the brother no one paid any attention to. They kept walking along corridors lined with wood panels and hunting trophies, every niche hung with tapestries and paintings that made Sophia want to stop and stare at the sheer quality of the work involved.

“I find it hard to believe that women would ignore you,” Sophia said. “Are they blind?”

It was too much, but right then, she couldn’t help herself.

“There are some,” Sebastian admitted. “They crowd around sometimes, and I can see them planning who will make the next move.”

“Milady d’Angelica?” Sophia asked.

That brought a smile. “Among others.”

Sophia couldn’t help herself then. “She is very beautiful. And I’m told she has excellent taste in dresses.”

That earned her a small look of puzzlement, but that was quickly gone.

“I guess I’m looking for more than that,” Sebastian said. “And… well, I get the feeling that they’re hoping to catch me in a marriage. I want to be more to someone than just the object in a game.”

The guilt from before flashed through Sophia again then, because in her way, she was every bit as bad as the others were. Well, maybe not as bad as a girl who had been planning to drug Sebastian and take advantage of that, but she was still being anything but honest with him.

“I wish I could say that my intentions were entirely pure,” Sophia said. She shouldn’t be warning the prince, but right then she felt as though she owed it to him. She could see what kind of man he was. Exactly the kind of honesty and kindness that made him so attractive to her meant that Sophia felt as though she shouldn’t be doing this at all. “I wish that this were just because I liked you.”

“But you do like me?” Sebastian said.

There was no one else around right then, so Sophia let herself do what she’d wanted to do since the ballroom, and kissed him.

It was a strange experience. The only time it had happened in the orphanage had been when an older boy had pushed Sophia up against a wall, forcing his mouth against hers until one of the nuns had broken it up. Sophia had been beaten for it, as if she’d had any choice in it all. That had been rough, and brief, and disgusting.

This kiss was none of those things. Sebastian, it turned out, was a gentle kisser, whose mouth met Sophia’s in what seemed like a perfect joining of two halves into one whole. Sophia could sense the concern in him, not wanting to drive her away even as he wanted to kiss her deeper. She wrapped her arms around him, encouraging him, and for a moment or two, Sophia let herself be swept away by it.

“I hope that answers your question,” Sophia said. “It’s just – ”

“That you are homeless, and you do need to do what it takes for a noble girl to survive?” Sebastian suggested. “I understand, Sophia. Let’s face it, most of the girls in there wouldn’t have been half so honest.”

Probably not, Sophia guessed, but right then, she didn’t want Sebastian thinking about the other girls who had been in the ballroom.

“Are we okay?” she asked. She hadn’t thought it would be this hard to bring herself to seduce someone. Maybe she should have gone with someone else. Someone she could have done this to without feeling guilty.

The truth was that Sophia didn’t want anyone else.

“I think we’re more than okay,” Sebastian said, offering her his arm.

Sophia took it, relishing the feeling of being that close to him. It made her heart beat a little faster just to be there, and she found herself missing half of the beautiful things they passed in the palace, simply because she spent her time staring at Sebastian instead.

The palace was impressive, though. It seemed to stretch forever, in washes of marble and gold that must have cost a fortune to construct.

“It must have been incredible, growing up in a place like this,” Sophia said, thinking of just how different it all was from the orphanage. There was the most precious thing of all here: space. Space without people shouting or giving her orders. Space without a hundred other girls all forced into hating one another because they had to compete for every scrap of kindness and food.

“It’s an impressive building,” Sebastian said, “but honestly, it isn’t the one I spent the most time in as a child. My mother had me raised on one of the smaller country estates we own, because there were times when the city seemed too dangerous.”

Sophia hadn’t thought about that. Of course the dowager would have a dozen castles and homes spread around the kingdom.

“It was just you?” Sophia asked. “Not you and your brother, or you with your mother?” She caught a hint of sadness in Sebastian’s thoughts then, and reached up to brush his jaw with her fingers. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ruin the mood.”

“No, it’s fine,” Sebastian replied. “It’s actually good to have someone who wants to know. But no, I was mostly kept apart from Rupert, and from Mother. The idea was that we wouldn’t all be in the same place if anything… happened.”

In other words, so that one of them would survive if there was an attack or a fire, a plague or some other disaster. Sophia could understand it in a way, but even so, it seemed like a harsh way to live. Kate had been the only one giving her the strength to keep going when they’d been younger.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here now,” Sophia said.

“So am I,” Sebastian assured her.

They made their way up to a suite of rooms shut off from the rest of the palace by a solid oak door. Sophia had been expecting a bedroom beyond, but instead, it was like a whole house crammed into the space. There was a receiving room furnished with older but comfortable divans and rugs, and there were doors leading off the space that Sophia guessed led to bedrooms or dressing rooms.

Sebastian held her out at arm’s length. “Sophia, there’s a second bedroom here if you want it. I… I don’t want you to feel that you have to do anything, just to get my help.”

That was one of the kindest things anyone had done for Sophia. She’d assumed that everyone wanted something. She’d assumed that even for nobles, safety was a kind of transaction. Yet here the prince was, giving her a chance to get everything she wanted without having to ever go near his bed.

“You’re a good man, Sebastian,” she said, taking his hands. “A kind man.”

She kissed his hands, then pulled him closer.

“And that’s why I don’t just want to sleep in the room next door.”

They kissed again then, and there was far more passion in this attempt than there had been in the previous one. Perhaps part of that was that Sophia had far more confidence that she knew what to do now. Perhaps part of it was that Sebastian didn’t feel as though he had to hold back.

They clung to each other, kissing as their hands started to explore one another. Sophia felt a moment of nervousness then, and Sebastian looked at her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “It’s just… I haven’t – ”

“I understand,” Sebastian said. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, though.”

Sophia kissed him again. “I’m not.”

Somehow, between them, they made their way across the floor of the reception room without ever letting go of one another. Sophia fumbled with the stays of her dress, then gasped as Sebastian started to undo them for her.

He pushed open the door to one of the rooms there, and Sophia got a glimpse of a four-poster bed in blue silk before Sebastian lifted her, laying her down on it as gently as a feather.

“Yes?” he asked.

Sophia smiled up at him. “Yes, Sebastian. Very much yes.”

***

Afterward, Sophia lay in the dark, curled against Sebastian and listening to his breathing as he slept. She could feel the press of his muscles against her back there, and the movement as he shifted in his sleep made her want to wake him and start everything they’d finished again.

She didn’t, though, even though everything that had gone before had been more beautiful, more pleasurable, just… more, than she could have ever imagined. She wanted to take everything she could now, but the truth was that Sophia hoped that there would be time enough not to have to. She hoped that there would be a dozen more nights like this, a hundred.

A lifetime’s worth.

She felt the weight of his arm draped over her in sleep, and right then, Sophia felt as though she had everything she could ever have wanted.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The morning came, and when it did, Kate wasn’t sure that she’d ever worked so hard in her life. Not on any of the orphanage’s wheels or chores, certainly not since. The strangest part of it was that she was happier than she’d ever been too. Happy to be doing this work, pounding metal and working the bellows.

It helped that Thomas was a patient teacher. Where they’d beaten her at the orphanage, he corrected Kate by showing her better ways to do things and reminding her when she forgot.

“We need to draw out the metal more,” he said. “With a scythe blade, it needs to be thin and sharp. It needs slicing, not impact.”

Kate nodded, helping to hold the billet in place while he struck it, then pumping the bellows to get the flames to the correct temperature. There was so much to learn around the forge, so many little subtleties that went beyond simply heating metal and hitting it. Already today, she’d learned about the art of welding metal together in the forge, about the scale that formed with too much work on iron, and about judging the difference between good iron and bad.

“I want to cover the back half of the blade with clay when we harden it,” Thomas said, “because…?”

“Because that will mean it cools slower than the edge?” Kate guessed.

“Very good,” Thomas said. “That will mean that the edge is harder, while the rest is less brittle. You’re doing well, Kate.”

Kate wasn’t sure that she’d ever had anyone encourage her before. In her life to date, there had only been punishments when she’d done something wrong.

Some lessons were easier than others. Metalwork required patience that Kate hadn’t built up. She always wanted to do the next thing, when sometimes the only thing to do was wait while metal heated up or cooled down.

“There are things you can’t rush,” Thomas said. “You have time, Kate. Savor your life, don’t wish away the moments.”

Kate did her best, but even so, it wasn’t easy. Now that she’d found something she enjoyed doing, she didn’t want to waste a moment of it. There were plenty of wasted moments, though, mostly spent looking through the forge or the shed nearby for things they needed. Despite Thomas’s obvious talents as a smith, organization clearly wasn’t one of them.

“I’ll go and fetch lunch for us,” Thomas said. “Winifred has been making bread. Don’t try to forge anything yourself while I’m gone.”

He left for the house, and Kate found herself chafing under the weight of his instruction. If he hadn’t told her not to do it, she probably would have jumped up and started working on a knife or a section of wrought iron. Probably a knife, because Kate could see the usefulness of that in a way that she couldn’t with a decorative bracket or a gate bar.

She couldn’t just stand still, though, couldn’t just rest, in spite of the heat and the closeness of the forge. In the absence of anything better to do, Kate found herself starting to reorganize things. The tongs made no sense in a random tangle of ironwork, so Kate hung them up on a hook. The sections of metal made no sense in a rough pile that made no distinction between brass and iron, hard steel and mild.

Kate started to sort through it all, arranging it into neat stacks. She set the tools in places that seemed to make sense, based on where Thomas would probably need them. From the forge, she went over to the shed, with its barrels and its stacks, setting everything into place, trying to bring some kind of order to the chaos of it all.

It took a while, but Kate could see how to do it. She pictured herself moving through the shed and the forge, picking things up as she needed them. Then she simply put things where they needed to be in order to make that work. She swept the floor, tidying away the fragments of metal that had fallen there, and the sand that had spilled from casting in brass and bronze.

“You look as though you’ve been busy,” Thomas said as he came back.

In that moment, fear crept into Kate’s heart. What if she’d done the wrong thing? What if he punished her for it? What if he told her to leave, and Kate found herself having to find her way on the streets of Ashton again? She wasn’t sure that she could go back to that, so soon after having found a place in which to be safe.

“You aren’t angry, are you?” Kate asked.

“Angry?” Thomas said with a laugh. “I’ve been meaning to organize this place for years. Winifred keeps telling me to do it, but what with one thing and another… well, I’ve never gotten around to it. It looks as though you’ve done a good job, too.”

Thomas handed her half a loaf then, stuffed with cheese and ham. It was more food than Kate was used to being given in the orphanage, and certainly more than she’d managed to steal for herself on the streets. She wanted to think that there had been a time as a child when she had been well fed and cared for, but the truth was that Kate couldn’t remember it. It was hard to believe that it could possibly all be for her.

Even so, Kate ate, because she wasn’t going to let food go to waste. Especially not since she was starving after working the forge so long. She devoured the bread at a speed that made Thomas raise an eyebrow.

“I hadn’t realized you were that hungry, or we’d have stopped sooner.”

Kate wiped her mouth, realized that she probably didn’t look very civilized right then, and didn’t care. That was something that her sister might have worried about, but it wasn’t something for her to be concerned with.

She looked around, and found herself hoping that Sophia had found something as good as this for herself. Kate wasn’t sure if this would last forever, because she couldn’t imagine anything lasting forever right then, but if it did, she wouldn’t mind. This was as close to perfect as she could have hoped for.

When she was done with her lunch, it seemed that Thomas had more lessons for her.

“You want to know about weapons more than the rest of it, don’t you?” he asked.

Kate nodded.

“Before you can forge them, you need to know about the differences between them. Come with me.”

He led the way to the shed, leading Kate inside. Thanks to her reorganization, it didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. Kate was actually a little proud of that.

“There aren’t just swords and daggers and axes,” he said, lifting blade blanks and a couple of wooden blades that obviously served as models. “A rapier isn’t a broadsword. An offhand blade catcher isn’t a stiletto. You need to learn the differences in their balance and their weight, the way they’re meant to be used and the places where they’re meant to be strong.”

“I want to learn all of that,” Kate assured him. She wanted nothing more than that.

Thomas nodded. “I know. That’s why I want you to spend the rest of the day trying blades and carving one that you think would fit you best. When you’ve done that, we’ll work out what you’ve done right and what still needs work.”

“Why carve it?” Kate asked. “Why not just forge it?”

Thomas looked at her expectantly. “You already know the answer to that, Kate.”

“Because wood moves easier than steel,” Kate said.

“Exactly.” He handed her a whittling knife. “Now, get to it, and we’ll see what you come up with. If it’s good enough, I’ll even let you forge it.”

That prospect excited Kate more than the rest of it put together. She would do a good job with this. She couldn’t remember her father, but right then, Thomas almost felt like one to her.

She was going to make him proud of her.

***

Kate spent the rest of the day learning that wood didn’t move quite as easily as she’d thought it did. It certainly didn’t move in the same way that steel did, and the skills she’d been learning from Thomas weren’t of much use when it came to carving her wooden weapon.

Wood didn’t flow like water when you heated it. Wood didn’t bend the same way. It didn’t stretch into new shapes. All you could do with it was shave from it, taking off more material to see what was left behind. That took some getting used to, and Kate found herself considering each stroke of the knife as she sought to construct a weapon that was perfect for her.

In the corner of the yard, her stolen horse whickered. To Kate, it sounded far too much like amusement.

“It’s easy for you,” she said. “Nobody has ever made you design a sword.”

It needed to be slender and light, of course, because she wasn’t as large or as strong as a boy would have been. But it still needed to have strength down toward the hilt, so that Kate could parry with it without it snapping. It would need a hilt that would protect her hand, while still being light enough to keep the balance correct. It couldn’t be too short, because Kate didn’t want to fight taller opponents with the added disadvantage of a blade shorter than theirs.

She whittled and she considered, shaping and reshaping, until finally, she had a blade that she thought might be good enough. It reminded her of a rapier more than the other kinds of blades, but just with the most delicate of curves to it to allow it slash effectively. It was the kind of weapon that might have resulted if a saber had been designed for fighting duels, rather than hacking from horseback.

Kate lifted it, and the grip felt right in her hand now, shaped perfectly for her fingers. The weight of the sword was exactly what she’d hoped it would be, light enough that it flowed as easily as breathing as she cut with it through the air.

She tried to imagine foes in front of her, and cut at them, practicing thrusts and slices, parries and binds. In her mind, she battled the boys from the orphanage and foes from a dozen lands. She struck out and leapt back, guarding against imaginary blows.

Kate could feel the need for revenge rising in her then. She found herself picturing all the people she wanted to strike down with that sword, from the boys who’d attacked her to the masked nuns who had kept her and the others virtual prisoners. Given the chance, she would hack them all down, one by one.

In the middle of it all, she found herself daydreaming about a different time. About her sister lifting her and running through a house where there were enemies she hadn’t understood. Kate had a glimpse of flames…

She stumbled, tripping on the grass of the forge’s small front yard.

“Are you all right?” a voice called out, and Kate sprang up, embarrassed, looking around with hostility at the thought that someone might have seen her fall. Almost on instinct, her wooden sword came up, leveled at the newcomer.

“I’m quite glad that isn’t a real blade,” he said.

He was taller than Kate, with blond hair cut short in a style that suggested it was to keep it out of the way. He couldn’t have been much older than Kate was, his body just starting to fill out with the muscle it would have when he was older. For now, he was slender, with a sense of wiry sense to him that Kate liked.

He was wearing the uniform of one of the mercenary companies, with a gray surcoat that had obviously been patched after some bout of fighting. Kate wasn’t sure whether to be worried by that or not.

She wasn’t sure what to feel about him at all, because right then her heart seemed to be trying to feel about a dozen different things at once. For what had to be the first time in her life, Kate felt herself feeling nervous around a boy.

“You don’t look as though you’re here to rob my father,” the boy said.

“I’m not,” Kate said. “That is… I mean… I’m Kate.”

What was wrong with her? This was closer to the way Kate expected her sister to react around a handsome boy. And just the fact that she was thinking that this boy was handsome said all kinds of things that Kate wasn’t sure she was equipped to think about.

The nuns in the House of the Unclaimed hadn’t even tried to teach their charges about love, or marriage, or anything to do with it. The assumption had been that if the girls there ended up with a man, it would be because they’d been bought for it, and nothing more.

“I’m Will,” he said, holding out a hand for her to take. Kate just about managed not to drop her wooden sword while she did it.

“I thought that you’d joined one of the mercenary companies,” Kate said. “I mean, obviously you have. You’re wearing a uniform.”

How had she turned into something so foolish? Kate didn’t know, and she didn’t like it. She could see this boy’s thoughts, though, and they weren’t helping.

I like her. She’s kind of… spiky.

“I have joined,” Will said, “but we’re back training and looking for more recruits. The wars over the water are getting more serious. It’s good to meet you, Kate. Are you helping my father out?”

She nodded. “He’s letting me stay here while I help with the forge. I’m learning from him.”

She saw Will smile at that.

“That’s good to hear,” he said. “I was worried when I joined up. I thought he wouldn’t be able to do it all. I should go in now, but… I’m glad you’re here, Kate.”

“I’m glad you’re here too,” Kate said, and then cursed herself for saying it. Who said things like that? Thankfully, Will was already heading for the house. Kate watched him go, trying not to admit to herself quite how much she enjoyed doing it, or what she felt about him then.

She liked him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Judging by the light, it was later than Sophia had intended when she woke, and it took her a moment to remember that she wasn’t on the streets, or in the hard beds of the House of the Unclaimed.

The sight of Sebastian beside her reminded Sophia of exactly where she was, and for a moment she tensed at the scale of the deception she’d undertaken last night. If she had any sense, she would creep away and not come back.

The trouble was that she didn’t want to. Right then, Sophia felt better than she had at any point in her life. The night before had been everything she could have hoped, and more. It had been sweet, it had been passionate. It had been loving, and that part at least had caused Sophia more than a little surprise.

On instinct, she reached out to brush Sebastian’s cheek with her fingers, just enjoying the sensation of him where she could touch him. Sophia felt as though she’d learned every inch of his skin the night before, but even so, she wanted to touch him again then. She wanted to be sure that he was real. That was enough to make Sebastian’s eyes open, and he smiled at her.

“So it wasn’t all some beautiful dream,” he murmured.

Sophia kissed him for that. Well, that and the fact that she wanted to. She wanted to do a lot more than that, but Sebastian pulled back.