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Anyone else would have gotten an automatic, “Please don’t.” I really do prefer Dulcie. But somehow, Dulcinea sounded just right when this magical old guy said it. Plus, he’d said I was sweet to match my name. From him, that sounded like high praise. “Thank you. Dulcinea is fine. And you’re…?”
“Prince Medwyn Greyfell.”
The metaphorical lightbulb went on over my head. No wonder he knew who I was. “You’re Eric’s father.”
“And there you have it.” He gave me a small smile. Brit had mentioned him more than once. Besides being Eric’s father, Prince Medwyn was also the second most powerful man in Gullandria, the king’s top advisor, the one they called the grand counselor.
Prince Medwyn held out that pale, veined hand. I gave him mine. He brought my hand close and brushed his thin, dry lips—so lightly, the whisper of dragonfly wings—against my knuckles.
I realized I adored him. Who wouldn’t? “Tell me more.”
“Concerning?”
“Oh, anything. The Norse myths. Who wove this tapestry and how old it is…”
“In 1640, it was presented as a gift from the King of Bohemia to King Velief Danelaw, in appreciation of Gullandria’s support in convincing the Swedes to withdraw from Bohemian soil. The creator, more likely than not a woman, as women are the weavers in our lands, is not known.”
I turned to the tapestry again. “Artist unknown…” A heated flush crept up my cheeks. “I hate that. Someone labored for months, or even years, creating something so beautiful. And in the end, who remembers her name?”
“Alas, Dulcinea. You do speak true.”
“It’s as if the artist never even existed. It’s just not…” Turning, I saw that the place where the old man had stood was empty. I blinked and glanced around. Nothing. He was gone.
It was pretty bizarre, how fast he’d vanished. And right in the middle of my sentence, too. Yet strangely, I felt neither dissed nor deserted. There was something about him. You just knew the everyday rules of conduct didn’t apply in his case. Like he was above them, or beyond them…
With a sigh, I turned to the tapestry again. By then, I’d forgotten all about my firm intention to avoid acting the wallflower. I was thinking of Medwyn, getting that hungry feeling I get when I meet someone interesting, hoping I’d see him again, planning to have a list of questions ready next time.
When I went back home to L.A., I wanted to have loads of Gullandrian background material. I tried to do that wherever I went, to take lots of notes, to get my questions about the place answered and to keep a computer journal of my impressions. I planned to write a lot of books in my life. Every location was a potential setting for a novel. Up till then, the farthest I’d been from California was a trip to New York City, in the spring, right after 9/11. I’d seen Ground Zero, walked down Park Avenue, visited SoHo and the Village. I’d come home deeply moved, full to bursting with ideas and possibilities. I hadn’t written my New York novel yet. Give me time. Same thing with Gullandria. I would take it all in, and take notes, as well. And someday…
“Dulce?” It was Brit, jerking me out of my authorly delusions of grandeur and back to the here and now. I was still facing the tapestry and away from her, but from the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a black tux: a man, standing beside her. More cheerful greetings, another name for me to instantly forget…
I turned with a big, hello-and-nice-to-meet-you smile.
And there he was.
My prince.
What can I tell you? That the world stopped? That the stars went supernova?
It was nothing like that.
It was everything like that.
“My brother, Prince Valbrand.” Brit’s voice seemed to come from somewhere down at the other end of a very long tunnel. She was so far away, she almost wasn’t there. Not to me.
The music, the glittering lights, the rise and fall of laughter and conversation around us…everything was overshadowed. Eclipsed.
By him.
He filled up the world. He had dark brown hair and eyes to match. A tender mouth—half of one, anyway. He was tall. Lean. Too lean, really, but with strong, wide shoulders.
And all that is…only fact. The full reality was so much grander, so much more complete. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen—and the most terrifying.
How can I tell you?
How can I make you see?
Half of his face appeared to have melted. Remember that old Mel Gibson movie, The Man Without a Face? That was Valbrand. It happened, I’d been told, in an accident at sea that almost killed him. An accident that included second- and third-degree burns from temple to jaw on the left side—burns never treated, that healed on their own.
Brit had prepared me, or at least she’d tried to. We’d had a few minutes alone the day before and she’d told me of his injuries, so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself, gaping like an idiot the first time I saw him, so that I wouldn’t pile any more hurt on all that had already been done to him.
So much for Brit’s thoughtful preparations. I saw him and the world spun away and I flat-out gaped. Rudely. Blatantly.
There was a sudden, welling pressure at the back of my throat. I was so busy staring, I didn’t make myself swallow the emotion. My eyes brimmed and two fat tears escaped. They slid over the dam of my lower lids and trailed down my cheeks.
They felt hot. Scalding. Should I have swiped them away? Probably. Tried to hide them? I suppose.
But I didn’t. I only tipped my face to him, higher, as if to display both my face—and those tears.
Somewhere, in some part of me, I realized that Brit had to be thinking she couldn’t take me anywhere.
But it wasn’t something I could control. It was love like a thunderbolt. And it was my heart breaking.
For him.
For what I saw in his lightless eyes.
What he was once. What he had become.
For all that was lost.
Chapter 2
I gazed down at the redheaded American in the blue gown, at the wide eyes that were some gleaming color, green and gold and brown all mixed, at the tears sliding over those soft, smooth cheeks, leaving a glittering trail.
First one and then the other, the tears dropped. They fell to the front of her dress, just below where her fine, full breasts swelled from their prison of fabric. I watched them fall, watched dark blue turn darker: twin small stains. I wanted to lower my head, stick out my tongue and taste them: the salt of her tears.
That was when I looked away—for a second or two only, long enough to collect my suddenly scattered wits, long enough to remind myself that, while a madman might bend close and lick the tearstains from a woman’s breast, I must not.
I was a madman no longer. I was, once again, a prince. Once again, I was bound by all the strictures, all the dragging obligations and careful courtesies that being a prince—and the only surviving son of a king—entailed. This servitude to princely sanity was necessary. I had goals. Sworn. Sacred. And murderous. Goals the madman in me was too disorganized to achieve.
I dared to look at the American again. Her expression had not changed. She gazed at me as if all that she was, all she had been or would ever be, was mine. It stunned me how powerfully I wanted to take what she offered—right there. On the polished, inlaid hardwood of the ballroom floor.
I had to look away again. I glanced toward the dancers in the center of the floor. Once I had loved nights like that one, in the ballroom, all the lights blazing, fine music, the laughter of flirtatious women…
And the absolute assurance that I was where I belonged.
But that was before the horror. Before the madness. By that night, the night I met my sister’s friend, it was all too difficult, too hurtful—the pity in such large doses, the expressions of shock followed instantly by broad counterfeit smiles.
I longed, if not for the refuge of madness, at least for the mask. For the comfort of shadows.
Or I had, until that moment.
Until the redheaded American with the wide, honest eyes.
I looked at her again and found she had waited for my gaze to find her once more—waited with her head tipped up, the tear-tracks drying on her velvet skin. I did not smile at her. My smile, after all, had become an exercise in the grotesque. Flesh and muscle pulling in the most bizarre ways.
I was thinking, A few words only: Hello. How are you? So pleased to meet my little sister’s dearest friend, at last.
A few words, and then farewell. I would turn and walk away.
But no words came.
Instead, in a moment of purest insanity, I held out my hand. I knew she would trust her hand to me, without hesitation. With no coyness.
And she did.
Somewhere a thousand miles away, my brave and cheeky little sister said, “Well, um, okay. Looks like I can leave you two on your own for a while…”
Neither I nor the woman with her hand in mine answered her. Brit was far away right then. Everything was far away and I was glad it was. Everything but the American, everything but her soft hand in mine, her honest eyes, the truth in her tears, shed for me.
The music right then was slow in rhythm. No longer a waltz, but a foxtrot. An American classic: “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Suddenly I was ridiculously smug, as if the orchestra had played this perfect song at my command. I saw I had the excuse a sane man needs to take a woman he’s only just met into his arms: a dance.
I guided her to me, put my left arm at the curve of her back, felt the slightly stiff fabric of her dress—and the warm softness waiting beneath it.
Her flesh, I thought and heat shot up my arm to break at my shoulder into arrows of need. The arrows flew on, cutting all through me. My body responded like the starved thing it was.
I knew shame.
Loss of control was a thing I greatly despised since my slow return from the horror and the madness. I might be hideous now. But I was well-behaved. And in perfect control.
I hadn’t thought to worry about my penis betraying me. Since the horror, it kept…a low profile. At times I might imagine the joys of bedding a woman, but those thoughts were like faint echoes from a safer, happier time; not real to me anymore, vague bittersweet fantasies that always remained strictly above the neck.
Or they had until that night, at the first in a gala series of balls honoring the imminent union of my sister and my bloodbound lifelong friend—that night, when I made the mistake of pulling the American I’d just met into my arms for a dance. That night, when I saw something I wanted beyond the triumph of my revenge and knew that it was something I would never have.
I longed to yank her closer—and at the same time, to shove her away, turn on my heel and run.
I didn’t fear that anyone would see the way my body shamed me. My trousers, like every other man’s in the room, were black. Black is effective at masking unwelcome bulges. And while I held the woman in my arms, no one would be glancing there anyway. And even if they had, I would not have cared.
The shame was not that someone might see. The shame was that I had let my guard down so far and so fast that it had happened at all. One would think I would have learned better, after all I’d allowed to be done to me—and more important, to those who followed me—as a result of failing to stay in control and on guard.
I held the American lightly, enough away that I knew she couldn’t feel my physical response to her. And I kept my wreck of a face carefully composed.
As I led her across the floor, I saw in her sweet and dreamy expression that she had no clue of my sudden shame. I began to relax. Soon enough, the front of my trousers lay smooth once more.
The song ended. I led her back to the place I had met her, near the World Tree tapestry. My sister, by then, had moved on to other guests, other introductions.
I let go of the American’s hand. She stepped back—at the same time as her body seemed to lift and sway toward me, like a flower seeking the sun.
Didn’t she realize? What she sought was not in me. No light. No warmth. In me, there was only darkness and a determination to root out and destroy what had so very nearly destroyed me, what had been responsible for the deaths of good men who had trusted me.
I nodded. She bit her soft lower lip and nodded in response, clasping her hands low in front of her, knuckles toward the floor. Demure—and yet so very eager.
Her soft lips parted.
I put up a hand before she could speak.
She closed her mouth, seemed to settle back into herself. She nodded again. Brave. Disappointed.
I turned and left her there.
Neither of us had said a single word.
Chapter 3
Sunday, December 8, 11:02 pm; the king’s palace, Gullandria. Snowing.
Before I drew the heavy window curtains and climbed into bed, I stood for a moment at the tall mullioned windows, watching the white flakes coming out of the blackness to hit the diamond-shaped panes.
Things I learned today
Offshore oil drilling: major Gullandrian industry since the 1970s. Country was poor before its discovery; now, prosperous.
kingmaking: the election ceremony in which the jarl elect the next king.
Gullandrian slate: all of Isenhalla’s outer walls are faced in this silvery gray and semireflecting stone.
bloodsworn: a vow of
I looked up and groaned, then bent my head again to the mini word processor in my lap.…
Trouble concentrating. Keep thinking of last night, of V. Know I shouldn’t. Clearly a case of inbred romantic impulses spiraling scarily out of control. Must keep firmly in mind that it was only a dance. One dance. He didn’t speak. Neither did I. He shushed me. Now that should tell me something—that he was shushing me when I hadn’t said a word.
No sign of him today, or this evening at dinner. I might have asked Brit about him, but, as usual since I arrived here, we hardly had a moment to ourselves.
I can’t help believing that he
I looked up again, blinking, shaking my head.
Oh, lovely. Obsessing over Valbrand. Again. Filling up my AlphaSmart with lovesick babble.
A few minutes on the dance floor with Brit’s long-lost brother and there I was, a slave to love. I’d stayed awake all night the night before, typing like mad, filling four whole files with V., V., V. Had to dump most of it. Drivel anyway and the Alphie only had so much space. Until I got home to my PC, I’d have no place to download it. And the point was to pack it with facts and observations about Gullandria—not endless yada-yada about a man I hardly knew.
That morning I had made a firm resolution: if I couldn’t keep myself from starting in about him, I would at least switch to longhand. Maybe longhand would stop me. I swear, at the rate I was going, if I put it all in longhand, I’d be sure to get writer’s cramp, end up with a hand like a twisted claw.
Which would serve me right. I mean, how could I have spent all night pounding the keys on the subject of a guy with whom I had not exchanged one word?
Don’t answer that.
