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Ead stared up at the Queen’s Tower. Beyond the ranks of windows and gutters, beyond the laddering vines and architectural flourishes, a single light twinkled through the darkness like a star.
Or a beacon.
Hand over hand, Ead climbed. Sabran had been even angrier and more withdrawn since she formally rejected the prince’s advances. Everyone at the court could feel the tension. Ead alone felt another, stronger tension: Sabran’s eyes on her every time they spoke, Sabran’s shiver every time Ead so much as brushed the queen’s skirts.
It was, Ead told herself, probably the tension of someone wanting to be your really good friend. Like, really just appreciating your company, right? Right?
Nah. She took a deep breath, feeling an inexplicable draw towards Sabran’s window, and began to climb. She would confess her feelings or fall trying.
Ead did not need to pause and check her path, for she felt the pull of Sabran’s presence as surely as a taut line, and also like, it was a tower. You could climb up or you could climb down. There was not a lot of room to get lost.
The moon bathed her path in its lambent glow. She boosted herself up on a window sill and edged around a narrow ledge. Wind-blown debris crumbled away under her feet. Ead heard the distant patter of dirt and mortar on the glasshouse roof below and shuddered with exhilaration. Climbing such a height like this felt like walking hand in hand with death itself.
She kept her eyes open and trained on the stones. No mistakes could be afforded. Hand over hand, up one jutting stone and then another. She couldn’t see the candle from this angle. Sabran was still actually in the tower, right?
But she had to be. Ead could feel her call, as strongly as if Sabran sang out to her. She was so close to the window now. All she had to do was pull herself up over the ledge, surmount the balustrade and crawl inside.
Meanwhile, on a distant strand of the multiverse, Melissa Etheridge was strumming a guitar and having a Feeling.
Experts agree that, on a scale of numbness to ten, most humans feel their emotions at a five, although artists frequently score as high as eight. Melissa felt hers at a twenty-five, which is impressive even taking into account the +5 associated with Gay Drama.
She considered the girlfriend-less void outside her window and struck another chord. Across the multiverse, gays felt an inexplicable urge to turn up the volume really loud and belt badly about their drama. It was A Lot.
It was such An emotional, gut-wrenching, soul-shaking Lot that the fabric of reality (reality, widely considered by experts to be fake, is therefore also bisexual) spasmed in glorious agony at the exact moment that Ead hauled herself over the balustrade, landed cat-like, and delivered a hair-toss that would have made even the straightest Berethnet monarch go weak at the knees.
Except. There was a problem.
“Can I help you?” Melissa stared at the intruder, and fumbled a chord, which honestly still sounded pretty good. Ead stared back at her.
“You—uh—are not Queen Sabran Berethnet.”
Melissa looked around her room. Ead followed her gaze, craning her neck. “Is Sabran in here somewhere?”
“Who?”
“Sabran. Queen of Inys. Descendant of the Saint. No? About this tall, perfect hair, looks really good in a farthingale, has this soul-penetrating gaze that just—” Ead let out a sigh. If any experts had been there to measure its emotional intensity, that sigh would have broken the scale.
“You get it,” Melissa said. Her low, throaty voice stirred something deep within Ead. She turned away from the window, and the careful climb-down plan she’d begun to formulate.
“I’ve made promises I can’t afford to keep,” Ead said, “I can’t sleep at night. And yet—I’d forsake all the rest of them for her, my home, my people—”
“Just to reach her” Melissa agreed. She shut her eyes tight, and strummed a new chord on the guitar. Ead gasped. The music hit her somewhere in her deepest, darkest, most dramatic self. It was like a hit of siden, if siden came with an intense urge to go look really good in a black leather jacket.
Ead took an uncertain step towards Melissa. Melissa, eyes still shut, exhaled a rough, mournful line of poetry.
“Yeah,” Ead whispered. “And you don’t know how far I’d go—”
“You don’t know how much I’d give—”
Melissa opened her eyes as Ead came face to face with her, and they shared a look so rife with feelings that somewhere in the multiverse, all experts started screaming as their instruments exploded.
“I was climbing to her window,” Ead whispered, all her earlier longing suddenly transmuted by the power of really excellent 90s folk-rock and someone looking good in a leather jacket.
“But you crawled in through mine,” Melissa said, and they kissed furiously over the guitar as its strings throbbed with a bridge so intense that I have an uncontrollable urge to start belting it out as I type. It was that amazing.
The kiss was pretty good, too.
“I have to go back to her,” Ead said as they fell apart. “She needs me. She’s a dumbass who keeps making bad calls—”
“Oh no,”
“And I think she thinks she’s straight?”
“Oh no,”
“But she’s my dumbass.” Ead finished her sentence as the last chords died out. Slowly, Melissa nodded.
“Go to her. Don’t let anyone’s words dissuade you. I give you my blessing.”
“I’m coming to you, Sabran,” Ead said, very heroically, and she vaulted back over the balustrade and into the dizzy, love-drunkenly tangled fabric of reality. Melissa considered her parting words. They had a nice ring.