Chapter Text
By now, Lady Marina was well-accustomed to traveling back and forth between Syracuse, her adopted home, and her birthplace of Thrace. As the fiancée of the prince of Syracuse, and an appointed ambassador to the city, she had many duties there. And despite the fact that Thrace was her ancestral home, she always slept better in Syracuse. Her rooms there in the royal palace were smaller, yes, but cozier, more comfortable—they felt even more like home than her birthplace, especially after eight years.
Syracuse was a warm, mellow, welcoming place. The balmy, always-summer climate fit well with the look of the city: a lush ocean bracketed it with profound blue, foam washing gently against the docks; the city itself was a forest of tall slender white towers of marble and gold, rising up high on a series of hills so that anyone approaching seaward for miles around could easily see the city taking shape proudly on the horizon. In the mornings, the sunrise gilded the city splendid and gleaming with warm amber light, dimpling on the white of the towers. It was deeply peaceful, especially at this time in history—no wars, solid alliances with all surrounding nations, no particular strife to disrupt Syracuse’s calm.
In the mornings, Marina liked to wake early and take a walk to the docks, sometimes sitting on the very edge and gazing out over the rippling pink-reflected water. The only sounds around her would be distant shouts of sailors doing business on their ships, and the gentle swish of the water against the dock, and the cries of gulls overhead. At that time of day, much of Syracuse was still asleep, and a tranquil energy had a hold over the city, seeping into Marina’s bones and making her feel honey-warm and heavy, like good medicine.
Today, though, she didn’t get the chance to slip down to the ocean. The sun was barely peeking up in the east when Marina woke in her chambers, shifting and stirring in her bed with her blankets bunching around her legs. It took her a few moments to pull herself confused out of deep sleep, and she pushed herself up until she was sitting hunched and tired, rubbing her eyes.
The sound that woke her came into focus slowly: a high-pitched, whistle-like screaming, coming from down the hall. So much for Syracuse being peaceful.
She knew at once who that voice belonged to, and therefore, she knew that the screaming was probably nothing to be concerned about. Scowling and rubbing the heel of her palm against her sleep-crusty eyes some more, Marina forced herself out of bed and stomped over to her wardrobe to dress. A typical lady would allow two or three female servants to dress her, but all the servants of the palace knew by now that Lady Marina, out of principle, would allow them to do nothing for her that she could do for herself. Besides, she was far too cranky at the moment to put up with a servant’s poking and prodding. The shrill voice from down the hall was only growing louder, shouting incoherently, while a chorus of other voices pleaded with it to calm down and be silent. Whatever was wrong this time, it had better be good.
Three sharp raps at her door. “Come in,” Marina called, making a few final adjustments to her sea-blue peplos.
The door opened and her fiancé entered, already dressed in his boots, loose dark pants and blue tunic with a gold sash. He offered a sheepish smile. “Ahem. You may have noticed a slight disturbance down the hall…”
“I think they’ve heard that screaming in Athens by now,” Marina grumbled, but she couldn’t keep a fond smile from her face at the sight of Proteus. Seeing him made every day, no matter how terrible, a little better. “What’s bothering her majesty this morning?”
“Evidently her favourite golden diadem has turned up missing. The princess is convinced it was stolen from her chambers.”
“Of course,” Marina sighed, blowing a wayward strand of hair out of her face with an exhaled puff of air. “And I suppose we’re to recover it for her?”
“Someone certainly must, or she’ll ‘burn the whole city down.’ Her words.” Proteus’s face took on a twisted grimace. “Honestly, I don’t doubt her for a moment.”
“And I suppose because she’s a foreigner from Damascus, I’m the one expected to deal with it,” Marina said with a little more annoyance and venom than she intended.
“If you don’t want to, I entirely understand,” Proteus replied quickly. “By all means, stay here and go back to sleep; I’ll handle it.” The screaming rose in pitch, and Proteus winced. “Or… perhaps seek out a room on a quieter floor of the palace.”
“No, no. I’m coming. It’s my duty to handle these types of things diplomatically. For better or worse,” Marina groaned, rolling her eyes skyward as deafening curses become audible from down the hall.
Moments later, they’d headed down the hallway to the Princess Desma’s chambers, and were attempting, as many servants had done before them, to calm the slighted royal.
Desma, the daughter of the king of Damascus and (for some awful reason) his chosen representative to Syracuse, was a short, slender, deeply unpleasant woman of perhaps thirty-five. You wouldn’t think such boistruous character could exist in such a small body, but the princess possessed a wicked temper which had made itself known every single day of her diplomatic visit to Syracuse. This was the worst outburst of all. (So far, Marina reminded herself with a shudder: the princess’s visit was to last at least five more days.)
“Please just listen to us, Your Majesty.” Proteus was at his wits’ end; Marina could practically feel the irritation vibrating from him where he stood beside her. “We’ll replace your lost item gladly—”
“No replacements, I want the real thing!” howled the princess. Her chambers were a garbage heap: clothes and sheets and objects tossed and thrown everywhere as though a hurricane had been set loose. (Which it had been: a hurricane named Desma. The traumatized servants standing near the door could attest to this.) “This happened in your city, in your palace, and I want you to make it right!”
“We will make it right,” Marina soothed. “I’ll send a patrol of guards to search for your diadem right away. No corner of the palace will be left unsearched.”
“No corner of the city!” corrected Desma spitefully. “That object was passed down through generations of my family. The last thing I have left of my grandfather’s—!” She was edging dangerously close to hysteria again, voice rapidly rising in pitch.
“I understand,” said Marina, calm and sympathetic, stepping forward as close to the princess as she dared, “how important your traditions are. How precious that diadem must be to you. You feel slighted, wronged. We are… so apologetic.” (Only Proteus, here, would hear the biting sarcasm in her tone; he was the only one who knew her well enough.) “No matter how, we will do our best to correct this wrong. On my own honour.”
“And mine,” echoed Proteus seriously, stepping forward.
Desma’s gaze flickered, furious, between the both of them. “You will,” she spat. “And if it’s not found, Damascus and Syracuse will never exchange a friendly word again. Never. Mark my words well!”
Proteus and Marina exchanged a look, and she saw the worry furrowed between his brows: the prince was genuinely troubled by this threat. “We understand, Your Majesty,” Marina said deferentially, bowing her head to the princess.
“Good. Now go. Get out. Take this useless clump of ingrates with you.” She threw a jewel-bedecked hand at the three servants hovering near the door. “And get better help! These fools were no help at all!” she shouted after them, the last thing Marina and Proteus heard before the door to the princess’s chambers slammed shut behind them.
“I find myself believing that she meant what she said. That she’ll truly destroy relations between our two cities over this simple, stupid thing.”
Proteus and Marina were strolling down a long hallway in the palace, taking their time to pace slowly together as they spoke. To their right—the east—the wall was open save for a succession of decorative pillars, and the morning sunlight streamed in, illuminating all in gold. Marina looked sidelong at her fiancé; his long, angular face was cast half in golden light and half in shadow, making the sharpness of his cheekbones even more apparent. He looked troubled, mouth tight, and Marina felt a burst of odd affection, and wanted to run her thumbs over those cheekbones, wanted—more than the limited privacy of a palace hallway, and their chaste royal courtship, allowed.
She settled for reaching over and touching his hand lightly. “You’ve watched her make a dozen threats over the past few days. The drapes aren’t her favourite colour, so she’ll have Dymas overthrown by her private army. The musicians in the street are too loud, so she’ll use warships to bring the city to its knees.” Her tone became more exasperated as she went on. “Desma is ridiculous, Proteus. She is a ridiculous prat of a woman, and probably completely out of her mind. I wouldn’t be too concerned about any threats of hers. Besides, we’ve already sent guards to search for the diadem; we’ve done all we can do.”
“She seemed more serious this time. To me, at least. And I do worry…”
“I know you do. Syracuse is your baby,” Marina mocked, but gently, very gently, and with a healthy dose of fondness. “I think the city will survive this. In any case, her diadem will likely be found within the hour. She’s probably dropped it behind some cushion somewhere.”
“If it’s found behind a cushion, after all this nonsense, I might just sail to Damascus with a dozen warships and overthrow their monarchy,” Proteus said irritably, and Marina laughed loud and clear as a bell, echoing through the hallway. She slipped her arm through his, and they continued on.
She glanced over at her fiancé, who’d gone suddenly quiet, and then she looked at him harder: Proteus seemed abruptly sad, contemplative. “What’s that look?” she questioned. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s just…” He sighed. “My old friend, Sinbad. Years ago, I would have suspected him of this theft right away. He used to steal at his own leisure from the palace—anything he wanted, really—and I’d turn a blind eye because… Ah, I don’t even know why. We were both very stupid boys, Marina. You’re lucky you didn’t know me then.”
“I thank the gods for it every day,” Marina said solemnly, and Proteus chuckled.
“Yes, well. I just miss him. That’s all.”
The sheer scale of the longing in his voice took Marina by surprise, and she became aware that Proteus was sharing something quite private, a feeling he usually kept close to his chest. They knew each other well at this point—they had been engaged for eight years, and exchanged letters for some time before that—and Marina would even call the prince her best friend, but Sinbad was a name that had only cropped up once or twice, in the entire time she had known him. Yet clearly Proteus cared for him very much. This must have been a very private wound, one that Proteus had been nursing for years.
She rubbed his arm with her free hand, up and down, softly, trying to convey that she understood. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “Where is he now? Has he…passed away?”
Proteus shrugged, looked out into the distance. “He left. He simply disappeared one day and I haven’t seen or heard from him since. I suppose our friendship meant more to me than to him. Either that or he’s dead. Truthfully, I’m not sure which option hurts more.”
“Perhaps there’s another explanation,” Marina proposed, grasping at straws to ease Proteus’s hurt. “Maybe… something came up, something he couldn’t tell you about, and he was forced to leave.”
“Maybe,” agreed Proteus, but there was doubt laced through the word. “The worst of the pirate gangs are always on the lookout for new slaves. He may have been abducted. I suppose I’ll never know the truth.”
Then Proteus laughed, though it was an awkward sound. “Don’t let me bore you with morbid talk, Marina. You’re allowed to tell me to shut up, you know.”
“I am,” the ambassador agreed archly, “and I will if I ever need to.” She patted his arm with gentle affection. “But I’ve never needed to. Or wanted to.”
Proteus smiled down at her, a warm and endearing curve of his lips. “Still,” he said, “you’re allowed.”
She smiled back, a sunbeam of tenderness striking her where it hurt most. They continued down the hall, leaning against each other; for a blissful minute, all thoughts of the princess and her diadem were forgotten.
There had been a time when Marina doubted she’d ever love the prince. Like him, certainly, as a friend and as her partner in life—but it wasn’t a choice she’d made for herself, only a duty to which she’d bow her head and submit, and love wasn’t necessarily part of the equation.
The prince wasn’t hard to love, though, and she’d fallen by degrees, over years, during their engagement. She fell one degree on the day they first sat together at his desk, and she kept him company while he wrote boring royal correspondence concerning trade to some foreign duke; before long they’d been snickering over a shared joke, and she fell by one more degree each time they repeated the process, finding excuses to sit together and walk together and tour the palace together and explore Syracuse together. Soon they were doing everything together. She grew to feel a blooming, fluttering warmth in her chest at the sight of the prince and the curve of his smile and the warm pressure of her arm hooked around his.
They had everything in common. They both loved Syracuse, Proteus because he’d been born there, Marina because she’d chosen it as her new home, and because it was a lovely city, one of the most beautiful she’d ever seen. They were both born diplomats, able to weave their way through political maneuvering and pleasant conversations that were a front for something more complex underneath, and both able to privately discuss, and laugh about, said conversations later, when they were alone. They both liked sailing, and history, and immersing themselves in different cultures; they both could spend hours buried in a book, and could both spend hours talking with each other about all these things, talking and debating and bursting into laughter at regular intervals. And slowly but surely, Marina was no longer marrying him out of duty; she was marrying him because he was her best friend, and, as the years went by, because she couldn’t imagine herself with anyone else in the world.
It had been eight years of engagement and they hadn’t kissed, hadn’t done anything of the sort, even though they’d had ample opportunity. She knew Proteus had great fondness for her, if only as a friend: knew it by the multitude of affectionate gestures he’d shown her over the years, by the hundreds of times he could’ve chosen to go anywhere and do anything, and had chosen to spend time with her instead. But she didn’t know if he felt what she did: the curious warmth, the burgeoning tenderness, that had been growing and growing for as long as she’d known him.
She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter: they’d spend the rest of their lives together, eventually as the rulers of Syracuse, and likely would have children, and would never be apart for long, tied down to their city as they were. Until they were old and grey, they would be together, and Marina tried to tell herself this was enough. Sometimes she looked at him, and he smiled back at her, and she remembered she would spend forever with this person, and it was enough. But—but. There were times when it wasn’t. There were times when she felt a knife-wound of pain at the idea that Proteus only was wedding her out of duty, and times when she wanted to ask him outright, wanted to recklessly kiss him, even, to see what he’d do. There were times when she wanted to know.
But for now they were walking arm and arm in the palace, the golden early morning sunlight shining on them in gentle beams, and feeling the weight of him beside her was enough: not because it had to be; just because it was.