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Their wedding night began quietly, low voices behind the curtains of the bed. By the time their cheeks were dripping with tears, Irene couldn’t remember how long the yelling and crashing had gone on.
Gen had overstepped his bounds when he had suggested reducing the guard. She had seen how he dodged attention and manipulated people’s impressions at court; he refused to even take the place of a king. How did he imagine the country would hold together with neither guard nor king? The volume of their words had risen like a dark tide until the moment she’d thrown an inkpot at the wall. The sound of the inkpot rolling unevenly across the wooden floor had echoed.
When it stopped, it was silent.
Irene stalked over to the dressing table, picking up a handkerchief to rub furiously at her cheeks. When she turned back around, Gen was framed in the open window, leaning out into the open air to peer towards the mountains in the distance.
She scoffed and said, “Do you plan to run away?”
“Do you think I could?” he asked.
“You’ve already been caught once as a thief. You know that a king would find it harder to leave.”
“I don’t suppose Eddis would welcome me back,” he mused. He paused, and then turned to face her. “But no, I wanted to invite you onto the roof with me.”
“I might suggest that my barons would use all their hound-like tendencies to hunt you down were I to be found dead on the ground outside my window the morning after my marriage.”
“You would not fall if you were my partner,” he said. Irene was hit with the truth of the statement. Helen had been right when she said that she would know when Gen told the truth. She’d almost rather stay guessing; being sure of so few of his words made her all the more uncertain of the rest.
He reached out his hand.
“Even if I won’t fall, we’d look like fools traipsing across the rooftops in our nightshirts,” Irene said.
“No one will see us, and we won’t be traipsing. I’ll teach you how to dance,” Gen said carefully.
“Some Eddisian dance?”
“Yes.”
In Gen’s terse reply, Irene tasted the sharpness of her own question. She’d only meant to clarify. There could not have been more than two days in the past two months they had not danced as the treaty negotiations and wedding planning dragged on. She did not know where he had learned the steps to the Attolian court dances, especially considering how the entirety of her palace snarled at him before he could even get close enough to offer his hand. Regardless of who had taught him, that first night, Gen had led her down to the dance floor from the dias, lifted her left arm into position, rested the cuff of his hook against her back, and spun them away with a competence that went unquestioned.
The representatives of their respective countries had watched their steps, interpreting each movement as a strike for or against the treaty and Attolia’s future. Dancing with Gen held no good memories, especially considering the number of times she had wielded her words to cut him and he had struck back in return, like cornered dogs snapping at each other in their pen. Would dancing alone on the roof be like letting the dogs out into the fields or like removing the watchful eye of their handler?
He still offered his hand, the yellow of the nightshirt washed out in the moonlight. The loose cuff revealed the scars circling his wrist. Her eyes caught at the edge of his soft trousers where an ink stain was spreading. She hadn’t realized how far the ink had splashed. When she’d flung the stone pot from her hand, he’d flinched so hard that his hook had knocked harshly against the desk. Watching the ink drip from his clothes, she was struck by the thought that it was just her acting like a cornered dog, a bitch who refused the food offered because she did not trust that it would stay put.
She had believed him when he said he loved her, she reminded herself. She just wished his tendency to surprise her did not send her into a panic.
Her hand was pale enough that it barely changed tone as it crossed from the shadow into the light of the full moon. Regardless, she felt the weight of herself lift away as she stepped onto the window’s ledge. She folded into the space Gen had left.
“You will join me?” he asked.
“I would find it useful to know the court dances of Eddis,” she replied hesitantly.
Gen nodded. “Step where I step.”
He moved up the side of the wall in a way that Irene could only call serpentine. He would periodically pause, turning to make sure she had kept track of the scattered path he slithered up—where there were gaps in the wall or roughened edges of stone—before he moved on.
Her breathing was ragged when they reached the edge of the roof. Gen stood on a thin rectangle of a flat surface between the two gently sloping planes of tile. As she clambered inelegantly up to meet him, she gave herself a moment to turn, taking in her palace from a perspective she had never had a reason to see before.
She said, “There is no room to dance.”
“I’ve danced here plenty of times.”
She looked at him sharply. “With who?”
He smiled. “I have not taken a mistress, if that’s where your mind has gone.”
“You said you might.”
“And you have been with me the entirety of my reign.”
“You know that was not my concern.”
He shrugged, “Thieves should have their secrets.”
“Husbands should not keep secrets from their wives.”
“Even a shadow wife?” He smirked at her. Irene tucked her arms around her waist. He looked away. “Besides, I’m showing you now, aren’t I?”
“It is too dark,” she said, fingers curling.
“I can see your face well enough.”
Irene traced the silvery shimmer of the Ephrata as it twisted and turned at the edge of the mountains, a massive blackness that made their presence known only by how they blocked out the stars. “And is it more beautiful in this light?”
“By the moon’s blessing, it is. Still, it could be more kind.” There was where the real problem lay; he saw so much of her when she could barely catch a glimpse of him.
She let her arms fall back to her sides. “I do not know the steps.”
He stepped forward, and she did not resist when he kissed her hand.
He drew himself up, and in the act lifted her right hand with his left.
“It’s simple,” said Gen.
“Said the goatfoot,” Irene muttered under her breath.
“Baa.” Gen bleated quietly back.
Irene pressed her lips together. She looked into his eyes. She did not think a relationship could be built around dark humor, around references to moments when one party had been in pain, but surely what they had was not a relationship. Maybe, whatever it was, it could start there.
He looked out over her shoulder. “We will have to adapt a few pieces.”
His hook hung loose at his side.
Irene ached.
“I would think that the last few months would have been a lesson in adaptation. There are not many Attolian traditions we have not altered if not outright ignored in the construction of this marriage,” she tried.
Gen smiled in a lopsided way, considering his words. “There’s been no reason to follow Attolian traditions when I’ve never been able to follow the Eddisian ones.” He began to walk her in a gentle circle, feeling out the length of her pace in relation to his own in this unfamiliar configuration.
“And so you pave a new path?”
“No, let me correct my words. I do follow tradition. I dance in the footsteps of Eddisian thieves before me.”
“You are a king now.” The words felt meaningless in their repetition.
“Maybe on a different surface, with an untraditional number of hands, and with a different title. It’s still the same steps.” He lifted his arm, and she stumbled through a turn. It felt unnatural in its closeness, leaving her looking into hard eyes that did not see her. She didn’t know what he needed.
“And you still haven’t deemed it necessary to show me what these steps are. You seem set on letting the moon go down and leaving us in the dark before you explain anything. Should I suppose you might be waiting for a convenient time to push me off?”
Gen tilted his head away with a laugh. “I think I’ll leave the murder of your newly wedded partner to you.”
Irene raised an eyebrow. “You shouldn’t give me ideas.”
He pushed, and she was listening more carefully now, so she responded. He slung himself around her, pushing her forward until she felt herself naturally turning to face him again. “That’s it,” he said softly.
“Baa,” she replied.
He grinned, raised an eyebrow, and pushed her out again.
Irene wasn’t surprised to find the feel of the Eddisian dance to be exhilarating in its tight footwork and quick pirouettes. What she did find surprising was how little she had to think beyond the continuous movement of her feet. Once they got going, the edge of the roof seemed to disappear. Their world existed in a tight square of turning feet and whipping cloth.
It wasn’t automatic, of course. She balked the first few times his hook pressed against her back where she still expected the warmth of a hand. Gen did not outwardly react—almost imperceptibly shuffling his feet to match her new beat—but that did not reassure her. The lack of response only made her more determined to erase her own instincts.
Still, she felt safe in a way she never did when wandering the halls of the palace with the entirety of her personal guard at her back. Maybe it was because he would not drop her. He couldn’t.
Disgruntled, she realized that only lent credence to Gen’s stance in the argument that had sent them up to the roof in the first place. It couldn’t have been his full intent, but she knew it wasn't a coincidence that she felt more inclined to agree with his perspective as he led her through the steps of his home country.
But, as they stamped out the edges of an imagined boundary, she found she didn’t mind. The issue tasted different now, beneath the stars and moon. She felt her mind free to wander as her feet turned ever tighter.
Dancing was a form of conversation. Beginners relied on memorized steps to avoid treading on their partner’s feet, but experts followed the established patterns only as far as they allowed their partner to craft an intelligent reply. When a novice was paired with an expert, it was the expert’s job to leave them room to stumble. Irene was the clear novice in this dance; she watched Gen deftly step around and through her path. From the outside though—she was certain—they would look equally matched. Again, she wondered, who had taught Gen to dance? He must have stumbled. Had his teachers been as gracious towards his mistakes? Had they given him the same space to learn?
Gen suddenly altered the course of their steps, swinging Irene around to face him. He pulled them to a stop in the same position where they had begun.
“Will you let me reduce the guard?” he asked.
Irene pulled him closer, so that their cheeks brushed and her mouth was by his ear. “If Teleus agrees to it first.” She felt Gen tense, close as she was.
Then he was laughing.
“They should call you the viper! Shadows could never be so biting.” She couldn’t help but let a small smile lift her lips. It was still an unfamiliar feeling. He pulled her into a set of sweeping turns that left her swinging out impossibly into the air.
Irene was breathing hard when they stopped, poised over her chamber’s windows. There was the taste of light rain on the wind.
She asked, “Do you think you can convince him?”
“I can do anything I want.”
Irene hummed. She knew that may be true for a thief, but knew it was not for a king. She supposed Gen had plenty of time to discover that on his own. She’d be there to catch him.