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The Headtaker, Queen Tenebrous, Dreadlord of Castroscuro was a fair-skinned woman some twenty-eight years old. She had blue eyes, sharp like a chase-hound's eyes, dark braids wound in a bun behind her head, and a scar extending from the right temple to the jaw where Etienna Blood-Handed struck her with an axe in the Battle of Deepmarrow. She was middling in height, shorter than her portraits made her seem. The portraits did not exaggerate, however, in respect to her shoulders. Those were as broad in the flesh as they were in paint. Nor were they much exaggerated by her clothes, but remained an imposing sight when she let her maid take her heavy black cloak and stood in the bedchamber in her shirtsleeves.
Mayanne, formerly Lily Princess Mayanne of the Blooming Gates, the scholarly bespectacled third daughter of the Lily Queen, was younger, darker, and more slightly built than her new bedmate, and had never swung an axe or blocked one outside of her lessons and drills. She had once thought to enter a convent. But Philomena was to succeed as Lily Queen, and Deirdre fell to a Grancheth sword, Mother keep her soul, so there would be no convents for Mayanne. She didn't think Mother would welcome the prayers of a nun who scorned her duty, in any case.
Another maid unwound her girdle and relieved her of her beaded wool overdress, leaving her in her petticoats. She felt exposed, but she consoled herself that it was natural to feel so on a wedding night. She wasn't the first. The servants retreated. She sat down on the huge canopy bed in the center of the room. The bed was laid with tapestries, and she noted the topmost one. It was an old piece, older than the reign of Headtaker. Sewn by the kinswomen of an older family, whose descendants Headtaker would have slain when she took Castroscuro. It was lovely needlework. A pattern of huntswomen and stags. The oranges of the huntswomen's coats were still bright and vivid, a testament to the dyer.
Mayanne looked back up at her new liege. "Shall we..?" She made a squeezing motion with her hands, pantomiming the use of the little device the midwife had shown her.
"Oh!" it was a moment before the Headtaker said anything, and when she finally did, she said, 'oh!' She tilted her head, deepening the resemblance to a chase-hound, and said more: "We don't need to do that just now. We have time."
Mayanne felt her cheeks flush hot. She wasn't sure if she preferred that she'd been excessively forward and the Dreadlord were uninterested, or that she'd been insufficiently connubial and the Dreadlord wanted a more marital scene before she settled into the work of motherhood. Either option was mortifying. "Excuse me." She smiled nicely, to remind her wife that she was foreign in a foreign country and a maiden in a marriage bed, and if she had given offense it was through innocent error. "I didn't mean to be so blunt, I only thought..." The maid who took the cloak took Headtaker's neck-cloth as well. Her shirt was open to the top of her waistcoat. Mayanne could see the curve of her muscles, and the very top edge of her breasts. "...daughters," she squeaked as she looked up to direct her gaze away from the bare flesh. She cleared her throat. "Excuse me," she said again. "I only thought that you would wish to... to start having daughters."
"I do! Very much, I do. Yes." The Queen Tenebrous waved her hands like she'd stepped on her dance-partner's feet, and were trying to apologize. "But... well, the thing about a pledge of lifelong fidelity is that it's lifelong." She knelt before the bed and looked up to meet Mayanne's eyes with her own. They were very piercing eyes, but that flustered girl-at-the-dance look hadn't left them, and for the moment, they seemed to seek her understanding. "So we have time."
"Yes." Mayanne flushed hotter. Her new wife was on the floor in front of her, very close to her petticoats. "Yes, of course. We do have time."
Headtaker nodded. She tilted her head again, like she'd learned something. She stood again and took a seat in the desk chair. "It's all right," she said, in softer tones. "You won't offend me. I'm not such a dragon as all that. No one can be a dragon all the time, can they?"
"I think that dragons generally manage it, my liege," said Mayanne.
The Dreadlord's lips parted in a smile. Her teeth were large and sharp in her wide mouth. A piece was missing from one, on the right side. "I suppose they do," she said. And then, "I think you can call me Emily."
"Emily," Mayanne repeated. Emily Dreadlord. Emily Headtaker. Emily with eyes like a dog's. "And you can... of course, you can call me Mayanne, my—Emily."
"Mayanne," Emily said slowly, as though she liked the taste. "There are little frogs in the garden ponds here. You might hear them." She held her thumb and forefinger together. "They're this large, about the size of a silverpiece, but they sound much larger, because they sit in flower pots and project their little calls like an actress in an amphitheater. Do you know what I mean?"
Mayanne blinked. She'd read enough of natural philosophy to know the workings of sound, but she wasn't sure how they'd got to this point in the conversation. "That's quite clever of them," she offered.
"Yes, it is!" Emily agreed with her. "A frog is very clever about sound. They have to be. It's how they decide business between them, before it comes to blows."
"Do frogs exchange blows?" Mayanne asked, trying to picture it.
"They don't strike each other with their forelimbs as people do, they rather kind of wrestle." Emily mimicked grappling an opponent in her great thick arms. "In any case, they decide who they want to wrestle by listening to their calls and deciding how large a frog they are."
"And they don't wrestle with the ones in the flower pots," Mayanne said, trying to follow the lesson.
"Exactly," said Emily.
"Because they sound like they have throats as big as flower pots," she continued, "and they must be commensurately big frogs."
"Exactly!" said Emily. She looked at her with every appearance of relief. "You understand."
Mayanne frowned thoughtfully and nodded. "I believe I'm beginning to."
"So, seeing as you're not a rival frog, but my queen and wife, and as we'll need to raise children and rule countries together, which are efforts which require significant trust, I... don't wish to frighten you." That soft tone was there again. Her voice was sweet when she spoke softly. A low alto like the rush of the wind. "I can't afford to frighten someone I will need in my confidence."
She hadn't thought before now of the Dreadlord needing someone in her confidence. Or if she had, she'd perhaps pictured hooded figures meeting by moonlight and talking in hushed whispers.
"So I thought before we got to other things," Emily continued, "we could have a bath?"
***
The bath room at Castroscuro was a wide room of gray stone tiles patterned with streaks of blue and gold, made close and intimate by a profusion of heat-loving plants. The fading sunlight filtered in through textured windows, supplemented by candles in golden sconces on the wall. Water from the mountain hot spring collected in broad, shallow channels, where it cooled enough it wouldn't scald the skin. A rope-pull controlled a sluice gate to let the cooled water into the basin in the center of the room, where the petrichor scent of the spring mingled with camphor and rosemary and the peels of sweet oranges and wafted into the air in clouds of fragrant steam. Mayanne's spectacles became quite blinding, and she took them off to see more clearly.
The maid who attended her before with her overdress now helped her off with her petticoats and shift. She stole a nearsighted glance at her wife as she was undressed by her own maid. She cut a striking outline, like the statues of soldiers in the courtyard back home. Mayanne felt a sudden curiosity to see more than an outline, to fill in the details with closer examination in clearer air. She told herself that this too was natural. If one weren't destined to be a nun, one may as well be a wife, and matrimony came with an attendant curiosity about the human form. She wasn't the first.
The bath itself was a deep basin set into the floor, constructed of the same stone as the walls and floor. It was wide enough that Mayanne could have floated in the center with her legs and arms spread and not touched the sides. Instead, she let the maid show her the steps down to the tilework bench that lined the edge. Her feet were sore from long standing in old fashioned ceremonial shoes, and the hot water was an instant relief. She did not sigh audibly—she thought that she and Emily were not on quite such intimate terms yet that she could sigh so in front of her—but it was only through effort that she did not, and through the exercise of self-restraint. She settled on the bench. The water came up to her shoulders, wrapping her tense body in a soothing embrace warmer than blood.
Her breasts floated to the surface of the bath. She tried to cross her arms over them unobtrusively. She realized there was no unobtrusive way to do this. She thought to herself, Mother... because even in her private thoughts she was not given to coarse language, and if one did not append the coda ''s womb' to the word 'Mother,' it was only a prayer for aid and not a blasphemy. She let her arms rest at her side. Her breasts lay where they would.
Emily sat on the other side of the bath, across from her. The water sat lower on the taller woman, and her breasts were half out of it. She leaned back and stretched her arms above her head. Mayanne could not see the fine points, but her outline was lithe and athletic in a way that brought to mind a war horse, with great muscles flexing and extending under skin.
"I love a bath," Emily said. "It's the first thing I do upon return from a campaign. And the first thing after a day of public ceremony, for similar reasons."
"I think I can only agree with you," Mayanne replied. Her legs, her hips, her back, were all unwinding from the knots they'd tied throughout the day. The cessation of the pain was almost painful in itself, and she welcomed it. She closed her eyes, and they sat in silence together, near but not touching, as she listened to the splash of water and the rustling of leaves.
She didn't realize she was drifting off until she woke to someone calling her name.
"Mayanne?"
She stirred awake and looked up to see Emily kneeling by the bath, now close enough to make out details. She bore scars on her arms and torso. She bore hair on her underarms and groin. The range of movement of her arms was slightly asymmetrical, the left moving not as freely as the right, constrained by her old wounds. Her light skin was rosy with the heat. She smiled and offered a hand.
"Perhaps that's enough bathing for now," she said. "It's better to sleep in air than in water."
Mayanne took her hand and let her help her from the bath.
***
She slept dreamlessly in the tapestried bed, in the cool linen nightdress she'd been given. She woke after two hours. There was food and wine on the bedside table, little cheese tarts and rice and meat cooked in oranges. She fell to it, she'd barely eaten all day. She looked up and saw Emily seated at the desk by the window, in her dressing gown, writing by the light of a candle.
"Good morning," Emily said. It was still very much night, but it was polite of her all the same. She gestured at the food. "Eat, you had little at the wedding feast. Sweet things are good luck at the start of something new. A sweet beginning."
"Good morning," Mayanne replied. She ate another cheese tart for good luck. "I hope I'm not interrupting." She glanced toward the work on the desk.
"No, not at all." Emily set her pen down and turned her chair to face the bed. "I'm writing dull letters. I'd rather talk to you."
Mayanne moved to sit at the edge of the bed to face her. "I have some questions, if you have the time. If it isn't too personal."
"You are my wife," said Emily. "I should hope there's little I would keep from you."
Mayanne licked her dry lips, thinking of how to begin. She had heard so many things of the Dreadlord before she came here, and she'd heard so much in their brief interactions this evening. She wanted to know where she stood. "Do you bathe in the blood of virgins?" she asked. She had seen Emily bathe in water, but it didn't necessarily follow that she bathed only in water, at all times.
"I don't." Emily looked only a little amused. She answered the question seriously, which was good of her.
"Do you keep up correspondence with the devil," Mayanne asked her, "or with other similar demons?"
"I don't," said Emily, "I wouldn't know how to contact the devil if I wished to, and I have never wished to."
Mayanne had guessed the answer, but she'd still felt a need to hear it spoken aloud. It did set her mind at ease a bit. "Did you kill and eat the Duchess of Crowhall?"
"Ye-es," Emily admitted, tilting her head equivocally, "but the circumstances are exaggerated in most retellings, and I choose not to publicly contradict them."
Mayanne nodded. She'd want more details later, but that was good enough for now. "Because you're not a dragon," she said.
"That's right," Emily agreed.
"You're a little frog."
She laughed. "I am. I hope you aren't too disappointed?"
"No." And Mayanne laughed as well. "I wouldn't say disappointed. I didn't wish—" I didn't wish to be the wife of a dragon. "—that is, I'm pleased to know you better."
"Well, good. I don't like to disappoint. If I'm a surprise for you, I'm glad to be a pleasant one." She looked Mayanne up and down. Thoughtful. Calculating. "You were afraid, before?"
"A little," she said. She didn't like to admit it.
"I couldn't tell," Emily said.
"Really?"
"Really. Well, not at the ceremony or at the feast. I started to suspect a little when we came here. You're a strong actress. I have some practice judging fear, you may imagine. You didn't show it in your eyes, voice, or bearing. At least, not to me, who doesn't yet know your mannerisms well."
"I'm glad I didn't." To show fear would have been unbecoming. A shame on her country. Since they were confessing, she felt she could give a little more information: "I eat more when I'm not afraid."
"I thought perhaps the ceremonial dress were too tight to make eating comfortable," Emily said, "or you weren't used to foods in a foreign style."
"It was, and I'm not. But that was not the reason." She took another mouthful of the orange-dressed meat.
"But you came to me, all the same. Willingly?" She tilted her head when she asked this, listening keenly.
"Yes," Mayanne said. She had come willingly. Her mother had not asked her to marry the Dreadlord. She had offered to.
"Even though you thought I might harm you?"
"I wanted the alliance," she said. She felt she shouldn't be ashamed of this. Perhaps it were a mercenary thing to say to one's wife, but it was true, and she wished to share the truth.
"You have it," Emily said, her amusement gone now, her voice low and reverent. "The Lady Queen of your land is my mother in law, and I am bound to love her country as my own."
"It is not said that you are unfilial," said Mayanne. "In the worst stories, it is not said that you scorn your elders."
"Only that I bleed virgins and consort with devils."
"Yes."
"Good, then," said Emily with decision. "Let them fear to cross Lilanth while the Dreadlord draws breath. Let them fear my one point of honor as they fear my many iniquities."
"And your pretended iniquities," offered Mayanne.
"Yes, those as well," said Emily. "My brave wife," she murmured. "My wife who loves her country with love that displaces fear. My wife the performer, with ice in her veins. I cannot make an enemy of such a person."
Mayanne looked away. She did not think of herself in such terms. Her heart beat faster. "Your... your departed Lady is my mother in law as well." She looked up again. She ought to meet Emily's eyes. "I am bound to love her country in her honor, though she may not be here to see it."
Emily beamed at that, a true and unfeigned smile. She stood to take Mayanne's hands in her own and sat on the bed beside her. She pressed a fond kiss to her cheek. Her breath smelled of cloves. "And Castroscuro will love you," she promised. "As I do already."