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Eva prepares for the party she will attend with a man other than her husband in the way she has always prepared.
For weeks, there has been a stranger in her mirror; a white-faced woman with bluish shadows under her eyes and lips cracked from biting them.
A touch of blush adds back the color to her cheeks. Whatever may come, I will be back here at the end of the night.
“And you’re sure you’ll be alright?” Wolf asks her, for the third time.
He really shouldn’t be talking so much; he overdid it talking so long with Reuenthal, and reduced his voice again to a hoarse whisper. Still, it’s good to hear his voice at all.
She lowers her lipstick, and finds his eyes in the mirror.
“Yes, darling,” she says. “It will be good, to see Yrsa and the others, and to show that all is well. If I stay away too long, they’ll forget about me and I’ll have to do that work of working my way in again.”
“It isn’t your responsibility —“ Wolf begins.
Men, always thinking they can pick and choose their wives’ responsibilities.
“It is,” she says. “But if any aristocrat tries to sink her teeth into me, I believe Reuenthal will protect me.”
Ever since their conversation, Reuenthal’s name in her mouth has provoked the strangest reactions from him. Strange, in the sense that any man should be alarmed; but instead Wolf just looks dark-eyed, like he’s forgotten how to breathe.
“I just —” Wolf says, and then falls silent. He huffs once, and squares his shoulders. “I should talk to Reuenthal, before you go.”
Eva laughs. “I thought you spoke with him yesterday?” Another long conversation; she’d gone out to the university library to give them time to speak, and when she’d returned, Wolf had been asleep with Reuenthal beside him, looking all in a daze, strange and out of place.
“I did, but — “ Wolf huffs again. “You’re right, he’s up to something.”
“Do you think it’s something dangerous?” Eva says.
His eyes soften. “He wouldn’t put you in danger,” he says. “Physically, anyway.”
"There you go, then, darling."
A note of anxiety creeps into his tone. “You’re sure of this. Of trying it, I mean.”
Sure is a stronger word than Eva can put to many things right now. “I love you,” she says instead. “And Reuenthal has been — ” She weighs her words for a moment, and then puts her lipstick down. “Reuenthal has always been dear to me because of his love for you. I’ve always thought it his best quality.”
He ponders that.
“But I —“ Syllables tremble and die on her tongue. He’s hanging on her words, as if they’re the thing between life and death.
She sets down the comb, and goes to him, sitting on the bed and wrapping her arms carefully around him. The smell of hospital still clings to him; plastick-y and thick, like the syrupy scent of plasma and bandages and the coppery tang of blood.
But his heart is beating, steady and just a little too fast. Her Wolf.
How would it feel to hold Reuenthal like this? some curious part of her whispers. Can it be called treacherous, if Wolf had put it there?
“Wolf,” she says, softly. “If you meant what you said, then —”
“I did,” he says, a little too sharply.
“I can’t know, unless I know,” she says. “And I have to know. The way I knew with you.” She cups his cheek. “And you must let Reuenthal be himself, for that to mean anything.”
“I trust him with my life,” Wolf murmurs. “But he is —”
“I know what he’s like, darling.”
He nods, but his eyes say differently.
“And besides,” she says, leaning close to murmur in his ear. “I want to find out just what he’s up to.”
The dress she’s chosen for Lady Brandt’s party is pale purple silk, gathered in voluptuous skirts and dyed darker at the edges. The slick cloth caresses her skin as she slips it up, and turn for Wolf to do up the back. He hums softly, pressing a kiss to the bare skin of her back before beginning to fuss with the latches.
Once, falling short had been almost part of her role; the fashions of the court were labyrinthine and esoteric, far more static than the clothing available to a commoner woman, but with a seasonal clock.
She smooths the skirts, and pauses by the orchids she’s set up by the window, to run a finger over the silky-smooth surface of an orchid blossom, and then checks the leaves for blight.
“They’re looking better every day,” Wolf says. “But not so beautiful as you.”
She smiles. “Don’t waste your voice on flattery.” But she’s pleased, nonetheless; pleased that he’s well enough again to have strength for those kind of words.
For quite a while, she’d thought of Wolf as a dandelion and Reuenthal as something of an orchid; temperamental and grown in strange circumstances, circumstances that did not feel conducive to life, and yet liable to rot at the root if ever removed from them.
She can say she knows more of orchids now; but much of Reuenthal is still veiled from her.
The trellis on which all this is grown is Wolf, and the long hours they spent at his bedside, comrades in a war only the two of them cared to prosecute. Seeing Reuenthal square up with a doctor, eyes blazing cold black-and-blue fury, had made something hot tear through her chest.
Now, desire traces those firepaths, something budding and tender that she had not dared think of before. Had it existed before? Certainly not as such; Reuenthal’s flirtation has always been a trap. A test of her virtue, her worthiness to stand at Wolf’s side. She trusts better his unyielding presence at her side, through those long nights; the hand on her arm, keeping her from stumbling in sheer exhaustion. He had drawn on all his reserves of patience and strength when her own had failed.
Reuenthal is a contradictory creature; he cuts himself on his own sharp edges, and every now and then drinks a little too much and starts to come apart.
She wonders sometimes at Reuenthal and the women she’s seen him walk with, the way his hands linger on their skin. His eyes follow them with heat, but not nearly so keen as the looks he turns on her husband.
I wish he would have some sense and marry, Wolf always says.
Even before the last few weeks, she’s freer with Reuenthal than she would be with any other man. The moments accumulate; a little of Wolf’s affection rubbing off on her.
Odin knows he spends enough time at her house.
But none of that would have come to anything —
(Now and then, Reuenthal’s lovers come to her. She has a vague notion of Reuenthal’s cruelties, punctuated by all of Frau Mittermeyer’s warnings about aristocrats and their whims)
— if it weren’t for the incident, and the long, wretched weeks that follow, where each day melds into the next, one long, drawn breath, one frozen moment of terror when the world conspired to try to make her a widow.
He loves my Wolf. It had tasted like tragedy; an unbearable thought, when her Wolf had seemed more likely to die than live.
He loves my Wolf, she thinks, as Reuenthal’s surface car pulls into the drive.
Admiral Reuenthal makes his way up the pathway, shining ink-black and handsome in the gathering dark. The breeze catches the edges of her skirts, carrying with it the heady perfume of the gardens in late spring, jasmine and rose and begonia.
The last few weeks have left a mark on him too, she thinks. He’s just a bit more weary than than before, but it’s the hesitancy on his face when their gazes catch that gives her pause.
Can he love me too?
That was the challenge Wolf had laid to Reuenthal.
Woo my Eva, he had said. You know what you mean to me.
It had started with Beowulf.
Wolf had been talking over breakfast for the past weeks of how one of Prince Lohengramm's purported geniuses was meddling with Beowulf, doing something experimental to her engines. He was due to take his fleet for a short training run, to test some new crew and the modifications to the ship.
The morning he is meant to depart, Beowulf’s hull cracks right up the center, baring her insides to the wan spring sunlight and spilling black smoke across the sky.
A thread of smoke is what Eva sees first; leaning over to prune one of her rosebushes — she likes to keep busy, when Wolf leaves, regardless of how long he is to be gone — she spots something strange in the sky. A thin thread of oily gray. She tilts her head back to follow it, and sees the gleam of a warship’s silvery sides, shaking like the heaving flanks of a beast pushed beyond its limits.
When she shades her eyes against the sun, she sees the proud red badge of Beowulf.
The hours between that and the hospital melt and stretch in her memory. She had stood in the garden, staring into the sky as if it might provide more answers, until the shrill tone of the videophone had pulled her inside.
Wolf had been on the bridge; of course he'd been on the bridge, when the ship had breached itself.
What follows she remembers after only in frozen moments, and the sensation of something unraveling. Doctors telling her words she didn't know. Sitting there, the picture of composure, as she waited to see if her world would come apart. Reuenthal, his voice raised, the blue of his cloak stark in that dim room.
He loves him, she thinks; but the shape of the thought cannot sink into a mind so soaked in panic.
Later, the smooth, cool synthetic marble of the hospital sink beneath her fingers. Her hand, blanched pale. Her wedding ring, catching the dull light of the fluorescents.
The foolish flush beneath her skin has fled, leaving only trembling, cold sickness in its place. What had that thought been?
Reuenthal’s long, delicate fingers taking her hand. The open relief of Wolf’s eyes, seeing Reuenthal at her side.
Take care of her.
She’s not a thing, to be handed off to Reuenthal. How dare Wolf treat her as such. Helpless anger rushes in in a tide, filling the aching, empty cavity of her chest; she’s choking on it, drowning in it, until she lets out her breath and it’s gone as quickly as it came, leaving her shoulders shaking.
Beneath that, something else building; unnoticeable at first, but rising in intensity throughout the long days and the awful conversations.
Are you such a whore? It’s the voice of her mother-in-law, sharpened beyond all reality. Your husband is still breathing.
The invitation to Lady Brandt’s party had arrived amidst the rush of condolence cards and messages, arriving at the strategic interval that makes her feel as if the senders had waited the miserable week out to see whether her husband would die.
The kitchen is awash in flowers; it must have taken half the morning to carry them all inside.
But maybe people just don’t know what to say.
She had agonized over it in the fall, when Wolf’s return had been shadowed by his tidings of Kircheis’s death. Sitting at the little table in her kitchen, she had agonized over what to write to Prince Lohengramm.
Prince Lohengramm himself had come and seen her in the hospital. Something had moved her limbs, moving her through all the motions of a grateful subject, while she sat frozen inside herself. And then Reuenthal and the prince had sat there, eyeing each other in the terrible silence of the waiting room.
Flowers. She has more flowers than she knew what to do with.
Amongst the rest is an arrangement of living orchids imprisoned in baroque, stylistic arraignment of metal arms and apparatuses. Their delicate petals bloom outwards, fragile and starkly beautiful against the brushed silver.
It’s beautiful.
In celebration, I thought you might appreciate something living, the card from Lady Brandt begins.
Curiously, she hooks a finger into one of the cups that hold the orchids; the crumbly texture of packed earth meets her fingers. She draws back, and peers at the orchid’s bases, where they are fixed into the apparatus with silvery wax.
They're going to die. I have no idea how to keep orchids.
She sits on the floor, pressing her bare feet to the wood and wrapping her arms around herself until the tilting, half-giddy feeling pressure building behind her eyes eases.
All that courtly heat had been for Wolf; it was only that she was a likely conduit. Or was that true?
But it hadn’t been Wolf, when they sat together in the cafe by the hospital, and he’d looked at her with such fear, such hunger.
This is all unmapped.
There’s no driver in Reuenthal’s car, and he opens the passenger seat for her. She slides in, and he gets into the driver’s seat.
“Driving me yourself?” Eva says, curious.
“It’s only fitting,” Reuenthal says.
“Is this what you do for all of your women?” Eva says. She’s heard Wolf call them such, when he thought she wasn’t in earshot: your women will be the death of you, Reuenthal.
“It’s important for a man to keep his wits about him when escorting a beautiful woman,” Reuenthal says.
“The mark of a good tactician is being agile enough to learn quickly,” Eva says, in the same inflection she’s heard Wolf say it when critiquing some strategy of Reuenthal’s in the games of hypothetical war they like to play.
Reuenthal laughs. “I could read that as a critique, Frau Mittermeyer.”
“Evangeline,” she reminds him.
“Evangeline,” he says. “I am at your service, for the evening.”
Eva giggles.
The hum of her own pulse sings in her ears as the engine thrums to life; the whole of her body echoes in response. The world is awash in late spring, the sweet smell of flowers ever-present and the warmth of the day still lingering, and something frozen inside her is beginning to crack. “I wonder what use I’ll put you to,” she says.
Is that a blush that comes to his cheeks? It’s too dark to tell. “What use would you put Mittermeyer to?” he asks.
“Oh, but you’re nothing like Wolf,” Eva says. “You’ll scare the ladies there.”
“Hmm,” Reuenthal says.
“Don’t play coy, Admiral,” Eva says. “You know your reputation just as well as I do.” She toys with her little fan. “But maybe I can use that. How well acquainted are you with Lady Brandt?”
There’s a shift in his expression, like the ripples a pebble leaves when dropped in a still body of water. “Well enough to know her reputation.”
Eva’s eyes narrow, but she lets it pass without comment. Wolf can sink his teeth into a topic and worry away at it better than anyone she knows, and he still loses half of his conversational passes at Reuenthal, so she has no hope in outmatching him here.
“I’m sure there are all sorts of things said about her,” Eva says. “But she’s really quite kind.”
“Kind to you now, I am sure,” Reuenthal says.
“Of course, she must be.” A little smile turns up the corners of her lips. “But there is truth to it, I think.” She knows the things they say about her, or can guess them — has heard them on people’s lips a time or two.
“You can’t trust a woman like that to show her true face,” Reuenthal says, scornful. “I’ve told you as much.”
“I haven’t forgotten any of your warnings about aristocratic women,” Eva says, with a laugh. “But it’s different now. I was no one then. Now — I have responsibilities.”
“Tell me your purposes for the evening, then,” Reuenthal says.
“To show them all is well,” Eva says.
All these friendships she has cultivated amongst the noblewomen, she is aware of their tenuous nature. They accept her among them because of her husband’s place, and because of Reinhard’s meteoric rise.
They’re just like the women who started coming to her at the military balls, as Mittermeyer’s star rose, the ones who wanted something for their sons and cousins and brothers. Except this is more complicated; she’s part of the ecosystem of power now, and with no woman at Reinhard’s right hand and the absence of his sister, there are few other women for the court to turn their attention to.
“Do you have any warnings about aristocratic men?”
Reuenthal’s mismatched eyes catch in the yellow beam of an approaching car, flashing wolfishly. “You’ve heard them all already, I have no doubt.”
They were the creatures that lay in wait, in the city and on the country roads; they took commoner girls where they liked, and did with them what they willed, and a girl would be lucky to come out of the dalliance with some recompense for her virtue. The unluckiest girls never came home at all, and the best a grieving family could hope for was a slap on the wrist or a disgracefully distant posting if the man in question was reichsritter.
“To avoid them,” Eva says, her tone purposefully light. “But that’s impractical now, Admiral."
Reuenthal laughs. "Let me think on it, then."
Eva studies Reuenthal from the corner of her eyes, as the wind tugs at her hair.
Wolf would never let a man like that into his heart.
Reuenthal comes on alert, as they pull into the drive up to the Brandt manor. Eva sees it in the way his hands shift on the steering wheel, and the narrowing of his eyes. It strengthens her conviction.
He’s up to something.
As nobility who backed Reinhard, the Brandts had been allowed to keep many of their ancestral holdings, which had been larger than those of Prince Lohengramm’s or Reuenthal’s families, but not quite at the scale of the Mariendorfs or Braunshweigs.
As Eva checks her hair once more in the mirror of Reuenthal’s groundcar, finger-combing her curls back into place, she has to swallow back a sudden sweep of exhaustion.
If Wolf had died, I would never be here again.
She feels the truth of that in her bones; this world, with all its marble and strange ways, would have spit her to the curb, and grown over the little place she has carved for herself. Oh, of course there would be provisions made for her — Prince Lohengramm wasn’t cruel, and she might even flatter herself to think he thought fondly of her. But there is no vital essence tethering her here aside from that inside Wolf.
So what does it matter?
“Frau — Evangeline?” Reuethal says.
When she looks up, he’s eyeing her with the look of someone pondering live ordinance.
She takes a breath, and steels herself.
Reuenthal extends his hand to her. “Let us show them all is well.”
She takes Reuenthal’s hand in her own gloved one. The warmth of his fingers leeches through the silk to her skin. They ascend the steps like that, her skirts whispering over the stone.
They step from the soft coolness of the spring evening into a world of light and color.
In a show of accordance with Prince Lohengramm’s administration, and the remain in fashion with the times, Lady Brandt’s parties had become simpler affairs, drinks and dancing and fewer of the gauche displays of wealth once common. She swells the ranks of her circles with eligible young women, the daughters of Prince Lohengramm's cabinet and the admiraltats of the High Admiralty and the rising stars amongst the political set.
When the footman announces Lady Mittermeyer and Admiral Reuenthal, a ripple of conversations briefly rises to push against the tides of the music. Eva sees Lady Brandt herself straighten from her conversation and turn to look at them.
“You didn’t tell Lady Brandt who would be accompanying you, did you?” Reuenthal says.
“Admiral, you think me an informant?” Eva says.
“I don’t know anything of the loyalties women have to each other,” Reuenthal says.
“I would never betray Wolf’s secrets to anyone,” she says.
“And I stand in his place?”
She flushes, but luckily Lady Brandt is advancing across the marble tiles of the hall, beaming at Eva and Reuenthal with frightful intensity.
Yrsa von Brandt is a handsome woman, tall and stately, with sharp, vulpine eyes. She wears her hair unfashionably short, accentuating the long, lovely curve of her neck and the haughty point of her chin. Her hair is auburn, and her eyes a deep, lovely brown. She has the kind of beauty from which men fashion Valkyries and goddesses, Eva thinks, with a little flash of something like envy. She quashes it, bemused that feelings like that are starting to emerge from the long frost of fear. Two weeks before, she wouldn’t have been able to fathom that she’d feel something so frivolous again.
“Lady Mittermeyer,” Yrsa greets her, leaning forward to enfold her in her arms and press kisses to her cheeks.
Everyone knows Yrsa is a hopeless adulterer, one of the other minister’s wives had told her once, and made her blush scarlet. Everyone had not included Eva until that very moment.
“Lady Brandt,” Eva says. “Thank you for your invitation. This is Admiral Reuenthal, who will accompany me this evening.”
Yrsa’s gaze snaps up to Reuenthal, and she cannot — or does not bother to — hide the way her tone cools. “Admiral Reuenthal,” she says. “We have been acquainted. Congratulations on your recent victories, Admiral.” He nods.
“Eva my dear, I suppose that means your Wolf won’t be here,” Her eyes flash with some unreadable emotion. “The dreadful things that have been said about the incident on his flagship — but I heard he was on the mend.”
“He is,” Eva says firmly. “But I want him to conserve his strength. He’s all afire to be back on Beowulf.”
“As befits his reputation,” Yrsa says admiringly, but her eyes don’t leave Reuenthal. “I take it you volunteered in the Admiral’s absence? How gallant.”
“I owe it to him as a friend,” Reuenthal says.
Her lips thin. “I’m familiar with your friendship, Admiral Reuenthal.” She turns back to Eva. “But it’s been far too long since I’ve seen you. You must tell me if there is anything I can do for you, or anything my husband can do, for that matter.”
“Gallant of you, volunteering him,” Eva jokes.
“He has his uses, occasionally. Mostly to His Excellency the prince.”
Eva laughs. What a strange, lonely world Lady Brandt must live in, where there is no safety at her hearth; but she has always seemed to create safety of her own, with her ladies.
[INTERLUDE: REUENTHAL]
A child.
Reuenthal can’t quite grasp the concept.
“It’s everything I’ve wanted,” Mittermeyer says. His eyes shine bright, like spring sunlight kissing the steel sides of a warship. Exuberance pours off of him. “It’s everything a man could want!”
A moment ticks by. Mittermeyer is too drawn up in his own happiness to see Reuenthal’s frozen state; he forces himself to rearrange his expression into a smile.
“You deserve every happiness,” he says at last, and clasps Mittermeyer on the shoulder.
If he were a true man, Reuenthal would feel joyful, or envious; there would be some prick of ambition, to see Mittermeyer’s family bloom. Instead, he feels nothing but an empty dread and the sharp, wicked hook of jealousy that has hold of him, jealousy not for his beautiful wife or his joy or even his military accomplishments, for those they had always shared.
There had been a time when he had been first in Mittermeyer’s heart.
I would rather stand at another’s doorway, he thinks, disgusted.
[INTERLUDE: EVA ]
Everything had been red, red, red.
And she’d lain there and felt the life slip red and tangled from her body, and she’d hoped to die too.
With that thought, the cold had stolen in, welcome cold that blanketed all the anguish. She could feel the warmth leave her limbs; could fancy that she saw her breath in the air, like she had when she stood on the plains of her home planet and watched the world become one vast, rolling expanse of snow.
Wolf had been stationed on a snowy planet not too long ago; and he’d described the way the world stilled around you, the beautiful quiet that came only with snow —
— not so bad a place to die, she’d heard Reuenthal say once, in a way that was not quite a joke, and Wolf had slapped his shoulder and told him that there was no time for thoughts like that —
— it’s that cold, only she can’t see her breath mist in front of her face, but she’s done everything she could. How could they ask any more from her, with this pain? Can’t she be done?
— Wolf is there, finally. Finally. It’s good. Soldiers don’t get to go home to say goodbye. How sweet it is, that she can see him; only she doesn’t want to let him see her shame. She turns her face from him, turns to look at the tangle of tubes and blinking lights feeding into her.
Eva, he says, his voice like broken glass.
She opens her mouth, but all she can say is I’m sorry.
Eva has never been squeamish by nature; when she was a child, her father taught her to butcher animals, and how to make mete sacrifice to Odin and his court.
It’s not the blood that turns her stomach. It’s the beeping of the machines, the sick tangle of tubes, the rubbery-sharp smell of the hospital that brings all the pain back.
She doesn’t let it show, sits calm at Wolf’s side and murmurs soothingly, even when nausea fills the hollows of throat with static.
But there’s no despair to retreat to here; it’s her Wolf in the bed, and if he dies she will have to go on living.
In a moment, she is surrounded, cut off from all avenues of escape, with a half-dozen questions levelled at her. When she turns to look for Reuenthal, he’s nowhere to be found.
Admiral Mittermeyer —
The Gale Wolf —
Your husband —
Over and over, she assures the crowds that her husband is well — on the mend, thank you — until the music screeches and scrapes against her raw nerves and the faces melt and drip together and she’s repeating the correct syllables over and over, in perfect form.
“A dance with you, Lady Mittermeyer,” Reuenthal says, appearing at her side from the crowd. His hands close over hers.
“Of course,” she says, and murmurs her apologies to her conversation partners.
“Admiral, where have you been?” she says. The words are dull, lifeless things.
“Attending to some matters,” Reuenthal says. “Are you well?”
“I’m fine,” she says, and lets her awareness fade to only the steps of the dance.
When she comes to herself again, she's leaning against Reuenthal in one of the siderooms, her hands trembling. He watches her come back to herself, a veiled kind of wariness lurking in his eyes.
The sideroom is lit by flickering pseudocandles; the warm light plays over the rich Imperial black of Reuenthal's uniform, and catches in the blue of his cloak and his eyes. She turns her eyes from him to rest of the room; bookshelves and vases. A side table with a brandy decanter and a bowl of uncracked nuts with a little silver, ornamental nutcracker, the sort of thing that cost as much as the whole of her garden.
How merciful, that Reuenthal has been primed to not be alarmed by her absences. He's seen enough of them now.
“In some ways, this is a relief,” Eva confesses.
“A relief?” Reuenthal asks.
Eva doesn’t reply. For so long, she has been lost; she stepped off the path when her body first began to bleed as if she was the one who went to war, when her hopes had crumbled and slipped from her hands.
This, at least, is a different kind of lost.
She laughs. “I don’t know quite what I mean, Reuenthal.”
"We could leave," Reuenthal says. "There are more entertaining ways to spend an evening." It doesn't sound like his heart is in the suggestion.
Eva shakes her head. “I don’t care for all this,” Eva says. “But it’s my responsibility, for the moment.”
Last time she was here, she and Wolf had wound up hiding on the servants’ stairs with a dish of nuts, as he cracked them for her, and each sliver came to her lips warm from his hands. The memory makes her laugh.
Reuenthal cracks the smooth oblong shape between the silver tongs with a flick of his wrist, and withdraws the flesh from the ruins fastidiously.
He lifts the nut to offer it to Eva. Instead of taking it, impulse seizes her; she leans forward and eats it from his hand. Her lips brush his fingers. He withdraws as if stung.
She could drink him in; she could compass him. What else is a woman for? If she is not enough for a child, perhaps she is enough for this.
Wolf’s orbit; at least she catches and holds a little of his light.
She dances another dance with Reuenthal, and then with Admiral Eisenbach; and then a minister who is all too excited to fill her ears with talk of construction policy and adjustments to zoning regulations under Reinhard, including the removal of aristocratic fiets, and a lord who steps on her feet; until finally she retreats with a head swimming in dance music, feeling righteously satisfied in her show of endurance.
“Lady Mittermeyer,” Yrsa says, appearing at her shoulder. “If I were a man, I would ache to ask for a dance. You’re aglow.”
“It’s just as well that you aren’t,” Eva says, accepting the drink with honest gratitude. “My head is swimming.”
“I would dance the part better than some of these men,” Yrsa says.
Eva giggles.
When she turns to accept the champagne, Yrsa pins her with those lovely brown eyes.
“I see that Admiral Reuenthal has been a friend to you, in your time of hardship.”
Eva lifts the flute to her mouth, letting the champagne fizz against her lips to buy herself a moment. “He has been a friend to my husband since they were lieutenants,” she says.
“Loyalty like that is to be celebrated,” Yrsa says, her tone ambiguous.
Over Yrsa’s shoulder, Eva spots the sleek lines of Reuenthal’s uniform. He’s still in conversation with another office, but as Eva watches, he nods to his fellow officer and peels away from the group, slipping through the crowd to head towards a side door.
Yrsa mustn’t see.
The impulse strikes her with concrete certainty. She has no idea of what he’s doing; but he’s hers now, in a way.
“Yrsa,” Eva says, mustering a smile. “I appreciate all your kindness, and your concern.” She exhales, letting the hands that holds the champagne glass fall slack a little. “It has been — difficult. Reuenthal’s been indispensable, but you know how men are — there’s so much —” She lets a tremor creep into her voice, and then drops the champagne glass.
The crack of glass against the tile dancefloor steals everyone's attention. Even Reuenthal turns; and their eyes meet for a moment, across the room. She offers him the tiniest of smiles, and he slips into the crowd.
"Eva!" Yrsa is saying.
Eva lets herself be pulled from the room, and ushered to the wing of the manor that holds Yrsa's private rooms.
“Should I summon the admiral?” Yrsa says, her lips drawn together in worry. “But I don’t think it would be appropriate to leave you with—”
“No,” Eva says, quickly. “We don’t need to trouble the admiral with this. Please, it’s just a passing weakness.”
Perhaps she overplayed it; or perhaps the rumors of Eva’s own ill health play in her favor.
“Please,” she says, after Yrsa has fussed for a few moments. “I will be fine, I promise.”
“Are you certain?” Yrsa says.
“I don’t want to keep you from your admirers,” Eva says. “Or your responsibilities.”
When she’s waved off Yrsa, and then the maid Yrsa sends to attend her, she buries her face in her hands, overcome by her own audacity. Playing sick to snoop.
But a familiar set of footsteps down the hallway draw her from embarrassment. She thinks they might stop at her door, but they go by without pause; Reuenthal either hadn’t noticed the commotion she caused, or is taking advantage of it.
She waits a breath, and then stands. Embarrassingly, her vision spins a little and her first steps are wobbly.
Padding down the hallway, she tries to get her bearings. The Brandt manner is a maze of honeycombed hallways, but it’s not her first time here. Where would she find Reuenthal?
On a whim, she turns further into the heart of the manor, towards Lady Brandt’s private rooms. She’s shared a house with Wolf since she was a child; she has a second sense for his presence that sometimes feels like a tether, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but never quite severed. So long as they’re planetside together, she can be confident in her ability to find him.
There’s no such thing between her and Reuenthal. But she has a hunch.
Thankfully, there is no sound behind Lady Brandt’s bedroom door, but when Eva pauses at the sturdy slab of oak that marks her study, she hears movement within. Someone rustling papers. It could be a servant, or Yrsa herself; and how would Eva explain herself then?
She knows it isn’t.
Still, her heart in her throat as she pushes the door open.
Reuenthal spins around, his mismatched eyes flashing in the half-light, something predatory and foreign that makes her take an instinctive step backwards. For a half-breath, she has a sense of how it would feel to be his enemy.
Then he recognizes her, and most of the tension leaves him in a breath. “Evangeline,” he hisses. “What are you doing?”
“I should be asking you that,” Eva says, forcing herself to step forward again, and pull the study door shut. Reuenthal has half the drawers of Lady Brandt’s desk open; he’s spread out her effects over the gleaming oak surface of the desk, papers and vials of perfume and letters — Eva’s eyes narrow. “Just what are you looking for, Reuenthal?”
Something flat and hot flashes through Reuenthal’s eyes, but when he speaks his voice is perfectly courtly. “It’s not anything of your concern.”
“She would have spotted you, if I hadn’t made a scene,” Eva says.
This time, she can pinpoint the look that flashes over Reuenthal’s face: panic. He freezes for a moment, and she can see him forcing himself to keep moving, sorting through the papers in front of him.
“Let me know what you’re doing, and I can help. I know this place.”
“You don’t have any idea what is going on,” Reuenthal says, sounding darkly amused. “You don’t owe me blind loyalty.”
“Admiral —” Eva starts. “This can’t come down to what I owe you. You’re not playing that game with Wolf anymore, are you?” She can’t imagine keeping track, over a decade of friendship.
They stare at each other. The silence stretches on, one long held breath, until his shoulders drop and he looks away, swearing quietly.
“I should never have —” he says. “Lady Brandt has — things of mine, from when we were involved. She’s used it now and then, to get my support with various — matters.” He grimaces.
“Yrsa is blackmailing you?” Eva says, her voice rising in shock. “What does she have?
Reuenthal laughs. “Nothing so dramatic. The matters are paltry. But I —” He stops. “With the way things stand, between — I couldn’t let it continue.”
Yes, being blackmailed by a former lover would cast a pall over whatever this is. “What kind of blackmail is it?” Eva asks, warily.
Reuenthal opens his mouth, but no words come out.
Before Eva can ask again, the door to the study begins to creak open.
She locks eyes with Reuenthal, and sees her own panic reflected back in his mismatched gaze. A quick glance tells her there’s nowhere in the room that will hide the both of them.
As the door swings open, he takes her by the shoulder and pushes her back to the window, pulling the heavy velvet curtain to hide her. Too tall to step in beside her, he turns to the mantle to hide the movement.
From behind the curtain, all Eva can see is a sliver of Reuenthal’s face, turned from the door, and the light spilling in from the hallway.
“Now, admiral, what are you doing here?” Lady Brandt’s voice reaches her ears. She sounds amused.
“You’ve had your fun, and I’ve humored it,” Reuenthal says. “But I am putting an end to that. Return them to me, and we can part ways like nothing happened.”
“Like nothing happened? My, admiral, has no one told you that you can’t unfuck a woman?” Yrsa says.
“Shameless woman,” Reuenthal says.
Eva recoils at the malice in his tone, biting her lip to stop herself from making a sound.
”You’re part and parcel to it.” Yrsa hardly sounds ashamed. Playful, even. “Was satisfying yourself with shameless women not enough for you?” Yrsa says, dropping the playful affectation. “This is new levels of depravity. Your friend’s wife, when he’s —“
“That’s enough,” Reuenthal says, in a dreadful tone. His voice is low and dangerous.
“What, afraid to say it? That doesn’t seem to be stopping you from trying your hand with Lady Mittermeyer,” Yrsa says. “Don’t deny it, Reuenthal. I know just how you operate.”
“You don’t understand.”
Eva digs her nails into her palms, her mind racing.
“What I don’t understand is what you can possibly be pouring in her ears. Were you expecting him to die?” She steps closer, and Reuenthal is trapped against the desk. In the low light of the study, his eyes shine white; predator and prey all at once, and the scene is catapulting towards something Eva is certain she doesn’t want to see.
“Stop!” she says, stepping from the curtain. “It’s not like that, Yrsa.”
For everything, this woman has some fondness for her; for everything, she was trying to protect Eva.
Reuenthal goes white. “No.”
She knows what he fears most. “It’s only my honor at stake, isn’t it?” she says. “Let me tell her.” Her eyes meet his; trust me, she tries to convey, in that lovers’ language that they don’t quite share yet.
Reuenthal says nothing; but he doesn’t stop her, either, as she begins to speak. She lets it spill from her; talking around the part that would shame him, never mentioning what lay between him and Wolf.
“He’s a man of honor, and he loves me, and Wolf loves me too. Is that so hard to believe? Is that so much rarer than your sordid stories?”
“A man of honor,” Yrsa says, her voice dripping with disdain. “Who offers his friend his pretty little wife…”
“Call it that if you want,” Eva says, lifting her chin. “But don’t think it is something you can use against him, or me, or Wolf. It’s cruel, and it’s a waste of your time. If there’s something you want —” She takes a breath, trying to steady the frantic beat of her own heart. “ — if there’s something you want, or need, bring it to me, and I can bring it Wolf, or — or anyone. You’ve been kind to me, Yrsa, and I know you were trying to be kind again.”
Yrsa’s eyes narrow. “Evangeline,” she says, in the soft tone that people save for Eva, the tone that says they think she is weak, and soft, and a little bit stupid. “Do you understand what you are doing? They’ll make you like me, you know.”
I’m not betraying anyone, she wants to say. Instead, she says: “I don’t think that would be so bad, if I get to have what I have now.”
“You don’t know what advantages you would be ceding.” Yrsa watches her, eyes narrowed, that playful smile still turning up the corners of her lips. “Eva, dear,” she says. “If I thought you were a cleverer — no, I should say crueler — girl, I would say you’ve got me in quite the trap.”
“Oh?” Eva says, lifting her chin.
“What would happen, if I went to the high admiral to confirm all this?” Yrsa says, her eyes flicking to where Reuenthal stands. “If you’re lying, it could tear half the government apart. It would have consequences far beyond my life, or yours.”
“It wouldn’t,” Eva says.
“You think, ah men are such rational creatures, who can always be trusted to put aside their petty personal grievances for the good of the country?” Yrsa says. Her lips quirk, her smile turning crueler. “Your husband is one of the pillars this new world stands on.”
Eva shudders. “Wolf isn’t like that.”
“You never know how a man will act in a passion,” Yrsa says.
Reuenthal makes a sound, low in his throat.
“Not all until you’ve tested him. And I don’t think, sweet thing as you are, that you’ve had the nerve.”
“You don’t know what has happened between us,” Eva says, turning and pinning Yrsa with a stare of her own. “You don’t have a single idea how I’ve tested him. Wolf has had every opportunity —- every excuse — to abandon me.”
For a moment, Yrsa seems unnerved; flustered, even. But that quickly disappears under that same vulpine smile.
“Go to Wolf, then,” Eva says. “Talk to him. Please.”
“And there it is,” Yrsa says. “If I went to him — wounded as he is — wouldn’t that be a cruel thing? Wouldn’t I be an intolerable woman? Don’t think me unfeeling.”
The Wolf that Lady Brandt is conjuring makes Eva’s heart ache with a teeth-grinding, head-aching throb. “It’s as I said,” she says simply. “My husband knows my heart, and his own.”
“And does Admiral Reuenthal know your heart?”
It’s Eva’s turn to smile. “No. I don’t think so,” she says. “But maybe he’ll come to know it. With time.”
Yrsa laughs, incredulous but not cruel. “Very well. Do as you will; but please, stop meddling here.”
“We will. Please,” Eva says. “Please, may I have whatever token of Reuenthal’s that you have? I will be in your debt.”
“Frau Mittermeyer.” Reuenthal has finally found his voice again. His voice is a warning, but Eva doesn’t take her eyes from Yrsa.
For a long moment, nobody says anything.
”Lady Mittermeyer,” Yrsa says at last, her expression smoothing, any turmoil disappearing behind her mask of courtly politeness. “I think you are an enemy I don’t care to make.”
”You are a friend I would like to keep,” Eva says.
With a sigh, Yrsa goes to her desk. She produces a little silver key from her bracelets, and presses it to the side; with a pop, a compartment slides open. She pulls a small paper package from within, checks the contents, and then holds it out to Eva.
Quick as thought, Reuenthal moves, snatching it from Yrsa’s fingers before Eva can lift a hand.
Eva starts, but regains her composure quickly. Better to sort this with Reuenthal later.
She lifts her hand for him to take, and he does. Their fingers fit together. “It was lovely to see you,” she tells Lady Brandt. “Please, come to mine next time. I’m sure Wolf would be glad to see you.”
The drive back is quiet; Reuenthal has yet to quite regain his color.
“Reuenthal,” she says, when he pulls into the drive. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else —”
Reuenthal barks a laugh. “A woman is a dangerous enemy,” he says. “And you are no exception. You had her dancing to your tune.”
”I — suppose so,” Eva says. “But it was all true, really.”
“She was right not to make an enemy of you,” Reuenthal murmurs. “I’m not sure one of Oberstein’s men could have done a neater job.”
“What do you think Wolf will say, if she actually goes to him?” Reuenthal says.
That draws a laugh from Eva. Perhaps he isn’t angry after all.
“I don’t have the slightest idea,” she says. “I’ll have to warn him. We’ll have to warn him.”
There’s so much to say; so much to sort through, but one question looms in her mind, as they sit in the heavy silence of the spring.
”Reuenthal,” she says, softly. Some strange, giddy boldness is burning in her blood.
“What is it, Evangeline?”
She listens to his voice move through the syllables of her name. It still sounds strange in his tongue, but it’s a joyful sort of frisson. A reminder that things have changed.
“You want to touch me,” she says. “Tell me if I’m mistaken.
Reuenthal flinches as if struck; the look in his eyes turns sharp with something. “What Lady Brandt said —“
”Her world is dying, isn’t it?” Eva says.
His eyes narrow. “Some things die faster than others.”
“I don’t want to play those games with you,” she says. “Wolf told you to please me — if it pleases you.”
She twines her fingers with his; pink against his pallid skin. Then, she leans in close and presses her lips to his.
Wolf kisses to hold and to devour. Even his most chaste, courtly kiss brings heat to her cheeks.
Reuenthal’s lips are chill, and at first he doesn’t move at all. But then he bends into her touch, just a little, and kisses her back, one long, drawn-out moment of slow-melting intensity. It feels as if the world is only this point of connection.
Beyond that, some sea trembles.
For her, kissing has meant kissing Wolf; before him, there had only been the half-forgotten playmates of her childhood and their kissing games. To be close to anyone was to be close to him; his arms around her, sweeping her up, arms that could hold the whole world for her. Guiding her, protecting her; he’s seen more of her life than anyone living.
A tremor runs through his shoulders. She curls her fingers in his uniform, pulling him closer.
The intensity burns; she pulls away, giddy and dizzy and afraid all at once. Her heart is hammering like she’s caught some creature inside her rib cage; she feels almost sick with it, with whatever longs to break free from under her skin.
Is this wrong? Am I wrong? It burns under her skin, the way sugar burns when it sits too long in her mouth.
She can’t answer it; she can only close her eyes and continue into the unknown.