“Everyone.”She shrugged.“They say if you were dropped in the sea, every part of you would sting from the salt.”
“There’s no need for anyone to be thinking about my skin,” I said.
She looked at me hard, suddenly seeming a hundred years older than I was.Knowing and sad.As quick as her deep expression had appeared, it was gone.“You are the new thing in the palace.They will talk of something else soon.”
And then, because I was someone who brutal mischief was drawn to, Dania’s eyes lit up, and she rushed to a simple gilded door behind me.“Look at this one!”
I was also awed by the metal sheen of the door, but not in the way that she was.Dania was likely thinking that the door was pretty and probably holding something just as pretty within.I was thinking that if I were to capture or create some lightning, I could fill the gilded coating of the door with it, and then only I would be able to enter, key or not.
“The keys, quickly!”Dania’s spiritedness spread to me, and I wove my fingers through the gold ring of keys, trying one after another after another.Finally, I stopped.
“No, Dania.We mustn’t go through this one.”There was only one key left to try.The one King Arik had expressly forbidden me from using.
“Why not?It’s the only door made of gold!”
I smiled a little.“It’s probably notmadeof gold, likely just coated with it.”
“Either way!It’s enchanting.Surely he keeps his greatest treasures right here!There is a rumour he has a magic horn that summons trickster spirits to it.Maybe it is in there!”
The horn sounded foolish to me.“We cannot.I promised him I wouldn’t go into the room opened by this key.”I held up the key.“It was his one request.”
Dania huffed and stared at me, blinking.
I smiled.“Don’t be cross with me.”
She kept blinking, putting on a face of teasing sadness.
“I must obey him,” I said, trying not to laugh at her false misery.“He has offered to see that I make it home.I cannot risk upsetting him.Please do not be cross.”
“He didn’t sayIcouldn’t enter though, did he?”
I shook my head.“Neither of us will enter.”
“Fine,” she said, with a growl.“But, to make it up to me, you must help me finish this.”She raised the mead skin.
I was afraid of drink that altered the mind.
“It is the only way I could possibly forgive you,” Dania said.
I smiled.“Very well.I will have a little.”
And I did.I had perhaps four small drinks of mead, holding the vessel to my lips for longer than I actually drank from it so Dania would think I was having more than I was.It was sweet, coating my lips and throat in warmth.We walked the halls and spoke in a way that was uncommon for me.It was like our hearts were speaking to one another through our mouths, as if our minds had nothing to do with it.She told me of her love: Eggun.He was rowing on a raiding ship and had been gone for nearly a full moon and wouldn’t return until next spring at the earliest.She told me of her father back on the Isle: a miller.She said his life was hard, and having seen it, she could not go back to our homeland.She had two boys who would be free to choose the way of their life when they were grown, but if they were on the Isle, they wouldn’t have the same choices.
“I do miss the moss, though,” she said.“How soft it is.How the whole world can be the greenest of greens in mossy woodlands.”
I told her of Dayne, of missing him.Of how much I loved horses and how I missed the time before my goldkeeper’s gown because I missed horseback riding.I spoke of being married to Loric as soon as I returned home.“If he’ll still have me.”
“Do you love him?”She asked the question so simply, as if it weren’t a terrible thing to ask, because what if I didn’t and had to marry him anyway?
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
“Then you do not.”
“But I might,” I said.“Our meeting was very promising.”
“Or…” Her expression grew mischievous once more.“You could stay here.You could try five or six or twenty cocks before you pick one.”
My eyes were wide with playful warning.“You mustn’t speak like this?—”
