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“It worked a little differently for the women,” he reminded me. “Particularly in France.”
“The good old double standard.”
“Oui. Most of the noblemen had mistresses, the kings even official ones. But their women were expected to be pure as new-fallen snow.”
“And when they weren’t, they pretended.”
“And removed the evidence.”
I looked at the evidence, and wondered how anyone had ever found him a burden. “That sucks.”
He reached past me for the wine, a ripple of fine muscle under finer skin. “Not…entirely. But my birth did make me stand out.”
“How did anybody know?”
He shrugged. “Rumors had spread of a fine lady who came to see me, all muffled up, a few times when I was a child. And then there was the money that was sent, every month, to pay for my schooling. It was thought that I was being educated for a reason, and that someday I would be summoned. And go away.”
“And the girls didn’t want to go away with a handsome sort-of prince?”
“It was not a matter of what they wanted. Their fathers had pu
t the fear of God into them. For the best, as it turned out.”
He didn’t elaborate, but he didn’t have to. I knew what that was like, to live with a group but never really be part of it. To have people find you useful but also strange, foreign. To have them automatically exclude you, suspect you, dismiss you. To stop talking when you came near, not because it was anything important, not even because they were afraid you might tell someone.
But because you were different.
What was weird was to think that somebody like Louis-Cesare knew it, too.
I glanced around the unprepossessing little shed again. And wondered about the young man who would remember a place like this so vividly, and for so many years. And about the foolish, foolish girls who had gone off with someone else.
And turned back to find him watching me again.
He was lying in a beam of firelight leaking around the side of the mostly missing wall. It was bathing that part of the room in an eerie ginger twilight. It bathed him, too, haloing his hair, darkening his eyes, warming his skin to damp golden velvet. I licked wine off my lips and watched his eyes follow the movement.
“Is there a reason you brought me here?” I finally asked.
“As living beings we stand out against the background of the memories we visit,” he said softly. “To someone gifted in the arts of the mind, it is as if we were in color and everyone else in black and white. But the more we sink into a memory, the better we blend in. If we sink far enough, Mircea thinks it may allow us to appear as part of the background, and so be overlooked.”
“That was option number three,” I guessed.
He nodded.
I drank wine. “And how do we do this fade thing, exactly?”
“I…did not have time to get complete instructions.” I looked at him. “Or any,” he admitted.
“But you have an idea.”
He finished his own wine in one long swallow. And then he got up and bowed slightly. And damned if he didn’t pull off courtly despite being dirty and half naked and covered with hay.
“If you allow, I would be honored to show you.”
And he held out a hand.
I stared at it.
An hour ago, I wouldn’t even have hesitated. An hour ago, I’d have just said no. Because it was what I always said, what I’d always had to say. So I wouldn’t hurt anybody, so I wouldn’t get hurt myself. No, you can’t have that person; no, you can’t stay in that town; no, you can’t live that life.
