Page 233 of The Priory of the Orange Tree

Sabran waited beside the fire. She wore nothing now but her stiff corset and shift.

“Make no mistake,” she said, “I am wroth with you.”

Ead stood on the threshold.

“I shared all my secrets with you, Ead.” Her voice was hardly there. “You saw me as the night does. As my truest self.” She paused. “It was you who drove away Fýredel.”

“Yes.”

Sabran closed her eyes.

“Nothing in my life was real. Even the attempts totakemy life were staged, designed to influence and manipulate me. But you, Ead—I believed you were different. I called Combe a liar when he told me you were not what you appeared. Now I wonder if everything between us was part of your act. Yourassignment.”

Ead searched for the right words.

“Answer me,” Sabran said, voice straining. “I am your queen.”

“You may beaqueen, but you are notmyqueen. I am not your subject, Sabran.” Ead stepped inside and shut the doors. “And that is why you can be certain that what was between us was real.”

Sabran gazed into the fire.

“I showed you as much of myself as I could,” Ead told her. “Any more would have seen me executed.”

“Do you think me a tyrant?”

“I think you a self-righteous fool whose head is harder than a rock. And I would not change you for the world.”

Sabran finally looked at her.

“Tell me, Eadaz uq-Nara,” she said softly, “am I a greater fool to want you still?”

Ead crossed the space between them. “No more a fool than I,” she said, “to love you as I do.”

She reached for Sabran, brushing a lock of her hair behind her ear. Sabran gazed into her eyes.

They stood face to face, barely touching. At last, Sabran took Ead by the hands and placed them on her waist. Ead slid them to her front and set about unravelling her corset.

Sabran watched her. Ead wanted this to be another candle dance, to savor the long climb of their intimacy, but she needed her too much. Her fingers looped beneath the laces and pulled them through the hooks, one after another, and at last the corset opened and fell, leaving Sabran in her shift. Ead slid the silk from her shoulders and held her by her hips.

She stood naked in the shadows. Ead drank in her limbs, her hair, her eyes like foxfire.

The space between them disappeared. Now it was Sabran who did the unlacing. Ead closed her eyes and let herself be stripped.

They embraced like companions on the first night. When Sabran placed a kiss on her neck, just behind the shell of her ear, Ead let her head list to one side. Sabran glided her hands up her back.

Ead lowered her to the bed. Hungry lips came against hers, and Sabran breathed her name. It seemed as if centuries had passed since they had last been here.

They intertwined among the furs and sheets, breathless and fierce. Ead shivered with anticipation as she relearned every detail of the woman she had left behind. Her cheekbones and her tilted-up nose. Her smooth brow. The pillar of her throat and the little chalice at its base. The twin dents low down on her back, like the impressions of fingertips. Sabran unlocked her lips with her own, and Ead kissed her as if this were their last act on earth. As if this one embrace could keep the Nameless One at bay.

Their tongues danced the same pavane as their hips. Ead bent her head and touched her lips to each fine-cut collarbone, the rosebuds at the tips of her breasts. She kissed her belly, where the bruising had at last faded away. The only trace of the truth was a seam beneath her navel.

Sabran cradled her face. Ead looked into the eyes that had haunted her, and called to her still. Her fingers grazed over the scar that led along one thigh, found the dew where it met the other.

Then Sabran rolled her over, mischief in her smile. Her hair eclipsed the candlelight. Ead slid her hands around the cruet of her waist, interlocked her fingers at the small of her back, and dragged her between her legs.

Desire was a banked fire in her. Sabran smoothed a hand beneath her thigh and placed a light kiss on each breast.

Surely this was an unquiet dream. She would throw herself on the mercy of the desert if it meant that she could have this woman.

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