Love Conquers All, Even Property Ownership Rights

“So my house,” I state, “which I own for my self, and which I requested solely to put some distance between you and me …is now the official rendezvous point for you and Imogen Rossach to conduct conjugal visits. Did I get that right?”

I stand in the doorway of my new home, which I have spent so little time in that I have not even seen all the rooms of it. Edgar stands on the front porch, huddled under an umbrella and sopping wet.

“That’s…well, when you put it that way,” he chuckles nervously.

“Eloise, who’s at the door?” calls Mom from the second floor. I am more than happy with her staying here, since I missed her. More importantly, the house on Lavendel Road has no place for Svara and Hilde, Mom’s permanent personal guard, to sleep.

“No one, my lady,” I respond. Then I glare at Edgar and lower my voice. “Your Highness. You know what His Majesty thinks of this. ‘By pain of prison or death.’ You are not to pursue a marital relationship with anyone, do you understand?”

“I’m not,” says Edgar.

“You want to have sex with her. That’s a marital act.”

“In the church? Yes. In the law? No. Before you ask, yes, I cleared this with Moretti. I am not doing anything forbidden by the King. Step aside, Miss Odric.”

I stay firmly put. “You cannot. Be staying. At my house.”

“I bought this house for you,” he counters.

“And I thank you for that! But it is ten o’clock at night and it has been a very long day and I am not equipped to host another guest right now.”

Edgar sniffs. “There’s enough space. Imogen and I will take one, you have another, the bodyguards take the last. It’s not like we’re all sharing a room.”

“Yes, but we’re sharing a wall. Good night, Your Highness.”

“Edgar?” Mom’s voice echoes throughout the foyer. I curse under my breath and slowly turn around.

Her makeup has been cleaned off and her hair let down from its elaborate style, gathered loosely over one shoulder. But she is still wearing her white and gold gown, its train and ribbons draping down the stairs as she descends.

Despite standing in the doorway between them, I have no power to stop what happens next. Love conquers all, even property ownership rights, I guess. One of them, I’m not sure who, starts running. The other breaks into a run a millisecond later. They meet in the middle of the foyer and spin as they embrace. For the first time in nineteen years, no one else in the world exists except Edgar and Imogen. I would have to be heartless to tear them apart.

That being said, I am an eighteen-year-old who is realizing for the first time how gross it is to watch your parents kiss. I wrinkle my nose, mutter something about going to stay with Thorunn, and start searching the house for my overnight travel bag.

I don’t have time to change out of my garden party wear, since Mom and Edgar are really getting into it, so I just throw on my hat and raincoat over my clothes and head outside. If I am lucky, I might catch Moretti and Thorunn as they head back to the palace. Fortunately, they left only shortly before Edgar arrived, and I spot them waiting at a corner down the street. They seem to be conversing, peacefully this time. Thank gods.

“Wait up!” I holler.

Miraculously, even through the rain and thunder, they hear me. A carriage rolls up, and I can see Moretti arguing with the driver as if trying to convince him to wait for me, but given the rain and the late hour, it is no surprise that the driver shakes his head and departs. I would run to catch up, but the slim cut of my skirts and the delicate high heels reduce me to a waddle at best. I wish my parents had enough self control to let me change my shoes.

As soon as I catch up to them, Moretti offers the shelter of his umbrella and Thorunn drapes his fur cloak over my shivering shoulders. “Evicted by the lovers?” Thorunn asks.

“Yeah,” I gasp, out of breath. “I hope…they don’t make a habit of this.”

“Why not? Not excited to have your parents under one roof again?” Moretti raises an eyebrow.

“I’m happy for them,” I reply, “I’d just rather they use a different roof.”

At the late hour on a Friday night, especially in a storm, it will be difficult to catch a horse-drawn cab, so Moretti convinces us to walk another block and hop on the electric trolley. This strange, newfangled device was just installed recently. I have been too fearful to try it, having witnessed some ugly accidents in my past life, but Moretti assures me that he takes it to and from the palace every day and it is perfectly safe. As we approach the tracks, the trolley car appears to be stopped for the night, with the operator moving between the seats with a broom. She raises an eyebrow as she watches us approach and eventually leans out the back exit.

“Trolley’s closed for the night,” she calls.

“We just need a lift to the palace,” says Moretti.

The operator starts to shake her head. “Sorry, kids, with the electrical storm, you’ve no idea how exhausted I am…” Then she pauses. “Say, don’t I know you? Little miss?”

I glance around to ensure there are no other little misses in the area, then say hesitantly, “Me?”

“Yes—oh, I saw you just this morning! Running like the devil was after you. Well, now I know why! You’re Prince Edgar’s clerk, aren’t you?”

“How…do you…”

“Oh, everyone’s talking about you! My daughters and their classmates, it’s all they were yapping about on the way home from school. The strangest story! Not only do I hear that the prince is breaking off a thirty-year engagement with some socialite, but it’s all thanks to some upstart prodigy barely older than my kids are! Of course, the meat and potatoes are the Prince and his new lady—that’s mostly what my kids were talking about, to be honest—but naturally the tabloids are going to milk that story for what it’s worth. Frankly, I think there’s a better story elsewhere. In something aspirational. Like a hardworking girl who gets a real respectable job up there in the palace, directly handling the sort of political matters that change the world…”

As fascinated as I am about the revelation that there is apparently citywide gossip about me—only nine-ish hours since we went public with the petition, too—all I care about now is that it is raining and I am still very cold.

“Well, um, thank you, I suppose? Listen, ma’am—” I don’t think this will work, but I will give it a shot “—I need to get to the palace. To work on…royal…clerk…work things. I can, um…give you an autograph?”

Within minutes, Thorunn, Moretti, and I are the only three passengers on the trolley. The operator, whose name I learned was Cindy, is at the helm, busy channeling the arcana needed to push the trolley car up the steep slope of Main Street, so she will thankfully not be bothering us anytime soon. She has looped me into a half-hearted guarantee of free trolley fares as long as I continue to update her on the hottest palace gossip, so I suppose I should either get used to this mode of transport or find something enjoyable about walking to work. I will probably end up taking the trolley. Even though it is objectively terrifying to be at the mercy of a giant metal contraption piloted by an attention-deficit electromancer, I get to sit. And after a while, the trolley car’s rocking is actually soothing.

Reflexively, I rest my head on Thorunn’s shoulder. Moretti reaches across the aisle and taps my arm.

“Maybe don’t,” he suggests. “Not in public.”

He’s right. After the excitement of the day, I almost forgot about Edgar’s bluff. A proxy marriage. Thorunn and I are not supposed to be in love. Thorunn is supposed to be engaged to “Elizabeth.” He didn’t ask either me or Thorunn if we were okay with this new layer of deception, but strangely enough, I am most indignant on the part of Elizabeth—even though she doesn’t exist. Nothing like this was ever mentioned in Edgar’s letters to her. He didn’t ask her for her opinion at all. How would I have reacted in my past life? What if, all of a sudden, I started getting letters from my estranged father, learned he was a prince, and then suddenly was told that he engaged me to a foreigner I had never met as a political ploy? I would tell Master Odric to never sail our ships back to Saol Eile, that’s for sure. I would be pissed.

“I’m pissed,” I mutter. “We went to all this trouble to get engaged. And now we’re back to sneaking around again.”

“We’ll talk to Edgar in the morning,” says Thorunn. “Perhaps Lady Amira is right; and he is just playing a game.”

“No, I know he’s playing a game. I just don’t want to be a part of it.”

Since we are the only passengers on this trolley, there are only two stops on the route. As the car begins to slow, Moretti sighs and stands. “Well…this is where I part from you lovebirds. If it makes you feel any better, Thorunn’s engagement to ‘Elizabeth’...doesn’t change anything in the long run.” He glances over to Cindy, then leans down and lowers his voice. “It could be worse. Elizabeth could be real.”

This is true. I suppose it also lends some stability to my future prospects with Thorunn, too. Once I go public with my identity, we now have a plausible political reason behind our marriage besides fickle young love. At the same time…I hesitate at the thought of a royal wedding. Those events are a level of insane that make me sick to my stomach to imagine—standing up there in front of all those people, being scrutinized by so many eyes, with such lavish displays of decorative waste surrounding me on all sides—I shake my head. No, I do not think the worst case scenario is one where Elizabeth is real. The worst case scenario is the one where I have to become her.

But that is a lot to unpack for ten o’clock at night. So I just wish Moretti a good night and look out the window as the trolley rolls away from his house.

“Now that he’s gone,” Thorunn announces, “what say we resume?”

He pats his shoulder, offering for me to rest against it again. I glance towards Cindy. She stands at the opposite end of the trolley and is thoroughly immersed in channeling the electric current, with her back towards us. The ambient sound of the trolley wheels on its tracks, the pounding of rain on the aluminum roof, and the harmonic hum of electromancy provides a rich backdrop of noise behind which to hide.

“Fuck it,” I say, and snuggle up close to my fiancé.

By the time we arrive at the palace trolley stop, I have recovered some energy from my catnap on Thorunn’s shoulder. Cindy bids us a delighted farewell, tells me a couple times how much her daughters will love the autograph, and flips the trolley’s sign to OUT OF SERVICE. Then she trundles away in her great metal beast. The resulting night is quiet and still, thick with shadows and petrichor.

It is not the driest night to be making out in the palace gardens, but who knows what other chance we will have? Thorunn is leaving for his home country soon ( can he still leave, what with the proxy engagement?) and even if that is delayed, Edgar’s whims are as wild as the wind. We have no idea how he will instruct us to behave in our new fake relationship. Plus, I do not know when I will have the chance to see Thorunn in this sleeveless armor set again, and similarly, he does not know when I will wear something quite as flattering as this garden dress. We might as well enjoy ourselves while we can.

Though it is nearly pitch black outside, with only the weak gaslamps along the main walkways to illuminate the gardens, Thorunn takes me by the hand and leads me back to the now-deserted site of the engagement party. As the spring storm rolled in towards the end of the party, the castle staff only had the chance to whisk the big decorations inside. Ephemera, like the balloons and streamers, were left behind to clean up later. We find our gazebo from earlier, push aside the tattered and soggy paper streamers, and find that the benches inside are dry enough to sit comfortably.

Not that it matters much to me. I do not end up sitting much of anywhere that is not Thorunn’s lap. Alone, in the dark, with the rain to drown out any sounds and not a single soul around to see, we are free to do as we please. Despite the cold of the rain and the night, it is suddenly too hot for my raincoat and hat, and they are discarded. Thorunn runs his hands down my shoulders, picks at the hem of my arm-length glove, and as he peels away the white satin, kisses each new inch of exposed skin.

“If only…” he murmurs between breaths and kisses, “I had just a little more light…to behold every angle of your beauty…”

“We could go inside,” I suggest.

“Would you prefer that, my lady?”

I hesitate. “I don’t know…oh, I do like the dark. It makes me think of…ah, nevermind.”

“Think of what?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t. Promise.”

“You really musn’t laugh. The dark just makes me fantasize…with your armor, your war paint, your crown…I cannot help but think of a fearsome barbarian, invading in the dark of night to carry me away, your prize of war to be ravished…”

He tugs off the last of my left glove and kisses the back of my hand. “Is that a good thing, my lady?”

“It is a very dangerous thing.” As I shift closer into his lap, my skirts slide further up my legs. While hardly modest , I am still decent, with my white stockings covering my exposed calves and knees…though not for long, as my skirts need only shift an inch higher to reveal the delicate clips of my garters. “How strange and nonsensical a feeling…to fear and desire all at once…yet the fear makes the desire only more powerful…”

The second glove comes off much quicker than the first. Thorunn guides my bare hand to cup his face and closes his eyes. “If only my fear did the same thing,” he sighs. “It does not embolden me. Just holds me back.”

“What could someone like you possibly be afraid of?”

“Hurting you.” He turns and presses his lips into my palm. “Losing you.”

Mere seconds ago, I would have thought that nothing could shatter the heated, passionate longing for my beloved. But now these four, simple words ring and echo in my mind until they nearly drown out everything else. The truth is that, for much of my second chance at life, I feared the same things. That some cruel twist of fate might turn Thorunn’s hand against me again; that his companionship will be ripped away by forces beyond our control. But at least the first of the fears has changed.

“Thorunn,” I breathe, kissing him. As we part, I touch my forehead against his and lay my left hand on his chest. “You don’t give me enough credit. If I had even the slightest sense that you might hurt me, I would never have let you put this ring on my finger. I trust you. I do not grant my trust lightly.”

He manages a tiny nod. As my vision has adjusted to the darkness, I can just make out the silver glimmer of his eyes, which dart between my own eyes and my lips. When he kisses me, he pushes deeper into it, tentative, exploratory. I open my mouth and I let him. When we part for air, I guide his hands to my thighs.

“I think…” I ponder aloud, “there is also something to be said about what qualifies as ‘hurting me.’ Of course, some people might say that simply dishonoring a woman is inherently hurting her…but they’re boring, and I think that’s a load of bull. If you wanted to dishonor me, and then chose not to—why, actually, that would hurt me quite a lot. It would hurt my pride. So, I reckon…that is where my fantasy comes in. There’s something quite tantalizing about it…about being wanted so desperately that a man has no choice but to act dishonorably.”

Thorunn laughs. “I love how you say things,” he says. “I love you so much.”

As if I weigh nothing in his arms, Thorunn grips beneath my thighs and hoists me into the air. I squeal in surprise. He pulls me into a kiss, and I slide my arms around his shoulders to deepen it. I am held completely aloft, fully at his mercy. I would have it no other way. I whisper a suggestion into his ear, and with an excited grin, Thorunn turns and pushes me up against the gazebo wall. With his hands occupied in carrying me, I brush my hair out of the way, allowing him to kiss down my cheek, my jaw, my throat…

Wait.

He notices it as soon as I remember. There is no chance to distract him or mislead him away. As he reaches my throat and the satin ribbon tied around it, he hesitates. Then he pulls back, sets me down on the bench, and lifts his hands to my neck.

“Eloise…you’re bleeding!”