BOUND TO THE DEVILS HEIR

CHAPTER 3

Preparations

The next three weeks were a storm of silk and expectation.

Seamstresses arrived in waves, filling my chambers with bolts of fabric in deep jewel tones — the colors of Raveneth, which I quickly understood were not the soft pastels I had grown up wearing. Raveneth wore burgundy and black and deep forest green, colors with weight and intent. Colors that did not apologize for themselves.

I found, to my own surprise, that I did not mind them.

My lessons were adjusted. The usual curriculum — embroidery, music, the management of household accounts — was supplemented with new subjects. The customs of Raveneth. The formal address of its nobility. The history of the royal family, which was long and complicated and heavily redacted in the version I was given, which told me there was a great deal more to know than I was being shown.

I read everything I could find. It was not much. Raveneth guarded its secrets the way other kingdoms guarded their treasuries.

✦ ✦ ✦

It was Elara who told me what she had heard.

She had a gift for information, Elara did. Not gossip — she was too careful for gossip — but the kind of quiet accumulation of observed truth that came from being the sort of person no one noticed. Servants heard things that princesses never did.

“They say he does not speak often,” she told me one evening, working pins into the hem of a gown. “And when he does, people listen. Not because he raises his voice, but because—” She paused, choosing words. “Because you understand somehow that he will not say it again.”

“That could mean many things,” I said carefully.

“It could,” she agreed. She pinned another hem. “They also say he is fair. To his own people, at least. He does not punish servants for accidents. He does not take more than he is owed.” A pause. “He does not smile.”

“Ever?”

“That is what they say.”

I thought about that for a long time after she left. A man who never smiled could mean many things. Cruelty. Coldness. Or simply the kind of solitude so complete that there had never been anything to smile about.

I was not sure which possibility disturbed me more.

✦ ✦ ✦

My mother came to me on the last night.

We sat together in my chambers, drinking tea in the dark hour before dawn, and she told me what she could. Not everything — my mother was a woman of her generation, shaped by the same world that had shaped me, and there were things she had made her peace with by the simple method of not looking at them directly.

But she took my hands and she said: ‘You are stronger than you know, Rosalind. You have always been stronger than anyone has given you credit for. Whatever you find there — whatever he is — remember that.’

“What if he is terrible?” I asked, and I hated how young my voice sounded in that moment.”

My mother was quiet for a long time. Then she said: ‘Then you will endure. And you will find the spaces in the enduring where you can still breathe. We are very good at that, the women of this family.’

It was not comfort, exactly.

But it was truth. And that night, truth was all i needed.