Five

In which Daystar and Emberlace are upset, but it all works out anyway.

Emberlace jumped up from her place beside the fire as Daystar entered, running and throwing her arms around him, hanging off his shoulders and pressing her forehead against his before she dropped to the ground again, smiling warmly. Daystar smiled back, feeling a little pang.

His life changed so much with the introduction of a wife. She was already his confidant, an eager listening ear no matter how long he rambled on. Emberlace preferred to remain nearly all day in the prince and princess’s chambers, organizing papers, sending out his reports, and doing whatever else it was she did. Daystar roved the halls and the archives, looking for mention of the Drageklek in books, history or legend, and beginning to use the small amounts of information he found to imply questions to the various nobles and plumb their knowledge of the subject. Each day, he came up with little or nothing, and each day he returned to his chambers, feeling weighed down, only to be joyously greeted by Emberlace.

Since their first night together, he found she loved being close to him, always eager for affection. At first, Daystar thought she was pretending for the benefit of the court, but as the days stretched on and her behavior remained consistent, he came to the slow realization that somehow, in some way, Emberlace was in love with him.

The thought made him feel cruel, for he did not return her deep affection. She was a good woman, a good wife, and he did not resent her companionship, but he cared for her, and that was all.

All in good time, his father told him when Daystar admitted his concern about his lack of deep feeling for his new wife.

Emberlace turned away from him, catching his fingers to tug him towards their evening seats by the fire, and Daystar caught a glimpse of something on her neck. Catching her back, he gently tilted her head out of the way, holding her a little more firmly when she tried to squirm away from him.

Finger marks in soft purple bruises wrapped around the front of her neck. Daystar swept the hair over the front of her shoulder and saw another bruise reaching across the upper part of her back just above the hem of her dress. He pressed his palm against against her back, and she winced, still trying to tug away.

Daystar no longer found himself suffering from lack of feeling. He might not love Emberlace, but she was a sweet and gentle woman, his wife, and someone had grabbed her around the throat and shoved her into something. He spun her around firmly and took her face in his hands, holding her in place.

“Emberlace, please speak to me. Who did this to you?”

She bit her lip, tears brimming up in her eyes and spilling down her cheeks.

“Who did it?” Daystar demanded. “The nobles? The servants? One of my madcap suitor women? Could you at least nod or shake your head?”

Emberlace only cried harder, hanging onto him now, and Daystar groaned in frustration before embracing her.

“Give me something, anything at all, and I swear I’ll find them.”

Only sobs broke his young wife’s silence, and he picked her up and carried her to the couch in the sunlight where she liked to sit. They sat together until their supper arrived, and Emberlace slowly calmed. When the meal was set out, she rose eagerly and sat at the table, gesturing for the servants to fill her plate.

Daystar always wondered at his wife’s appetite. Most court women ate small portions to maintain their figures, but Emberlace consumed as much food as some men and never gained even the slightest amount of weight. It caused some tension between her and the noblewomen when they dined together, the ladies nibbling at the tiny suppers and politely insulting one another while Emberlace presided over the table in ravenous silence, daintily eating full plates of food while apparently ignoring the subtle bickering going on around her.

Even Dawncaster seemed stymied by the princess, which was saying a lot. The Far Haven heiress met with Emberlace at least once a week for tea or dinner or cards, trying to make a one-sided conversation and often failing miserably, as Emberlace barely communicated at all with anyone beyond Daystar.

“You need to coax her into speaking,” Felstar had told Daystar at last. “Whatever Damantian custom Ravenglen drilled into her head, it must be gotten rid of.”

His efforts still fell short. Indeed, he hardly knew what to do, and the only ideas that came to his mind anymore involved some kind of bribery or manipulation, and he hardly felt right about them. Instead, he fell to a more subtle method: trying to read her and learn her responses, when she liked things and when she didn’t. Currently, Daystar’s plan involved food. Emberlace clearly loved eating, and he ordered a varied and exotic menu from the kitchens. The cook was frustrated to no end by his demands, but Emberlace tried everything at least once, and Daystar had an extended opportunity to watch her changing expressions and judge them on whether she took more of the food or not.

Honey cakes she loved, shutting her eyes as she chewed and making certain not a crumb fell anywhere but in her mouth. Eggplant, on the other hand, was viewed with distaste. She swallowed with some difficulty and carefully shoved the stuff over to the edge of her plate, and Daystar was rewarded in his observations by at last seeing a faint flicker of disgust behind her otherwise neutral eyes.

“We’ve found nothing of the Drageklek,” Daystar told her, breaking the silence halfway through their meal. “Well, nearly nothing reliable. There are plenty of mentions of them in myth and legend, but no one is certain of what they do. Some say they aren’t really human at all, but rather false-humans, made of stone and dragon’s fire, like some sort of animated magical automaton. They spoke to the dragons, but no one knows how or why they held such prestige.”

Daystar watched Emberlace carefully as he talked, waiting for any gesture that might qualify as her entry into the conversation.

“Every Drageklek we’ve found springs to life on the page as a complete being, already in action, often having worked with the dragons for years. There are no records of how one became a Drageklek, or even a mention from the people themselves.

“One thing everyone agrees, though, the dragons will negotiate through a Drageklek, and a Drageklek only.”

After supper, Daystar turned his attention to Emberlace’s bruises again. She had acted normally through supper - or at least he did not see any outward signs of distress - but with her, he was constantly stymied in his attempts to translate her emotions into anything that made any sort of sense at all.

She was hesitant about letting him unlace the back of her bodice to look at the bruise on her back, but he insisted and saw the tension in her shoulders release. He guided her around into the lamplight and carefully bared the bruise.

Shades of blue and mottled green and yellow met his eyes, and he stared in horror at the massive discoloration that spread across her back. Emberlace had not been pushed against something, someone had thrown her, and hard. Beyond the finger marks around her neck, Daystar found more marks on her arms and her wrists, ugly bruises elsewhere on her skin. When he finally looked into her face, he saw the tears smearing her thick makeup, thinning it out, and he wiped it away with a quick swipe of his handkerchief and found that she was hiding another bruise on her cheek, this one marked by heavy rings.

A noble, then, probably a man by the size of the marks. Daystar saw the aftermath of the women’s fights from time to time, and they were marred with scratches, not blows.

“Please tell me, Emberlace,” he begged. “Who did this to you?”

She merely pulled her hair over her face and turned away, shaking.

Daystar’s frustration with her silence peaked. She was capable of speech, but something made her keep silent, and he was fed up with it.

“Will you just speak to me?!” he shouted, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her lightly. “Is there something going on in that head of yours, or are you just as witless as everyone assumes, because Emberlace, I can’t tell.”

Her tears fell thicker, and he hoped he was getting through.

“You need to talk to me, or gesture, or write something down. Anything, woman!”

Emberlace didn’t move except for her trembling shoulders, and he turned away abruptly, running a hand through his hair.

“Go back to your father’s chambers and stay there until we can get this sorted out. I have a feeling you talk to him.”

Daystar left without looking at her, slamming the door behind him. The halls were dim and empty this time of night, but he did not welcome the silence. With all the women chasing him for the past year, he thought all he wanted was silence. Now he had it, and it was wretched. He took no notice of the guards who quietly trailed him, letting his wandering steps lead him through the castle and down flights of stairs onto the transmitting floor.

Only a few guards and transmitters remained, watching the cubes, and he moved into their glow, listening to the warm hum of the cubes and letting the white noise wash over him. Daystar sat down with his back against the nearest cube and slowly calmed himself. His anger was less with Emberlace and more with the situation. Her complete silence in this, when she clearly knew who was hurting her and refused to tell him bordered on stupidity, and he did not think her unintelligent.

There’s another reason, he realized. Something that goes beyond upbringing or custom or habit. She’s afraid of something.

And you sure helped that, a part of him muttered at himself. Someone’s been hurting her, and what do you do? Shake her and yell in her face. Nice work. Very diplomatic.

Daystar groaned and put his face in his hands, rubbing at it. He had enough to worry about between the dragons and the barons and now his wife. At the least, he should go apologize and make sure she saw a physician to ease her injuries.

Do what you can, his father’s voice echoed in his head.

He found Emberlace in a frenzy when he returned. She slapped him as soon as he came in the door, then paced frantically across the floor, clutching her dressing gown around her and sobbing. Every pillow in the room was strewn on the floor, and Daystar found the reason as she picked them up and threw them at the wall.

“Emberlace-” he started.

She stalked over and slapped him again, and he stumbled back, surprised at the real fury in her eyes, though it quickly melted before she tilted back her head and let forth a wordless howl of agony. Dropping to her knees in front of the fire, she rocked back and forth, screaming incoherently.

The guards burst in, weapons drawn, and Daystar waved them out with a vague, “The princess is distraught and needs a moment.”

Daystar stared at Emberlace in confusion, utterly bewildered by her behavior and what could cause such distress. Why so much silence into so much wailing?

Because she wants to speak, a voice in the back of his head told him. She wants desperately to speak, but she is afraid of something.

“Alright, alright, I understand; you don’t have to talk to me, and I’m sorry I shouted at you.”

The statement did nothing to quiet Emberlace - if nothing else she became more frantic, breathing hard and fast and shaking to her bones before suddenly, abruptly, becoming still.

Lifting one hand and turning it slowly palm up, she bent her first finger twice, beckoning. Daystar gawked for a moment before the gesture registered, and he quickly joined her by the fireplace. She clutched at her hair, rocking on her knees.

“You’re frustrated?”

She bit her lip, then nodded, once, just barely.

“Okay.” Daystar took a deep breath, adjusting to the fact she was communicating and wondering what had changed.

“Can you tell me who hurt you?”

Emberlace rocked some more, her pained eyes roving the embers in the fireplace as if looking for her answers there. Finally seeming to come to a conclusion, she pulled a ring off her finger and held it out to him.

Ravenglen’s signet, a raven in flight, blinked back at him from the ring’s face.

“Your father?”

Two massive tears welled up in Emberlace’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks, hanging on her chin from a moment before they dropped into her lap.

“I’ll talk to him,” he told her quietly.

She gave him a quick, pained glance before staring back at the fire.

“And by talk, I mean something more along the lines of informing him that I know he’s hurt you and it won’t be tolerated.”

Another look, nearly frantic this time.

“Should I not tell him you told me?”

The look turned pleading.

“As you wish. I’ll say one of the servants saw it and came to me.”

Relief flooded her face, and when Daystar held out his arms, she slipped over and snuggled against him, whimpering a little from pain or the anxiety of the evening.

Taking Ravenglen’s signet out of Daystar’s hand, Emberlace rolled it between her fingers before clenching a hand on it once and throwing it into the fire.  Something possessive rose up in him when he saw her purple and green mottled skin. She was his, and no one had the right to lay a hand on her, and more importantly, she was her own, and her fear made him angry. She was the most powerful woman in the kingdom, and they should each be the other’s strength. Felstar missed his queen, Daystar knew, though he tried to fulfill his mother’s duties in her absence, and Emberlace should have taken that place, ordering the court, forcing the barons to cooperate, mediating the differences between them before they effected the kingdom.

Ravenglen was forcing her back, trying to keep the kingdom weak like the rest of the barons. And at some point today, she'd begun fighting back.  She had paid for it, certainly, and she was frightened, but he could sense the determination still in her and was amazed.

Because she was more. She was more in ways that he didn’t know, didn’t understand, and might never, so long as she was silent. But she was more than the silence and more than the fear, and somewhere beyond what he knew of her there was a woman who was more than what her past must have been like to bring her here like this. He wondered suddenly if he could trust someone like she trusted him after being hurt as she was and was amazed at her courage. Somewhere within her was the nerve to defy the thing she feared the most - whatever that specter was - and that, that he could love in silence until she broke it.