Something More Than Honor: Hours in the Solar
Content for this chapter: sexual and romantic abuse, emotional manipulation, victim-blaming, homophobia, claustrophobia, solitary confinement, medieval gender hierarchy
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Lilli Ausric tells Konstantin things he'll never forget. Two years later, he tests how much he can open up to Cat.
The force of her desire had grown so strong, enough to return his, and only now was she learning what other people’s desire had done to him.
Chapter wordcount: 3,250
He came across the solar while wandering Castle Ausric’s labyrinthine corridors. He’d taken a wrong turn, or so Konstantin would say if anyone asked. Out of boredom, he’d started finding the long route anywhere he had to go, not that he had many places to go. Just now he’d followed the sound of voices when one seemed familiar.
The open door spilled sunlight into the hallway. Inside, she sat before the glass-paned window, black hair shining. Lilli looked up from her embroidery frame, her eyes bright with a color somewhere between the emeralds and sapphires in her necklace. Her features sharpened in surprise—but with a smile.
She was beautiful in a way that made it hard to believe he had ever touched her. Or tasted her.
She murmured a few words to the women sitting around her, and they rose in a torrent of skirts, stirring air scented with lavender and honey. The small figure of Dora Ausric crossed the room with them, hiking up her long hem.
“You shouldn’t be caught exploring,” Lilli said in a low tone.
“I’m not.”
“Are you lost, then?” Her laughter was almost soundless, a tilt of her head and curve of the mouth. “I’ve found you. Come in.”
“I’m searching for something to do,” he admitted.
“There’s not much use for a man when he can’t wield a sword, is there?” She drew a length of golden thread through her needle. “Don’t worry. We can keep each other entertained until it’s time to rejoin my husband.”
The image she sewed, on a frame as large as a table, was just taking shape—all suggestion, outlines he couldn’t identify. Lilli sent a small frown up at him. “Don’t hover, please. It blocks the light and makes me self-conscious.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Bring a chair over.”
Wooden legs scraped the floor before Konstantin could reach for one. Dora shoved the footstool toward him with all her small might. Her eyes, pale in a pale face, lowered just as his met them.
“Thank you,” Konstantin murmured. Speaking too loud seemed to risk startling her. She’d been listening intently to her mother. Hopefully none of the ladies had; they didn’t look up as Dora returned to their throng.
Lilli pointed to the bookshelf to her right. “There’s a collection of new tales I brought with me from Guilerac. The red-bound one. Do you ever read aloud?”
“Not much.” An exaggeration in itself. “Would you like me to?”
“I’d be delighted. It will be the most I’ve ever heard your voice.”
He smiled at her as he sat and opened the book to the silk ribbon marking her place.
She smiled back, but her voice seemed soft with sadness as she said, “You shouldn’t be so obviously in love with me.”
Konstantin blinked as though her warning had been a butterfly darting at his eyes.
“But I know you can’t help showing everything you feel.”
He hadn’t realized, of course, and yet it didn’t surprise him.
“You hide it better with Victor, at least.” Her needle pierced the fabric. “I don’t know what perversions they practice in Loredon, but here such things are known to be forbidden by the gods and despised by men.”
Lifting his head, Konstantin searched her expression and found only tenderness.
He didn’t understand the gods as concerned enough to forbid anything. Lilli saw the divine involved, ready to pour out blessings or chastise in response to prayers, the bestowal of chapels, sins. The only involvement Konstantin was ever sure of came from the Veiled Lady, who gathered all without mercy or malice. Her Veil was the entire world and so one never saw Her face—the real one, not the half-rotted ruin hymns lamented—but he’d felt Her eyes on him in the battle before his surrender. He’d feared Her, but not because of any perceived judgment.
Men, though. And women.
Lilli moved her eyes between him and her sewing. “I would never have been able to resist Victor either, even if it were a sin. We must live with our choices, however unwise.”
She hadn’t chosen Victor; marriages among the ruling families of Koltas were made along the same lines as those in Loredon. How much say the groom had in the decision would depend on how willing he’d been to displease his father. Hard to imagine Victor fearing anyone’s displeasure.
“However unwise,” Konstantin echoed.
Her brows rose. She seemed, for a moment, startled that his pretty mouth spoke in addition to…all else it did. Well, as she’d observed, she hadn’t heard much of his voice. A little on the evening of her return to Ausric. Flirting. Not much since the night she’d walked in on him with Victor.
It wasn’t flirtation, exactly, but he smiled as he asked, “Would you have me choose differently?”
So she didn’t have to take it as a real question if she’d rather not. He might not have to hear her answer.
She nodded toward the book. “I’d have you read to me.”
And so, because he wanted to please her—because he’d chosen her and Victor both and would live with it—he let her hear his voice, telling the story to its ending, almost ugly in its absurdly reached, impossible happiness.
Cat did not sleep through the entire morning. She came close to it, however, and she left Konstantin in bed with a brush of her fingers at his temple. Uncertain, she held back from making it a kiss.
The kitchen managed breakfast without her, but she helped with the midday meal before retiring to the solar with her sewing basket. She moved her chair across the window as the afternoon progressed, keeping her work well lit while trying to avoid baking in the sunbeams. Between stitches, she nibbled the bread and cheese she’d brought up, careful to keep crumbs off the linen. She’d arranged for a tray to be left outside the door of their bedchamber. Konstantin might not feel up to facing anyone in the great hall, any more than she had the past few days, though for different reasons. And they’d both skipped supper last night.
He joined her a little after Helene and Maerlis came in. A silence amid the arranging of their Capture game made Cat look over her shoulder to see Konstantin exchange a glance with Helene as he passed. A glance that involved a raised brow, returned with a nod and an expression she wouldn’t have expected from Helene, somewhere between approval, encouragement, and a humble admission of surprise.
She’d been as good as her word, not asking Cat about her meeting with Nic, content to keep a secret. If she’d looked Cat’s way now, Cat would have smiled at her.
Then Konstantin was standing in the sunbeam, gesturing. “May I?”
“Certainly.”
He folded his legs on the rush mat, half in the light without casting any shadow on her work.
“You can get a chair, you know,” Cat said.
“I’d rather see your face than the crown of your head.”
She smiled, feeling that face heat, and maybe it pleased him to see it. He looked comfortable enough down there. He had his back to the wall, though he wasn’t close enough to lean against it, and faced the door of the solar. Cat and the bulk of the cold fireplace behind her would block any view of the Capture game at the table before the other window. The clatter of its pieces carried in between the players’ voices.
“You realize,” he murmured, tilting his head toward them, “if this works, we’ll be proving her right?”
“If what does?” Cat asked.
“Talking. Helene believes in it.”
“She certainly does.”
He chuckled, though not for long. “I mean, she thinks telling other people…”
“Is that what you’re here for? To talk about it?”
“If you’d like. Or I. I could.” He hesitated so long she feared he’d offer to leave, but instead he murmured rapidly, “If you wanted my company. I’d sometimes spend hours with Lilli in her solar.”
So. He was talking about it.
To her chagrin, Cat realized she wasn’t sure where to go from here. She tied off the last thread in the flower stem she’d been sewing and bent toward her basket for a spool of yellow.
“I take it you aren’t bored in the company of women,” she said.
“Not inherently. I’ve spent mornings with accounts that would have been no less tedious if someone other than Maerlis were showing me how to go through them. I’ve…found the company of a particular woman I enjoy very much.” He said the last words slowly, deliberately, and her face found the capacity to heat more.
“Good. I’m coming to enjoy your company too. In fact, could you do me the service of catching that—”
He chased the errant spool, which hadn’t rolled far enough to evade the reach of his arm. For half a narrow candlemark, Konstantin sat patiently, once or twice handing her something else from the basket. In other circumstances, it might be tempting to describe him as obedient. Only he had no one here to obey.
For over three years Cat had lived here among women. Ruled by a man, of course, but Richard Eadinford kept himself distant. She never roused his anger and so could forget him for most of each day. She did what she ought to do—feed the castle, mend clothes—regardless of who would have commanded her.
Konstantin had never given her a command. Except to tell her to fuck off, in a flare of fear or rage. Would he do more, if she helped him repair himself, or know himself, or regain his strength, or whatever it was they’d undertaken to attempt?
Then he’d given in, agreed to speak with her—and maybe talking about this, whatever Helene’s opinion, would end up straining the seams of a life he’d managed to hold together. She thought of his words failing at the riverbank yesterday. His fidgeting, and far worse, how still he went. How he’d collapsed against Nic, which he might not have meant for her to see, only she looked back to see if he followed.
Though falling in Nic’s arms could be more akin to the way he’d kissed her last night. She gambled that the gentleness in him wasn’t only a form of defeat.
He’d called her naïve.
In a low tone—though Helene and Maerlis couldn’t hear over their game, even if they wanted to—Cat asked, “How did you spend your time in the solar with Elizabeta?”
“A number of ways,” he answered warily.
“It’s just, I can come up with options to pass this afternoon, but it would save us both trouble if I knew which to reject in advance.”
“We spoke to each other sometimes,” Konstantin said, “so let’s not reject all of it.”
“All right.” She bent for another kind of thread, and he tilted the basket in the sunlight to help her. “Thank you.”
“I read to her. There are some books—”
“I wouldn’t ask.”
“I know. But maybe you’d like to. I’m offering.”
“Thank you,” she said again. “Someday.”
Helene wailed in mock dismay and real defeat behind her. Maerlis savored her victory more quietly, but the Capture board was swept clear for a new game in a miniature thunderstorm.
After hearing it all without wincing, though two fingers rubbed an embroidered leaf on his vest, Konstantin remarked, “I don’t think I’d be able to keep track of what happened in any story I read just now.”
Cat wasn’t sure she could either, if she was listening to his voice—soft, its wide range usually settling toward the higher end for a man’s, but not weak, clear and with the thread of music winding through it.
The force of her desire had grown so strong, enough to return his, and only now was she learning what other people’s desire had done to him.
“Should we go somewhere else? Or ask them to play in the bedroom?”
He shook his head. “That was only…loud. They’re having fun.”
“Will you tell me what you don’t like about it?”
“Do you like to play?” he asked.
“Occasionally. But I can always play with our sisters.”
“Just as well.” He gave her one of those smiles that was an effort. “I can’t see myself playing Capture again. I spent…in the cell, round after around against myself in my head. Until I forgot the rules. Then I counted every stone in each wall two or three times.”
Awful. But not all of it. “When you first saw the board here,” she said as gently as she could, “that wasn’t boredom. Or a reminder of it.”
“It caught me by surprise, when I was especially unguarded. And yes, I know it’s stupid to be startled by a game.”
“I didn’t say so.” She shrugged. “My palms go clammy when I’m in a small space, even when I know perfectly well I can get out. This cave near the beach at Wardlow, it narrowed at one bend. Laura and Maud—our elder sister—nearly had to pull me because I became too afraid to walk. I don’t recall any bad experience to have caused it, though the fear itself has created some awkwardness.”
“Bad enough, then. The kitchens and storerooms—”
“Have high ceilings. Though there was an ugly candlemark when crates in the root cellar fell over and I had to squirm through. And then,” she said, “they’re not a dungeon.”
“It wasn’t a fear of small spaces I brought out of it so much as an uneasiness with large ones. The sky…” He cut himself off with a laugh. “I’m getting used to it again.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “If you need help moving crates next time, though.”
“Thank you. Since then I’ve left it to the cook and his assistants to fetch turnips.”
A sweeter laugh. His eyes settled on her embroidery hoop. His hands folded over each other, ring finger of the right stroking along his wedding band.
“Victor played,” Konstantin said. “And asked…unusual forfeits.”
Cat nodded to show she listened. She remembered sitting with him two or three times after their wedding, his garnet ring passing between them as a ransom.
“They started as small things. Humiliating, sometimes. But jokes. Standing on one foot as he counted to twenty, that kind of thing. Giving him pieces of clothing. Kissing his signet.”
Mild examples, and yet not mild at all. He handled them like her mother taught her to prepare mussels: very carefully, lest your knife or a broken shell slip and you be the one slit apart.
“They became flirtatious. Until…whether I paid them or he did. It became more…” He raised a hand as if to push hair back from his face, but kept it there. “Exciting. Frightening. To claim a forfeit from him than to give one. Because one had to ask for the right thing.”
Her needle slipped between clammy fingers. Cat put it safely through a folded corner of the linen and set the piece aside. She hadn’t sewn a stitch in some time, anyway.
“The first time he kissed me,” Konstantin said next. “It was over a game, but not part of the game.” He lowered his hand to trace a fraying corner of the mat. His eyes darted toward her face, but wouldn’t meet her gaze. “He had a sense that…”
She didn’t look away from him.
“Later, there were more forfeits.”
Cat moistened her lips. “It sounds as if we should look into dice or cards instead. I have a beautifully painted deck that hasn’t been shuffled since last winter.”
“Maybe pick-up sticks. Nic’s helped raise his brother’s children, I’m sure he can refresh our memory of the rules.”
They exchanged wavering smiles.
“Will you tell Nic?” she asked.
“He doesn’t play Capture, so it…” He lifted his hand to the lace cuff of his sleeve, which he worried at. “I know that isn’t the part that matters.”
“I could,” Cat said, “if you’d rather not say it twice.”
“Oh. Thank you. I…maybe. Do you plan to talk with him much?”
“We’ll see how often I can get down to the riverbank. I’m glad to have met him.”
He gave her an unfathomable look that still, somehow, wasn’t the one she’d expected to see. Perhaps she’d hoped his smile would become more steady when she joined him in speaking of Nic. She was fond of Nic just for that possibility. For his good sense and humor—her knuckles tickled with the memory of his kiss to the air above them—Cat could forgive Nic the scratch of envy she’d felt to see him and Konstantin holding each other. Something beyond a kiss. Comfort. Friendship. Selfish to begrudge that, not least because Konstantin needed it far more than she did.
Nic had given her comfort, too. A worry shared is a pain lessened, as Laura sometimes wrote. Which was another reason why Cat offered to speak to him. She was glad enough to spare Konstantin trouble, but it wouldn’t be a sacrifice.
“I suppose I take some handling,” he said.
“Not too much. At least not between two of us.”
His lips twitched before he studied the lace over his scarred wrist. “I don’t know what I’ll say to him tomorrow.”
“I’m sure there’s plenty to tell.”
The sound he made might have been an attempt at laughter, or an attempt to suppress a sigh. It failed regardless.
Cat reached out, and her hand fell short of him. He didn’t close the distance, though he didn’t flinch from her either. She made herself ask, “Does it feel like paying forfeits, talking about these things?”
“No. I’m…offering. But it isn’t.” His teeth touched at the last syllable and stayed gritted, bared.
“Isn’t easy?” Cat said.
“Most of the time there isn’t a word I can say, and then sometimes there are too many of them.” He waved his hand as if dredging through them, and the freely made gesture lifted her heart, despite everything. “Or one I can say and one that would be truer. Easy, yes.”
“What else?”
“Safe.” Konstantin shook his head, not refusing the word but revealing it fell short. “And Cat… I tried to keep you out of Ausric. Not to mention you. Not to think of you. I was…caught up in something and it. It isn’t that you seemed dull beside it.”
Cat became sure she did, and wasn’t really sorry for that.
“I tried not to miss you. A coward’s choice. But most of all I wanted to keep you apart. I didn’t want to hear them laugh about you. And I didn’t want you…stained by it.”
“While here I’ve waited, unstained and naïve.” He winced, and Cat added softly, “You were still trying to protect me yesterday.”
“Something like that. And now I’m bringing you into it. Telling you…” He looked at her. “Everything?”
She reached for the embroidery again. A stitch bought her time as she considered how much to ask. Or not to ask—how much to accept, when he didn’t know what he could offer, when they were learning how she would receive it.
“No more than you choose to tell me,” she said. “And no less.”
He breathed out. “So we’ll see.”
With nothing more she could say, either, Cat nodded. They watched her needle drawing thread through the linen.
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