I was greeted by a bright and cheery staff of three maids shortly after sunrise. They took me to an atrium I had never seen before. Its ceiling was an open structure within the castle, and the air was as frigid as it always was. The stones led down several shallow steps, into a steaming basin of crystalline waters.
“You may undress,” one of the ice servants—a dour-faced woman who only smiled when I looked directly at her, though the smile never even brushed against her eyes—informed me. “Enter the waters. It has been a long voyage from your land, we are told.”
As I soaked in the steamy bath, icicles formed in my hair, and when I leaned back to relax, they crunched against my neck. An unexpected smile curled at the corners of my lips. Everything had gone to a bitter, wintry hell… but I could still enjoy a hot soak.
The sky overhead was low and opaque. Snowflakes began to flutter down into the atrium, and the ice dragon servants either left my side or went to sit out of sight, offering me the illusion of privacy. I had to assume it was the latter.
My eyelashes fluttered closed, and I found myself thinking, with a pang, about Maine…
The clearing of a throat brought me back to my senses, and my eyelashes flew open. I started up in the bath. My arms instinctively went to shield my bare breasts.
Lethe stood there with a frozen look in his eyes, drinking me in without moving a muscle.
“Yes?” I prompted him.
Lethe shook his head, but didn’t avert his eyes. If anything, they trailed me more heavily after he had awoken from his stupor. “I thought that, if we are to be wed, you should become acquainted with the castle grounds. I’ve come to collect you for a tour.”
Collect me. I couldn’t fathom a more appropriate term. The three servants hovered at a distance, observing the exchange.
“All right,” I allowed. “Just let me get dressed first.”
At this, Lethe’s lip quirked. “Why? Won’t this all be mine soon enough?”
My eyes flattened and my mouth straightened. “That may be, sir, when I may be a wife,” I said, quoting from Romeo and Juliet.
He stared at me a moment longer, his mouth open as if with retort, hesitated, and then relented. He nodded, suddenly curt, and turned on his heel, striding from the atrium.
“That may be must be, love.” His voice floated to me, quoting the next line of the play, and leaving me speechless, nothing but a frosty plume of breath hanging from my lips in response.
When Lethe was with me, the entourage of servants departed to allow us privacy. They dressed me in the same light, pure linens, as if I was on the verge of baptism, and receded into the wings. The two of us moved through the castle, and I couldn’t help but think as we strolled down the spacious corridors, some still lined with heirlooms of the Aena dynasty—some of those vandalized—that this should have been my moment with Theon. He should have been the one showing me around his castle…
In between the ballroom and the library, Lethe made mention of my solemnity. “You’re being awfully quiet.”
“I’m a quiet person.”
But Lethe smiled ruefully, his eyes on the carpet. “No,” he said, “you’re not. But it’s all right.” He shook his head to himself. “You were bound to need time to adjust… and I must recognize that. You are a woman. Not my possession. Not really, no matter how badly I may want it.”
For a brief moment, I was even impressed. He certainly was in a position to treat me as his object—but he was… satisfied to wait for me to come to him of my own free will.
For now. Certainly, as time passed, he would become impatient. After all… I was poised to become his wife. His queen.
And so, I would not have all the time in the world, even if he was being particularly human just now. Eventually, he would become frustrated with my hesitation about intimacy.
Lethe gripped my hand, sending an icy shock through my fingers, and I jolted, startled back into reality.
“I noticed that you had pulled out all the cosmology books from the shelf in your room,” Lethe volunteered. His eager blue eyes were blind to my discomfort here, as his simultaneous guest, fiancée, newfound confidant, and hostage. “You enjoy talk of the planets? Their movements in the heavens?”
I had been trying to learn if this world was in any way connected to Earth, even if it was only a member of the same galaxy, as if I might be able to somehow send a missive to my people, or find a hidden path between the planets and return by my own methods. But the names of these stars were so foreign, the effort had been a hopeless one, and had left me more downtrodden than when I began.