Chapter 64: The Frost-Wine Confession
The bathwater had gone cold around their ankles before anyone suggested leaving it. Violet dried off slowly, kneeling on the thick rug while Cassian worked a towel through her curls with the patience of a man grooming something wild and beloved. Evander dressed her himself, in a plain black bra and then his own dark shirt, buttoning it to her sternum and leaving the rest open, so the fresh marks at her throat and collarbone sat in plain view like a published decree.
"The parlor," Evander said, and it wasn't a suggestion. "I made a promise at breakfast."
Cassian's grin was immediate. "He did. I witnessed it. Very official."
The Royal Wing parlor had been claimed by all three of them by degrees. Cassian's throw blankets multiplied across the couch. Evander's books colonized the side table. Violet's mending basket sat under the window next to a vase of something dried and gold. The fire was already lit, someone's foresight, and the low couch swallowed all three of them when they folded onto it, Violet in the middle, her legs across Cassian's thighs, Evander's arm along the back of the couch behind her shoulders.
Evander produced the bottle like a man presenting evidence at trial. Frost-wine, pale blue-green in the glass, cold enough that the decanter sweated the moment it left the cellar tray. He poured three measures without asking.
"Breakfast promises," Violet said, eyeing it. "You're holding me to that already?"
"You asked for this," Evander said. "A private night. To be the version of yourself Marcus taught you to bury." His blue eyes were steady on her face. "We're giving you the room. The bottle is just the door."
Cassian lifted his glass. "To the Valkyrie."
Violet went still for half a breath. Then she touched her glass to his, then to Evander's, and drank.
The frost-wine was exactly as she remembered it from Wintercourt years ago: cold on the tongue, then sweet, then a slow bloom of heat behind the sternum like a coal caught in wool. She drank again. Cassian refilled her glass before she'd set it down.
"So," Cassian said, settling deeper into the cushions, turning to face her. "The dare stands. Show us the mouth. The real one. The one that says whatever it thinks."
"You're daring your wife to be rude," Violet said.
"We're daring our wife to stop editing," Evander said. He took a slow pull of his own glass. "There's a difference."
Violet looked at the wine. Looked at them. Then she drank half the glass in one go, set it down on the table with a decisive click, and said, "Fine. First opinion. That wine is pathetic."
Cassian barked a laugh.
"It tastes like a sweetshop's apology," she went on, and something in her voice was already looser, rounder, a wheel starting to turn after fifty years of rust. "It's wine for people who are afraid of wine. I've had stronger cider. I've had stronger rainwater." She reached over, took the bottle of Evander's scotch off the tray where it sat unopened beside the decanter, and poured herself two fingers of it without ceremony. "If we're doing this, we're doing it properly."
"Leave the scotch," Evander said mildly. "That bottle has survived two wars."
"It won't survive tonight." She drank, and didn't flinch, and Cassian made an approving noise low in his chest.
The scotch was smoke and peat and a burn that went all the way down. Violet exhaled like a woman setting down a burden, and then the second glass arrived, and the third, and somewhere in there the filter fell off her entirely.
It started with the correspondence. "The eastern villages' water petitions have been sitting in that parlor for a century and a half because three successive record-keepers couldn't alphabetize their way out of a wet paper bag," she announced, gesturing with her scotch, several drops escaping and landing on Cassian's knee. "I re-sorted the entire archive in four days when I was advisor. Four days. Do you know what I found in there? A treaty written on a napkin. An actual napkin. It's binding. It's still binding. It's the funniest legal document in the kingdom and I'm the only one who's read it in eighty years."
"I knew about the napkin," Evander said.
"You signed the napkin."
"I was assured it was temporary."
"Everything in this palace is temporary, Evander. The east wing scaffolding has been temporary for sixty years." She pointed at him with the glass. "It's furniture now. Birds nest in it. I've seen them. There's a wren with seniority over half the footmen."
Cassian was laughing so hard the couch shook, his hand clamped on her ankle where her legs lay across him. "Keep going."
"The kitchens salt the stew twice because Cook doesn't trust the first salting, which is itself a decision. The chandelier in the smaller audience hall has been missing one crystal for eleven years and everyone has simply agreed to pretend the gap is intentional. Minimalism, apparently. And Vestille," she said, and paused to drink, and her eyes gleamed, "Vestille Black has told me I look 'not terrible' in every single garment she has ever made me, which in tailor means I look like the sun rising, and I know this, and I have decided to accept love in whatever dialect it's spoken."
Evander's mouth was doing the thing it did when he was trying not to smile, the small tug at one corner of his beard. "And the court?"
"Oh, the court." She refilled her own glass, steadier on her feet than she looked, perched cross-legged now with her spine straight and her chin up like a woman holding forth from a throne of cushions. "The court is a swamp of people who rehearse their flattery. Duchess Aneara rehearses nothing, which is why she's the only one worth listening to. Everyone else polishes their sentences until they're slippery and meaningless, and then they say them, and everyone nods, and nothing is ever actually said." She drained a third of her glass. "I have opinions. I have hundreds of them. I have had opinions for three hundred and forty-seven years and for fifty of them I swallowed every single one because if I was too loud, too much, too clever, too blunt, then I was too hard to love."
The room went quiet in the way a room does when the fire pops at exactly the right moment. Cassian's hand tightened on her ankle. Evander leaned forward, elbows on knees, watching her with his whole attention.
"Well," Violet said, and knocked back the rest. "He's gone. Banished. So I'm banishing him from my tongue too. One year loving him. Fifty years shrinking because of him. Done. He doesn't get my memories, he doesn't get my opinions, and he does not get another word out of this mouth. Starting now."
"That's the most romantic thing you've ever said," Cassian said, "and I once heard you declare war on a wardrobe."
"I won that war. The wardrobe's in pieces in the east storage rooms. Ask anyone."
She poured another scotch. Her cheeks were flushed deep and warm, the freckles across her nose standing out like constellations, and the scent coming off her had shifted, jasmine and caramel thickened by heat, and both wolves smelled it and both sat up fractionally straighter, though neither moved.
The opinions kept bubbling. She held forth on the Wintercourt seating charts (a hostage negotiation with place cards), on Ondrel's habit of cleaning his spectacles when he was about to overcharge someone, on the quality of Gullhaven harbor ale versus the Clave mountain mead (the mead won, "and I will die on that frozen hill"). She was funny, and sharp, and completely unguarded, and fifty years of filtered commentary came out of her in a golden rush, and her husbands sat there and let it wash over them like they'd waited a century for rain.
And then somewhere in the middle of a sentence about Pell's incurable blush, her eyes drifted to them. Both of them. She looked at Evander first, and she looked at him the way a woman looks at a meal she intends to eat slowly. Up, from the black shirt stretched across his chest, to the beard, to the ocean-blue eyes. Then Cassian, the same inventory, slower, her mouth curving.
"You know," she said, and her voice had dropped, gone velvety, "I've been very polite tonight. All my opinions about correspondences and chandeliers. Very civilized." She took a slow sip of scotch and held it a moment before swallowing. "But I've been thinking less and less about chandeliers for the last ten minutes."
"Have you," Evander said.
"Mm." She set the glass down and turned her whole body toward him, one knee coming up onto the couch, the open shirt shifting to bare more of the marks at her collarbone. "Evander. For a scholar who's constantly thinking, have you ever wondered what your head would be like empty?"
Evander's eyebrow lifted a fraction.
"Because I think about it," she said. "A lot. All that strategy in there. All those careful plans and quiet observations and centuries of restraint." Her finger came up and traced, slowly, down the center of his chest, over the buttons of his shirt, stopping at his belt. "I could always suck you stupid."
Cassian made a sound like he'd been punched, delighted, and Evander went very still in the way only he could, his pulse visible in his throat, his voice when it came low and rough. "That's the drink talking."
"The drink," Violet said, leaning in until her lips brushed his ear, "is the only reason you're hearing this out loud instead of just watching me think it at you across council tables like I have been for five years." Her hand settled flat and warm on his thigh, high, deliberate. "I meant it sober too. I've meant it since the my very first day. Now," and her fingers went to his belt, unhurried, "sit still, scholar. Let me empty that head for you."
She slid off the couch onto her knees between his legs, and the firelight caught the grin she wore, wide and shameless and entirely her own, and Evander reached down and gathered her curls off her face with one hand as she undid the buckle.