May I Have This Dance?

May I Have This Dance?
Amval

Ingrid eyes me suspiciously. Of all the risks I’ve taken coming up here, this may be the riskiest. This is the one that saw me breaking into my memorial chamber to pilfer my own clothes, the one that stands the greatest chance of destroying everything I’ve earned over the course of this conversation.

“You’ve mentioned the night we met,” I say. “And how you didn’t particularly like me.”

She nods with a wry smile, her golden hair loose and flowing. Goddess above. I may be dressed in royal colors, but she looks like a work of art in just a simple nightgown.

“I didn’t have the same experience,” I admit. “I thought you were lovely, if a bit confusing.”

She laughs. “I’ve seen you with your siblings now. You had heard a joke before.”

“Not at a royal function,” I say honestly. “And not the way you make them. That man you met, he wasn’t prepared for that.”

“And this one is?”

“I would like to think so.” I straighten my doublet—it’s funny how uncomfortable it is after only such a short time away—and hold out my hand to her. “I know it was your sister’s doing, but we were supposed to dance. For all the time we’ve spent together over these last weeks, we still have not. The ballroom awaits, Princess.”

“Are you being serious?” She looks me up and down. “What am I saying? You’re not this funny. Or this reckless.”

“You inspired me.” I smile, hoping our agreement is strong enough that I can tease her about what happened. I’ve learned that Ingrid has just as little interest in staying in her own negative emotions as she does anything else she finds boring.

Like I hoped, she laughs. Something in my chest flutters. I love her so much.

“You’re making that face again.” She shoves my shoulder. “And I have to say no. If you’re going to be my partner-in-crime again, I need you not immediately caught and murdered properly this time.”

“You are going to have to get used to this face.” I catch her hand before she can properly pull it away. “And I suspected you might say something like that, so I’ll remind you”—I spin up a breeze around our feet—“that those who want me dead are not the only ones who can use magic to their advantage. Take a step.”

She takes one—a heavy one, of course. Always trying to prove me wrong. The golden bubble of her laugh when it lands with the softest thud is worth it, though.

“I have to change,” she says.

“Aren’t I the one who’s supposed to be improving my first impression?” I reach for the door.

“Who are you, and what have you done with Amval?” she mumbles as she follows after me. Her grin gives away just how little she resents the change.

“Perhaps this is who I’ve always been.” I lower my voice to a whisper as we step out into the hallway. “Perhaps I’m just through worrying about who else people would rather I be.”

She tucks her arm through mine. “Then maybe I can see what the Goddess saw between us.”

My mark howls for me to pick her up and spin her around, but we have to move. Quieting our steps will only do so much, if I don’t avoid the patrols. Those wereMother’s idea. She always suspected that the final assault on Lightning Cape was so successful because one of King Gavin’s men snuck in first and let the others through.

I lead Ingrid down a circuitous path, taking side hallways and servants’ corridors whenever possible.

“You didn’t sneak out before,” she says. It’s not a question.

I smile. “I didn’t stop playing my music after we moved into the palace, and the patrolmen are all vicious gossips.”

The shock on her face is so sweet that it makes up for every night I spent making music alone in an empty dungeon because it was the only place the guards didn’t check.

“And I needed the occasional midnight snack,” I admit. Something about her earnest reaction to everything I say makes me want to be not just honest, but completely honest. Even about the far less romantic of my secrets.

She barely covers a snort. “You cook?”

I shake my head. “I put jam on cold bread.”

“Ah, always a good one.” She nods sagely. “I know how to make sugar cookies, but mostly I just ate fistfuls of dried currants.”

I grin. “My favorite is red currant jam! It’s the only good thing to come of the occupation, that some Dun’s Crossing soldiers discovered how to grow them here.”

“See, I prefer the black.” She smiles teasingly as I lead her up to the massive doors to the ballroom.

“Introducing Princess Ingrid Solberg,” I say with a formal bow.

“And the undead, no-longer-Crown Prince Amval Som.” She bows back at me.

Perhaps there is something to how quickly she moves on from being hurt. Hearing those words in her voice, wrapped around her smile…they are far less painful than I dreamed.

We enter the ballroom, making sure to close the door behind us. Ingrid’s nightgown swirls white around her ankles as she skips to the middle of the dance floor. The fabric is so thin, almost fragile. If there were any more light in here, I would be able to see her body silhouetted inside.

My mouth goes dry as I join her.

“I learned to dance with my sisters,” I say, perhaps because I’m determined to ruin this evening.

“I learned with an instructor and the air.” She puts one hand on my shoulder, holds the other out to me. “I suppose we’ll see which was a better method.”

I take her hand and settle the other on the curve of her waist. If I skim my thumb up, I can almost feel the sweep of her rib cage. She is wearing nothing at all underneath the nightgown, her warmth tempting beneath my palms.

But we came here to dance. I start humming the song that was playing when she first approached me at the name blessing, and she steps into a courtly pattern.

I could chart this pattern on the tiles of the ballroom, but I learned it on a hundred worn wood inn floors. Mother usually played our music on a thin, metal flute she always made sure to tuck into her bedroll when we had to run. It was the first music I fell in love with, even though—

“Ouch.” Ingrid grins at me, no real pain in her voice as I step on her bare foot with my boot. “It’s good you changed into royal clothing. Stableboys’ boots are much heavier.”

I let the music lapse, though she keeps us spinning to a rhythm I can’t hear. “I like to dance, but I’m not especially good at the formal ones.”

“How is that possible?” She shakes her head. “I don’t like them, but as long as you can hear the music, it’s easy.”

“We don’t have any music.”

She rolls her eyes and takes up the humming. Her steps become more exaggerated, and she hits each note on which she moves with particular violence. In, out, steps weaving like embroidery on a tapestry of air.

It’s beautiful—and it still makes less sense to me than puzzling out how I would recreate the music on my naqun. She narrowly avoids my foot landing on hers again with a laugh.

“All right, you’re hopeless.” She doesn’t release me, doesn’t even slow. “If you’re not good at the formal ones, what are you good at?”

“Standing very still.” I spin her to a stop, freezing us at a single point on the dance floor, and gather her closer into my arms. Her body presses against mine, soft and pliant. I sway to the beat of the tune she dropped.

She drapes her arms around my neck. “This isn’t dancing.”

I brush a kiss against her temple. “Oh, I know. I’m also good at improvisational dancing, but I wanted to hold you.”

Her chuckle vibrates against my shoulder, so close to my mark that it feels like a lightning strike. “And here I thought we were working on trusting each other again, but you’re hiding information.”

Letting her go after a week and a half apart goes against every instinct I have, but if there is one person whose opinion I will value until all the stars burn out, it’s hers. And despite the humor in her voice, I can hear the very small edge. Our truce is more tentative than I would like.

So I take up the humming, a faster tune, more like something I would play at the Pony, and spin her out. She half-gasps, then spins herself back in. I grab her waist, somewhere between a courtly distance and the closeness we shared a moment ago, and begin swirling across the floor.

She laughs, high and bright. I struggle not to lose the music around my smile as I pull out every trick I know. Dips, spins, crossovers. Ingrid’s nightgown furls around her body, around mine, until we’re both a flurry of white in a dark blue ballroom. In between her bursts of laughter, she hums with me, a harmony to my melody.

In a thousand years, we would never have danced like this that first night. I would have stumbled through some courtly pattern and made an ass of myself. If we woke up together the next morning, she would have run away instead of waiting to talk.

So perhaps this is better. To have found each other sideways rather than head-on. She already said she likes me better dead, and as much as I found her charming that first night, I don’t know if I really could have seen her as anything more than a threat to the stability of the kingdom. Ingrid is many things, but stable isn’t one of them. She is a flickering flame, a ray of sunlight casting rainbows through a window. Always changing and more beautiful for it.

“Anyway, I said I wasn’t going to do any fucking more of these without a raise,” a man says somewhere outside the ballroom.

I freeze, holding Ingrid in a perilously low dip that flattens her nightgown against every swell of her body. She looks at me, then at the door.

Another man snorts. “Good luck with that. You know how she’s been about the ‘palace purse.’”

“Patrol,” I whisper.

“We have to run.” Her smile is equal parts worry and excitement, but the excitement is swiftly winning out.

Despite the risk, I bend down and kiss her. She opens easily under my touch, breathing ink and violets that wash over me like the first night in your own bed after a long trip. The kiss isn’t easy or gentle, but it still feels like coming home.

I could spend all night here with her.

The large doors crack open, and I pull back, spinning a breeze with sharp flicks of my wrist. Ingrid’s work has more than proven that there are larger, more dangerous forces in this palace than I dreamed. Dangerous enough to blackmail a sister I didn’t even know had any secrets from me. So, with our steps quiet and the guards hopefully blinded by the pool of their own torchlight, I grab Ingrid’s hand and we run through the servants’ door.

Once it closes behind us, I realize we’re both stifling laughter.