So it went for many weeks. Once or twice a fortnight, when Tacen's caravan company was visiting the capital out of Gallowsport or on its way to Cavis Cove and other cities on the Torchlight Coast, a courier would appear at her apartments with a message bearing the hart horns and a time. Carala was mildly pleased that Tacen was wise enough to employ a different courier every time: over the weeks she saw everything from painfully shy boys even younger than Casimir to adolescent maids totally awestruck by being in the Chalcedony Palace and meeting an Imperial princess to scowling old men who looked as if they would be thoroughly unimpressed even by the Emperor himself.

She wished he had some more clandestine way to contact her, but since she didn't dare send a messenger to the caravan company's office on Glassmere Street and knew no other way to contact him, she simply hoped the messenger companies he employed were discreet. A foolish hope for the capital, but it was the best she could do. Every time she found herself more and more deeply tempted to go up to his rooms when he asked her, but she never assented, and he never did more than to smile, kiss her cheek, and make some sly joke about his status, or her status, or how important it was to obey the Graces.

Still, she had to admit her behavior with him had become ever more brazen. When his hand had found its way under her skirts, and even under her smallclothes, a man's rough fingers skating against the shape of her sex for the first time in her life and eliciting a gasp so sharp it was nearly a cry, her own fingers instinctively clawing hard at his shoulder (Tacen seemed to mind that not a bit), she was sure she must have gone mad; that she had finally gone too far. But then she remembered Ralessa's taunt: Do you think he never tumbled a chambermaid in his father's castle? She remembered Lorith Gallis's cutting words to his brother, overheard in the banquet hall the last time his family had visited Talinara before the engagement had been secured: I saw you and your men go to the Lady's Slipper, Deni. Did you pay for them or did they pay for you? And there were her brothers and sisters -- it was madness to think any of them had been perfectly behaved before they'd been shipped off to their various duties around her father's kingdoms.

So Carala didn't resist when Tacen touched her, and even allowed herself to touch him in the same fashion, laughing slyly into his mouth as he hissed his own pleasured gasps.

But she never went up to his rooms. That ultimate act she held back. Part of it was for sheer practicality: if she fell asleep in his rooms and was noticed missing from the Chalcedony Palace the next morning, there would be the blackest depths of the pit to pay. Her father's household guard comprised some of the most skilled and intelligent soldiers in all the Anointed Realms, drawn from as far as the Gates of Ismene and the Scorched Desert and the edges of the Straits of Twilight. Carala had no doubt she would be found within the hour after she was missed, and when she was found Tacen would face the hangman if he were lucky, and she would be shipped off to a cloister in the Chalk Hills or some even worse place. Assuming, of course, her father didn't mount her head on a pike like her poor siblings. Carala's relationship with her father was complicated, to put it mildly, but she suffered no illusions about what little mercy he possessed.

(In fact, Somilius Deyn III would never have executed any of his children for such a minor indiscretion as bedding a commoner, certainly not if that child had been promised to a barely significant house as the Gallises of Marhollow. The children he had executed or assassinated had been guilty of far graver offenses than that. He likely would not even have shipped her off, though Carala could have expected to hear clever and exceedingly cruel insults about her lack of propriety for the rest of her days every time she was in his presence. She was, however, entirely correct in her belief that Tacen would be fortunate if the worst he suffered for laying his hands on the Emperor's daughter was execution, and given the reaches of Somilius Deyn's imagination, his fate would likely have been far, far more colorful.)

But something else held her back as well, and that something was Denisius himself. Whatever Ralessa thought of him, she found it hard to begrudge him what experiences he'd had with the girls of Marhollow's brothels. She still found it a little hard to believe Marhollow even had a brothel. Certainly Talinara must have a few; she accepted that easily enough, but a backwater like Marhollow? In any event, why should she hold it against him just because he had spent a few silvers to be with a woman? It had nothing to do with the fact that he was a man and she was a woman; Carala scoffed at the idea that women should be held to different standards than men on such matters regardless of what the Chronicle of Joys might say, and that was especially true if the woman was noble.

But it cut both ways. She knew perfectly well that by any measure she was in a far better position than any son of the Lord Marhollow, even his heir. Just the fact of their father's name made both she and her sister Sarai desirable to many, many powerful men. Denisius, on the other hand, had no expectation of ever being married at all, unless his father gave him leave to marry a commoner or some girl from an even less prominent house than his own out of simple affection. And what opportunity would he even have to meet such a woman? And so why wouldn't he have gone to a brothel, if only to know something he otherwise might never experience? Her father's offer to him was perhaps the greatest windfall of his life -- not because she was the most beautiful woman in the Kingdoms or anything so foolish as that, but simply because her name was Deyn. Perhaps she owed it to him, and herself, to treat her virtue a little more carefully.

Those things were all true. They were also hard to remember when Tacen kissed her, when she felt the physical presence of her potential deflowering hard and ravenous against her backside, when his strong hands roamed her body with knowing ease and a growing need that reflected her own.

On one thing, at least, she felt comfortable in her judgment, and that was she believed she had her priorities correct. Only once had she not answered one of Tacen's invitations, and that was because it coincided with one of Denisius's visits to the court. That was the time they had attended a concert together in the Ivory Room, a band of troubadours and minstrels performing adagios from Vilais for their pleasure. While Denisius well remembered the princess taking his hand in hers during the second half of the concert, he never would have dreamed what was running through her imagination. Not Tacen and the possibility of what she might do with him if she continued to meet him at the Three Harts. Rather she was imagining Denisius, wondering what that soft body would look like in the candlelight of her marriage bedchamber, wondering how his gentle hands would feel on her body, wondering if his arousal would feel as large and hot as Tacen's when pressed against her. Ralessa might have rolled her eyes and whispered behind her hand to the other handmaidens that the princess would surely feel disappointment if not sheer disgust at comparing Denisius's physique to a man like Tacen's, but that wasn't the case. Rather she felt intense curiosity -- what must two such different men be like? The thoughts that blazed through her mind when she squeezed his hand and kissed him on the cheek might well have sent Denisius into a dead though ecstatic faint.

Later that night, burning the message from Tacen in her fireplace as she always did, and deciding on the spot she would simply not show up at the tavern rather than risk some blind communication with him, Carala found herself sorely tempted to send a message of her own to Denisius. To conspire to find some way to sneak him into her apartments -- or herself to his rooms at the Scholar's Rest! -- and do with him what she was increasingly tempted to do with Tacen, to whisper to him that he could do to her anything he did with the girls at the Lady's Slipper, and it wouldn't even cost him a copper. But she resisted the urge. Such a course was dangerous for both of them -- surely not as dangerous as her not-quite-affair with Tacen, but the scandal would be tremendous. And she didn't trust the discretion of his two bodyguards, for they were total strangers to her.

Something wonderful occurred to her simply from having suffered (and delighted in) this temptation all day, ever since she and Denisius had breakfasted under the watchful eye of her father, her mother, and the Grand Chancellor, who often took his meals with the Emperor when the Palace was hosting a visiting dignitary. What she felt with Tacen was nothing but an infatuation; a lark as meaningless if pleasurable as any her siblings might have indulged before attending to the Imperial duties their father commanded, and even if she did at last go too far with Tacen, she could rest in the knowledge that when the time came to settle with Denisius, she would do so with a free heart. And maybe with that knowledge in the marital bed that Ralessa assured her such noblemen desired.

So it was as an infatuation she described it to herself that evening, as Varallo Thray would read when he examined her diary some time later. But inevitably things changed, and when they did that infatuation twisted smoothly and hideously into something far darker.

A fortnight before that terrible night in the Curate's Tower, Carala found herself in the Three Harts, nestled against Tacen as she enjoyed a cup of Aznian spirits. (By now she had developed no small skill in knowing exactly how much to drink without overdoing it.) The tavern was quieter that night, with only a single dulcimer player entertaining the small crowd. "When you've finished," Tacen murmured in her ear, toying with a lock of her hair, "I'd like to take you somewhere."

Biting her lower lip she met his eyes, the light just right to glitter against those lovely gold specks in his irises. After a moment's hesitation, sincerely not knowing if she would decline again or not, she murmured, "To your rooms?"

With a smile he shook his head. "No. Someplace else. Have you ever been to the Maathinhold?"

In fact, Carala knew the Maathinhold quite well. All children of the Emperor were expected to assume some manner of Imperial duties upon coming of age, and from the age of thirteen until she had turned fifteen, Carala had served as a high courtier, performing mundane Palace functions when such functions were at the service of high ranking visitors to the court. Among those duties was giving tours of the Maathinhold and other Imperial possessions in Talinara, if such a tour was requested by someone her father favored or wished to impress. Upon later reflection, she supposed he had also been displaying her to future potential suitors, though the Gallises had never been among them. So she was intimately familiar both with the Maathinold's layout and its history (although the version of the history she had learned differed considerably from the version Ammas Mourthia knew). But she had never been there at night, and the prospect intimidated her more than a little.

"I imagine I know the Maathinhold better than you do," she replied archly. "But I don't see what might be so interesting there."

"If you'll allow me, I can show you."