Valley of Secrets

“You’re curious, aren’t you?” Éamon said, lowering himself into the hot water of the spring to wade across to a natural stone seat, stretching out and lifting his arms up and behind his head to relax. “As to why I use male honorifics, when I am very clearly no man?”

“As a daughter of the Valley, I already –” Grace started to say, then at Éamon’s amused, raised eyebrow, she flushed and admitted, “Yes. If it’s all right.”

“Growing up, I felt an affinity for masculinity, so I claimed the honorifics. I require no connection to manhood to do so, and indeed have no desire to be male. Nothing more.”

“I see.”

“I’d like to ask you something, now.”

“To be clear, I didn’t actually ask you,” Grace said, stripping her own clothes off as modestly as she could, aware of Éamon’s burning gaze upon her body as she followed the alleged will of the gods to also bathe naked.

Éamon lifted a shoulder. “You could have declined.”

Grace scoffed. “Fine. Ask.”

“Bryson was well into his fifties. You were a girl of seventeen when you married him. Why did you accept his proposal?”

“He was the Archon of Arajon. I wasn’t going to say no.”

“Plenty of women over the years had said no.”

“I didn’t realise that at the time.”

“So you married him for power?”

“No! I – I married him because I thought – I thought he was a decent man, just receiving poor advice. I thought I could… influence him.”

Éamon laughed. “You thought you could change him? You married him in an attempt to fix the city? You are a fascinating woman, Grace Harrington. All this time I had assumed you were like the others of the Bronze, scheming social climbers circling the throne like a pack of wolves for the opportunity to snatch it away from the Carlyons and impose your own family’s lineage upon the nation. That, or you simply desired older men. He was a handsome beast, with his dark southerner’s skin and his mother’s Valley blue eyes which won him a tacit acceptance from the Draoidhean –”

“You sound as if you desired him.”

Éamon waved a hand. “I am capable of appreciating the aesthetic of a finely made man. My desires...” His gazed drifted across Grace, now nude as the day she was born, from head to toe, his violet eyes glinting, “lie elsewhere.”

Grace’s mouth turned dry. Her arms, crossed over her chest, tightened – then fell away.

Éamon held her gaze, but she noticed the corner of his mouth twitch upwards.

Grace stepped into the hot spring, then submerged her body, issuing a low groan as the warmth of the water immediately soothed her aching muscles.

“It is said that the waters of the hot springs are healing,” Éamon said.

Grace believed it. She already felt better. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly and deeply. For several, wonderous minutes, it was as though there was nothing wrong in the world at all – no coup, no Iovanius, no Draoidhean.

She felt the water ripple as Éamon waded closer to her, though she did not open her eyes.

“For your entire year on the throne, I wondered why you did not make your pilgrimage to the Valley to meet me,” Éamon murmured. “I understand now it was because you could not, out of fear of the snakes in your court.”

“You could have accepted any of my invitations to come to the city for the seasonal celebrations,” Grace pointed out, opening her eyes now. Éamon was much closer than she had realised, and found herself wetting her lips, though they were of course already damp from the rising steam of the spring.

“The invitations were taken by the Elders as insults,” Éamon said to Grace’s utter mortification. “An attempt at authority, demanding us to come to the heathenish city rather than bothering to make the journey to us. The Draoidhean are not at the beck and call of the Archon. The Archon is at ours.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” Grace said. “I was trying to be – friendly.”

Éamon gazed at her through heavy-lidded eyes, a gentle smile upon his mouth.

“I see that now, Grace Harrington,” he said softly.