Page 93 of A Vow of Embers

“Yes!”

“Put your hands here.” She guided me and I placed my hands on her and waited. I felt a slight jab under my hand and it startled me.

“Was that it?”

She radiated light with her smile. “Yes, it was.”

“Oh.” There was an actual baby inside her. A new life. A powerful and overwhelming longing blazed through me, making my eyes burn and my chest hurt. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted this until I was told I couldn’t ever have it.

My mother had been right: This was magic. A magic I would never get to be part of.

“You want a baby of your own,” Parthenia said softly.

“What?”

“I can tell,” she said with a nod. “I was the same way when I first got married. This little one is a miracle. A gift from the goddess, one that I prayed for. A physical manifestation of how much my husband and I love each other. We are going to be our own little family.”

I took my hands away. I wanted what she had. For some inexplicable reason I ached for it. My mind was filled again with the vision of me pregnant and Alexandros holding me, cradling my stomach.

That would never be. I didn’t know why I kept imagining it, but I needed it to stop.

Themis greeted me when I entered her rooms. She had a large loom set up, and several different women sat around it weaving and talking. “Come and sit with us,” she said.

I took the seat next to hers as she explained to me how the pattern for my section should look. I was determined to win her over and get her vote for the prince. Because the sooner he was named king, the sooner I would be free to find the eye and get Quynh out of the palace and away from Thrax.

“Did you weave much at home?” Themis asked.

“I did. I wish I had spent more time doing it.” I wasn’t as talented as Kallisto but I had always enjoyed it. I had found the almost hypnotic, repetitive movements soothing. I had neglected weaving to focus on training over the last year, and part of me wished that I hadn’t. That I had soaked up every moment possible with my mother and sisters before I left.

Weaving was connection. Something the women before me had done every day for thousands of years, just as the women who came after me would. Like a thread through time.

“That husband of yours must have quite a bit of stamina,” she said.

My hands stilled. “I beg your pardon?”

“You never came back last night and you look tired. He seems the type to make certain that you enjoyed yourself repeatedly. I remember those days and nights when my husband wouldn’t let me leave our bed. Youth is wasted on the young.”

“Themis!” One of the women close to my age put her hands over the ears of a younger girl while I tried not to flush from embarrassment. I did not want to think about Alexandros’s stamina.

Which I suspected was vast.

The archon just laughed. “I’m too crass for my daughters-in-law. They don’t like that I come from nothing.”

“Nothing?” I repeated.

“I was poor as dirt, as was my husband. We were able to work hard and gain our wealth. I put just as much into our import business as he did and he always said the success belonged to us both. We wanted our sons to make good social matches and had enough money to make sure that they married up. Although their wives would like to pretend that their husbands come from the noble class, as well.”

If I had liked her before, I liked her even more now. “We had to work hard at my home, too.”

“A princess like you?” she said. “I wouldn’t have guessed that. There’s nothing better than hard work. Something this lot doesn’t know anything about. I think it does a woman good to be in charge of her own life, to be a true partner with her husband instead of a pretty ornament.”

The scandalized daughter-in-law said, “Themis, you should not talk about such things, nor should you brag about your perceived accomplishments. ‘A woman’s greatest glory is to be talked about neither in praise nor blame.’”

Themis leaned over to me and said, “So, the philosophers want us to be invisible then. Sounds boring to me.”

I stifled a laugh and ignored the glare from the daughter-in-law. “Me too.”

“Let’s move over here,” she said. “Away from disapproving ears.”