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“I’m sure. But enough talking.”

There’s a strangeness when we come together. The room’s low light does its best, but it can’t transform us into the people we truly seek. The more our bodies connect, the more a sense of desperation takes hold to try to defy this fact, to find pleasure in it anyway.

And pleasure there is—the lovely tingle of skin in the wake of a caress, the bittersweet ache between my legs. There’s a pleasant sense of fullness when he’s inside of me, but even after, when he teases that ache to release with his tongue, none of it’s enough to banish Cora.

A long silence settles upon us once it’s over, broken only when Will brings my hand to his mouth and places a warm kiss on my palm.

“You’re so lovely,” he says, but there’s a distance in his voice. A mist that gathers in his eyes at the second half of his thought, which remains unsaid.But…

My hand slides to cup his face, as I try to blink away the tears that threaten to gather in mine. In this moment, with our limbs still draped across each other’s, I must face the fact I’ve done my best to ignore these past few weeks—that Will is truly good. How can I possibly protect him from what’s coming when he’s the one who won my hand?

“I need to go.”

His eyebrows furrow as he helps me from the floor. “My lady, I’m sorry, I…”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for, Will.” I reach for his hands and draw in close to rest my forehead against his. We stand like that for a moment, hands clasped and foreheads touching, a new sense of understanding enveloping us in its embrace. “It was worth a try, right?”

There’s a faint crack in his smile, and something inside of me breaks at the sight of it. I wait for the safety of the darkened streets, still punctuated with the radiance of Yuletide candles in the windows, and then I let the tears fall freely.

“Where did you sneak off to?”

The question accosts me as soon as I slip into the kitchen, sending my heart into my throat. There, at the table where Margery prepares our food, Thomas waits. He’s leaning back in a chair, his dirtied boots propped up on the table’s surface, where they leave little puddles of melting snow.

“Good evening, Master Thomas,” I reply coolly. “I didn’t sneak off anywhere. I just wanted a bit of fresh air and to watch the snow fall.”

The confidence in my tone brings him to a standing position, and his lips curl.

“Oh, really? And your new prince wanted some fresh air as well?”

“I’m not exactly sure what you’re implying. I bid Will good night outside the meetinghouse.” I hang my cloak on its hook beside the door. “But do keep in mind that you don’t have the rank to question me.”

A low growl emanates from his throat. Thomas isn’t used to being below someone in class, to being put in his place.

“How can anyone be certain you are who you say you are?” An ugly sneer cuts across his face. “Never forget that you’re a guest in my home.”

“How could I?” I snap back. “And I’ll happily prove I am who I say once the weather clears. I would have already, if you didn’t stall our return.”

Gods, how I’ll relish cutting his throat, spilling his blood into the sand and sending his body on the wings of flames toProserpina. His death will free my sisters from the chains of Ceres’s curse.

His death will free Cora.

“Royalty or not, I won’t tolerate you behaving like a harlot underneath our roof.”

I push past him toward the stairs, digging my shoulder into his chest as I do. The force catches him by surprise, and he stumbles, the backs of his legs hitting the table with a loudthump.

When I reach the first step, I turn around to face him once more.

“Then good thing we weren’t under your roof.”

Thomas does not follow me; he does not say a word.

The turn of the year comes and goes, taking my third full moon with it, though her image is lost to me behind a curtain of snow that refuses to lift. For the next three weeks, each time it seems as if the clouds might part, another storm darkens the skies to re-cloak the city in a fresh layer of white. Long gone is the sense of calm brought by Yuletide, replaced by a quiet desolation that’s fraying everyone’s nerves, mine included.

Will and I continue to steal moments together, though it’s not lust that draws us into each other’s orbits—it’s that we’ve somehow shared our silent truths. There’s comfort in that for Will, and there would be for me, too, if it didn’t complicate my plans for spring. I spend our time together praying for some sin to reveal itself, to justify what must happen to him, but one never comes. Will is as kind and as thoughtful as I feared him to be, and I have no way to keep him from voyaging to Scopuli.

When I’m not with Will, I’m with Cora. We spend most ofour days together now, after I finally convinced her and Margery to let me help with the housework. My wealth and status have slipped just far enough into the fog of memory for them to allow me to participate in the mundane. As soon as Margery and I finish cleaning the kitchen after breakfast, I head to the Waters house, where I spend the day helping Cora tend her hearth, mend and clean clothes, and care for her ailing father.

We spend long hours sitting before the same fire where Will and I sought comfort in each other. That night felt like a dream the moment it was over, but the first few times I find myself in the same room as the act, I’m terrified that Cora can read what transpired between her brother and me on my face. But she never broaches Yuletide at all—not my time spent with Will, and not the conversation we shared. At first, I worry that she’s intentionally ignoring it, that my confession tainted whatever blossoms between us with rot. But she treats me no differently, and there are even times I’m certain that I catch her staring when she thinks I’m not looking; though as quickly as our eyes meet, she turns away, and the flush that creeps along her graceful neck always has causes more plausible than longing. Still, it’s easy for my imagination to rewrite Christmastide’s history—how I might have ended up here with her instead, had she not retreated. What would our hair look like tangled together, the red and the black?