Page 13 of The Court of Venus

When I kicked my heels against my mare’s side, she tugged me off the path to snack on clovers. Tom and Wyatt passed by, sneering about how I should be taught to handle a woman, and they both laughed before trotting away.

Ambrose, my new friend, fell back to my side. “All right, Mistress Bianca?”

“Fine,” I said, digging my heels in, urging her on.

One half of the party wanted to cross a stream, and the other insisted on the promise of torn shrubbery deeper in the wood. Ambrose and Oliver both followed Jasper and Cosmo, the two blue-haired Jupiters, into the crooked forest. Jupiters were notoriously lucky—whatever path they chose at random was usually the right one.

I decided to stay with Roland and his friends. I had my own path to follow: a lingering trail of fear. A frantic heartbeat, leaping across the stream. I knew it belonged to the stag.

But Roland’s group quickly lost interest in the hunt. Tom composed sonnets on the riverbank as the others waded into the stream, boots cast off and hose rolled above their knees. Bare ankles flashed between shining rocks. They bent to cup water in their palms to drink.

“Tom, who are you writing about now?” Roland asked over his shoulder.

“You,” Tom said sweetly.

Roland kissed his cheek with wet, shining lips. “What do you write about me?” He snatched the paper from Tom’s hands, spilling the ink pot into the water. It ran black. “Are my eyes really the color of a blazing dawn?”

Yes, I thought.

When Tom nodded, Roland ran a hand over his face, smiling. The sun leapt through the trees and illuminated them, in their grace and youth, standing like river gods on the bank. Here was the court in its true glory—not the king, but the beauty he adorned himself with.

Roland shrugged off his jerkin and furs, then his doublet, folding it all carefully on a boulder. He grasped the hem of his linen shirt and tugged it over his head. Folded that, too.

Droplets immediately shattered across his broad shoulders, his thinly muscled chest.

The carved arrowhead of his hips.

“That poem was a trick!” Roland lunged to splash his friends in turn, and then Wyatt and Tom were ganging up on Roland, hauling him underwater.

He emerged breathless, flinging his hair back. He was dunked yet again. Spray flew in perfect, glistening arches.

My mare was still happily chewing on her clovers. I tapped her with my heels to get her attention, then guided her across a shallow part of the stream and into the forest. The deer’s trail was stronger here.

“Where are you going?” Roland called, holding Wyatt off.

“Yes, don’t worry about the hunt,” Wyatt insisted. “We never catch anything. Others do that for us.”

“Chasing is very well and good, Wyatt, but you haven’t bedded Agnes Bryer after two summers of trying.” Roland shook out his hair and jogged onto the banks. He rolled his loose shirt back over his head and shoulders, tucking it into his soaked breeches. “How about a game, Mouse?” he taunted. A slant of sunlight escaped through the trees and cut across his chest. I spun my mare around again. She was exasperated with me now.

Whenever someone asked if I wanted to play a game, I lit up inside. It couldn’t be helped.

He grinned at my predictability. “If you find the stag first, if you’re so sure it’s that way, Wyatt will tell you who you’re paired with in the first round of the tourney tomorrow. Wyatt loves to hand out advantages. Don’t you, Wyatt?’

Wyatt shrugged. “Only for those deserving.”

“And if you find the stag first?” I asked Roland.

“Hmm.” He bit his lip as he thought. “You withdraw from the tournament.”

Tom was watching the two of us carefully. Beads of water hung from his dark curls.

I hesitated. “What about a favor instead. A secret?”

“But you’d just lie.”

“Yes, most likely,” I conceded.

“At least you’re honest about that.” Roland licked his thumb, scrubbing dirt from his boot, a habit I remembered well. Roland worried over a mess almost as much as illness and plague. He’d been that way since we were children. If anyone in the palace so much as mentioned the sweat, he sequestered himself for days. He avoided sickly Fulke Roet entirely. And he liked his linens smoothed a certain way, his garments hung in the wardrobe just so. Hal and I would run muddy hands along his clothes whenever he irked us. We’d cough onto our plates or eat with our mouths open, twirling food on our tongues while he stared in horror.