“‘I love you, Queen Eleanor,’ I said to her, and this was true. It was. ‘I existed here for you. My cock existed for you. My body existed for you to use and punish. And I have deceived you and I am ashamed. But we cannot be commanded to love. And we cannot command ourselves to love either. I love you, but Lexius loves Sonya!’”

Beauty nodded silently. No, we most certainly cannot be commanded to love. Beauty gazed at him fearfully, wanting him desperately to continue yet afraid of what he might reveal.

“Well, she answered me in unvarnished words,” said Alexi. “‘My heart is broken,’ she said. ‘I lose you, Alexi, you who were to me the sun and the moon, and I lose him, this dark bewitching god of love who makes a fire in my blood that nothing can cool, all in the same night! I cannot bear it.’ She began to wail like a woman at a funeral pyre. And she sent for Sonya.

“It was daylight by the time Sonya was brought into these chambers. Lexius was on his knees, nude, with his head bowed, saying nothing. And never had he looked more like a god, in fact, with his slender face and downcast eyes and strange patient submission. As for Sonya, this was the first time I’d ever beheld her and she had a humbling magnificence to her, that’s the only way I can describe it—a statuesque beauty who was clearly frightening. For one thing, she was exceptionally large for a woman, all over, large of bone, with facial features that were large, but the entire sculpture was that of exquisite and extreme femininity without doubt. She’d dressed hastily yet the impression was one of village opulence, I suppose, with the shorter hem required of villagers, yes, but beautiful sleeves and skirts and finely made boots. Her raven hair she had not done up, nor had time to brush, and as a consequence she looked as if she’d been pulled from bed, mussed with her cheeks burning, and her eyes aflame with a kind of raw indignation that can’t be suppressed.

“I could see in a flash why Lexius had succumbed to her. Sonya, of course, had never been anyone’s slave, and was in fact a terror of a mistress except to those who adored her. And when she began to speak to the Queen, she spoke much too much and she was not wise.

“‘Your Majesty,’ she cried, ‘I would never have left the kingdom with him and gone anywhere. I only took him into my private rooms because he needed so badly to be instructed, trained, broken. He had never really surrendered to anyone.’ Of course this infuriated Queen Eleanor as she thought she had already instructed, trained, and broken Lexius long ago, and that he’d surrendered to her completely.

“She banished all of us from the kingdom. Sonya, sobbing and crying, was not even allowed to see her uncle the mayor or say farewell to her beloved fillies, as she called them. Lexius was allowed his fine clothes, his sword, and his gold from its hiding place in the woods, as it was indeed his, and we were all put out of the kingdom.

“The Queen in those last hours was as a flower withered overnight, a flower that had been past its prime already for some time but as lovely still as other blooms—only to wither all at once, and drop its petals in a silent downpour. She was a ghost of herself as she stood accepting our parting bows. She gave gold aplenty to me as was the custom, but not her kiss, her forgiveness, or her blessing. And it was then—as I learned later on—that she began her turning away from the kingdom.

“I journeyed with Lexius and Sonya to a port from which they sailed for India. We spent many nights together in the inn there talking to one another as we waited for the right ship. Sonya and Lexius, well, they had begun to quarrel before they sailed.

“A year later, maybe a little more, I received a letter from Lexius that Sonya had disappeared. She had not found the climate of Arikamandu and its surrounding country congenial to her. She had gone away. Lexius had bestowed great wealth on her. But she was never coming back, this he knew. He was bereft. About that time, Dmitri had long been free and was visiting with me. . . . Dmitri wanted to visit Lexius—” He stopped.

“I went on to Arikamandu,” said Dmitri carefully. “I wanted to see Lexius. A bond had been forged between me and Lexius when he brought us back from the sultanate. I visited for some time with Lexius in India. We were bound together by many things. And then I returned, and now Lexius is returning as well.”

Beauty was amazed. What had the distant city of Arikamandu been like? And what of Lexius’s powerful family? There was so much she wanted to know. She did not yearn for foreign places or new adventures beyond Bellavalten, but she did long for knowledge, knowledge of all sorts, and she always had.

She tried to picture Lexius as she remembered him. There came back to her a seductive memory of him as the Sultan’s exacting steward, examining her body as he had received her into the Sultan’s service. There had been something melancholy and languid about him always. And when Laurent had made a slave of him, he’d enjoyed a sweet terror that she well understood.

“But what of his strange remarks?” asked Laurent. “What did he mean when he said that this was not the only such kingdom?” He waited and then gestured for Dmitri to speak. “How long precisely did you stay in Arikamandu?”

Alexi looked up shyly at Dmitri, and Dmitri looked at Alexi in silence for a protracted moment that almost threatened disrespect for the King, but then Dmitri came to some inner resolve, and he looked towards Laurent.

“Sire, if you will forgive me, I must say that that is Lexius’s story to tell,” he said softly and pleadingly. “Please, I beg you, ask me not about those things. For that is another country, and another people.”

Laurent was obviously reflecting on this. Of course Beauty understood. Dmitri had been a guest in that other country, with those other people, and he did not want to violate his honor in any way.

Since he’d taken over the Place of Public Punishment, Dmitri had grown strong and resolute, losing entirely the tentative movements and speech that had marked him on the day of his return.

“I returned to my own country,” said Dmitri. “And it is this kingdom to which I belong now. Please let me say no more of Lexius than what I’ve said so far.”

“And Lexius will be here soon enough to tell his story,” Beauty said. “He’s made a long journey to come here. He must want to offer us more than his greetings and his good wishes. Those he might have given us by letter. Surely he has a purpose in coming himself.”

And that purpose had to be the very same purpose that brought all of them back, she thought, that he wanted to be part of the kingdom again.

A moment of silence fell. They were all pondering. Lady Eva was the first to speak.

“And was it this, you think, Alexi, this treachery of Lexius that started the decline of the old kingdom?”

“Yes, I suppose that it was, Lady Eva,” said Alexi. “But forgive me, Your Majesties, for saying so, because I must say so: the Queen did not understand things! I mean the undoing of the kingdom lay within the Queen for she had such strong ideas and was, well, blind to so much that was plain to others.”

“I agree,” said Laurent. “You don’t offend me when you speak of her in that way. I have spoken of her in that way, and so has my queen. All one has to do is listen to the grumblings and rantings of old Lord Gregory to understand what the Queen never understood.”

“Ah, but Lord Gregory has his uses,” said Lady Eva, rolling her eyes. She smiled and the King smiled at her in a secretive confiding way.

Beauty never minded when that happened. She’d grown accustomed to the King’s devotion to Lady Eva. She tended the King’s bruises and welts when Lady Eva had left his chambers. And Laurent came to her hot and hungry for her embraces on those nights as if Lady Eva had fed him one of her potions when in fact her potion had consisted only of her great gift for command.

“We have taken our building blocks from Queen Eleanor here,” said Beauty, “but we have laid a new foundation. We have built new and wondrous edifices of our own.”

“Yes, Your Majesty, that is so true,” said Lady Eva, and now she flashed the smile she always reserved for Beauty, one of admiration and trust. “Well, maybe Lexius will have things to teach us, tricks and rituals from the Sultan’s kingdom for which the old queen had no taste.”

“Oh, he knows many,” said Rosalynd with a soft laugh. Elena nodded in agreement. “But then we know them too, don’t we?”

“You have been indispensable, Rosalynd and Elena, to the splendor in the gardens,” said Beauty. And this was a simple statement of truth. And then there were the slaves tethered in niches throughout the castle and on the road down to the village, works of art in bondage. These singular figures and clever tableaux were Beauty’s delight. “But then all of you here are indispensable. Yet there is room for more.”

“I will gladly receive Lexius,” said Laurent, with an air of finality. “Without hesitation, I will welcome him. It was I who brought him here years ago. I would have welcomed him had he come to me after he was banished. I’m glad he found friendship with you, Alexi and Dmitri.”

“Thank you, sire,” said Alexi. “I can’t claim to have done anything much but follow my heart.”

“And you are right,” Beauty said softly, gazing up at Alexi. “One cannot command oneself to love. How blessed we are those of us who do not have to try to do this. And we cannot command ourselves to love one form of loving over another.” She looked down, down at her hands folded in her lap, and her thoughts were suddenly confused and frightening to her. She wanted to speak of many things, but this was not the time or the place, and she feared she had revealed too much of her soul already.