In the morning, in the light and sanity of the Imperial apartments she could barely even remember returning to, she felt differently. Much differently. During the weeks into months she had spent perilous evenings sneaking into Talinara to dally with Tacen, she had often imagined how she might feel upon waking up after giving in to what he wanted; what Carala denied she wanted. At worst she had imagined guilt, regret, shame.

She had never imagined horror. But that was the exact, the precise, the only way to describe what flooded her heart and brain as she rose to consciousness that morning. Every detail of the night before returned to her as she woke, shiveringly aware that she had allowed a werewolf to claim her maidenhead. If the darkest stories about such creatures were true, then she was now his. And it would only be a matter of time before he sank his fangs into her flesh and made her into a wolf like himself. Hadn't he said as much, with his mad talk of the moon and sharing his gift with her?

Carala could hardly breathe, shrinking into the furthest corner of her bed, hugging her knees to her chest. When Elana came to her apartments that morning to help her dress for the day, she dismissed her at once, claiming illness, but forbidding Elana to send for a Madrenite sister to examine her. "It's nothing, it's nothing, just a touch of a cold," she had insisted to Elana. The handmaiden had gone away troubled, but she knew better than to gainsay the princess.

But she was an imperial Princess of the House of Deyn, and she could not hide in her apartments for the rest of her life. Somehow she found the steel to summon Elana back later that day, and even exchange pleasantries with her as the handmaiden helped her into her corset and skirts and brushed her hair. "You're quite recovered then, your highness?" Elana had asked as she laced up the princess's boots.

"Very much so, thank you Elana. I think I may have just eaten a bad pasty last night."

"Ooh, don't let the chamberlain or your father hear that. Cook will be down in the dungeons by nightfall."

Carala laughed dutifully, both of them knowing full well that Chamberlain Tienn would never impose such a punishment for a scrap of bad mutton and that the Emperor very well might. The rest of the day had passed in a blur, attending her lessons with her tutors, waiting on her mother, futilely working on Denisius's portrait, which until today had actually been progressing surprisingly well. When a courier arrived that night, she felt an almost superstitious dread, and, to her shame, all the aching excitement and anticipation she had felt every other time Tacen had sent an invitation to her.

The note had once more said 11, but this time instead of a sketch of hart horns there was scrawled a rough illustration of the Curate's Tower. And there was no question mark this time. That one small difference was enough to tell her that this was no longer an invitation.

It was a summons.

And she answered it, sneaking down into the city once more, heading toward Hearth Town and the Maathinhold.

She answered it because she was his. She belonged to the wolf.

It terrified her that whispering such things to herself aroused her so very much.

He was waiting for her that night, stripped to the waist and his eyes already a blazing gold. Tacen waited for no invitation before embracing her, his mouth hungry on hers, his hands already sliding her cloak to the floor and undoing laces and buttons. "Wait," she stammered. She needed to ask him things; needed to know what he intended to do with her; needed to tell him she was no wolf's plaything and that this had to come to an end, now. "Wait -- I -- "

"What is it, my lovely princess?" His smile was kind. His wolf's eyes spoke of a truer hunger.

"How is it you're still in Talinara?" she asked breathlessly.

"I have business here. In fact I should be here for a few weeks. That pleases you, doesn't it, my princess?" Still he smiled into her face, one hand kneading her lower belly through her corset, the tips of his incisors sharper than she remembered, that forest aroma stronger than it had ever been.

"Yes," she breathed.

"It pleases you so much, in fact, that you wish to meet me here every night until I say otherwise?" Oh, those eyes, those golden eyes. Once as a very young girl she had seen eyes like that in the leopardish face of a Namarri visitor from Summervale. That had been the most crowded she had ever seen the throne room, for most in the Anointed Realms believed the feline Namarri to be nothing but a myth. But a priestess of a tribe called Sun's Wrath had deigned to visit the Palace, to inform the Malachite Throne that the Namarri of Summervale were not and never would be its subjects, and the curiosity of the courtiers had been such that some had ridden from as far away as the Scorched Desert and even from the Sultan's court in Q'Sivaris to see the cat woman with their own eyes.

That had been one of the only times Carala could remember all her legitimate siblings being assembled in one place. It had also been the last time, for her brother Ursus had been beheaded for treason not long after.

One of the whispered rumors of the Namarri had been that their eyes were the most beautiful in the world; fathomless cat eyes of the most exotic colors with a human intelligence behind them. Carala had not gotten that close to the priestess; her heritage was that of a leopard and she looked even more dangerous than her four legged brethren in the menageries were. The princess (along with many others) had found her thoroughly intimidating and had spent much of the leopardess's audience with the Emperor hiding behind her mother's skirts. But she had seen enough of her eyes to know that they were as enchantingly beautiful as the whispers said, and perhaps even magical, for how else could the priestess have spoken so impertinently to her father and left the Chalcedony Palace alive? But perhaps it had only been their beauty that had inspired the Emperor's rare moment of mercy.

But these eyes -- the wolf's eyes -- her wolf's eyes -- were even more beautiful. And so she nodded to him, and let him strip her bare, and made love with him again in the ruins of the Maathinhold.

So the days passed, one blurring into the next. Carala spent the day attending to her duties as if through a veil of thick fog and her nights descending into the city, finding her way to the Curate's Tower and the windowed chamber within, where she and Tacen spent the hours of darkness indulging every carnal hunger imaginable. The Judges' Conservatory began to acquire a lived-in look, as during the day her wolf had begun to clear space for them by shifting the piles of debris here and there, spreading thick blankets liberated from some storeroom in the Tower so they wouldn't have to lay on the bare stone floor, finding a set of crystal candlesticks he used to give them some light. When she was capable of thinking about it logically, Carala wondered if anyone in Talinara could see those flickers of light from the long-empty Tower. But the old arcane brethren knew their craftsmanship, and those windows were enchanted to allow no light to pass through them unless the proper word was spoken, and no one now alive in Talinara knew what it might be. And with the lived-in look came the scent -- the unmistakable, faintly rank scent of a room that was used for nothing but assignation, thickened by Tacen's forest scent; his wolfish scent.

Other scents in other places began to make themselves known to her as well. In fact her every sense seemed intensely heightened as her bond with Tacen deepened. She could smell her mother's perfume, oddly reminiscent of Tacen's forest scent but far more exquisite and refined, as though it had passed through some alchemical process to filter out its less pleasing qualities, minutes before her mother ever appeared. (Niella's Longing, it was called, the most expensive perfume in either the Anointed Realms or the Sultan's kingdoms, a few ounces costing more than a commoner earned in a whole year.) When passing a guard in a corridor, she was forced to shrink away from the stench of his sweat, hiding her twitching nostrils behind a handkerchief -- and her father was adamant about his household guard's hygiene. Woe betide the soldier who appeared at his post unshaven or smelling of last night's drink. As for her father, she dared not linger in the same room with him. The only saving grace when it came to her perception of the Emperor was that she now found his voice even more thoroughly beauteous than she ever had before, and on those rare occasions he deigned to hammer a few notes from his dulcimer or burst into a few stanzas of the Deyn anthem, the loveliness of the sounds was enough to make her forget all her anxiety and terror of what the werewolf was doing to her.

If only she could convince herself that he was forcing her to do anything. Her days she spent in growing fear and confusion; wanting to put a stop to it all but having no idea how to do so. The diary she kept in the secret compartment behind her headboard began to reflect her thoughts, frightened and disjointed, and more than once she considered hurling it into the fire. But she had maintained a diary ever since she had learned her letters, slender volumes filled with increasingly skilled handwriting and increasingly sophisticated thoughts, a chronicle of her whole life, if anyone ever wished to read such a thing.

And more importantly she needed to write down her thoughts, so bewildered and fearful had they become. As nervous and agitated and terrified as she was during the day, she was equally passionate and hungry for her wolf lover during the night. She did not lay there passively as he did what he pleased with her. She climbed atop him, took him into her body greedily, sank her nails into his flesh and licked the sweat from his neck as he clutched her to him and claimed her again and again. Not all of this was written in her diary, of course, but there was enough to make Varallo Thray realize just how powerful Tacen's influence was when he read it later on.