Devices and Desires Read Free Page A

was put on the plate, with all sorts of leaves and frills and things
     to make it look pretty; but really it was just bits of meat and dumplings in slimy sauce.”
    To the best of his recollection, Valens had never wanted anything in his entire life. Things had come his way, a lot of them;
     like the loathsome pointy-toed poulaines, the white thoroughbred mare that hated him and tried to bite his feet, the kestrel
     that wouldn’t come back when it was called, the itchy damask pillows, the ivory-handled rapier, all the valuable junk his
     father kept giving him. He’d been brought up to take care of his possessions, so he treated them with respect until they wore
     out, broke or died; but he had no love for them, no pride in owning them. He knew that stuff like that mattered to most people;
     it was a fact about humanity that he accepted without understanding. Other boys his age had wanted a friend; but Valens had
     always known that the Duke’s son didn’t make friends; and besides, he preferred thinking to talking, just as he liked to walk
     on his own. He’d never wanted to be Duke, because that would only happen when his father died. Now, for the first time, he
     felt what it was like to want something — but, he stopped to consider, is it actually possible to want a person? How? As a
     pet; to keep in a mews or a stable, to feed twice a day when not in use. It would be possible, of course. You could keep a
     person, a girl for instance, in a stable or a bower; you could walk her and feed her, dress her and go to bed with her, but.…
     He didn’t want
ownership.
He was the Duke’s son, as such he owned everything and nothing. There was a logical paradox here — Doctor Galeazza would
     be proud of him — but it was so vague and unfamiliar that he didn’t know how to begin formulating an equation to solve it.
     All he could do was be aware of the feeling, which was disturbingly intense.
    Not that it mattered. She was going home tomorrow.
    “Slimy sauce,” he repeated. “Yetch. You had to eat it, I suppose, or risk starting a war.”
    She smiled, and he looked away, but the smile followed him. “Not all of it,” she said. “You’ve got to leave some if you’re
     a girl, it’s ladylike. Not that I minded terribly much.”
    Valens nodded. “When I was a kid I had to finish everything on my plate, or it’d be served up cold for breakfast and lunch
     until I ate it. Which was fine,” he went on, “I knew where I stood. But when I was nine, we had to go to a reception at the
     Lorican embassy —”
    She giggled. She was way ahead of him. “And they think that if you eat everything on your plate it’s a criticism, that they
     haven’t given you enough.”
    She’d interrupted him and stolen his joke, but he didn’t mind. She’d shared his thought. That didn’t happen very often.
    “Of course,” he went on, “nobody bothered telling me, I was just a kid; so I was grimly munching my way through my dinner
     —”
    “Rice,” she said. “Plain boiled white rice, with noodles and stuff.”
    He nodded. “And as soon as I got to the end, someone’d snatch my plate away and dump another heap of the muck on it and hand
     it back; I thought I’d done something bad and I was being punished. I was so full I could hardly breathe. But Father was busy
     talking business, and nobody down my end of the table was going to say anything; I’d probably be there still, only —”
    He stopped dead.
    “Only?”
    “I threw up,” he confessed; it wasn’t a good memory. “All over the tablecloth, and their Lord Chamberlain.”
    She laughed. He expected to feel hurt, angry. Instead, he laughed too. He had no idea why he should think it was funny, but
     it was.
    “And was there a war?” she asked.
    “Nearly,” he replied. “God, that rice. I can still taste it if I shut my eyes.”
    Now she was nodding. “I was there for a whole year,” she said. “Lorica, I mean. The rice is what sticks in my mind too.