Saint-Luc's Wager

"A month," Saint-Luc said, refilling his cup for what was probably the fourth time. "I'll have her favor within a month, or I'll pay every debt at this table myself."

The table roared its approval, as tables full of bored, wine-soaked courtiers reliably did at exactly this kind of wager, and by morning Saint-Luc had a headache, an empty purse from the round he'd insisted on buying to celebrate his own confidence, and a considerably clearer view of what he'd agreed to.

"You look unwell," said his friend Villequier, over breakfast.

"I look like a man who promised, in front of witnesses, to court a woman purely as a wager."

"That's most of what courtship at this court actually is. You're only unusual for having said it aloud."

The trouble started three weeks in, when he realized he was arriving early to their conversations.

"You're early again," she said, not unkindly, the fourth time it happened.

"I had nowhere better to be."

"That's a very poor compliment."

"It's an honest one, which I'm told is rarer at this court." He meant it as flattery. He heard himself mean it as something closer to the truth, and the difference troubled him more than he expected it to, walking back to his own rooms afterward turning the wager over like a coin he could no longer remember the actual value of.

"Just tell her," Villequier said, when Saint-Luc finally admitted the whole business had stopped being funny to him. "She likes you. Everyone can see she likes you. Marry the wager to the wine money and forget you ever mentioned either."

"I can't court her honestly while she doesn't know how it started."

"Why does it matter how it started, if it isn't that anymore?"

Saint-Luc didn't have an answer that satisfied Villequier, and he wasn't entirely sure he had one that satisfied himself. He knew only that every time she laughed at something he said, some small dishonest weight settled further into his chest, and he'd grown tired of carrying it.

"I have to tell you something," he said, the next time they walked the gallery together, "and I'd rather you heard it from me than from someone at that table who'll enjoy telling it worse than it actually is."

He told her. All of it: the wine, the wager, the month, the debts he'd have owed if he'd failed to win her favor by a date he'd since stopped thinking about entirely.

She didn't speak for a long moment. When she did, her voice was flatter than he'd ever heard it. "So which part of the last three weeks was real?"

"All of it, after the first few days. I know that's not much of a defense."

"It isn't." She walked several paces without looking at him. "You may go."

He went.

It took her the better part of a season to speak to him again, and when she finally did, it was to say, without preamble, that she'd decided the honesty itself was worth something, even coming this late and this clumsily. "Most men at this court would have let me go on believing whatever kept me pleasant company," she said. "You couldn't manage it. I've decided that's worth more than I first credited it."

Saint-Luc never told Villequier what she'd said. He only told him, years later, that he'd learned something at that table with the wine and the wager that no one else at it had ever bothered to learn alongside him: that the truth, told at the wrong moment for entirely the right reasons, could cost you everything and still, eventually, be worth exactly what it cost.