TheKingsViper (8 page)

“If I’ve offended you…”

“I’m not offended. You keep me warm, don’t you?” But she did
not meet his eye. Would not, even when he laid a hand on her arm.

It’s not deliberate
, he wanted to say. But couldn’t.
It had been an indulgence on his part, and inexcusably so. “We’ll sleep
separately from now on,” he whispered.

“Why? Do you think I’d be safer alone?”

He didn’t answer that; he was too startled. Did she mean
that she wanted it? The world seemed to come loose from its moorings and rotate
around them.

But she pressed on. “If I’m not safe with you, then who am I
safe with?”

She’s innocent
, he thought.
That’s good, but not
for her. She must learn better before it destroys her
. And the potential
for betraying that innocence was so immense that he felt dizzy.

* * * * *

“Tell me about the King,” she said to him as they camped in
the angle of a ruined field-barn one night. She was feeling oddly fractious,
despite the long hours of walking. It always made her feel jumpy when one of
Severin’s silent phases went on too long.

He fed sticks to the fire. “What about him?”

I might as well
, she thought,
ask the difficult
questions. It isn’t as if I can shock him.
“Does he have a mistress?”

Severin’s lips thinned, and he looked at her thoughtfully
before replying. “He does. The Lady Katrine of Tockforton. She’s
lady-in-waiting to the King’s own mother, and a woman of excellent lineage,
though her family is not what it once was.”

Eloise stretched out her hands to the flames and affected
nonchalance, despite the churning in her blood. “Will he put her aside after
marrying me?”

“I don’t know.” Severin’s voice had that clipped, cold sound
it got when he was unhappy with a conversation. She’d gotten to know his habits
of speech. “He might do, if he were to become taken with you.”

“Am I…attractive enough for him? To become enamored of me, I
mean?”

“Well, you certainly don’t look much like a queen now.”

She grimaced, acknowledging that she was bundled up in
layers of peasant clothing, that her hair was uncombed and her cheeks rough and
freckled from exposure to the weather. Then she jumped at the next question
before she could think better of it and lose her nerve. “Do you think I’m
attractive?”

“This is not a conversation we should be having,” he
growled, holding up a warning finger.

“But do you?” It mattered to her, somehow. Oh God, it
mattered.

“I can hardly judge. Given how long it’s been since I’ve had
any female company,” he said sourly, “I confess that even the sheep around here
are starting to look appealing to me.”

The coarseness of his words took her breath away and she
blushed, momentarily flustered. But a moment’s pause and then she wasn’t
fooled; she realized that his brutishness was calculated to put her off
questioning him. She narrowed her eyes. “And I thought you were a man who
wasn’t scared to tell the truth.”

“The truth?” His dark eyes looked like holes in a fire-lit
mask. His voice grew no louder, but audibly darker. “You think you want the
truth, girl?”

She blinked. Too late, she realized that he was really
riled. Why had the subject prickled him so? “I—”

“The truth is that women will do anything for status in the
eyes of other women, and that men will do anything to get inside a warm
cunny—and both will do anything for gold. The truth is that people are selfish
and lazy and would rather die than think for themselves. The truth is that God
never helps the weak, that love and justice and honor are stories we tell to
comfort ourselves, and that we live and die alone. Don’t ask me for the truth.
You don’t want to hear it.”

She sat as if frozen, though her skin was hot with shock and
shame. His bleak and bitter litany, coming almost out of nowhere, horrified
her. She wanted to shout “That’s not true!” but she could only think how
childish it would sound. So she stared and stared, and Severin held her gaze
over the fire.

“That’s not the
whole
truth,” she whispered at last.

“Oh?” he cocked an eyebrow.

“You’re proof of that yourself.”

Something strange happened to his expression, a
near-unreadable shift that might have been only the flicker of cast firelight.
But he looked away, no longer challenging. “You’re right,” he said hoarsely.
“It’s not the whole truth. Nothing is the whole truth. There are always
complications.” Then he sighed. “Listen, you have no need to worry about the
King’s mistress. A mistress…has no authority. No power, unless the man is weak.
Do you think the Lady Katrine might threaten a queen? Arnauld is not such a
fool and, believe me, the Lady Katrine has no talent for politics.”

“Like me, then?”

“As you say.”

They sat in prickly silence for a moment. Then Eloise
gathered herself, thinking,
Now or never
, and ventured, “Do you have a
mistress?”

Severin went still, and she wondered if her second foray
into the wyrm’s lair was once too often.
Bait a dragon and get burned
,
went the saying. Would he snap again? His eyes seemed to be eating into her. “I
do, I suppose,” he said at length.

Eloise felt lightheaded with daring. “Who is she?”

“Well, not counting the servant lass who makes up the fires,
to whom I have fairly regular recourse, I imagine the Baroness of Eltingham
would be the lucky woman to bear that title. She has no great lineage, but she
is a most excellent fuck.”

He was doing it again, trying to repulse her. Eloise’s
irritation rose in response to his dishonesty. “She’s married?” she snapped.

“Yes. Her husband is elderly though, and knows when it’s
wise to be tolerant.”

“Do you love her?”

“No. Of course not.”

Why
Of course not?
Eloise wondered. “Poor woman.”

Severin raised a black brow. “Why do you pity her?”

“Because she loves you, and you don’t love her.”

His lip curled. “What makes you think she loves me? I’ve
never wooed her with flowers or jewelry or sweet words, so why should she?”

How could she not?
Eloise was tempted to answer
sarcastically, remembering his words to her. But the answer that found its way
to her lips was more considered. “It’s the nature of women to love those they
lie with.”

He laughed out loud at that. “You’re very sure of your
facts, for a maiden of not yet twenty summers!”

Eloise looked away this time, clenching her jaw. Severin
must have seen the hurt in her face because he relented.

“Look. Hilde…the baroness lies with me because it amuses us
both, and because I have the ear of the King and she thinks that I might be
advantageous to her. She’s quite mistaken about that, in fact.”

“So you’re using her ambition?”

“Snakes and mice, Ella.” His eyes reflected the red of the
fire. “But I’ve done her no harm, which is more than she might expect.”

She shrugged angrily, and yet not sure why she was angry except
that she wanted him to be better than that. “That’s just mean.”

“None of us get what we really want in life, Ella. Remember
that.”

* * * * *

That conversation unsettled Severin deeply. He’d found the
young woman’s interest in his personal life rather too pointed for comfort. It
suited the goal of rescuing her that she trusted and obeyed him, even that she
liked him—but no more than that. He wasn’t blind, and he wasn’t a fool. There
was enormous danger here for both of them. She was ripe for marriage but too
inexperienced to be a good judge of men, and she’d been all but alone in his
company for weeks now. It was asking a great deal of any maiden to fix her mind
faithfully on some distant, unknown man, even if he were the King of Ystria.

Yet he wasn’t sure. She had that self-contained reserve
inculcated into noblewomen that meant she could withdraw at a moment’s notice
to some other, inner place, and he might then be ashamed of his
suspicions—except that he had more than enough desires of his own to be ashamed
of, and they occupied all his attention. He was obsessed by the physicality of
the King’s betrothed; by the soft skin on the inside of her elbow, by the
glimpse of a breast as she leaned forward in her ill-fitting garments, by the
arch of her back when she stretched and the curve of her lips and the gray of
her eyes that seemed to change with the weather.

By the inexplicable way her slender body molded to his, its
fit perfect, as they slept together. As if she were made for him.

By the way she looked at him with those unfathomable eyes.

Mithras and all the saints—she had a way of getting under
his skin, asking all the wrong questions, submissive at one moment and defiant
the next. She poked around in his soul, stirring the dust in long-undisturbed
corners, and it left him rattled. She shouldn’t be able to do that. No one
should.

But then, he shouldn’t want her the way he did. He shouldn’t
knot up inside at the thought of handing her over to another man—and that man
his king.

There were times when he felt like he was being asked to
walk up a stake that impaled him through the gut and up under his ribs and
right through his heart. Every step northward hurt.

* * * * *

Once they were away from the coast the land grew richer and
the farms more prosperous and well-ordered, with many servants. Ruda’s little
steading began to look in hindsight like a hovel, and her hospitality the more
generous in comparison. While they could usually find someone willing to offer
them bed and board in exchange for work, such was the time of year, they were
never treated with such concern as she had shown.

Eloise found herself in the back scullery of a large
farmhouse one day, pounding and wringing the laundry of a household of at least
a score. This was one of the jobs she liked least—it was punishingly hard
labor, the weight of the wet sheets making her forearms ache as she wrung them
out—and for some reason that day she could not keep her mind on the task but
chased it restlessly over a dozen different things—her father back home on
Venn, the road ahead, or the pleasing way her feet and legs were growing
stronger for the walking they undertook. She wondered how Severin was doing.
He’d been sent out with the other menservants to harvest the hay. She pictured
the way he’d swung the long-handled rake across his shoulders in the yard and
stood with both arms up and resting upon it as he awaited his instructions, his
neck back at a slight angle in reaction to that yoke, one hip hitched, his eyes
watchful and patient. The ragged line of his hair on his forehead and neck. The
gape of his shirt neck, showing the first speckles of hair upon his chest. The
thought was distracting enough to make her pause at her labor over the big
stone sink and stare through the plaster of the wall, unseeing, her hands
resting loose in the water.

“My mother told me she’d hired a new maid for the scullery.”

Eloise jumped, turning. A man stood in the back doorway, his
hands on his hips. She had a vague recollection that the farmwife Mairy had
mentioned grown sons. This must be one. He had Mairy’s look about him.

“Uh,” she said, paddling her hands in the water, reaching
frantically for the cloth there. “I was…”

“Don’t worry. I’m not running to her to complain.” He walked
toward her. He was a slab of a man, handsome but fleshy, his fair hair shorn
close at the sides but loose on top in that Mendean way she found so ugly. His
neck was broader than his head, she noticed, and his skin weather-beaten. “I’m
an easygoing man. You’ll like me.”

She wasn’t sure about that last at all, although his body
language was all affability he was getting close enough to make her nervous.
She wasn’t sure what she should say, so she only smiled weakly.

“What’s your name?” He was at her shoulder now.

“Ella.”

“Ella. That’s nice. She said you were pretty. Mine’s
Duggan.” He stood with head tilted, watching as she started to draw the sheet
out of the rinse water, twisting it as it emerged. “That looks like hard work.”

“Uh. Yes.” What did he want? “Have the men all finished in
the field then?” she asked, hoping Severin would be back soon.

“Mmm. Mostly. Let me help you with that.”

Since he was not a servant, and she was hired help, she
assumed that she ought to be polite to him. So she didn’t object when he took
the heavy linen from her, even though he stood behind her to do it and reached
round her with both arms. It was his house, after all. She just pressed herself
against the stone of the sink, trying to take up as little space as possible.

He had big, muscular forearms. He wrung the water out of the
linen as if it were curd cheese. But her meek stance didn’t stop him brushing
up against her from behind—just a gentle bump at first, and then again, rubbing
against her rump and back. Eloise’s eyes flew wide open.

“I should go out and hang these up,” she stammered.

“Out?”
Bump
. Was it deliberate? It must be.

“If you’ll just…”

“Have you got your eye on one of the fieldmen then, Ella?”
he murmured, laying the twist of cloth aside on the wooden slab. His thighs
brushed her again.

“My husband,” she said with a leap of hope.

“Oh? Which one’s he then? I’ll make sure he gets extra
rations.”

“Sev.”

“He’s a lucky beggar,” said Duggan, and cupped her breast
gently.

Heat flashed through Eloise like a lightning stroke and dew
sprang out on her spine. She wanted to shriek—and yet she made no sound. The
air seemed to catch in her throat. She had never encountered a situation like
this. The only interest ever shown in her had been by scrupulously formal
noblemen whose thoughts were more on her inheritance than her person. She had
no idea how to react, and so she did not react at all. She froze, as a leveret
in its form between the furrows freezes when a dog presses in to sniff it.