Whorespawn (Seven Brides for Seven Bastards #2 ) (2 page)

Chapter Two

"Where have you been, Whorespawn?" her husband demanded, cuffing her around the ear. "Are we supposed to starve here waiting for you to dawdle back and serve our supper?"

The potter's one-room cottage vibrated with his bellowing anger. The stifling heat that day had done naught, it seemed, to help his naturally sour temper.

"And what's this?" He grabbed her thick hair and twisted it around his fist. "Running about with your head uncovered. A wife covers her hair at all times." He yanked hard and the pain sliced through her skull, but Aelfa kept her lips tight. "Do you never listen to me, bitch? Mayhap there's something blocking your ears that needs knocking out?"

The second blow of his fat hand knocked her across the cottage. He followed and she dodged a third strike only by ducking and reaching for her apron.

Usually by the end of the day Aelfa was tired, her mind dull, her manner listless. If the potter found some reason to hit her—and he never needed much excuse—she would fall like a straw doll. Tonight however she was alive for once. Spying on that dangerously handsome stranger and then outracing him across a meadow, getting away by a hair's breadth, was like being revived by a splash of cold water.

Her pulse was racing and her legs ached from running, but it was a good ache. Inside she was so giddy that she barely felt her husband's presence, let alone his slaps. Fearing he would see the change in her, she bowed her head quickly and got on with the supper. Fortunately she could blame the heat for her flushed cheeks and the perspiration stains marking her gown.

When her lazy eldest stepson stuck out his foot and she tripped, scalding her knuckles on the cook pot, it didn't even matter. She had the vision of that naked beast to entertain her. Along with musings of what might have happened had he caught her. Under her gown, tiny goose bumps lifted across her skin as if the stranger was there and had touched her.

The potter's complaints bubbled away, fading in and out of her awareness. "If I find you outside the walls again—alone—I'll beat you so hard you'll wish you were dead. Ungrateful wench." He burped loudly into his bowl as he watched her move about the cottage. "I rue the day I ever took you in out of pity."

Pity? She wanted to laugh. He'd taken her in because he wanted free labor and that was all there was to it. She was a girl of thirteen when he married her. His wife had just died, leaving him with three sons to take care of, cook for and clothe. And Aelfa was about to be hanged in the town square for stealing food. No one cared that she stole for her sick mother.  Thus the potter performed a "charitable" deed by making her his wife and saving her from the gallows.

"It was the red hair that lured me in," he added. "I should have known better and heeded my mother's warnings. She told me the thieving daughter of a whore would never come to any good."

When supper was over and his belly full again, he gave a series of belches, then leaned back on his narrow pallet, parted his legs, fidgeted under his tunic and ordered his sons out of the house. He beckoned to Aelfa.

"Come on then, Whorespawn," he growled, his small, spiteful, blood-shot eyes taking on that heated, distant gleam that made her stomach writhe with disgust. "Time to fulfill your wifely duties. Make haste!"

She got down on her knees, closed her eyes tight and leaned in to take him in her mouth. Quickly she flushed all thoughts of him from her mind and focused instead on the man she'd seen in the forest.

It was over in less than two minutes. "Christ, wench, you're in a hurry tonight, eh? You must be acquiring a taste for me after all."

Grabbing her hair again with one hand to keep her still, he jerked his penis out of her mouth, cursed, and sprayed her face with his seed, grunting wildly. With his fist clenched hard in her hair she could not get away from it, but again she kept her eyes shut and thought of her hunter in the forest as that thick, hot, sticky stream spattered across her lashes, her cheeks and her clenched lips.

He laughed, pulled her hair again, and as she stood to move away he kicked her feet out from under her so that she tumbled to her hands and knees on the hard earthen floor.

"Whorespawn! For all your crying and protesting, I always knew you'd soon learn to enjoy fornication. Just like your slut mother and her mother before that. 'Tis in your blood and the only thing you're good for, you filthy little wretch."

She was struggling to her feet when he shoved her down again, lifting her gown, he pinned her and she felt his flaccid cock flapping against her buttocks. He must be drunk, she realized, for apparently he thought he could fuck her even though he'd just spilled all over her face. His foul breath was suffocating as his great, sweaty bulk arched over her body and he tried thrusting his spent prick into her from behind.

"Just like a stray bitch in heat, you'll take it. Come here!"

When he couldn't mount her, the potter's rage erupted and then she could only shelter her head with her arms as the blows rained down upon her. He hit her until he'd exhausted himself and she was dizzy.

The potter's day only so briefly interrupted, he went out to clean his wheel in the back yard—a responsibility he never left in her unworthy hands—and Aelfa eventually found the strength to stand. She was sore all over, but at least the beating was done for today. She had begun to regard it as just another chore she must complete.

Her husband would be tired now after all that exertion and he would not want her again tonight since he'd already spent.

Aelfa hurried outside to wash her face in the rain barrel and there found the potter's eldest son who was the same age as she. His eyes, so like those of his father's, raked over her body with calm insouciance.

"One day you'll do that for me," he said, grinning evilly.

"By all means hold your breath while you wait."

"You'll have to be polite to me, or I'll tell father that you've been in the forest again. Where he told you never to go. And one day, when he's dead and gone, I could turn you out of this house if you don't do as I say."

One day, when he's dead and gone.
Oh, how she longed for that day. Knowing her luck the potter would live forever.

"Go away, Edwyn. I have things to do, even if you don't. We can't all sit about idle on a fat, pimpled, hairy arse."

He grabbed her arm, pinching the flesh through her worn sleeve. "You won’t be laughing at me when I'm through with you, Aelfa. I could tell father about the faces you pull behind his back and the way you flirt with the blacksmith."

"Edwyn, you're a foolish boy and a liar."

"And I know what
you
are." He thrust her back against the wall and leaned over her, his hot breath stinking of sour ale and rotting teeth. "I've been watching you. I saw you today."

She thought he referred to her latest trip into the forest and her sinful coveting of another man's body. It was in the forefront of her mind and so the first thing she thought of when he accused her. But he took her chin in his grimy hand and forced her to look at the wall of the cottage, where he'd chiseled a small peephole. He showed it off to her as if he expected praise for his handiwork. "I saw what you did. I like watching."

His breathing had quickened and now he pressed his disgusting body to hers, rubbing up against her.

Aelfa spat in his face and watched his eyes widen as it dripped from his fleshy nose. "I shall put a curse on you, Edwyn."

But at eighteen he was too old to be frightened by curses. He struck her cheek so hard that she bit her tongue. Apparently he'd learned that from watching his father too. Her eyes watered, but she kept her gaze on his round, charmless face and said very carefully, "What is the matter, Edwyn? Are you jealous? Is that why you watch through this wall like a pathetic little worm? Can't you get your own woman?"

He sneered, wiping her spittle from his face. "Why should I bother when we've already got a whore in the house? Like mother like daughter."

With one quick, sharp motion she brought her knee up between his spread legs and then turned her head away as another cloud of rancid air gushed out of him in a startled squawk. He fell away from her, hands to his groin, his face crimson.

"Let that be a lesson to you, Edwyn," she said primly, straightening her gown. "Let us have no more of this nonsense. I suggest you compose yourself before your father sees you in this shameful state. Tsk, tsk, foolish boy. Whatever next?" Aelfa always took pleasure in reminding him that she was officially his step-mother, despite the fact that they were the same age. She knew it raised his hackles.

"Bitch!"

Head high she left him there and went back inside. For a while she stood rubbing her hot cheek and contemplating the bowl of stew she had not yet touched.

No, she had no appetite this evening.

Her knuckles where she'd previously burned them on the pot were throbbing now.  A delayed reaction.

Through the back door she could see the potter still cleaning clay off his wheel. He took greater care of that equipment than he did of anything else. It always amazed her that those thick fingers, which treated her so callously, could be capable of any form of skilled artistry. Perhaps if he had ever touched her with the same care as he did his pottery she might have had a happier life. But from the beginning she knew that would not be the case.

As he'd said, it was her bright hair that drew his attention from across the market square on that grim, grey winter's day, five years ago. If not for that she would have been dead.

Couldn't have been much worse in hell than it was here, she thought with a sigh.

"I'll take the whorespawn
," he'd called out from the midst of the crowd as a noose was put around her neck. "
I'll beat the sin out of her and make her remorseful."

And so he did. Or he tried.

The daylight was almost faded now, the evening closing in, suffocating and relentless. Like the life to which she was sentenced.

Suddenly a high-pitched shriek broke through her daydreams. "Whorespawn! Whorespawn! Dirty little whorespawn!"

Her shoulders stiffened.

She knew the children of the town mostly teased just for the thrill of being chased. They barely knew what the name meant although they'd heard the adults calling her by it and knew it made her among the lowest of the low. Usually she closed her ears to the chanting. Today, however, that name cut through her nerves like a scythe. After seeing that beautiful man in the forest her pitiful situation seemed even worse than usual. Subjected to her disgusting husband's cock and then his foul son's crude fumbling just rubbed it all in. The misery. The nothingness of her existence.

Aelfa's fury built quickly and ferociously until it was a swirling pit of fire.

"Whorespawn," the children sang, "Whorespawn!"

She picked up her bowl of stew and ran out through the front of the cottage. The taunting children scrambled, squawking like hens.

"Look out, look out!"

Aelfa swung her arm and the bowl.

* * * *

Sebastien's frustrated chase had roused his temper to boiling point and now, although anyone looking at his face might think him calm, untroubled, the disappointment still simmered through his veins. He was a dog that had been promised a juicy bone, only to be cheated out of it. For a man unfamiliar with defeat, letting that redheaded fox get away had caused a bitter pinch to his pride. Only his closest comrades and his brothers would know that when he was quiet like this, his face composed and stern, it was far more dangerous than the initial outburst of his rage. It was the eye of the storm.

With his clothing hastily replaced, he rode through the main gates of the town and looked around. She had run this way, therefore she must be somewhere within these walls. He'd find her. He must, for lust left unrequited could do desperate things to a man's concentration.

He spat into the dirt and moved his horse forward slowly with the lazy tap of his heels. They passed a fishmonger's stall, his horse skipping sideways to avoid a pile of fish skulls, guts and bones discarded nearby.

And then he heard a cluster of childish voices yelling and screaming. Sebastien twisted around in his saddle, irritably swatting at flies with one hand, only to see a wooden bowl hurtling through the air directly toward his head. With a warrior's well-honed instincts he caught the projectile inches from his nose.