Married to a Sea Lord (The Brides of Craerenth #1)

1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

T here was a time Julia did not shiver at the sound of those heavy footsteps. There was a time she dreamed of escape - planned it meticulously, in fact. A great tale of her own, a triumphant ending.

Except the tale had come and gone, and the ending was washed away by the waves. Now, here she remained - among the debris.

“Yes, father?” She raised her head from her embroidery. The light was still good in the solar, but it was quite clear that soon - too soon - the day is going to tilt into the darkness. The too-early winter darkness.

“I have good news for you,” Lord Milburn said briskly. He avoided looking at her directly, instead directing his gaze upon the tapestried walls, straight and sharp as a deadly arrow. ”You are strangely flushed”.

“I have been washing my face, and the water was cold.” The lie came easily and smoothly to her tongue. Well-practiced lies were the only way she could survive here – the only way she had been able to survive for the last three years.

“Were you? You have not been walking in the gardens unchaperoned, were you?”

“Of course not”. Julia’s smile was as demure as it was false.

He looked at the pitcher with water standing on the nearest table, walked over, touched the linen towel nearby. Julia found herself watching her father’s movements like a hawk – or a frightened wife, numb with apprehension of what was to come if her deception were discovered.

But she knew what she was dealing with. She had shored up her story beforehand, and her father stepped away from the table, clearly satisfied that the towels have indeed been wet.

Julia released a breath. Her pulse was beating wildly at her temple.

She knew that, in a few hours, she was to expect another headache.

“You wanted to tell me something…” She would have hated the way her voice sounded so halting, but she was used to the sound by now. Years could accustom one to many things.

Her father turned to her.

“We have made a match for you, and a great one indeed. I didn’t think it would be possible, given... everything.”

“Does he not mind my - history?” Julia blinked. That was a surprise.

“He only knows about it in the most general terms. A young damsel, brought up with too much indulgence, misbehaving. I dearly hope you would at least be clever enough to make sure it stays this way.”

She swallowed the rage. She smiled with an effort.

“Who is the man in question?”

“He is connected to the new dynasty. As I’ve said, we have been fortunate.”

“It is not...”

Once upon a time, she might have been considered an eligible enough bride - highborn and beautiful and well-dowered - to be chosen by a young monarch, especially one who rose to power merely a year before that conversation. His Majesty King Orwyn, after all, had once been a mere lord of middling lands, before his revolt catapulted him upon the throne.

“No,” her father cut this line of thought curtly. “When His Majesty is going to choose a bride, she would have to be without blemish. For you, his younger brother is more than a blessing already.”

He must have been glad that his daughter was finally going to be off his hands, respectably married, and giving him a link to the new royal family at that. He must have been. Still Lord Milburn clearly could not help but speak with bewilderment of the fact that anyone above an outlaw had decreed her good enough.

“Lord Athelstan Waite, then?” Julia paused. “But he had never seen me”.

She could not help but slip a note of reproach into her tone. After all, whose fault was it that she was now cooped up in the family seat, with nary a chance to visit the capital or the new court?

“He knows you come from a blue-blooded and suitably fertile family. He doesn’t want anything beyond that”.

“Anything in a wife beyond bringing him good connections and healthy children? What, nothing at all?”

“Few men do.” He lingered, as though wanting to say something else. Call her by her name, perhaps, as he did sometimes in the days before her disgrace.

But nothing happened, and Lord Milburn turned his face away from his daughter:

“The negotiations for your dowry have just been concluded. You are going to be wed in two months.”

***

“I have very little desire to take a wife, brother.” Athelstan Waite glared at his now-crowned sibling, wondering at what on earth, by the will of the Virgin, the Lady, or the Fate would make the other man at least stop his horse.

Who on earth delivered such news laughing at a gallop?

Orwyn Waite, apparently. The man who approached the whole world as though it were his glorious feasting-table.

“What on earth is stopping you? The pleasures of the flesh you cannot tear yourself away from?” Orwyn laughed, a bright and booming sound. “I have heard the reports, Athelstan. You live in the kind of grim chastity that would horrify some priests.”

“You concern yourself too much with my chastity. I would have thought one is usually perturbed by its lack. Just ask the selfsame priests.”

“They would tell me the married state is blissful and natural.”

“Then it’s a great enigma that you are in no hurry to assume it.”

“I will, with time. The interests of the state demand it, after all,” for a second, Orwyn did stay his mount, and such a wince of displeasure ran through his expression as though he had just eaten a lemon whole. “They demand the same from you. The Milburns are an ancient family. Let’s be honest, Athelstan - half the country is looking at us as parvenus. Minor lordlings from a bleak shore, propelled to the golden throne, no idea what to do with it. We must prove them wrong”.

“We will, if you rule wisely.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you swallowed one of those conduct books whole when you were a child. That would have explained a lot about why are like that. I hadn’t seen their Lady Julia myself, but I’ve seen the portrait - she is quite easy on the eye. I am not marrying you off to a deformed creature.”

Athelstan thought of the time of the campaign, the dire days of winter and the hunger gnawing on the innards, and the orchards now fed with buried bones. He did not succumb to despair then, as countless other men did - there was no room for despair in him, only for a grim, plodding sense of duty.

He had done that. If the interests of the realm and their family truly demanded it, he told himself, he could stomach wedding a woman he had never seen before. He had come through blood-soaked bandages; he won’t be defeated by a cloth-of-gold.

***

Julia moved as though she were a blind woman who had finally seen the light of day, but over the decades of darkness it had become harsh and unfamiliar to her. Not decades, of course; only three years. But, Triad, those years felt like decades for sure.

“Stop stumbling so,” her mother hissed in her ear. “People are watching. You can’t let them say that the future Lady Waite is a clumsy bumpkin.”

People would have said much worse things about the future Lady Waite, had they known the whole truth, Julia thought. They only did not because of her family’s gift for burying scandals, quashing them in the darkness amidst the confusing rumours of her ill health.

None of that would have made Lady Milburn in any way less determined to make sure her daughter was perfect to the stitch.

“Stop looking about like you’ve never seen a great garden before. Look ahead. Look dignified.”

Julia did not obey this one injunction. She might have seen great gardens before - an eternity ago - but not the palace garden. It was for the better - when fanatical tyrant still ruled here, the gardens were splattered with blood of traitors and highborn blasphemers.

Which, for the man who held the highest power in the land not so long ago, was one and the same.

It was all different now, of course. Freshly-planted flowers, some clearly transported from beyond the Glittering Sea, lined the alleys, innocent of gore. The sand upon the walks was white and pure and new. Everything looked like it was the shining spring of their existence.

Julia supposed it was, in a way. The dawn of a new era, to hear some people speak, when the golden king would sit on his golden throne and rule them all happily ever after.

She wished she could believe in such things as easily as she once could.

A sharp tug on her taffeta sleeve drew her back to reality.

Julia looked right, and saw him immediately. It was hard not to.

Athelstan Waite was a tall man, broad-shouldered and dark-haired. He looked as muscled as his famous brother, but there the resemblance ended - he lacked the golden presence, the effortless way Orwyn Waite (King Orwyn, Julia reminded herself) always towered over the crowd in any room.

Lord Waite, on the other hand, was a grim figure, black-clad against the white columns of the gazebo.

Julia felt a shiver run down her spine, her bare spine beneath all the taffeta and the yellow damask, and it had little to do with the winter day.

“My Lord Waite,” she stepped closer to the man she was to marry come spring. “I am... glad to make your acquaintance.”

Her mother’s fingers tightened painfully upon her arm at her forwardness, but for a moment, Julia did not care. Gold or black, in less than two months she was going to be out of her family’s clutches.

She preferred not to think of what would follow afterwards, of whether her husband’s clutches might not prove even worse. She lived in the moment, and to her, right now, nothing seemed worse.

Athelstan Waite, at least, did not look dismayed at her taking the liberty to address him first. He bowed briskly - not so much in a show of particular disrespect but as though he was a man to find that ceremonious gesture onerous.

“Lady Julia. It’s a pleasure for me, too. If a surprising one.”

“Surprising?”

Julia felt the pressure on her arm melting away, her mother stepping into the background. She was still being chaperoned, but at least she was granted a few minutes with her now-betrothed.

“My royal brother had sprung the engagement upon me as though I were a hare and he a skilled huntsman. Which is likely not the best metaphor, given that he is a skilled huntsman.”

“I would have never compared you to a hare, my lord.”

“I dearly hope so.”

“I’ve heard about your deeds during the rebellion,” Julia continued. It rankled, of course it rankled, that this man compared a marriage to her to a trap to her very face. But she had to make him change his mind - to like her, or at least tolerate her presence.

There was a time such charm was effortless to her. That time was past, the tools have grown red with rust, and now she had to tend them once more.

“What have you heard?”

“You have held the Redstone Pass with a force barely one-fifth of the one bearing down on you. The usurper had made you two offers of surrender on honorable terms, did he not?”

The renegade priest had ruled Craerenth for several decades, and there were people - Julia included, even Lord Waite included - who had never known another power upon the throne. But she had judged it better not to term the dead man anything else but a usurper in front of a commander who fought against him.

“So he did”.

“If I were commissioning a song about your deeds, I would have made it three. For neatness” sake.”

“No one is going to be commissioning a song about these deeds, Lady Julia.” He did not sound self-pitying, merely matter-of-factly, as though saying the snow was white. “Besides, the fight would have been much more impressive had I not been one of the eight survivors out of four hundred men.”

“But you did hold the pass until His Majesty saved the day.”

“So he did”, Lord Waite repeated - the same words he had just used when talking about the usurper’s offers of laying down his arms.

Julia was beginning to grow irritated. What was wrong with this man? It was not as though she were anything but comely, or as if her dowry was meagre. He might have not been overjoyed about the engagement, but could he not at least make a little effort to make her enjoy his company?

“I hope to hear more of your battle days, once we are wed,” she said and, as a last effort, put his hand upon his arm.

He did not smile at her touch. She wondered if he ever smiled at all, about anything.

“I think you would have more interesting occupations than listening to me talk about fields strewn with corpses or ship-decks slick with blood.”

As a matter of fact, Julia would have been very much interested to hear something about the ship-decks slick with blood - any kind of ship-decks, really.

But she was not bad at understanding hints. She nodded with all the demure grace she could master, and asked herself whether Lord Waite might not be right - if all the interesting occupations she could find as a wife would have little to do with her husband.