Chapter 26 A Bath
A Bath
She was stronger the next day, but still weak, her legs wobbling anytime she got out of bed. Still, after a few bedridden days, she was glad for the change.
“You seem better,” Niel suggested as they finished lunch, sitting at the table he’d carried into her small room just for the purpose. It had felt silly when she’d watched him do it, but she was glad now to be out of bed, and in her own chamber instead of Ditmar’s sitting room.
He sat across from her, his long, dark hair clean and spilling over his shoulders and onto his chest armor.
The cuirass, gone for a few days in illness, was back.
There was color in his square-jawed face again.
She didn’t dare wonder how wretched she must look.
The oily feeling of her hair was uncomfortable.
She was almost scared to meet his eyes. He was looking at her like she mattered. Not like she was a broken cast-off who hadn’t properly washed in a half a week.
Between his illness and hers, something had shifted between them. But how could she trust him, when he wouldn’t even reveal why he was tearing the country apart at its seams?
“I am better, I think,” she agreed quietly.
The room felt smaller than normal with Niel in it.
And she felt nervous in an unfamiliar way, shy, like she was worried how she looked and what he thought of her not out of fear but out of desire for him to find her favorable.
It was an odd, unfamiliar feeling, to be self-conscious without any fear of violence.
“Still. There’s no need to push yourself. Healing takes time.”
“Please don’t send me back to bed. I’m sick of it.”
He grinned. “I wouldn’t dare. What do you want instead, then?”
“Nothing you can provide,” she said, with a heavy sigh, thinking of a hot bath more longingly than she had during the whole siege. She wanted to wash the illness from her skin. There was no satisfaction in crouching before the fire with a rag and a wash-bucket.
“What’s that?” He pushed his empty plate away from himself.
“A real bath.” She almost moaned the words. “To be clean and warm again, for once.”
Niel raised an eyebrow and leaned back in his chair, kicking one long leg out to the side of the table.
“You think quite lowly of me if you think that’s out of my reach.” His eyes seemed to laugh at her.
“Oh, no. It’s far too much work.” She set her utensils tidily across her empty plate.
“You want it in there?” he asked, flicking his eyes to her bathing room as he stood and collected their plates.
“I’m not asking you to do it at all,” Ayla said, horrified he’d heard it as a request. “Really, you aren’t to bother your men with this.”
“I’m not,” Niel said. “I’ve been sitting still for days. I need the exercise.”
“Niel, please.”
“It’s in both our interests that I stay fighting fit. And it’s such an easy request.”
“Easy? Certainly not.”
She watched helplessly as he left the room.
Then he was back, hefting the table in his big hands and carrying it out like it weighed no more than a bedsheet.
She went to sit in the window. Pulling her cloak tight, Ayla pushed one of the shutters open and stared down at the snowy landscape.
The sun had burned hard while she recovered, and the recent snowfalls, according to Niel, were somewhat diminished.
From so high up, she couldn’t tell. Men moved along the castle walk.
Far below her one of the soldiers exercised her own Gemshorn in a trampled circle in the courtyard.
The gelding must have been going mad, with only the castle yard to stretch his legs in.
A siege couldn’t last forever. What would happen when it fell? No matter how fiercely he could fight, Niel couldn’t overcome an army of the size camped outside. She pulled her cloak tighter and tried to turn her mind to happier matters.
Niel came back again a number of minutes later, a bucket of water in one hand and a heavy iron cauldron in the other. He’d tied his hair back.
“Mercy,” Ayla said as he sidled through the door. She had expected him to give up. Had thought it was one of those generous offers once made but never fulfilled.
He barely spared a look at her as he hooked the cauldron onto the hearth crane and bent over to pour the bucket in.
“This will take a while,” he warned.
“Niel, please.” She couldn’t fathom how many trips up and down the stairs it would take for a single man to heat enough water to fill the tub.
“Do you not want it?” he asked, his eyes fixing on her.
She bit her lip, and considered lying, but decided against it.
“I do, but I never meant to ask it of you. You’ve wasted so much of your time on me already.”
He shook his head, and left without a word, taking the bucket with him.
It took a number of trips for him to fill the tub, heating the icy water until it boiled one bucket at a time, then dumping it in the tub, where it steamed and cooled.
At some point he removed his cloak, proof the exercise was warming him.
Sitting in the window she grew colder and colder, staring down at the small figures moving below.
She could even see Niel emerging to fill the bucket from the well, so far below her she had missed him at first.
She leaned her head against the frigid stone wall of the window seat. It was dangerous, the way her heart fluttered in her chest.
She barely knew Niel. It hadn’t been long.
They were both married, and he was younger than her, twenty to her twenty-four.
And he was violent; deadlier than any man she’d known.
A traitor, no matter how rightly, who in all odds would be dead before the end of the terrible war stretching out before them.
She didn’t want him. Couldn’t want him. It was just new, she told herself: being without Ditmar. And Niel was handsome and gentle with her. Mercy, in her illness he’d lifted her in his arms like she was delicate and weightless.
That didn’t mean she could get carried away with wanting him. There was no future there.
The door opened again, Niel striding back into the room with snow dusting his boots and another bucket of water for the cauldron. Her heart sped faster.
“Are you alright?” he asked, pausing to frown at her. She was staring at him.
“Oh. Yes,” Ayla said, and cleared her throat. She forced herself to look back out the window, feeling her cheeks burn despite the cold.
She could still see him out of the corner of her eye.
He went into her bathing room for a moment, then came out with one hand wet, as if he’d been checking the water.
Niel stopped in front of the hearth, facing the fire with his legs shoulder-width apart and his arms crossed in front of him.
He couldn’t see her staring from that angle.
She slowly turned her head to admire him: the breadth of his shoulders and the sharp outline of his jaw.
Agonizingly slowly, he unfolded his arms and rolled up each sleeve of his shirt, revealing heavily muscled, thick forearms. She gulped and looked away again as he grabbed the cauldron off the fire with an iron hook.
Muscles sharp as they strained, Niel carried the heavy cauldron out in front of him into the bathing room.
She heard splashing, and then he came back out, dangling the empty, steaming cauldron on its hook like it were made of cloth instead of heavy iron.
“If you like it hot, you’ll want to hurry,” Niel said. “It’ll cool fast in this weather.”
“Thank you,” Ayla whispered. He nodded, and left the room, closing the door behind him.
She buried her face into her hands for a moment, resisting the urge to scream with some emotion she could not name, hot and burning in her chest. She looked up and stared at the door a moment, desperate for him to come back but not even knowing what she would say if he did.
Her feet were cold on the stone as she padded to the bathing room.
He’d pulled a stool beside the tub and placed two folded towels from the shelf there.
Ayla shrugged off her cloak, then fumbled at her dress with cold, stiff fingers.
As she slid from the clothes the frigid air pebbled her skin.
Teeth chattering, Ayla stepped carefully into the water.
The bath was hot, almost burning. She sank into it like an embrace, until even her chin was covered, and felt her body thaw. Ayla couldn’t help the embarrassing whimper from escaping her lips. The urge to cry from gratitude nearly overwhelmed her.
She had never washed so thoroughly, soaping every inch of her skin and her hair not once, but twice, until the water was filmy with soap scum.
Her muscles relaxed and her skin burned as she scrubbed away the sweat from her illness.
The water was almost cool by the time she was done.
She was reluctant to stand, a shock of cold on her skin that nearly had her sinking back into the lukewarm tub.
Instead she quickly dragged the towels around herself and ran on wobbling, exhausted legs to the hearth in her bedchamber.
Shivering, Ayla crouched in front of the fire and let it steam the water from her fresh-scrubbed skin, rubbing her hair dry.
There was a breeze coming from the open window, nipping her damp skin.
She dried as best as she could with the towel, then ran, shivering, on tiptoes to fetch a heavy robe and furred pinson slippers.
Pulling the fabric tight around her skin, Ayla went to the window and leaned across the seat to pull the shutter closed.
She’d spent enough time watching Niel fetch water that she recognized him instantly, even as far below her as he was in the snowy yard. The naked sword in his hand gleamed as it caught the sun.
The captive Ashbrin knight knelt one-legged in the snow in front of Niel, his hands bound behind his back.
Ayla stumbled back, drawing in a sharp breath. She knew what Niel would do with that sword, and just how little effort it would take him to execute the man. He’d kept the codes of war for Ayla and ransomed her. From the look of things, the Enarian knight would face a different fate.
There wasn’t time to dress properly, or dry her hair. She wasn’t even sure she had time to get from her room down to the large castle yard. With the robe flapping open around her bare legs she charged down the winding stair, one arm against the railing to keep herself upright.