Chapter Nine #3
Rowan smiled broadly in the darkness. “Jura, no woman alive is prettier than you, and even smelling as you do, you are sweeter than a hundred princesses together.”
Jura’s eyes widened. She didn’t know why she had felt so angry at Rowan’s compliments to the frightened maid or why she had sniped at him like a simpering girl, but it was amazing how pleasant his words were to her.
Daire praised her when twelve arrows in a row hit their mark, and Geralt and Thal never complimented her at all.
Of course men had said she was pretty but not in this lavish, gentle way.
If they had, she would have held her knife to their throats, but tonight she rather liked this man’s words. In fact she wished he would say more.
“You…you handled yourself well tonight,” she said tentatively. “And you got yourself into Vatell territory without being recognized. It was good that you darkened your hair.”
“You thought I wouldn’t?” he snapped. Just like a woman, he thought, you give her a compliment and she insults you. He turned on his side away from her. He’d had about enough of her insinuations that he was incompetent. The woman was emasculating! “Tomorrow you go back to the Irials.”
Jura grimaced and didn’t reply. This Englishman was very strange.
But the next morning they did not have time to argue. Jura woke fully alert, her senses knowing that something was wrong. Slowly, she reached out her hand to Rowan, asleep a few feet from her. He opened his eyes the instant she touched him and read the warning in her eyes.
To her consternation, Rowan leaped to his feet and began to shout. “Damn you, woman, always after me, a man can’t even sleep.”
Jura saw that he grabbed his sword as he stood. She also took hers and aimed it for his throat. “After you?” she yelled up at him. “You are a poor thing for a woman to want. I have had lovers twice your age who were better than you.”
“I shall show you who is the better lover,” he said, and leaped on top of her. “Roll to my right,” he said into her ear. “Hide in the forest and wait. There are two of them.”
When Rowan moved, Jura did indeed roll to his right, but she came up to her feet, her sword held firmly with both hands, and she positioned herself at his back as she had been trained.
Two men, thieves by the look of them, came toward Rowan, knives drawn. They looked hungry and ready to commit any crime to take what little Rowan and Jura carried with them.
“I am your king,” Rowan said, “put down your weapons. I will share what I have with you.”
“You’ll not give my horse away,” Jura said, still behind him, watching the forest for more thieves.
“King?” a thief said, and snorted laughter before he attacked Rowan.
Jura listened to the sounds of battle behind her and kept her head turned a bit so she could see when or if Rowan needed help, but he was a good fighter, very good. And she was surprised to see that he fought like a Lanconian.
One of the thieves fell and Rowan went after the other one while Jura still stayed close to his back. She had been trained well and they worked together as if they were dancing. When he moved, she moved.
She heard the second thief scream in pain, but she didn’t turn her head because, just as she thought might happen, a third thief came tearing from the forest, a sword raised above his head and coming straight at her. She parried his blow and steel rang against steel.
“Run, Jura, run,” Rowan commanded, and she cursed him for trying to confuse her. She was trained to obey orders but this was a bad order.
She fought the man with all her strength, not even hesitating when his steel cut into her upper arm.
The man was frenzied as his sword raised and lowered, and Jura took each blow on her own sword.
Then she counterattacked and began to push him back toward the forest with angry, aggressive blows of her own.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Rowan, finished now with his own fight, come toward her, but he stopped and watched instead.
Jura pinned the thief against a tree, ready to ram her sword into his belly.
“No!” Rowan said. “He is Lanconian.”
“He is Vatell,” Jura said, but she hesitated and didn’t kill the man.
“Here,” Rowan said, holding out a heavy meat-filled pie to the man. “Take this and take your friends. They are only wounded. Remember that your lives are a gift from the king. The king of all the Lanconians.”
The thief looked at Rowan the same way Jura felt, as if Rowan were crazy, and it was good to put miles between them. He snatched the pie and ran into the forest while the other two men, groaning, limped off.
The sun was beginning to rise now and Rowan looked at Jura’s bleeding arm then led her to sit on a nearby rock while he brought linen and fresh water from his saddle carriers. Tenderly, he began to wash and bandage her arm. It was a shallow cut.
“I have not seen that before,” he said softly. “I mean the way you stayed by my back. Feilan said nothing to me of women who guard a man’s back.”
“Perhaps he took it for granted. What does an Englishwoman do? If you had been here with your sister, what would she have done?”
“Lora would have hidden in the forest as I told you to do.”
“And she would have been taken by the third thief or he would have killed you when he attacked your back. Together, we made an impenetrable column with eyes all around.”
Rowan was frowning. “I see that but I do not like it. The men should be trained to guard each other’s backs.”
“Men are the stronger fighters, and quite often a woman only guards, she does not fight. It would be wrong to waste a strong arm merely to protect.”
Rowan finished the bandaging but he was still frowning. “I thank you for your protection this time but next time you must—”
Jura kissed him. Her action surprised both of them.
He drew back from her, his eyes dark with longing. “Jura,” he whispered.
She knew what he was going to ask: she was to beg him. Angrily, she stood and went to her horse. “If we are to reach Brita, then we must ride.” Every bit of her fury told in her voice and her manner as she mounted her horse and rode away, not looking to see if he followed.
They were on higher ground now, always traveling up into the mountains that formed the northern borders of the Lanconian territory and the air was cooler and thinner. They were also off the path Cilean had told Jura about and it was taking longer to reach Brita’s fortified city.
Rowan rode beside her but she did not look at him.
“What does this Brita look like?” he asked.
Jura kept her chin up. “I have never seen her and I have never asked anyone about her appearance. She is Daire’s mother, so she is old; she has led armies against Thal and the Fearens.
When I was a child, I heard she even attacked the Zernas, so she must be scarred from battles.
I do not imagine she is a beauty if that is what you are seeking. ”
“Jura, can’t we—” Rowan began, but Jura urged her horse away from him.
She could forgive much of his strangeness because he was an Englishman, but she could not forgive his flirting with a maid one minute and rejecting her a few hours later.
At midday they stopped to eat by a stream and Jura looked at her reflection in a still pool of water.
She had never been concerned with her looks before, only with her prowess with a weapon, but she had seen the looks in men’s eyes and knew they found her desirable.
So why did her English husband reject her?
Was it because she wasn’t blonde as his sister was? Did he only like pale-skinned women?
At dusk they camped. They did not light a fire because now they were very close to Brita’s walled city.
“It would be too much to hope that you remain behind tomorrow,” Rowan said, his eyebrows raised in question as he looked at her in the fading light.
“Someone must watch your back,” she answered.
“I thought we would ride into the city tomorrow: $$$ believe we can get in without question. It is good you speak our language. We will identify Brita and the first time she rides out, we will take her. There is a peasant’s hut a day’s ride back; we can keep her there while you talk to her.
We will have to watch that the peasants do not betray us, though. ”
“Is that all the decisions you have made?” Rowan asked in a low voice. “You have not also perhaps decided that I am not allowed to participate? Perhaps I would be too much in your way.”
“You are the one who tells me to stay in the forest,” she said, not understanding what she had done now to make him angry. “Do you have another plan that is better than mine?”
“No,” he said through clenched teeth, “it is the same plan I had except that I was to ride into the city alone but—” He stopped.
“What is the difference whether I say the plan or you do? I think it is good that we agree on something.”
Rowan kicked at a rock with his toe. “You are a woman,” he muttered.
“Not enough of one,” she said under her breath, and turned away. Winning a man seemed to be easy. All she had to do was outwrestle, outshoot, outrun, outjump fifty or so other women, but what in heaven’s name did it take to please a man after one won him?
They slept a few feet apart, and during the night Rowan’s restless tossing woke her.
Instinctively, she moved beside him, and in his sleep he reached out for her and pulled her to him, clutching her to him tightly He felt so good to her, so strong, so warm, so right. She snuggled close to him and slept.
In the morning she woke before he did and quickly rolled away from him. She couldn’t bear another of his “beg me” talks.