Chapter 13 Rights of a Hostage #2
It was good bread. He took another bite.
She turned her wide gray eyes on him, both eyebrows delicately arched. Unconsciously, he straightened his shoulders.
“It’s black out the window.”
He glanced the way she’d been looking, chewed, swallowed, and shrugged.
“Can’t see the stars anymore,” Niel said. The lady tilted her head quizzically, but didn’t say anything. “Sun’ll be up soon,” he added. “That makes it morning. Do you always sleep in?”
“I wake at an acceptable time,” she said reproachfully. “At sunrise.” She yawned, as if to prove her point.
He stared at her as she covered her soft, parted lips delicately with one hand, eyes fluttering slowly back open.
Niel knew he was not a desirable companion, no matter the hour.
He was his father’s son: a tool honed to violence, and good at nothing else.
So what, if the lady was safe in his keeping.
He’d taken over her castle and dragged her from her bed before dawn to test for poison.
It didn’t mean he had to keep her there, after she’d done her job.
“Go,” he told her roughly.
“What?” she turned to look at him, suddenly far more alert than she had been before.
“If you aren’t hungry yet, go. You’ve already done what I needed you to.”
“Oh.” She looked down at her food. “If I can’t get food from the kitchens later, though…”
“Take it with you. For when you hunger.”
If his father were there, he’d have punished Niel for being softhearted.
But Niel didn’t miss the lady’s blush. How could he, when his whole body seemed to react to her slightest movements?
She got up, and curtseyed with her bowl in one hand and the mug in the other.
He waited until she’d left to sigh, and finished the meal with nothing but the fire to stare at.
The sky did brighten, as it did every morning.
He took stock of the Lord of Blackfell’s wardrobe again, hoping some of the clothes might have decided to grow since yesterday, but came to the same conclusion as before.
Niel had lost some fat during the months of war and marching through the mountains, leaving his muscles starkly visible instead of padded.
But he was still a large man. He could fit the socks, and the cloaks, but he was too tall and brawny to make use of the rest, which meant he was stuck with the same clothes he’d carried to the war at Ironcliff and back home from it.
He was going to be a frequent guest at the castle’s laundry. At least he’d gotten stuck here at winter, not summer, when clothes had to be changed more often.
He stripped down to his braies and a shirt to exercise, not wanting to get sweat on anything he could avoid, and shivered as he put his body through its paces, running the castle wall in loops until the sky was blue, then returning inside to hone his skill with fist and sword and knife.
The sun was dominant in the sky by the time he dressed again and walked a loop of the castle's interior, keeping an eye on his soldiers and the servants. On a quick step back out on the wall he spotted Lady Blackfell making her way across the yard to the stables. He stared for a long moment after she’d vanished inside the wooden structure, and wondered if she was desperate enough to try an escape.
When she emerged with a dapple gray horse on a long exercise line and a lunging whip, he decided he was thinking about his hostage too much and made his way back inside.
Still. She liked to exercise her horse herself. That surprised him, somehow.
Bode, a soldier with perpetually rashy skin, an impish smile, and a missing finger was making an inventory of the castle’s supplies.
It was a task Niel had hoped would be done by now, but apparently required a half-dozen soldiers, endless re-counting, and quibbling over what had been included already and what had been left out, as well as what would be good to eat and what would taste like punishment.
He was ready for another meal at mid morning. I eat at an acceptable time, he could picture Lady Blackfell saying. At noon. He couldn’t bring himself to drag her back into his presence just for a mid-morning snack. What kind of soldier couldn’t ignore his hunger for a few hours?
“Lord Niel,” Kerr called from behind him. Niel turned in the hall he was walking down, not ten paces from the kitchen, and frowned at the grim look on Kerr’s face.
“Don’t tell me she got out,” Niel said, thinking again of Lady Blackfell and her horse in the yard.
“They’re here,” Kerr said, without asking Niel what he meant. “The Queen’s army.”
“How many?” Niel’s appetite vanished.
“Can’t say yet. A lot, looks like.”
“Fuck,” Niel muttered, and made his way back out to the wall to look.
He’d known, of course, that it was inevitable.
He’d felt his brother Corin breathing down his neck all along the flight from Ironcliff through the mountainside.
It was a miracle the Queen's army hadn’t arrived prior to this.
But the moment Niel had decided to stay in the castle and keep the lady safe from her husband was the moment he’d known the army catching up wasn’t just a likelihood. It was a fucking guarantee.
The wind blew strong along the wall, needles of ice that prickled his skin and cut through his clothes like they were nothing.
The good fur cloak was back in his room, where it did him no help.
The town lay beneath him, the valley stretching around them.
To the south, past a wide field, rose the slope of a hill covered in black Kettalist firs, their boughs glazed with snow.
A column of soldiers stretched between the town and the hill, ten wide and hundreds deep. His throat tightened as he watched tents unfurl and banners rise at the base of the town. Niel rested one fist on the cold stone wall and stared as more and more and more men poured over the lip of the hill.
“That’s that, then,” Kerr said behind him. “No leaving until your father comes. If he comes.”
“He’ll come,” Niel said grimly. “He’s not going to let his only remaining heir die.”
The Duke of Mount Eyron needed Niel. There was no treaty with the Aronthians without an Eyron to offer up in marriage.
The Aronthians needed Eyron blood. It was Arevon blood, really; the old dynasty, but the Mount Eyrons were direct descendants.
The ancient treaty that kept the immortal Hulder restrained, and a human monarch in charge of the country of Enar, depended on it, because the treaty was between the Hulder and the Arevon bloodline.
Niel's family had held the throne since the founding of the country.
When Aronthia eventually conquered Enar, Niel or a relative would need to remain on the throne, even if only as a figurehead.
Otherwise, the Hulder would be free to reclaim their lands.
It didn’t mean the old dragon wouldn’t let Niel sweat, though, for getting into this mess. His father would be blistering mad when the messenger bird arrived in Eyron with the news that Niel had holed up in Blackfell.
“Let’s just hope he gets here before the provisions run out,” Niel added.
“Little late to worry about that, my lord,” Kerr said conversationally. “At least you can leave, either way.”
“Come now,” Niel said. “You must think lowly of me, if you think I'd flee to safety and abandon my command.”
With the Unicorn cloak he'd won at a tournament last year, he could move unseen when he needed to. But invisibility was a coward's resort, and he wouldn’t use it to abandon his men. He wouldn’t even use it to sneak into the town and cut Lord Blackfell’s throat, as much as he wanted to.
Niel was a warrior, and with the necessary exception of tricking his way into Blackfell, he preferred to crush his opponents head-on, with weapons in their hands.
A flag was quickly being raised in the town below, the royal insignia. A blank flag with a pair of crossed black spears rose below it.
“Well, if it's that or death… that’s the armies’ flag,” Kerr said, drawing beside Niel and squinting at the flag amidst the sea of rising tents. “No commanding knight?”
“Worse,” Niel growled. “A commanding knight without a flag of his own.”
As if Niel’s words had summoned him, a figure emerged from the base of the town. Niel’s eye was instantly drawn to the knight below him. The man was a hulking armored giant, on a massive black war horse.
Even with his features covered, Niel recognized his brother instantly.
He folded his arms and rested them on the castle rampart, staring grimly down below. Corin lifted his helmet’s visor with two fingers, tilted his head back, and peered up at where Niel leaned over the wall.
“Really, Niel?” Corin’s voice boomed up at him. “Blackfell?”
Niel didn’t answer. He could see Kerr shifting out of the corner of his eye, the captain eyeing the number of men that now blocked their escape from the castle.
“Come out,” Corin called. “The Queen will grant you mercy for a surrender. If—”
“You and Aunt Mirabel can fuck right off,” Niel called.
“Queen Mirabel,” Corin called back, his voice venomous. “Show some damned respect before I cut out your tongue.”
“She’s not my queen,” Niel called. “Hope you brought a ladder, if you want my tongue.”
“Don’t make me drag you out of there,” Corin threatened. “I'll only warn you once. Come out now, Niel. Or else.”
Niel’s eyes narrowed. He straightened, unfolding his elbows, and gripped the edge of the wall with his bare hands. The stone was achingly cold.
“Your head ought to make a nice battering ram. It’s hard enough,” he shouted.
“You think you can outlast me?” Corin yelled up.
His brother’s dark eyes were scanning the castle, taking strategic stock of the target he now held under siege.
The column of men kept coming. Mercy. There were over a thousand already, and more still out of sight.
It was impossible not to feel his gut tighten.
Blackfell was well built for a siege, but with numbers like that against the fifty-odd men he had left…
“Know I can,” Niel said. “Not hard to outlast a traitor. Moment the wind shifts you trip over yourself to trade sides.”
The black warhorse shifted anxiously, stomping and sidling; Niel knew his brother had gone stiff with fury.
He couldn’t help the smirk that tugged up one side of his mouth. It was worth the cold to get under his brother’s skin.
“Traitor?” Corin called at last. “You, of all people—”
“Remind me, Corin Arevon,” Niel called, using the dynastic name his brother had adopted now that he was no longer of Mount Eyron. “Who was it who renounced his own damned fucking brother over a girl?”
He wasn’t going to let Corin have the last word. He turned and walked back into the castle, letting the wind grab and slam the heavy wooden door behind him. It swung open again a minute later and slammed shut a second time, Kerr’s footsteps hard on the stone.
“My lord, the army…”
“He can sit out there and freeze his balls off as long as he’d like,” Niel growled. “Add another sentry to each watch. And spread the word. We’re under siege.”
Inevitable, Niel reminded himself as the image of a thousand men spilling over the hill echoed in his mind. He’d known the moment he saw her bruises that it would lead to this.