Chapter 15 A YesNo Sort of Question
A Yes or No Sort of Question
Dinner started silently. She came into Ditmar’s room and curtseyed to the knight who’d taken it over.
Niel was already seated at the table beside the fire.
He gestured for her to sit, his movements sharp and his mouth pressed tight.
Without him needing to request it, she ate a quick bite of everything, and took a sip of wine.
Ayla kept her eyes down on her plate, not daring to meet his.
She could feel him staring, scrutinizing her every move.
She finally looked up after he started eating, when the knight’s eyes were no longer boring into her.
“I heard you were offered clemency for surrender,” she heard herself saying. “Will you truly not take it?”
He gave her a sharp look, his dark eyes glinting in the firelight.
“No.” He ripped his bread in two and kept eating.
She couldn’t help that her stomach unknotted at the word. She knew that was traitorous, when she ought to be plotting for his downfall. But the longer he resisted, the longer she was away from Ditmar.
“They have a lot of soldiers,” she said.
Tension practically pooled off the man. Ayla should have known better than to poke at him. She’d spent the last three years learning how to shrink herself down and keep her lips shut, but common sense seemed to have left with her husband.
“Yes.”
“And you, ah…” she trailed off, not sure how to diplomatically phrase it.
“Don’t?” Niel asked, his eyes sweeping up again to catch on hers. Ayla nodded mutely. “It takes fewer men to hold a castle than it does to take one,” Niel said.
There was a moment of silence as they both ate.
She found herself trying to study him without staring outright.
She did not understand the man across the table from her.
Was he not frightened of the army camped outside?
There were thousands of them. She was frightened of them, even though they were ostensibly on her side.
“It didn’t take you many men,” she noted. There had only been three of them, at first, in the castle.
Niel snorted. “That was different. Your husband was an idiot who let a wolf into the sheepfold.”
“And when supplies run out?” she asked quietly.
He stopped eating, set down his silverware, and braced his elbows on the table. She stared at him wide-eyed as Niel carefully studied her. The knight’s jaw looked tense.
“We have enough to last until reinforcements can arrive. Why? Are you hoping I’ll be overrun?” His voice sharpened with each word, a knife on a whetstone, and his eyes were like flint.
Her body braced for what happened when men got angry.
Ayla’s eyes jerked down as she bowed her head submissively.
He was furious. Not frightened of the army outside, but angry it had come.
Her next breath was shaky. She forced the muscles of her shoulders to relax; forced herself to stay seated instead of fleeing.
This was the part, she was certain, when Niel turned violent. It had been bound to happen eventually.
Fool, she thought. You’ve stayed quiet through hundreds of dinners with a man far less terrifying, but now you couldn’t keep your lips shut?
“I did not mean to anger you,” Ayla whispered. “Apologies, lordship.”
“You are not the one who made me angry.” His hands were the only part of him she could see with her eyes downcast. They rested on the blue tablecloth, and she watched as he curled them into fists, his knuckles battered and the backs of his hands covered in the lines of old scars.
“I made the choice to stay. But I find myself wondering,” Niel continued, his voice turning halting, “why you hadn’t just run away.
Is there some part of you that loves him?
That would rather be… with him, than here, with… ”
Ayla frowned and relaxed her shoulders, slightly. She didn't know how, or why, the conversation had turned from the army to her feelings for Ditmar. She could not fathom why the knight would want to listen to her prattle on about emotions.
“No,” Ayla admitted quietly. “We were married. I had no choice.”
“That’s a lie. Of course you had a choice. And you stayed. Was it the riches you loved, then?”
Startled, she lifted her wide eyes to stare at him. Even through her terror Ayla felt the barbs of those words sink into her skin. But the knight only looked sullen, his expression drawn.
“I could not care less for the finery. I never wished for this,” Ayla told him. Her voice was barely louder than a whisper, but the room was silent apart from the fire, and she knew he heard her.
“He turned mean after, I suppose,” Niel said. His voice was still cold, hard, and low, his mouth downturned at the edges.
“I knew him all of a day,” Ayla informed him.
She didn’t know why it mattered, what this brutish traitor thought.
But the idea of anyone thinking she loved Ditmar, even in passing, made her sick.
If Lord Niel wanted to hurt her, he was going to hurt her, with or without the truth.
She could at least defend her side of it.
“He saw me, he demanded me, and my father had no choice but to deliver.”
Niel leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and stared at her. His brow was furrowed.
“It was an arrangement?” he asked flatly.
“In a sense.” Arrangement seemed to imply the passage of time.
“My father is a merchant. His rival supplied Blackfell, and father wanted the position.
He mostly sold goods, but Ditmar told father he wanted to own a mine, so father made a deal between Ditmar and a neighboring lord who'd found silver ore in a cavern on his lands. Except after the ink on the contract dried there was a cave-in. Two of Ditmar's men died, and you couldn't get into the cavern anymore.” The words spilled out of her; she couldn’t stop them. It wasn’t as though he needed to know, but oddly, she wanted him to.
Niel’s lips parted slightly.
“There was no mining to be had,” he murmured grimly.
“No silver,” she agreed. “But Ditmar had paid expecting he'd get years of profit from it, so he came to Carinth to ruin my father, and he saw me, and…
well. It wasn't father's fault, but Ditmar said he'd forgive the debt if I returned with him.
It seemed a simple solution at the time, and father wanted his favor.
Not that it mattered. Ditmar still hasn't given father any trade.”
Niel stared at her for another long moment, then nodded stiffly. A scowl flickered over his lips.
“I should not be surprised,” Niel said. “Enar. Pretty on top, rotten beneath.”
She stiffened, like she’d been slapped.
“I am sorry you find me so displeasing.”
“No.” He growled. “Not you. The nobility. The laws. Fathers who trade their daughters and men so powerful they can beat their wives without punishment. It sickens me.”
She blinked at him in surprise. The anger in his voice hadn’t faded, but it occurred to her that perhaps she was neither the cause nor the intended target.
“My father didn’t have a choice.”
“Of course he did. He could have fought. There’s always a choice,” Niel said. “In his shoes, I’d have chosen poverty over handing a child to a man like Blackfell.”
Ayla dismissed this immediately. She couldn’t blame her father, sacrificing her to keep the rest of the family safe.
Back then, none of them had known who Ditmar was behind closed doors.
He had not seemed kind, but nobody had expected the violence.
And for a common-born merchant family, having a daughter become lady of a fief was no small thing.
“Well, it is a done thing. I am his wife.”
“You’ll be his widow before this ends.” Niel’s voice had the cold certainty of a promise. “And you can leave Blackfell, if you want.”
She stared at him, feeling frozen and unsure what he meant.
“I thought I was your hostage,” Ayla said. “That I was to remain.”
Niel snorted.
“Yes, you are, so long as he’s alive. I meant you could leave with me after it’s over. I’ll kill him, either way, but you have my protection if you want to leave this place for the far north, instead of being handed back to whatever Enarians survive our victory.”
He sounded insane. But then, he was a brutal man, and clever enough that he'd tricked Ditmar out of the castle in the first place.
Could he actually win? He'd mentioned reinforcements. Did the army camped outside know what was headed their way?
“...Thank you?” she offered uncertainly.
Niel reached for his wine with a shrug.
If what he said came to pass, could she really leave Blackfell with him, and go somewhere else?
Ayla had assumed the siege would end with the traitors overrun and her delivered back into Ditmar’s grip.
Was there another option, one where she left Blackfell forever, to start a new life where nobody even knew who she was?
She didn’t want her freedom at such a high cost: the slaughter that would doubtlessly happen on the fields and forests surrounding Blackfell.
But surely that was outside Ayla’s control.
That was the province of men. And if she couldn’t kill the knight or get him to surrender, was it so bad to let him take her away from this place?
But men didn't make promises for free. Surely his claims of hating people like Ditmar weren’t enough to explain this offer. He desired something. And men usually desired one thing.
“I am not in want of a second husband,” she told him slowly.
Niel’s eyes narrowed.
“And I am not looking for a second wife,” he answered. “I’m offering you an escape from this rotten place, Lady Blackfell. Not a deal of some kind.”
She blinked at him rapidly, her eyes shifting between his left hand and his face.
Had she missed a ring on his fingers? But no, they were as bare as before.
Her stomach felt sour, which made no sense.
Why shouldn’t the knight be taken? It wasn’t like she wanted a traitor for herself. She’d just told him as much.