Chapter Five On Meeting Your Heroes
It must have started raining outside because his clothes were dripping.
He appeared nearly out of breath, his pecs heaving, but that didn’t stop him from pausing with his hands on both doors to whip his long wet hair out of his face.
Claw, the great sword of his family, was at his back and daggers sat on his hips, sheathed.
He stepped forward, a clear head above the men who entered behind him.
“My queen!” he bellowed. “The Western Riverlands are secure!”
A cheer went up around the room, but I couldn’t look away from his face.
I’d spent much of my adult life wishing to be in the same room as this man and now.
..I was. I expected him to look my way, single out the new face in the crowd, but he had eyes only for the queen.
He knelt, steps away from her table. I wished I had sat closer and rose in my own seat, craning my neck, the better to see.
“But I have grave news.” His deep voice carried around the hall effortlessly. He had the voice of a war commander. “The traveling caravans of the east are congregating to the Dark Mage Amédée.”
Someone hissed.
The queen, however, was undisturbed. She might have shrugged. “A band of old and orphans. What do we care?”
Ironclaw rose to his feet. “Others may follow, Your Grace. We have early news that their allies in the valley are discussing joining as well.”
Her blue eyes flashed. “Why?” the queen demanded. “They seek to turn my wrath upon them?”
If I recalled correctly, the valley tribes guarded great deposits of ore and, I don’t know, other kinds of things needed to make weapons.
“Should we send an envoy to the valley?” Lord Parable put forth.
“I would be happy to go, Your Grace,” Ironclaw said, as if he was eager to rush into the dark night again, rabble through the woods until dawn. My insides twisted. I didn’t want him out there—I needed him in the castle with me.
Queen Elthra’s face was carefully blank when she rose from the head table. It was as if her thoughts mirrored my own. The difference was, she had a right to think that way.
Ironclaw and the queen have been betrothed since book four. It was a political alliance as much as love but the fact that the ghostwriter broke them up in book five was the single issue that most enraged the fandom.
For my part, I understood logically that a romance story should end in the hero and heroine getting together. Yet, here I was, and there he was, with his dark wet hair pushed back from his intense face, his pants tight across his backside.
It was an ethical question—if I slept with a fictional character in a committed relationship, AITA?
I knew neither of them stayed true to the other. They spent more time apart than together, and I’d gotten pages full of what Ironclaw did on his adventures. Their relationship was rocky right now.
So, couldn’t I be one of his side quests? When I had my fill, I could trigger a few couples-therapy discussions, set up the plot to move forward as it should have in the first place, and be on my way home like Sorrel said. No angry queen to deal with.
Ironclaw was speaking again, but his less notorious cousin chose that moment to talk. “The most extraordinary expressions flickered across your face just now, Lady Mayfair.”
I tried to ignore Lord Draw and strained to hear what Ironclaw and the queen were saying.
“It’s not unlike the look most women give him, truth be told.”
I was immediately offended. I didn’t need to be sized down by a medieval lawyer. “My good fellow, I’m trying to hear what’s happening.”
“Good fellow...” Lord Draw mused, but I couldn’t be bothered with him.
“Let us finish our meal,” the queen declared. “Then we’ll convene.”
Ironclaw circled the table and bent to her ear as the hall erupted in conversation, digesting the news about the valley land’s fickleness. I was uninterested, suddenly determined to make good on my bookish fantasy within Castle Creneda. I was sure there was a private room somewhere.
“Do you know my cousin?” Lord Draw asked me.
I flicked my eyes to him before returning to the cousin in question who seemed perilously close to Elthra’s low neckline for a public gathering.
To me, the problem was not whether they’d bunked together—Sherry Whitehorse’s too-cute phrase to replace that of a more graphic nature—but if they were in love.
“Mmm. Only by reputation,” I answered as I wiped my plate clean with the last of my bread. I wanted to be ready to leave the hall when Ironclaw did.
“Here, try some of this.” Lord Draw summoned a serving boy with a tray of honeycomb. He cut a slice from the platter and laid it on my plate. It immediately oozed.
“Ohhh, I love honey.”
“Don’t we all?” he said, yet he took none for himself, only watched me as if to be sure I was eating, then looked across the room.
As he had barely stopped talking since we met, I took the opportunity to study him.
The books didn’t let on about his green eyes—Ironclaw’s were dark, of course—and they shared the same black hair and nearly the same height, but the resemblance ended there.
Sherry Whitehorse had always described him by way of comparison to Ironclaw—which meant by deficit.
He didn’t have Ironclaw’s strength. Didn’t have Ironclaw’s fight.
But really, it was a comparison that shouldn’t be drawn.
That would be like saying Issa wasn’t pretty because the queen was very much so.
Draw’s stature was lithe, and any man that lived during this time—in this world—would have some certain strength.
Moreover, he seemed utterly comfortable with himself. Arrogant even.
I looked away before he could catch me staring.
I followed Draw’s gaze across the hall, unable to understand what he was zeroed in on.
A woman in brown homespun fed a baby as she talked with a friend.
I spotted black cornrows and a beard—there was Jerrald, whispering conspiratorially with a company man.
I’d have to make my way over before I lost him again.
A group of men in the back seemed to be playing a drinking game, but it was subdued, as if they were trying to pull a sheet over the pallor Ironclaw’s news had left behind.
And up at the dais, Ironclaw was still fixated on the queen.
The queen seemed as cool as always, but I didn’t like the intensity in Ironclaw’s eyes.
For the first time, despite being surrounded by all those people, I felt alone, or rather dwarfed by the big tasks in front of me.
I was supposed to—what were Sorrel’s words?
—lighten up? From within the darkest chapters of the series while fixing everything?
It frustrated me that she didn’t just plop me in book two before Ironclaw was betrothed to the freaking queen.
I had felt quite confident when I first saw him, but now seeing him and the queen together, the whole scenario definitely felt beyond my nonexistent skills as a seductress.
And the impending war. I’d read those scenes in full, of course, but the few battle scenes of the TV show had bundled things up tidily.
Viewers saw only what was in front of their POV character.
They didn’t hear the screams or see the blood darkening the ground.
What I’d seen earlier that day—that felt much more real than anything so far.
Still, they were figments of an imagination—Sherry Whitehorse’s. I wasn’t really here either. If I could read the words on a page and imagine a character’s death, what was the difference if I saw it played out in front of me?
“Come, Lady Mayfair,” Lord Draw said. “They’re convening.”
––––––––
WE WERE NEARLY TO THE door of the great hall, Lord Draw’s elbow deftly tucked into my hand—well, he’d offered it, and I’d always wanted to walk on a lord’s arm—when it occurred to me.
Feasting on oysters in a castle surrounded by forest. The fine sugar cakes the high table received over our messy honeycomb.
How many times had I read the descriptions of the lavish meals of the queen’s table and wished for the same?
And here Lord Draw was, eating seared beef with me.
That sneak. After gossip already. A shadow flitted across his face as we passed through the doorway. The sconces cast amber spheres along the hall. Other people dispersed elsewhere as well. “You attend the council meetings but don’t dine with them?”
Lord Draw looked over at me. There was a flicker of something in his eyes. “What, eat up there? That’s not where the best conversation is.” He smiled, but it wasn’t a full, real smile.
It was a longer walk from the dining hall than when I had been shepherded earlier, but we walked in silence. Draw seemed to be thinking, and I wasn’t eager to say more than I had to.
At a set of marble busts with long, thin faces, he turned through a doorway.
It was the same stone wall and flagstone floor as the rest of the castle, but this room was much smaller than the receiving hall.
It was a dim golden from the lanterns. Painted on the floor in front of us was a numbered grid already set up with knee-high battle tokens.
I scanned it quickly. Not just tokens—there were a few tiny gears along the side of the map, and colored yarn ran between certain pieces.
My special edition books had a full-color map and I found Castle Creneda, the castle on a hill, forest on all sides, a river to the north, and bogs to the south.
We were clearly part of Queen Elthra’s campaign northeast in hopes of finally defeating the Dark Mage Amédée.
I still wondered at the fact that Badgerden and Lionsgate seemed to have switched sides. In the books, Lionsgate was the ally. Sorrel didn’t allude to those changes at all—unless, that was a decision made for the television show?
What else might be switched? Frustration bubbled. I couldn’t know for sure.