2. Fraught exits & see you later’s
FRAUGHT EXITS & SEE YOU LATER’S
ENORA
When push came to shove, or a day became two hours, there wasn’t much I considered valuable.
It took just over half of my allotted scrambling time to gather my most sentimental items—small mementos from my father and friends—and vital travel goods.
That left Joyce with another hour to puzzle it all into two saddlebags and me to soak in my bathtub one last time.
Joyce didn’t approve of that, but it was an easy judgement for her to make when she wasn’t the one wondering when she’d bathe properly again.
If I could trust the math I’d done, weeks separated me from making landfall in my new and notoriously hostile home.
Just to clear the mountains and cross the Wastes could take a fortnight on its own—entirely weather and equine dependent.
Another week after that, and we’d hopefully see Grimm’s Keep after being ushered through some apparently terrifying wards.
That was a long damned time to hope we found a few creeks to bathe in. So, I scrubbed my skin until it ached and Joyce was hauling me out of the tub on a string of muttered curses.
The stout, graying brunette I loved dearly stuffed clothing into my arms and kicked my ass out the door before I was fully dressed.
She was hot on my heels as we rushed down the hall, and I tried not to think about how I’d likely never see her wrinkle-lined face framed by the airy, pale-gray stone and gentle archways of Caenleigh Fortress ever again.
Thankfully, my maid didn’t have time for sentimentality.
“You missed a clasp,” she chirped from beside me. “Here, just let me—”
I swatted her hands away from my chest as I fought with my riding coat and stared at her. “I’ve. Got. It. Thank you.”
She rolled her eyes and pointed down. “You’ve got those too?”
My boots were tied before we’d left my room—I was positive of that—but both had become tripping hazards during our hurried trip down the corridor. If that wasn’t the most foreboding omen of how this entire trip would go…
I parked myself on the nearest window ledge, refusing to take a glance at the glorious alpine landscape beyond the glass as I focused on my boots. A lot of good that did for my wavering emotional state that almost unraveled when Joyce kneeled in front of me and stared at my other boot.
She clearly mistook my frown for frustration.
“Stop your pouting. It’s faster if I help.”
“I know that,” I whined. “But I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”
“Enora Camelia Wynn.” Joyce cut me an unimpressed glance as she sat back on her heels. “You’ve survived every one of your deployments without me and spent months holed up in inhospitable bases. You’ll do just fine there.”
There.
She said it like the word tasted foul on her tongue, and rightfully so.
After evolving from my nursemaid to the closest thing I had to a lady, Joyce was pouring steam from her ears when my brother first announced his grand diplomatic plans—after the ink dried on the marriage contract, of course.
“He’s selling you to our goddess-damned enemy!” she would bark as she tore around, tidying objects like they owed her a debt. And then, like clockwork, she would collapse on a sofa and question how in the hell I was coping.
Every so often, the barbed accusation of how I’d given up would come out too. For months.
And not that I was coping or had given up.
For fuck’s sake, I’d tried to bolt from our home twice! But on that devastating second time—after the King’s Guard hauled me, kicking and screaming, back to the fortress through the lower city—one of my departed father’s many wise teachings hit me with far too much clarity.
Know when to pause, when to yield, and when to raise hell.
My father lived by those principles until his last moments, and it made him a tremendous king.
He knew when to roll in with the fury of a foothills storm, decimating all in his path.
Just as often, he knew when to school himself into neutrality while he listened and learned.
A little more rarely, my father knew when to back down.
I knew that day, when my brother’s personal guard tossed me back in my room, barred my windows, and posted a guard outside my door, that my time to yield—temporarily—had arrived.
My brother was my fucking king, and he had proved with swiftness the unchecked power he would rule Odessa with.
I’d witnessed more public executions and acts of humiliation in the months since our father’s death than the rest of my life combined, and our people were ravenous for those displays of brutality.
Joyce could say I’d given up all she wanted.
Taking a page from my father’s book was the best thing I could do for my sanity, and he would have been so damned proud of me for finally listening to him.
That thought still didn’t ease the frown on my face.
“Chin up, hey?” Joyce pushed herself up with a soft groan. “We’re already late. Let’s get out to the stables before His Majesty ends up bursting a boil over your tardiness.”
If anything, I could always count on her to be as keen as I was to shove aside the blossoming threat of sentimentalities.
Through a blur of service halls and back corridors, we didn’t speak another word until we’d reached the other side of the fortress.
The doors to the lavish royal stables were all that separated us from our likely permanent separation.
A separation that neither of us had ever properly addressed in all our discussions of the utter absurdity of this betrothal.
Joyce may not have been my actual mother, but she was the closest damned thing I had after the woman who birthed me left and my eventual stepmother refused to associate with her husband’s past indiscretion.
Foolishly, I couldn’t bring myself to look at Joyce, tugging on my weathered leather riding gloves instead. A once-over of my jacket was next, fiddling with each fastening that needed no adjustment. I even inspected my boots again before Joyce clicked her tongue.
“Enora.” I could just hear how her hands were planted on her round hips before I looked up. The tears in her eyes, though, caught me off guard.
“Joyce.” My voice was unsteady as fuck. “Please don’t do—”
All five feet of her nearly took me clean off my damned feet.
“You aren’t leaving without saying a proper goodbye,” she huffed into my jacket, squeezing my midsection. “Do me that much, will you?”
I yielded and wrapped my arms around her, fighting the wave of emotions that made it a little hard to talk. “Weren’t you the one who always told me goodbye was too finite? Only suited for executions and funerals?”
Joyce clicked her tongue with weighty disappointment, but those were words plucked right from her very lips. I was never sure if my father passed the belief on to her, or she to him, but it became one of the core tenets of my upbringing, and I would not let her forget it.
“I’ll see you again,” I added. “I promise you that much, Joyce.”
A hedged bet at best, and a bald-faced lie at worst, but she took it.
Joyce eased back and wiped at her face before she gave me a firm nod. “I’ll see you later, you little pain in my arse.”
I could only nod back and return her small smile, for fear of how feeble my voice would be.
And I waited there as she turned, wiping at her face and cursing, and trekked back down the corridor.
Once Joyce had finally vanished from sight, I emptied every ounce of air from my lungs and pushed open the door into the stables.
I, of course, was very late.
Across the expansive space, the external doors were already pulled wide open, and my entourage was gathered outside, all mounted and pacing on impatient steeds. With a curse under my breath, I hurried across the packed earth of the aisle, tugging my cowl up around my ears.
I couldn’t help clutching my arms tight to my body too—goddess take me, it was brisk.
With it being only a few months into the turn of the year, most of Odessa would still be cool, but the fortress was its own frosty beast to contend with.
Being so high in the mountains gave us the blessing and curse of frigid, relentless gusts of air, no matter the season.
We suffered a little in the winter months, sure, with ice so thick it needed to be chipped off doors and chimneys or melted away by a fire-blessed amplifier.
But what were a couple of extra layers and an excuse for sharing body heat at night? Better than living out the sweltering heat in the lowland border villages. I’d served enough cavalry assignments in them to know there was little worse than rivers of sweat in every bodily crevice.
“Well, well,” came a drawl from one of my brother’s bundled-up envoys as I exited the shelter of the stables and a familiar but jarring gust of wind pummeled me. Weston, or Wesley, maybe, but I really wasn’t sure. “She finally graces us with her presence.”
Even though my brother was nowhere in sight, I hitched dramatically at the waist. “I live only to serve, as I’m sure you know.”
He scoffed and pointed at a lone, riderless steed. “Saddle up, Wynn. We need to get moving.”
Figuring it was in my best interest, I didn’t dally further and set about rigging up my saddlebags while I took a sidelong glance at our group. To my surprise, the party making up my escort was better than I thought it’d be.
An almost even split of Odessans I’d seen kiss my brother’s proverbial feet, and ones I’d seen the wrong side of sunrise with countless times.
Of the members clearly picked by my brother, there were a handful of faces I was less familiar with, but that wasn’t surprising, with the sweeping changes our fickle king made daily.
An entourage of twenty to escort me to my new home seemed excessive, but I opted to look on the bright side.
It meant we had a fighting chance over the next few weeks of holding some measure of entertainment.
There was one face in that crowd I was exceptionally relieved to see, especially when she started weaving her way over to me—Streja.