Chapter 59
I t was a strange new world when Rowan wasn’t challenging everything I did and ordered along the road. I couldn’t help but steal glances down at her while she laughed with Kirill or poked fun at Taras.
With her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright, she looked more alive than she had since…well, since the last time we were headed to this cabin.
Though she held up admirably for the first part of the ride, her posture was sagging by late afternoon, and she was leaning into me more and more for support. When the horse slowed to a jostling trot, she hissed in pain, shoulders tensing, and I nodded to Taras that we would stop at the next inn.
There was no need to overly tax her on this first day of travel and risk her being in too much pain to ride tomorrow.
It wasn’t like we could hope to hide a tiny Lochlannian princess for an entire journey with no carriage to stash her in, and it wasn’t unexpected that I would bring my pet along with me.
And yet, as we approached the inn, she stretched up her arms to pull her hood closer around her as if she could hide herself from the villagers. She darted paranoid glances at everyone who passed by, carefully tucking away every strand of her fiery hair.
At the stables, Taras dismounted his horse first, though the others were quick to follow.
They quickly cast about, looking for any signs of danger.
As anxious as they were for some medovukha and a few hours away from their horses, their hurry now was to root out any danger to the princess. And me, of course, but the protective glances they cast were reserved for her.
Once their shoulders relaxed, I dismounted as well, turning to Taras.
“Secure the inn, and I’ll take care of the food.”
He left with a quick nod, and I reached up to help Rowan down from the saddle. She was surprisingly warm in the frigid air, and still more cheerful than anyone had a right to be after a long day on the road.
She pulled her hood even tighter around herself, prepared to hide all the way into the inn, and something about it needled at me. She didn’t need to hide her storms-blasted hair for the delicate sensibilities of the villagers.
My people were strong enough to handle a few ginger curls, and we were only going to throw ourselves into another war if we continued to cave to these ridiculous prejudices.
“A moment, Lemmikki ,” I called to her, stopping her in her tracks.
She paused, and I hesitated for only a moment before I held my hands up, making my intent obvious. She gave the barest hint of a nod, her eyes blazing into mine.
So I closed the distance between us, gently pushing back her hood from her face. Though I had ridden at her back the entire day, and shared a bed with her several weeks running, this closeness felt different. More intimate, somehow, energy zapping in each place my fingertips made contact with her skin.
“Aren’t you concerned with terrifying the locals?” she breathed, her voice barely above a whisper.
“They’ll get used to it, eventually, if you’re stuck here.” I wondered at my own motivations once I said that part out loud, but quickly shoved the concern to the side. “What do you think, Dmitriy?”
He pretended to examine her, shaking his head a bit.
“I think you’re right, Van. Sort of like one of those monsters under your bed that you get used to after years and years and years of it tormenting you.”
She laughed, reaching out to shove the man who was easily twice her size.
“What?” he shrugged. “It’s true.”
I shook my head and let out a low laugh while the rest of the men commented on the ways they had felt tormented by her, her hair, singing voice, or the way she cheated at cards.
Just as we rounded the corner to the tavern, we came face to face with a couple of the village children. They froze at the sight of us, their wide eyes taking in the armed men in black uniforms.
The blood drained from their dirt-stained faces, and the older boy stepped subtly in front of the younger one, like he was prepared to protect him from the swift death that surely awaited him.
Three more children ran up to greet the others, only to go still with the same reaction.
“Look,” Rowan joked. “I’m terrifying them already.”
But they hadn’t glanced once at the princess or her hair.
“It’s not you they’re afraid of, Lemmikki,” I assured her.
And who could blame them? On a different visit, with a different set of orders, they would have had every reason to fear.
“He has been slowly changing the laws in the people’s favor, but there’s a lot of history to overcome.” Kirill and his endless optimism tried valiantly to come to my defense.
I focused on keeping my features and my gait even, refraining from reminding him that adjusting the laws in the people’s favor would not wash away the blood of their own, not in their eyes.
Rowan’s stare bored into the side of my face, and I built my wall a little higher.
“That might be part of it,” she said casually. “But I don’t think your face is helping.”
“Is that so?” I peered down at her. “And what’s wrong with my face?”
“Objectively speaking, nothing.” She paused with her lips still parted, her cheeks reddening more than the cold accounted for, and I smirked.
“But you have resting aalio face,” she added quickly.
Kirill snorted.
“She’s not wrong,” Dmitriy said casually, leaning against the post at the tavern’s entryway.
Even Yuriy decided to be vexing, narrowing his eyes as he pretended to scrutinize my appearance. “I never noticed it before, but she has a point. Maybe we’re just used to it.”
Aalios…all of them.
The men were obviously humoring the princess since I had a perfectly normal face. She tilted her head, mischief lighting up her bright green eyes as she glanced from the terrified children, to the parents coming to collect them, and back again at me.
Then she bent down, picking up a handful of snow, and pitched it directly at my face.
I saw it coming, of course. Had time to duck, if I hadn’t been so stunned that someone just…threw a snowball at me. Like a child.
My lips parted, freezing ice seeping down my neck.
“There, that’s better,” she said, an impish grin tugging at her mouth.
A beat of silence passed, then another, while I debated on whether to pick her up over my shoulder and hurl her bodily into the snowbank behind us as payback.
She bent at the waist, letting out a ringing peal of laughter that echoed down the street.
Had I heard her laugh since the flogging?
After a beat, the men joined in, and even a few of the villagers—the previous tension all but seeping from their shoulders like melting snow. They were no longer cowering or staring at me in horror. Instead, they were just…staring—watching the ridiculous show that Rowan had decided to give them.
Like I was more than just my father’s executioner.
I reached up to wipe the remaining slush from my face, wondering how the hell this woman had managed to make headway on a problem that felt so endlessly complicated with a single ball of ice.
Of course, that didn’t mean I would let it go unanswered.
She must have read the thought on my face, because her eyes widened and she turned to scout out her escape.
Trying to remember the last time I formed a snowball, I picked up a handful of snow and launched it toward her. I might not have thrown many snowballs lately, but I had been trained to throw all manner of weapons, so it hit my target squarely in the center.
My target being Rowan’s endless mass of curls.
I lost track after that of the number of projectiles that I catapulted and was attacked with in turn. Though I wasn’t cackling maniacally like certain red-haired princesses I knew, I couldn’t deny feeling lighter than I had in years.
It was a dangerous feeling, though. I couldn’t let myself forget that this village square could just as easily have been painted in blood. That my hands were made for weapons that were a great deal sharper than snow.
That one way or another, she would be gone soon, and my life would go back to what it was before.
When Rowan was actually limping in pain and parents were calling their children back to them, I finally convinced her to go into the tavern.
This village was out of the way of the normal trade routes, so the food was more sparse than usual, but no one complained. Not even my biscuit-loving captive.
Well, she didn’t complain about the food. Though, she did glare openly at the barmaid, who leaned in closer than she strictly needed to every time she sat down a mug of ale.
The barmaid’s behavior wasn’t surprising. She was the same way with all of my men, undoubtedly thinking if she ingratiated herself with the soldiers, her head wouldn’t be on a chopping block if we ever came on official business.
On the other hand, Rowan’s behavior was…interesting.
As was the way she froze when we reached our room and she caught sight of the two distinct beds.
I paused behind her, wishing I didn’t feel the same reluctance and knowing how very unreasonable it was.
As little as I had wanted to face the reality of playing house with Rowan when we were in my rooms, it was somewhat more unavoidable now that we were on the road.
We both knew I trusted her enough to sleep in her own rooms...but I didn’t trust her safety. So sharing a room made infinitely more sense than my standing guard outside of hers all night.
But there was no logical reason for us to be in the same bed when the inn came equipped with two.
She squared her shoulders, closing the door to change her clothes while I waited in the hallway. She was already in her bed when I came in a few minutes later, but I saw the collar of one of my shirts peeking out from underneath the blanket.
I swallowed, not allowing myself to dwell on why she was continuing to choose it over her own nightclothes.
“Well,” she said awkwardly, not quite meeting my eyes. “Goodnight, then.”
She looked somehow smaller in the tiny bed than she looked in my much larger one, pulling the covers around her.
“Yes. You, too,” I said, climbing into my own bed fully clothed.
It was perfectly fine. It wasn’t like our arrangement was permanent. She was leaving. I was…getting on with my life. This was the way it should have been all along, the way it would have been, had my stepmother not taken out her rage on a single unsuspecting girl.
So now things were going back to normal, which was for the best.
And if my bed felt oddly cold, it was probably only because the fire was running so low.
I awoke to the sound of a whimper from the other side of the room. It wasn’t unusual, in and of itself, but these days, I didn’t even wake entirely up at the sound. I only placed a hand on her wrist, knowing it would pull her out of her nightmares enough to settle back into sleep.
But of course, I wasn’t in her bed tonight.
She whimpered again, her entire body going rigid.This was probably for the best, her learning to stave them off on her own. I took a slow breath in, staring back up at the ceiling and counting the seconds until the next small cry escaped her lips.
Sighing, I ran a hand over my face, wondering at the stupidity of what I was about to do. But I couldn’t just sit by while she suffered, even if it was only at the hands of her own mind—memories of things that never would have happened to her if she hadn’t been at Bear. If I hadn’t taken her there.
I told myself that she was still healing. That she needed the rest. That her cries were keeping me awake as well, and there was no point in neither of us getting an ounce of sleep.
All of those reasons made sense.
But even as I eased out of my bed, my feet touching the cold, worn slats of the wooden floor before climbing in next to her, I knew there wasn’t a single storms-blasted logical thing about any of this.
She shivered as I lifted the blankets to settle them around both of us, then a small, relieved sigh escaped her lips. And damn it all if I didn’t feel the same peace creeping into my own limbs.
I drifted in and out of sleep, woken occasionally by the hitch in her breathing that meant another nightmare was coming on.
When that happened, I stretched an arm over to rest lightly on her wrist, running my thumb over the soft skin of her inner arm as I had every night since she’d begun sleeping in my bed.
And just like each time before, a gentle exhale would escape her as she relaxed into me, the tension ebbing from her small form.
Der’mo.
This was not sustainable. It wasn’t going to end well.
Chaos. That’s what Taras had said she was, what she brought. Maybe that was true.
But she brought peace as well, and somehow...somehow, that felt even more dangerous.