Chapter 5
Horses
Alina sank down into the hot bath water with
a weary sigh. A small chamber of wood and stone with a hearth fire
to heat the kettles of water, the bathhouse held two wooden tubs, a
small table of soaps and oils, and washing and drying linens.
Though it wasn’t as private or as well appointed as the bath
chambers in her family’s long house, after four days on a ship and
yesterday, it felt good to soak and wash the stink off herself.
Unsure of how long Peg, who sat guard
outside, would allow her to stay in here, Alina dunked her head
underwater and then scooped a handful of soap and sniffed, smelling
rose and lavender and bracing rosemary. She stood and lathered her
hair and her body from head to toe, and then sat back down and
dunked and rinsed, breathing in the clean scent of the soap and
lounging in the warm, wet heat of the water, determined to enjoy it
for as long as she could.
She hadn’t slept well last night despite
being in a big, soft bed. Her mind had been racing with everything
that’d been said at supper, especially Roger’s comment about where
she was going. She could tell Roark didn’t believe Roger was
sending her home. Something was going on, and she had to find out
what.
Leif’s bawdy story and Gwyneth’s cruelty were
horrid, but not as worrying as what Roger had said.
Poor Roark. Stuck between his obligations and
a lifetime with a horrid woman who couldn’t see his worth. Alina
padded the tub’s edge with a rolled-up linen, leaned her head back,
closed her eyes, and thought of Roark. He was everything she wanted
in a man: handsome, kind, and intelligent, who kissed like no other
man she’d ever met.
She would be twenty years old in a little
over a moon’s time, and she was a princess. A princess who’d been
kissed and to whom marriage had been proposed by six men. Six men
whom she’d never come close to responding to the way she had to
Roark. Yet, he was her abductor and played an integral part in her
capture. Nothing she could say or do would change their
circumstance.
Her fingertips were starting to prune. She
stood and stepped out of the tub, toweled herself dry, and wrapped
the towel around her hair. She eyed the woolen stockings Peg had
given her and ignored them. It was nowhere near cold enough to wear
those itchy things. She shook out the brown linen long tunic and
was holding it out in both hands when the door burst open and
Lynette and Myrna sauntered in, their gazes of honed steel leaving
a trail of cuts as they razed her unclad body.
“She’s Alyssa’s whelp all right,” Lynette
said in the Northern tongue as Alina quickly slipped the tunic on
over her head and yanked the skirt down her hips and legs. “If her
green demon eyes weren’t proof enough, her harlot’s body is.”
Myrna smirked. “I remember how the little
strumpet would strut around, smiling and flirting and tempting
every man who looked her way.”
Alina’s jaw dropped at their naked hatred.
She closed it with a snap. Her parents had always been open about
how her mother had been accused of infidelity by Fenrir and his
yellow beards, of how her father, an admittedly jealous man where
her mother was concerned, had briefly believed them, until they’d
been proven to be lies. Lies that these women, wives of two of
those yellow beards, continued to spread.
Lengthening her spine and squaring her
shoulders, she met the women’s vindictive glares. “Is there a
purpose to this?” she asked. “Whatever this is?”
“We wanted to see for ourselves how alike you
are to your mother,” Lynette said, her voice, her smile, dripping
venom. “Our spies tell us that though you look like her, you act
more like your true father than the cuckhold king who’s raised you
as his.”
Alina chuffed. “You mean Hamar, the
stablemaster, I assume.” The looks on their faces were almost worth
the inquisition. Alina laughed, short and harsh. “Did you really
think my parents would try to keep what happened a secret from
their children when the entire royal household witnessed Fenrir’s
accusations, as well as the trial where they were proven false?
Where his own family admitted he was a lying, scheming
murderer?”
“Admissions they were forced to give upon
pain of death,” Myrna spat. “Lies that were sold as truth and
caused our family’s banishment. That took everything from us.”
Roark had told Alina about Myrna’s losing her
infant son on the journey here, about her inability to carry a babe
to term since, and she was sorry for her. But not sorry enough to
stand here and listen to this.
“You were both there, you know the truth,”
she told the women. “Yet you’ve held on to your grievances, based
on known lies for over twenty years. You’ve not only held on to
them, you’ve fed them and nurtured them with your hate until you
can’t see how twisted and pathetic your obsessive need for revenge
against my family is.”
Myrna stepped up to Alina and slapped her
across the cheek. Hard. “My only regret,” she hissed in the Green
Isles tongue as Alina held a hand to her stinging cheek, “is that I
won’t get to see their faces when they find out what really
happened to you.” She smiled, as thin and cold as ice over
treacherous water. “Though it is a poor trade, an only daughter for
two sons.”
Cackling like two hens, they left the
bathhouse as abruptly as they’d entered. Alina tore the towel from
her head, threw it on the floor, and stormed out after them right
into Peg.
“Oh my,” Peg said, eyeing Alina’s cheek,
which she knew without seeing was red and welting. “Oh dear.”
“It’s nothing,” Alina said, catching sight of
Lynette and Myrna as they headed for the manor house. She glanced
around the yard, wishing for somewhere she could go to walk off her
still-seething anger, and saw Roark leading the dapple grey he’d
ridden yesterday from the stables toward her and Peg.
“What was that all about?” he said in Alina’s
language, lifting his chin toward Lynette’s and Myrna’s stiff backs
as they entered the house.
“Nothing,” Alina said, looking everywhere but
at Roark.
He looked to Peg, who pressed her lips tight
and shook her head.
“Alina?” He cupped her chin and lifted her
head, cursing as he spied her cheek, which had stopped stinging but
still emanated heat. “Damnation.” A low rumble rose from his chest.
“Who slapped you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Damned if it doesn’t. Roger swore to me that
you wouldn’t be harmed while here.”
“Apparently his wife and sister-in-law took
no such oaths.”
“Excuse us for a moment, Peg,” Roark said,
taking Alina by the arm and walking her and his horse over to the
paddock. He tied the horse off to the fence and took Alina by the
shoulders, holding her so that she was facing him. “Tell me,” he
said.
Alina shook her head and dropped her gaze,
embarrassed. She glanced at the manor house, from where she was
certain Lynette and Myrna watched them.
“Alina.” Roark cupped her chin and held her
gaze. “Tell me, my lady owl.”
“Lynette and Myrna came into the bath while I
was naked. They spoke of how I looked and acted like my mother,
like a harlot.”
He ran the pad of his thumb along her
jawline. “They were—”
“Being bitches, I know,” she said with a
short, harsh laugh.
“What else did they say?”
“Oh, the same old lies about my family that
their family has been spewing for twenty years.”
“Which one slapped you?”
“Myrna.”
Roark gently ran the backs of his knuckles
down her tender cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Though not that
surprised. Myrna’s disappointments in her life and marriage have
soured her. Her soul is as withered and dry as a raisin.”
“I can handle Myrna and Lynette and whatever
venom they spew at me,” Alina said. She glanced around, making sure
there was no one close by listening. “What bothers me is something
Myrna said and echoed Roger’s words last night. In Green Isles
tongue she said her only regret was that she wouldn’t be able to
see my parents’ faces when they found out what really happened to
me. That it would be a poor trade, a daughter for two sons.” She
held Roark’s intent gaze. “Why would she want to see my parents’
faces? Why did she say it in Green Isles tongue, thinking I
wouldn’t understand her?”
“I don’t know,” Roark said. “Yet.”
Alina shook her head. “Something’s wrong.
Roger said plans change. What’s he up to?”
“Everything’s wrong,” Roark rumbled. He
clamped his jaw, rubbed his beard, and toed the ground with his
boot. “I know this is a big ask, especially after my part in
bringing you here, but I want you to continue acting the good,
submissive prisoner waiting to be ransomed, and I swear to you,
I’ll find out what’s really going on.”
“And then what?”
“Then we’ll know what we’re dealing with and
what to do about it.”
“Why?”
Roark grinned. “Why what, my lady owl?”
“Why are you helping me?”
Roark cocked his head at her, stepped in to
her so their backs were facing Peg and the manor house, lifted her
hand in his, and kissed the backs of her fingers. “Because.”
***
Roark tied off Artur in a copse of oak at the
edge of the port town and focused his spyglass on the docks where
the contents of The Rover’s hold were being loaded by the
crew onto a wagon bound for North Shore Keep under Captain
Murtaugh’s supervision.
Kerwin and Kerry had no great love or loyalty
to Roger. If anyone would tell Roark what he wanted to know, he
figured it’d be them. He’d simply have to keep his eyes and ears
open for a chance at finding them alone, away from Murtaugh or
Gall, or anyone else who could be Roger’s spy. The man was one of
the most untrusting, suspicious people Roark had ever known, and he
was beginning to see why. It was looking more and more like his and
his family’s lives here were built on lies large and small.
Too many things had been said and done to
erode what little trust Roark had put in Roger’s word to begin
with, and he was finding it harder and harder to believe anything
Roger said about the whole sordid mess.
Roark had seen, heard, and borne witness to
how the city of Sea Ridge thrived and prospered under King Jerrik