Chapter 7
Plans
Roark tied the cover over the lens and
slipped the spyglass into its sheath at his waist belt. As far as
he could see, neither Murtaugh or Gall were on The Rover as
it was being loaded for the voyage back to Sea Ridge. But Kerry and
Kerwin were. He walked Artur to the docks and tied him off to a
post.
The secret of Ash drinking on his own had
lasted only a day. Alina hadn’t wanted to deprive Ash of the chance
to feed when he wanted, and so they’d left the bucket of milk out
as they always had. Yesterday Gare had come upon the foal drinking
from the bucket. He’d been apologetic about telling Roger. Roark
and Alina had assured him they understood.
Gare had also told Roger that it would be
good for both the foal and the mare if Alina could continue tending
them throughout the day, freeing him and Fergus to tend to all
their other duties, and Roger had agreed.
Roark figured it was as much to keep his wife
and sister-in-law happy as to help out Gare and Fergus, but no
matter the reason, it allowed Alina to be with the animals she
loved rather than trapped in the manor house with people who hated
her.
When he’d ridden out on Artur this morning
for the docks, she’d been overseeing Ash’s and Smokey’s first time
out in the paddock under the watchful eyes of Roger’s guards,
laughing at their antics as the foal and the kid gamboled and
tumbled in the grass.
“Ahoy, the ship,” he called out as he stepped
onto the gangplank.
Kerry poked his head over the railing.
“Roark. What brings you here?”
“I was out for a ride,” he nodded toward
where Artur was tied off, “and saw the ship being loaded up.
Thought I’d come by and say hello.”
“Glad you did,” Kerry said as Roark stepped
on deck. “Always good to see you.”
Roark clasped his arm and then Kerwin’s.
“How’s the princess?” Kerwin asked.
Roark told them how she’d only been at the
keep a day before she ended up tending Ash. He told them about
Smokey and Mama Cat, and how Alina still wore her breeches and
tunic.
“Sounds like her,” Kerwin said. He’d never
been shy about his admiration for Alina. He looked to Kerry and
pressed his lips into a thin line.
“What’s wrong?” Roark asked, and went fishing
when neither brother answered. “You don’t agree with what Roger has
planned for her either?”
Kerry bit. “Do you?”
“No,” Roark said. “I never wanted any part of
it from the beginning, but like you two, I had little to no choice.
Now that I know her…”
“It don’t feel right,” Kerry said.
“It ain’t right,” Kerwin added. “She don’t
deserve it, none of it, even if what laird high and mighty says
about her parents is true.”
“No,” Roark agreed, “she doesn’t.” No matter
what the new plan was. If Roger concocted it, she didn’t deserve
it. Roark glanced around the deck, making sure they were alone. “To
be honest, lads, after what I saw and heard at Sea Ridge, I have my
doubts about the laird’s version of his family’s banishment.”
“Even if it were true,” Kerwin said. “The
princess is an innocent in all of it. She don’t deserve to be taken
and sold in no slave market.”
Roark did his best to hide the shock jolting
through him. “Of course, she doesn’t,” he managed to say. He
cleared his throat and scuffed his boot on the deck, trying to
think. “At least she’ll have you two looking after her on the
voyage,” he said. “How long a sail do you expect it to be?”
“A moon’s sail at least through the Mid Earth
Sea to the desert port,” Kerry said. “Then we have to stay until
we’ve traded all the goods and the princess is sold to some king,
special like for his pleasure house. Roger’s orders.”
Roark didn’t even try to hide the rage
building up inside him. Roger was exacting his revenge on King
Jerrik and Queen Alyssa with some twisted play on their family’s
history. By selling Alina as a pleasure woman as her
great-grandmother, Oona the Swan, had been. He spat his distaste
out onto the deck.
Roger was many things, but stupid wasn’t one
of them. If he sold Alina as a slave in some desert port, and
Jerrik found out, he had to know that the Northman king would sail
into North Shore with his warships and raze the town, the keep,
everything to ashes. Which meant he had no intention of telling her
parents, ever. His revenge would be letting them think her dead for
the rest of their days while secretly gloating over the fear and
degradation she’d be living through for the rest of hers.
“You said you sail in ten days’ time?” he
asked the brothers.
“Aye,” Kerwin said.
“Do us all a favor,” he said. “Don’t tell
anybody we had this conversation.”
The brothers looked from each other to Roark.
“What conversation?” they said in unison.
***
“There you go, my faerie girl,” Alina said as
she removed the lead rope from Etain’s neck. It was the mare’s
first outing in the paddock since foaling Ash. Alina watched the
high-stepping, flaxen-maned, chestnut beauty dance and prance
around with a happy smile. “I bet you’re as fast as my Brynja on
those long legs of yours.”
Brynja. How Alina would love to be riding her
along the sea’s shore right now, free as the wind. She glanced over
at the stables where Gare sat on a bench outside working on
braiding leather straps into a bridle and keeping an eye on her
along with one of the laird’s men-at-arms, who sat on the bench
beside him, whittling a piece of wood.
Everywhere she went outside of the manor
house, one of Roger’s men followed, which was still better than
being inside the house. Peg and Jenny were friendly enough, but
Lynette, Gwyneth, and Myrna never hesitated to show their hatred.
She couldn’t be in their sights without their eyes boring holes
into her like maggots in a days’-old carcass.
She shook her shoulders and squared them. She
was a princess of the Northlands, born and raised. She could deal
with these women for another fortnight and a half. She had to. What
she didn’t have to do was subject herself to them any more than was
necessary.
She wandered over to an old oak in a grassy
corner of the paddock and sat down under its shady branches,
leaning her back against the trunk. She hadn’t slept well last
night, alone in the bed without Roark nearby. She’d felt his
absence keenly since he rode off on Artur, his big, powerfully
built, dapple grey stallion, this morning.
“He’ll be back,” she told Etain, closing her
eyes and leaning her head back. “He won’t leave me here alone.”
She woke with Etain next to her, the mare’s
long legs folded up beneath her, her head bobbing in the dappled
sunlight under the oaks sprawling branches. By the sun, they’d
slept their way well into the afternoon.
“What does it say about me that I sleep
better on the ground amongst horses than in a clean, soft bed in a
house?” she asked the mare, standing and stretching her back.
She slipped the lead around the mare’s neck
and led her past the sleeping guard and Gare into her stall. Smokey
and Ash were curled up together in their pen, Ash’s belly rounded
and the milk bucket half empty.
“Gare.” She nudged the stable hand’s
shoulder. “Gare.” He woke with a snort and blinked up at her. “I’m
returning to the house now,” she said in her Northern tongue, using
hand gestures pointing to herself and then the house.
He stood and left the guard snoring away,
walking Alina to the front entrance himself. “Best of luck,
lassie,” he said as she pushed the door open and walked in.
The ladies of the house were sitting and
sewing in the common room, and Alina turned for the kitchens. She’d
barely eaten any breakfast in her haste to get out of the house and
out to the horses, and her belly was grumbling.
“Alina,” Lynette’s commanding voice stopped
her in her tracks. “Where are you skulking off to, girl?”
Alina turned and faced the women. “To the
kitchens.”
“We serve breakfast and supper here,” Lynette
told her. “The staff have enough to do without worrying about
feeding you special meals. If you’re hungry this early in the day,
I suggest you take the time to eat a sufficient breakfast, unlike
this morning.”
“Yes, Mistress,” Alina said, biting her
tongue to keep from pointing out the half-eaten tray of sweet cakes
on the table between Lynette and Myrna. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“See that you do,” Lynette admonished.
“You’re not here to be coddled.”
Alina chuffed.
“What was that supposed to mean?” Myrna
huffed. She tossed her sewing aside and strode over to Alina. “I
asked you a question, little miss high and mighty bastard daughter
of a stable hand and a cuckolding mother.”
Alina laughed, short and quick. What was it
with these women that they kept spewing this same tired lie over
and over? Did they really think if they said it enough it would
somehow be true?
“Well?” Myrna demanded when Alina still
didn’t answer.
“Well, what?”
“Don’t take that attitude with me,” Myrna
squawked.
She drew her hand up and back and swung at
Alina, who’d been taken by surprise in the bath chambers, but not
this time. She grabbed Myrna’s wrist mid-air and held it as the
older woman struggled and squirmed. “I may be the laird’s
prisoner,” she said through grit teeth, throwing Myrna’s hand down,
“but I will not willingly take such abuse. Not from you. Not from
anybody.”
Myrna rubbed her wrist and smiled. “Oh my
dear,” she said smugly in her Green Isles tongue. “You have no idea
what humiliations and abuses await you.”
***
By the grim set of his jaw and the silver
glint in his eyes, Alina could see there was something bothering
Roark the moment he sat down at the high table for supper. Myrna,
on the other hand, looked overly pleased with herself.
It’d taken every bit of Alina’s willpower not
to recoil at the woman’s vile threat of humiliation and abuse in a
language she thought Alina ignorant of this afternoon. To remain
calm and simply walk away when she’d wanted to scratch the smug
smile off not only Myrna’s face, but Lynette’s and Gwyneth’s too.
To scream at them, demanding to know what she’d done to deserve
such blind hatred.
Instead, she’d climbed the stairs to her
chambers and paced and brooded at the unfairness of it all, missing