“Milady! Where have you been?”
Not being able to answer was a relief, and I shrugged and began unwrapping my hair from around my head, releasing the twigs and leaves caught in the coils.
“You’ve been with a man!” Bethe squealed. “You’ve spent the night in the woods with a man.”
“She did no such thing,” Boojohni growled, offended. I patted his head, gratefully.
“Your father will have to be told, Lark. You know how he worries. I can’t keep this from him,” Madame Pattersley said righteously. Madame Pattersley had spent the fifteen years since my mother’s death trying to win my father’s affections. We were alike in that regard, though I’d given up years ago. She told him everything. Maybe that made up for the fact that I could tell him nothing.
“Keep what from me?” My father stood in the doorway.
“Lark was out all night, milord,” Madame Pattersley declared, her proclamation bouncing off the pots and pans hanging overhead, her glee echoing the din.
I raised my eyes to my father, willing him to look back at me, but he looked at Boojohni instead. I could see myself in the grey of his eyes and the fine bones of his face. He was elegant without being feminine, tall without being gangly, thin without being gaunt. But he was also shrewd instead of wise, mannerly instead of kind, and ambitious instead of strong.
“I hold you all responsible,” my father said quietly. “She must be watched at all times. You know this.”
The women dropped deep curtsies and Boojohni bowed, but I could feel his empathy. It permeated the space between us. My father turned and left the kitchen without another word.
The chattering squirrels didn’t like our presence. They wanted us to leave. A snake coiled in the bush to my left, and I felt him taste the air. His life force pulsed, emitting the word enemy and then wait. It wouldn’t strike, but it was poised and watching. A toad belched to my right, completely unconcerned with the company. He hardly noticed us at all, and he felt no fear. He belched again, reminding me of my father slumped against the dinner table, the dogs at his feet, waiting for him to leave the table so they could fight over what he left behind. Whispers and clicks and buzzes and hums, slithering across the forest floor and sliding up my skin and into my head. Sound everywhere, yet my companion didn’t seem to notice it.
I dismissed the babbling creatures the way they dismissed me and began filling my apron with the sweet berries hidden by the brambles. A bee fled with one goal in mind. Home. Home. Then he was gone. It had been three days since I’d discovered the wounded eagle in the woods. I’d come back every day, as if I would find him again, or he would find me. Or maybe I thought I would find the archer who brought him down and break his arrows one by one. It was not against the law to hunt, and I did not judge a man for feeding his family from the forest, but I was filled with helpless fury when I thought of the eagle. My agitation must have shown.
“You’ll prick your fingers, Milady.” I raised my eyes and met Lohdi’s gaze. Boojohni had been needed elsewhere, and young Lohdi—a clumsy youth of sixteen who couldn’t hold his tongue for five seconds—had been assigned to shadow me. I preferred my own company but was rarely given that option, and it was beyond infuriating. I lifted a shoulder, dismissing his concern.
“Your father said I can’t let you harm yourself.”
I ignored him with clenched teeth and kept picking. I had almost twenty-one summers. Most women my age had several children of their own, and I did not need a nursemaid, especially one younger and decidedly less capable than I.
Lohdi shifted nervously and looked at the skies, as if the patches of blue we could make out above the trees would soon turn to stormy grey.
“We need to go. They will be here soon.”
I raised my gaze from the berry bush once more, questioning him.
“Your father didn’t tell you?” Lohdi asked in surprise.
I shook my head. No. My father didn’t tell me anything. He didn’t talk to me because I couldn’t answer him.
“He is expecting visitors. Important men. Maybe even the king.”
I stiffened, the news making me drop my skirts and lose the berries I was collecting in my shawl. My stomach clenched painfully as Lohdi chattered on in excitement. If the king was coming, I didn’t want to be caught in the woods. I wanted to be safely away, tucked in my mother’s old tower room where he couldn’t find me. Or harm me.
I started immediately for home, Lohdi falling into step behind me, expressing gratitude for my hasty return. When we heard the pounding hooves we started to run, Lohdi in anticipation, me in terror. I flew through the trees, skirts in hand, my hair streaming behind me. My maid complained that my hair was like corn silk. She couldn’t get it to curl or stay or conform to the exotic shapes and styles that were fashionable among the women of Jeru, and I’d stopped trying to tame it, brushing it and leaving it loose more often than not.
“Milady! Stop!” I heard Lohdi call out behind me, but it wasn’t my fault he was slow. I was many things, but slow wasn’t one of them, and I picked up speed, hearing the thundering of the horses and feeling the energy in the air. I broke out of the trees seconds before two dozen riders came over the rise from the nearest village, flags waving and bugles screaming. Green and gold, the colors of the kingdom, adorned each horse and every rider. They were almost upon me, and I stared in horror as they slowed reluctantly, the horses resisting their reins, their eagerness to run, run, run, coming off them in waves. Horses had very few words. Run. Eat. Home. Fear.
But I was the only one afraid now, because I was too late.
I stepped back, intending to turn and run back into the forest and hide in the shadows until the king’s party left, even if it drew my father’s ire, but at that moment, Lohdi barreled out from the dense tree line onto the hard-packed road, and collided with my back. I fell to my hands and knees directly in the path of the procession. I heard several horses whinny in panic, stomping and sidestepping, and someone cried out. I felt a foot in my back, and I fell to my stomach on the hard-packed dirt. I realized Lohdi hadn’t just knocked me down, he was trampling me.
“Halt!” someone roared, and I scrambled to my feet, narrowly avoiding a rearing, sweating stallion with bared teeth.
Lohdi cried out as he also tried to rise. I reached to assist him, not wanting to see him harmed, though at that moment I could have killed him myself. Someone beat me to it, catching the back of his shirt and hauling him to his feet. The King had dismounted, and he stood towering above the wriggling Lohdi.
“King Tiras,” Lohdi gasped and fell back to his knees in subservience before being yanked to his feet again.
“Stand up, lad,” he commanded.
“Yes, Majesty! So sorry, Your Highness.” Lohdi bobbed and genuflected. The king released his arm and turned to me, pinning me with eyes so dark they appeared black in a face that was arresting rather than beautiful, formidable rather than cold. Warm skin covered sharp edges and well-formed features, and I was certain he was accustomed to bows and obeisance though I gave him neither.
His hair was completely white against his bronzed skin, like a man well on in years, though he couldn’t yet be thirty summers. His hair had been black when I’d last seen him, but he looked very little like the boy I remembered, and I was certain he didn’t remember me. I’d been five years old when my mother was brought down by his father’s sword. He’d been older than I, but I doubted that day had made the same kind of impression on him as it had on me.