Page 24 of The Consolation Prize

“You’re not following your own advice,” he said dryly. “Relax, Una.”

Una? He said it with such easy familiarity that her face flooded with color. No one had ever dared addressed her with such ease and assurance when she was a princess. It gave her hope for the future. “How far north have you been?” she asked, and her voice sounded husky even to her own ears.

“Strethneal,” he said shortly.

Oh. She closed her eyes, her stomach lurching as her rising hopes were immediately dashed to the floor. She knew what that meant. Sir Armand had been at the siege of Demoyne, she thought with sudden despair. She had to ask that foolish question, even though she knew it was always a mistake to go down this route. She thought of Lord Mycroft, her grim jailor of three years. His son and heir had died at Demoyne, in the mud and the rain and the misery and pain of that conflict. She remembered the hatred that would flash out of Lady Mycroft’s eyes toward her and was glad it was dark, and she could not see her husband’s face.

She had been foolish to cling to the hope that perhaps Armand de Bussell had not been touched by the evil of Karadok’s civil war, but she had always known it was a forlorn one. The whole country was scarred, she thought bleakly, and it would take more than her own lifetime to heal.

He removed his hand from her waist to run up and down her upper arm. “You’re trembling,” he said, sounding shocked. “Is it me? Una? Is it my touch?”

“No, no, of course not.” She wiped a hand over her face in the dark, as she strove to make her voice steady.

He swore, sitting up abruptly. “You’re crying! Did I hurt you on our wedding night?” His voice had an urgent undertone. “I knew I must have been clumsy sot, but I never imagined—”

“No, no,” she protested, rolling back toward him and reaching out to touch his arm. “It’s not that. I’m just being foolish, it’s nothing of that sort. Indeed, Sir Armand you have been nothing but considerate, I assure you.“

“Una,” he pulled her firmly into his arms, his voice urgent and low. “If that’s true, then why are you shaking like a leaf?”

So startled was she, by the physical contact, that she could not even think to tell him anything but the truth. “It’s silly,” she said stiltedly, wiping her wet cheeks again. “It’s just … talking of the North. Of the war,” she forced out.

“We weren’t talking of the war.”

She looked straight into his face, even though she could not make out his expression in the dark. “You said you had been to Strethneal,” she said forthrightly. “I know what that means.”

His arms tightened around her a moment in the dark. “You were there?” he asked, and she could hear the incredulity in his voice. “At Demoyne?”

She nodded, unable to speak the words aloud and his hand was suddenly at the back of her head urging her to rest her wet face against his chest. “Ah, Una, Una, my poor girl,” he murmured, along with other soothing nonsense words until she closed her eyes and let the comfort of his warm body soak into her limbs, as he rocked her in his embrace.

Even Estrilda had never babied her like this, she thought wonderingly, as she took comfort in the press of his warm body and the husky voice in her ear. Her nurse had been a brisk, no-nonsense woman who had shown her affection by the assiduousness of her service rather than affectionate gesture.

“I’m being silly,” she mumbled. “Doubtless you had a far worse time there, than I.”

“They should never have taken you to such a place,” he said vehemently. “What can they have been thinking?”

She lay still, not liking to tell him that for those four years, all her life had been nothing but a succession of battlefields. She was oddly touched by his indignation. She let herself be weak and relax just for a moment or two before lifting her head. “I’m quite well now,” she said quietly but with conviction.

“You’re sure?” he asked gruffly.

“Absolutely sure. I must—”

“Don’t apologize,” he said, guessing her intent and rearranging her, so she once more presented her back to him. Then he slipped an arm around her again, quite easily, as though it were something he had done a hundred times before. “Now go to sleep,” he recommended. “I’ll be waking you in the morning soon enough.”

What an extraordinary change in her circumstances, she marveled, that meant she was now lying here in the dark next to this man. Una lay awake long after she heard Armand’s breathing even out into sleep. Her thoughts were troubled and gave her no peace. She stared up at the ceiling above her and gave in to the fact she would probably find no sleep this night. It was not unusual for her to be thus deprived. She had lived her whole life on a knife’s edge and had often woken to the sound of a soldier’s footfall approaching to urge her to dress and flee or even to the sound of clashing swords nearby.

She had been schooled from a young age to never accept wine except from a trusted source and her father had always employed tasters to sample their every meal. In her old voluminous gowns, it had been easy to tip the contents of a goblet down her wide sleeves. These precautions had to fall by the wayside when she spent three years under Lord Mycroft’s household, but in any case, they had been an honorable family, even if they bore no love for her. She could not imagine stiff, autocratic Lord Mycroft lacing her meat with poison, though his wife perhaps might have been sorely tempted.

At the Southern palace, her dear Estrilda had insisted on drinking and eating a mouthful of any dish sent to her rooms, and at the public feasts she had eaten but sparingly. Her gowns had grown a good deal looser, and it was hard to remember that in her youth she had been round and plump. Perhaps, she thought folding her hands across her stomach, in old age she could relax enough to grow a little stout. That would be nice.

She was not sure why tonight she had eschewed the wine, although in truth, her husband had pulled such a face at the sip he had taken that it was not to be wondered at. The food too had been unappetizing, greasy and tough, so that could account for why she had pushed her plate away, largely untouched.

If she were truthful though, it could not entirely account for it. In part, her abstinence had been due to her own finely-tuned instincts, tingling away and warning her to be on her guard. But why was that, she pondered, turning it over in her mind?

Armand himself had been put out by the fact their hosts were not who he expected. Was that what had triggered her unease? She went over their reception by the smiling landlord who had explained he had taken over the business some twelve months earlier. Could he be an agent of the collapsed North? His accent had not been Northern, but that did not rule out such a thing.

She knew only too well that certain factions would like to gain control of her as a figurehead for their planned uprisings and rebellion. Even under house arrest, she had received smuggled messages, which she had been forced to burn, and twice the house had been breached by rebels wanting to free her and incredulous of her disinclination to go with them.

If this did turn out to be some attempt to grab her and spirit her away to some fortress full of loyalists to the Blechmarsh cause, she would resist it with her last breath, she thought with determination. She could imagine nothing worse than returning to that life of hiding and running away, a mere pawn in someone else’s game. Especially, when freedom had been almost within her grasp.