Enchanting the King (The Beauty's Beast Fantasy Series) (3 page)

The stranger stirred again, and his eyes fluttered open—a startling gray-blue color. “
Getfalen hwaa
?”

Aliénor’s breath caught.

He tried to shift in her arms and look at her, but the movement seemed to overwhelm his strength, and his eyes rolled back into his head. He’d lapsed into unconsciousness by the time the soldier had returned with a canteen.

“What did he say?” her guard asked as he took a deep drink of water for himself.

Aliénor cleared her throat. “Gibberish. He’s disoriented, I think.” A lie. She’d understood his words perfectly well. The problem was, he had been speaking the language of Lyond—the language of her nation’s greatest enemy.

The wounded man did not awaken before the army stopped to make camp that night.

Noémi tried to distract Aliénor as she waited for the rest of the army to arrive at camp, but it was no use. Aliénor had only half an ear for anything said to her. As they walked to her tent, her belly went tight from anxiety, anticipating her husband’s arrival.

Her other lady-in-waiting, Violette, was already at the tent when they arrived. Violette was a pretty child of fifteen or so, thin and delicate-boned with dark, copper-colored skin. Her tightly curled black hair was still in a neat coronet braid atop her head despite the trials of the road. Aliénor’s own hair was a disordered mess atop her head, her braids slipping down as the hairpins fell loose from her baby-thin hair.

Violette smiled a greeting at them and continued to direct a few of the male servants as they bustled about, arranging the two feather mattresses Aliénor slept on each night. The mattresses were a ridiculous extravagance, of course, and every time Aliénor looked at them, she felt a fresh flush of mortification. She’d been so naïve when she’d left home.
Feather mattresses in this wilderness
. Yet Philippe had not forbidden them. Indeed, Philippe and his closest officers slept on feather mattresses of their own.

Noémi persuaded Aliénor to sit beside her on a camp stool, apart from the activity of Violette and the servants. “The prince might be impressed by your initiative, my lady. He might be pleased.”

Aliénor snorted.

“He was pleased when you helped him organize this expedition. He doesn’t always mind when you take charge of things.”

Aliénor twisted her mouth into a smile that had nothing at all to do with happiness. “Those efforts pleased my husband because they served his ambitions. He needed my treasury to fund this adventure, and he needed my influence to convince the other lords to follow him. Without the lords loyal to me, there would not have been enough men to undertake this campaign.” Once she’d accomplished those tasks for him, raising the money and the men, Aliénor was supposed to have stayed at home, waiting for Philippe’s triumphant return.

Aliénor rose to begin her restless pacing once more, but both ladies jumped as someone yanked the tent flap back. Philippe stormed inside, his pale skin flushed with anger. He was a slight man, slender, but the anger on his face made Aliénor recoil from him. Noémi shifted in her chair but seemed to restrain her first protective impulse to leap in front of Aliénor.

“You,
out
.” He flung a hand behind him, and Noémi hustled out with a quick, worried look at Aliénor. Violette and the servants scattered as well, abandoning the mattresses in a lopsided heap for the moment.

Philippe circled Aliénor and glowered. “You should not have risked yourself. There might have been Tiochene soldiers still about.”

“Husband—”

“You are meddling where you are not needed, are not
wanted
.”

She folded her hands together behind her back to hide how they shook. “I found the injured man myself. My guard captain was not—”

“
Bah
. One injured soldier? Is that worth the life of a princess of Jerdun?
No
.”

She gritted her back teeth, feeling again like she rode an unsteady mount, and at any moment she might lose control of her wild temper. “I thought the soldier might tell us what happened, how the raiders attacked. Then we could take better precautions for ourselves on the road ahead.”

Philippe blew his breath out through his teeth, looking deflated at this sound reasoning. But then he straightened and waggled his finger in her face. “You should not even have been riding at the front. I knew I should have made you stay in the wagon.”

She fought to maintain her composure, but the wild stallion of her temper broke from her control. “I did not go on this quest to ride around like some fragile pearl in a jewelry box—”

“
Always
you put yourself forward.
Always
you seek more than is proper. You are my wife. You belong to me, and you should damn well start learning to obey me.”

Ever the same argument, ever the same problems between us
. She scrubbed both hands over her face, trying to rub the fatigue away. Her efforts were in vain. This weariness went bone-deep, an infection in her blood, her very spirit, which seemed impossible to overcome.

“Aliénor.” He must have sensed how near she was to breaking entirely, for his tone had gentled. She heard him approach but could not make herself face him. He caught her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry, my dear. I was just so worried for your safety when I heard what you had done.” He planted a chaste kiss on the back of her hand. “Join me for dinner tonight?”

He framed it as a question, but Aliénor knew she had little choice. He was right: she was his wife. Her movements and every last detail of her life could be dictated by him should he choose to exercise that power. “Of course, my lord.”

“No more madcap adventures, my girl.” He patted her cheek as he said it but hurried out of the tent before she could make any reply to him.

She folded herself back into her camp stool and massaged her throbbing temples. At a rustle of cloth, she looked up. Noémi returning.

“Well?” her handmaiden asked.

Aliénor puffed out a mirthless laugh. “I know how thin the walls of this tent are. Don’t pretend ignorance. You know how it went.”

“
Hmm
. It’s not…entirely unreasonable of him, you know.”

“To expect better obedience from me? I know. As a loyal subject I owe that to him, and how much more so as his wife? Did you have such problems with your husbands?”

Noémi tilted her hand in a
so-so
gesture. “The first one, I suppose. At first. But then he broke me to bridle. Or I broke him.” Her teeth flashed in a smile. “Or perhaps better to say we learned to work in tandem, like the horses that pull your wagon. To aim ourselves and work together rather than trying to run away in opposite directions. You only end up with a mess of tangled reins and broken legs that way, my lady.”

“I know it.”

“My second man, well. I married him for his looks, and we didn’t much leave the bedroom. We worked well enough together
there
.”

Aliénor flopped back in her chair, combing her fingers through her hair and mussing her braid. “So perhaps it’s me. Perhaps I’m not made for marriage. Perhaps I lack that womanly trait, that ability to combine my will with another’s to make us both better.”

“Yes, or—” Noémi bit the word off and pinched her lips tightly closed, as if the words might fight their way free despite her.

“Or what?”

Noémi shook her head, but Aliénor knew well enough what she would have said. What they were both thinking:
Or perhaps you and Philippe are simply not well suited
. But neither of them could say that aloud. Jerdic women married for life. To contemplate leaving Philippe, being free of him…

Noémi touched her hand. “For both your sakes, my lady, perhaps you should try harder?”

Aliénor flinched.
Marriage is for life. I took this vow for life
. However ill-considered it was, however young she’d been—
This is no good. Sitting here wallowing will accomplish nothing
. “Noémi, let us see if that wounded soldier is awake.”

“An excellent idea, Your Highness.”

Thomas awoke in pain, disoriented. When he opened his eyes and looked around, he recognized neither his surroundings nor his caretakers.

“Easy, easy. You’re safe.” The lady had a pleasant voice, young and clear, so it took him a moment to understand the spike of alarm that arose inside him at the words. It wasn’t until she spoke again—“How are you feeling?”—that he understood his instinctive fear.

The woman was speaking Jerdic, the language of Jerdun. Thomas eased onto his elbows and smoothed the lines of his face to stillness. When he answered her, he answered her in perfect Court Jerdic. “Where are the rest of my men?” There were a few other injured men laid out on pallets on the ground in this tent as he was, but none that he recognized.

She tilted her head, looking surprised as her large brown eyes widened. She had a lovely face with strong cheekbones and a determined chin. Her skin was ivory pale but dotted with freckles, and her hair was a light red-gold braided in a somewhat mussed coronet atop her head after the Jerdic fashion. A married woman most likely and, judging by her cultured accent, a lady.
No matter. Too young for you, old soldier
. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, nearly half his age. Still, she was exceedingly pleasant to look at.

She stared at him from narrowed eyes for a long moment and cleared her throat. “I’m so sorry. You are the only…the only survivor we’ve found so far.”

Thomas gritted his teeth, tamping down the wave of despair that threatened to swamp him.

“I’m sorry.” She made a small flinch of movement, as if she would have touched his hand, but then her eyes fluttered downward again. She kept her hands tightly folded in her lap.

He wet his lips. “I think I owe my salvation to you, fair lady. It was you who found me, yes?” He thought he remembered her face now, hovering over his before he’d blacked out. “May I know my rescuer’s name?”

“I am Princess Aliénor. Of Jerdun.” Her gaze flicked to his face, avidly studying him for some reaction.

So this is young Philippe’s bride
. Thomas knew of her husband by reputation—a weak, petulant child—but Thomas knew nothing of this woman. A duke’s daughter, perhaps? Was he remembering right? A particularly insistent thread of pain uncoiled in his forehead, but he still smiled pleasantly for this woman. A soldier never shows weakness in front of his enemies.

“And you?” the Princess Aliénor asked, and there was more than a bit of challenge in the question.

“I’m called Thomas.” True enough, if incomplete information. He should have invented a minor barony or claimed residence in the colonies here, but some foolish whim inside him disliked the idea of lying to this good lady. She had saved his life, after all. Falsehoods and trickery seemed a poor repayment for that.

“Can you tell us what happened?”

He scrubbed the back of his hand over his brow. The clang of swords rang in his ears. The smells of piss and offal and blood prickled in his nostrils. If he closed his eyes he would be back on that pass through the valley, under attack, watching his men die… “We were attacked, my lady. A pack of raiders swooped down on us in the mountain pass. They had magic users, more than I’ve ever seen together at one time. Their bows rained arrows on us from all sides so that the sun was entirely blacked out, and each bolt found its target with deadly aim. They struck fast and hard, cutting the rest of my men down with fire spells. Failing that, they used their hatchets and swords.”

He and his men might have been able to fight them off but for the alarming amount of magic at the raiders’ disposal. Magicians were rare in Lyond and Jerdun, and the practice of even simple magic outside the nobility was frowned upon in both nations. He’d assumed that to be the case everywhere. How could the Tiochene raiders here possibly have so many magicians? Nearly one in three among the Tiochene fighters seemed to have had a least a small amount of Talent. “I led— Our army retreated, fleeing for our lives, but the Tiochene caught up to us here on the river road. They…they showed no mercy.” His eyes stung.

“Here, have some water.” Princess Aliénor lifted a flask toward him, and she held it to his lips when his hands proved too unsteady for him to do it himself. He sipped a moment, then nodded his thanks.

Behind Princess Aliénor’s shoulder, her stout lady companion pursed her lips in disapproval. “How did
you
survive?”

“I was knocked off my horse and separated from my men—from the others. I climbed that tree you found me in and kept my back to the mountain. I must have passed out after that. It’s a miracle no one found me before you—”

Before he could finish, a young man threw back the flap to the infirmary. The boy swept into the room like he owned the place. He had a mass of waving dark hair and heavy-lidded brown eyes that gave him a sleepy appearance. Prince Philippe, Thomas guessed. He’d never met the prince, but the lad had the look of the late King Bernard about him. Philippe’s face was narrow and thin with delicate, somehow fragile features. His eyes bulged with anger as he stepped closer and saw the Princess Aliénor by Thomas’s bed.

The lady, for her part, rose to her feet and stared the prince down with calm composure. “My lord, I was just checking on this survivor.”

The boy let out a low, quick huff and whipped his gaze away from her to glare at Thomas. “You, soldier. More survivors from your party have wandered into our camp. Shall I take you to them?”

Princess Aliénor held her hand out, palm down in a flat gesture of denial. “He is not well enough—”

“No, no, I will come. Show me.” Thomas shot her an apologetic glance as he pushed slowly to his feet. He was dizzy and weak, but damned if he’d let this arrogant princeling see it.

Princess Aliénor flicked a glance at her handmaiden. The larger woman immediately stepped in to catch Thomas’s elbow and let him lean his weight on her side. He gave his helper a quick, thankful nod. She returned him a brief, irritated grimace in return. The handmaid clearly did not like him.

“This way.” Prince Philippe turned and started to go. When he realized Princess Aliénor was not immediately at his side, he grabbed her by the arm, towing her out beside him as he whispered angrily in her ear.