Nobody's Lady (12 page)

If I had known then what I know now, would those days have been different?

If I had apologized for dooming him to that fate from the start, would he have ever been cold and cruel? He was kind during our first meeting.

The memory of him tending to my hand in the darkness brought a raging heat to my face. I wasn’t angry at him—I had no cause to be angry at him then.

What if I’d tended to that kindness and learned to love him before my seventeenth birthday?

What if I’d been able to push Jurij out of my heart back then? At least Jurij and Elfriede would have been happier. Ailill would have been happier—if he’d never gotten to know that stubborn side of me. I would have been …

“What shall we do for dinner this evening?” Ailill’s knight would have snagged my rook when I wasn’t paying attention. I’d have been focused instead on those pale brown eyes.

“Mother invited us to dine with her and Father. Friede wants to ask my opinion about her gown for her wedding.”

“A lovely idea! We shall invite them here. It is far roomier.” Ailill would have signaled to a specter at that and relayed his instructions. He would have grinned as his attention turned back toward me and I moved my queen diagonally across the board. “Perhaps you should put on the gown you wore for our wedding for the occasion.”

“It’s just a dinner, not the wedding. Besides, it’s not
our
wedding day. We already had that with the Returning.” I would have been blushing then—I could feel the heat in my cheeks even now. Ailill would have caught my queen with a pawn. I wouldn’t be able to believe how distracted I was, how I couldn’t have seen the danger I’d just put the poor piece in. “Thank you again, for saving my mother
…
” I would have to say something sobering, otherwise I would never have been able to tear my eyes from him. “I still wonder, at that miracle.”

“You need not thank me.” Ailill would have leaned over the board, his elbows knocking over the pieces, neither of us caring. “I would do anything for you.” His face would have been mere inches from mine, his breath like a surge of fire across my cheek. “Thank you, for loving me. That is the true wonder
…
”

This is ridiculous.
My fantasies couldn’t capture Ailill properly. He was cold, not warm. He was stubborn, not agreeable. The whole thing rang false. My dreams could never capture happiness—whatever that was like.

Of course, if I’d been happy, I’d have had no reason to leave, voices calling me or not. I’d have had no reason to cause Ailill to break the curse. But then I’d also have had no reason to create the curse to begin with, and Ailill wouldn’t have loved me, and Jurij wouldn’t have loved Elfriede, and Elfriede wouldn’t have loved Jurij.

It was all so confusing. I couldn’t lay there a moment longer, lost in my thoughts.

I flung back the blankets and swung my legs over the side of the bed, my toes scuffing the rough wood floor. In the dark, I could just make out Arrow’s head lifting. “Shh,” I whispered, wrapping my cloak around my shoulders. It was still summer, but the season was waning and the nights had grown colder. I slid on my boots and tiptoed to the door. Arrow clopped toward the moonlight, his toenails scuffing the floor with each step.

I patted his head. “Stay.” He nudged his nose past my hand, determined to fit his entire body under my arm and out the door. He never did respond to me that well. I let him go and followed. As I shut the door behind me, I spared one last glance at the pile of hay. Dog and master were blissfully breathing, lost in the respite of their dreams.

“Arrow!” I shout-whispered. “Here! Don’t go too far!”

Arrow clearly hadn’t insisted on coming out to do his business. Or if he had, he’d forgotten the task entirely and taken to frolicking in the fields of flowers like it was the perfectly natural thing to do when the rest of the village was sleeping. “Arrow!” But he took off even farther.

I’d planned to get a taste of fresh air. Maybe take a moment away from the man I’d once loved—perhaps still loved—sleeping there in the shack beside me. To remind myself that I was finally free to walk away from my problems, to push aside the anger in my head. Regardless, it was clear I was following Arrow’s plan now.

“Arrow! Come!” My voice grew louder farther from the cottage, where I wasn’t concerned about waking Jurij and having him interrupt my escape. “Arrow!” But he wasn’t listening. He ran straight through the fields as if chasing something only he could see.

The moonlight was just bright enough that I could make my way after him. He was heading home—to Mother and Father’s home, to Elfriede. If I could just grab him before he whined too loud outside their door, I could go back without them ever being any wiser.

But damn, that dog was fast.

I gave up on calling after him and headed for the eastern path, not because I cared about getting my dress and cloak stained with the dew forming on the grass, but because I thought I had a better shot of running fast on the dirt path. It worked, but there was still no hope for catching up to him before he got there. By the time I came over the last hill, he was already there panting outside my parents’ door. The slightly
cracked
door.

I froze. Elfriede seemed to be smiling as she rubbed her hands over his head. I wondered if I should turn back, leave it to her to give Arrow back or to keep him, pretend I never knew he’d run off. But Arrow gave me away, and Elfriede saw me.

I swallowed and pulled the cloak tighter at my neck. “He ran off,” I said, taking a few careful steps closer.

Elfriede’s lips soured, and she wiped her cheeks with the palm of one hand, the other still digging in behind Arrow’s ear, which made him melt in joy beside her. She looked back over her shoulder—a fire was still going, albeit a dying one—and shut the door behind her. “Take him.” She glared down at Arrow, as if he were the one she was talking to.

I stepped closer, running a hand atop Arrow’s head. He looked back up at his former mistress, his tail wagging like he had no sense that he wasn’t wanted. But I didn’t feel that from her, either. “You can keep him if you want.”

Elfriede sniffled. “No.”

“He’s
your
dog.” I patted Arrow’s head. “He’s always been your dog. It doesn’t matter if he was born from Bow.”

“It matters to me.” Elfriede inhaled a long, tortured sniff, fighting the mucous her pinched tears wanted to let loose from her nose. “Mother and Father are asleep already. I don’t want him waking them up. Go.”

“Sure.” I turned, laying pressure on Arrow’s neck to guide him away, but he wouldn’t budge. I pinched my lips together as Elfriede stared at Arrow. Her eyes sparkled too fiercely in the moonlight. “Why were you with Jaron?” I’d meant to think it, but I was asking it, even though I had an idea of what kind of answer was in store for me.

Elfriede’s eyebrows arched slightly, and she used the back of her hand to wipe furiously at each eye. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

I nodded. “Maybe not. But he’s not exactly known for his faithfulness these days.”

Elfriede glowered at me. “Maybe I don’t expect faithfulness from men anymore. Aren’t you the one insisting women need to start treating men differently?”

“Where did you hear that?” Arrow slid down, throwing his front legs over my feet, as if deciding he and I were going to be standing there indefinitely. “Before today, you hadn’t said a word to me in weeks!”

Elfriede took another ragged breath, too proud and dainty to blow her nose into her sleeve in front of me. “I don’t need to speak to you. Everyone knows you’re going around with all the young men these days, giving them ideas about how they’re finally free from women.”

“What are you talking about?”

Elfriede jutted her chin out, either to appear standoffish or to keep the snot from flowing. “I
saw
you with four men.”

I flung my hands up in the air. “I wasn’t
courting
them!”

Elfriede seemed as oblivious to my words as she was to common sense. “Not only my husband, no. You couldn’t just keep it in the family. But Marden’s and Roslyn’s, too!”

Of course. Her friends. The ones I wouldn’t touch with a three-foot stick, although as a child I did swat at them with Elgar, which was basically the same thing. “And you’re spending time with Jurij’s
aunt
’s former man.”

She seemed to hear
that
. “It’s not the same.” She squeezed her arms tightly across her chest. “Alvilda never had the slightest interest in Jaron, and you
know
it.”

“Maybe not, but Mother did!”

Elfriede stopped speaking, but her jaw hung open a moment before she snapped it shut. “That’s a lie!”

“No, it’s not!” I pointed to the door behind her. “Ask her!”

Elfriede threw her arms into the air and sniffed loudly. “Sure, let me wake both Mother
and
Father and ask if Father wasn’t the only man Mother ever—”

The door opened behind Elfriede. A cold sweat formed on my forehead, and my cheeks flushed. I hadn’t spoken to my parents in so long. It was Father, looking every bit as disheveled and empty as when he was first parted from Mother. “What is going on—Noll? Is something wrong?”

I stared into my father’s bloodshot eyes, a haze of fatigue over his face that seemed to have no hope of lifting. I swallowed. I’d barely seen him the past few weeks—no, months now. I’d run from the castle, but I’d also run from everything else. I’d tried to put it all behind me, thinking things would get better in my absence. “No,” I said, too late, after a moment of staring. “No, Arrow just ran away, and I came back to get him.”

Father grunted and turned his attention to the dog at my feet. A flicker of a smile lit up his face and even made his tired eyes brighter. “Aw, there he is! Missed you, boy!” He crouched and ruffled Arrow playfully behind the ears. Arrow lapped up the affection, rolling over onto his back.

I raised an eyebrow. Elfriede’s lips were pinched as she turned to go back in. “If you like him so much, Father, he can stay.” She glared at me. “But I better not see you here tomorrow, demanding I let you take him back.”

I scoffed. “Wouldn’t dream of it. But if I do miss him, I’ll just send
one of my men
along to pick him up.”

Elfriede went inside without another word.

Father murmured in an infantile voice from my feet. “Good boy. Good boy, that’s a sweet little boy!” He finally seemed to notice I was still standing there and looked up, his eyes hopeful. “So the dog is staying?”

“If that’s what Elfriede wants,” I said. “I don’t really have a say in anything anymore.”

Father patted Arrow absentmindedly, looking back into the open cottage door behind him. “I have a feeling nobody does, Noll. Not anymore.”

I searched for the moon, wincing as I realized just what it hovered over in the eastern sky. “If we ever did.” Was he watching now, the lord who was “always watching”? I tore my gaze from the silhouette of the castle in the night and nodded at Father. “Good night, Father.”

He didn’t look up from Arrow, but his patting of the dog’s stomach slowed. “Good night, Noll.”

Arrow flipped over and turned toward a sound in the woods beside us that only he could hear.

But then I heard it, too. The turning of the wheels enveloped me with the feelings of nostalgia and dread I’d experienced when I’d heard them every day for months after I refused to visit the lord. My eyes fixed on the path to the woods, my body aflutter with anticipation and revulsion, my mind spinning and as conflicted as ever.

The black carriage emerged from the edge of the woods, the moonlight glistening off its roof. My heart beat so fast, I could barely make out the pounding of the horses’ hooves. Not quickly, no, never quickly with him. He had nowhere to be in such a hurry. But then again, I couldn’t be sure. Not with the way the moment slowed down impossibly so, cutting me off from everything else, from all my other senses.

White seemed to shine as bright as the sun in the dark carriage window. I thought of his paleness, how his brown hair framed his face, so lacking in color. But my eyes caught his—just for a moment, but a moment that lasted—and they were red. Of course. One of the specters. An Ailill. Him but not him at all.

The specter turned his head and looked forward. I felt dismissed, ignored. Nothing to a ghost of a man. Time resumed its normal pace, and the carriage fled west down the dirt road, fading into dust and darkness.

“What are they up to so late?” I’d almost forgotten Father was still behind me.

I clutched my forearm. “I don’t know.” I shivered from the cool breeze. “But it’s none of my business.”

And it wouldn’t be ever again.

“You thought we were
what
?” Darwyn rolled a wooden wolf in his palm, dropping a few crumbs from the bread he was chewing atop the wolf’s nose.

I yanked the wolf from his hand so he could devote himself to properly eating and flicked it to send the crumbs onto the blanket. Annoyed with the way the yellow crumbs stood out amongst my forest of animals, I slapped the wolf down next to a doe and picked the crumbs up between my fingers. “Courting women. At the tavern.”