Page 53 of The Royal Curse

Damn it, that was simple cowardice. And my alternative would be going home with my tail between my legs to admit defeat to my mother, who’d lecture me about my recklessness anyway, praise Andreas for bringing me home safely, and reduce me in his eyes—and mine—to a childish idiot. He already saw me as an embarrassment.

No. If I wasn’t a man now, when would I be?

I tried very hard not to notice how much my motivation for going on resembled Dario’s urge to prove himself, and firmly tamped down my reservations about the plan.

With (I hoped) manly (but entirely feigned) confidence, I said, “Unless you can give me an incontrovertible reason why we should turn back for Surbino, I expect us to be on the road as soon as possible. And wanting to keep me wrapped in cotton wool in a locked box to make my mother happy doesn’t count as an incontrovertible reason,” I added waspishly, before I could stop myself.

Andreas straightened his shoulders, hands clasped behind him, and for a moment I was transported back to the day we met in the palace stable, when Andreas had stood in this same posture, that of a soldier showing respect for a prince he didn’t particularly like. The last of the warmth went out of me.

A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Your wish is my command, Your Highness,” Andreas said, bowed curtly, and strode past me, already giving orders to Salvius as he passed. His voice faded in and out as my temples throbbed. “…horses watered…his lordship’s saddlebags, take particular care with…”

My saddlebags. The potion. Damn it. I’d probably be on a boat tomorrow when it was time to take it, and if the pains came on early, which they very well might given the unprecedented ways in which I’d been treating my condition…it was too unpredictable. My bags might be put away in a hold, the boat might be moving too much for me to get it without spilling it everywhere, and I simply couldn’t bear the thought of breaking down and starting to scream and beg in public, in front of my guards. It made my flesh crawl to imagine it.

Which meant testing the potion to its limits would need to wait.

I slipped upstairs and quickly unpacked the bag in which I’d stashed the bottles, my hands shaking as I pulled one out and yanked out the cork. The taste of the first swig made me grimace and nearly gag, but I choked down a second anyway. Gods, it tasted so much worse now that I had Andreas’s cock to compare it to as an alternative.

With everything stowed away again, I left my bags for whichever of the guards Andreas had assigned to take them down, and went to the taproom to see if I could find some tea before we left.

We rode out an hour later, the moon peeking through the clouds enough to cast deep shadows beneath the trees lining the road and limn the mud under the horses’ hooves with a silvery gleam. Andreas rode beside me, his silence almost a tangible thing, more eloquent than speech would’ve been. The tightness of his lips and the set of his jaw, the tension in his broad shoulders, and the way he kept his gaze anywhere but on me said everything.

Dario spurred his horse a little bit ahead to lead the way. The others were strung out behind us on the narrow road, keeping to the edges to avoid the worst of the sticky mud.

At this hour of the night the road was deserted. We didn’t pass any other travelers, not even a hunter or a messenger. Wind rustled and whispered around us, rattling the bare twigs of the deciduous trees and shushing through the evergreens. Wisps of cloud passed across the quarter moon. An owl hooted, and another answered cheerfully in a slightly higher timbre.

Even the fucking owls were happily mated, damn them, and they probably didn’t have queens for mothers either.

The monotony of the ride and the rhythm of Fluffy’s hooves lulled me into a fugue, helped along by my exhaustion. Gods, I’d have gone to bed long since if I’d stayed at the inn.

I might even have gone to bed in Andreas’s arms, my head tucked under his chin, his hand resting on the swell of my ass, everything right with the world.

My heart gave a sad, unsteady little lurch and my eyelids drooped.

“We’ll stop here for a few minutes,” Andreas said, and I forced myself upright, trying to appear as if I’d been alert the whole time and not slumping in the saddle. I glanced over and found him turning his head quickly, as if he didn’t want to be caught looking at me. “I think I hear a stream.”

Dario called back, “There’s a better spot another little ways ahead, sir, I stopped there earlier. The stream goes closer to the road, and the horses can drink without our having to pick through the trees.”

“Your Highness,” Andreas said, pitching his voice very low, “if you need to rest now—”

My cheeks burned in the chill of the night. “I’m fine,” I snapped. Damn it, he’d seen me falling asleep. How pathetic could I be? All of the soldiers in the party were wide awake. “I can ride as long as you can, thank you.”

It took the startled, ringing silence following that announcement for me to realize how I’d sounded. Someone behind me snickered and then quickly coughed. My head went light as all the blood rushed…somewhere, and my cheeks probably glowed. Bright spots swam in front of me in the darkness.

“We’ll go on for now,” Andreas said, his tone so dry it could’ve soaked up all the water in that stream we were going to find. “Lead the way, Dario.”

“Yes, sir,” Dario said.

Silence fell again. I didn’t hear any more laughter from the men, but that could’ve been because Andreas had twisted around in the saddle and glared over his shoulder for a long and quelling moment.

And then we were riding together, not speaking, with everyone else carefully not speaking, and if I hadn’t suppressed my thrice-damned magic down to nothing again with a fresh dose of that thrice-damned potion, I’d have exerted every iota of power I had to open the ground beneath me and let it swallow me up forever.

At long last, Dario reined in. “We’re here! The stream’s on the left. Your Highness, if you’ll allow me?” He waited until I’d come up beside him, and then waved a genial hand toward the stream and bowed like a butler inviting a guest to the dining room.

“Thank you,” I said, and I spurred forward as he fell in behind me, only too glad of an excuse to get a little farther away from Andreas. “You stopped here earlier? Is the water running clear, or is it muddy?”

“Clear enough, Your Highness,” Dario said, his voice a little strained. Gods, I hadn’t meant to sound as if I’d blame him for a dirty forest stream. He needed to calm down. At this point, I didn’t care about the damn bridge, and it’d been an honest mistake anyway. “Would you like to dismount and let me water your horse?”

I nodded at him and jumped down, slightly more stiffly than usual given the way the muscles pulled between my legs. How long would it take before my body no longer bore the marks of Andreas’s possession of me?

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