Page 52 of The Captive's Curse
I choked it all down, the rising hair on the back of my neck and the tingling in my fingers giving me an instinctual warning that I ought to take care.
Great care, even. The sense of danger mounted, a thickening of the air, an urge to take a few steps back.
“Yes,” I said, because the silence had stretched too long. “It was frightening to be held to ransom.” I couldn’t resist adding, somewhat maliciously, “And Bruno refusing to ransom me was so terribly upsetting.”
Hans smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m sure it was. Wheredidthey take you, anyway? A fortress, isn’t it? It must be,to hold all the men I’ve been told he has in his train. Perhaps even a castle?”
Acastle? And now I was confused all over again. Of course he wanted to catch Enzo, because he needed a prize to present to the queen to demonstrate his effectiveness as her Lord Constable.
But…what possible difference could it make to him where Enzo had his base, if he could find it in the end? Hans’s drunken speculations about the Mad Lord’s castle surely hadn’t been serious, had they? And if they were, then—why on earth?
“I can’t talk about it,” I stammered, hoping I sounded more distressed and weak than angry and suspicious. “I’m too—besides, you know, my sense of direction is so poor.” I batted my eyelashes and simpered. If he thought I was a pretty, empty-headed slut, I might as well take advantage of it. And honestly…aside from the part where I pretended to be stupid, it was leaning into my strengths, and I wasn’t ashamed to admit it. “I think I set out from Montefime to the south.” The only road from Montefime went south until you reached the fork. “I really don’t have the strength to discuss it now.”
“We’ll speak again later, then, when you’ve recovered from your ordeal,” he said, doggedly missing the point. “Perhaps this evening. We can have a glass of wine, spend a quiet hour—”
Oh, no. I knew where this would be leading. And if he thought to occupy my mouth in another way if I wouldn’t use it to talk, he’d need to grow used to disappointment.
“So kind of you,” I said breathily, “but I’m a poet, you know. I need solitude to express my feelings in verse. For now, anyway. As soon as I’m ready to speak to someone about it, of course it will be you. Perhaps tomorrow. Or next week. I’ll faint if you ask me more questions now!”
Hans’s hand twitched, and his cheeks went a bit red, but otherwise he kept his frustration in check admirably. I was almost impressed.
He sketched a shallow bow, and said, “I’ll look forward to it. Very soon, I hope. Surely you want these criminals caught and punished. And as Queen Lessandra’s Lord Constable, that is my purview and my prerogative. I know you’ll be cooperative as soon as you’re able.”
Had I imagined the hint of a threat there? No, I didn’t think I had.
“Of course,” I murmured. “Now—I ought to take that cup of coffee upstairs. Where I have my lute and my books.”And where you can’t follow me, I didn’t say.
With obvious reluctance, Hans handed me the coffee he’d poured for me, and I pasted on my best impression of a smile, fleeing all the way to the safety of my locked bedchamber before I felt secure.
Gods. It probably was my duty as a loyal subject of the queen to tell Hans anything I knew about how to find Enzo and his people, but the very thought of doing so made me utterly sick. It felt like a betrayal.
Which…they were criminals—in a technical sense, although thinking of Beatrice and her little son that way, or even Leander with his neatly kept ledgers, strained my definition of the word. But were they really so terrible? Logically, I knew that I’d thought of them as nothing but bandits myself until very recently. And I knew that Enzo broke the queen’s laws every time he held a hostage or robbed a merchant going through the pass.
But he’d rescued Prince Nikola and his escort. He hadn’t hurt me. All of the children who lived at the castle were happy and well fed and cheerful, and who’d ever heard of ruthless bandit encampments with happy children, and…oh, my headached trying to justify it. I did know that I didn’t like Hans and didn’t want to help him, and that the idea of Enzo on a scaffold gave me a sharp, stabbing pain in my chest.
Even if he had walked away from me without a backward glance, the bastard. And hadn’t fucked me before he sent me home. And had never even kissed me.
I drank my coffee in high dudgeon and spent the rest of the day settling into my rooms, fiddling with my lute, and bemoaning the weather, which remained hideous and kept me from putting so much as a toe outdoors.
Four more days passed similarly, with me more or less barricaded inside my chambers and taking my meals in my private sitting room, avoiding Hans and Bruno by dint of staying behind a locked door.
All the while, I remained horribly conscious of the clock ticking down to my curse’s resurgence. It’d been years since I had to pay so much attention to it. The solution now was the same as it had been all that time: simply enjoy myself, take a lover or three, and not think of it at all.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I told myself it was because I’d inevitably need to deal with Hans if I went out and about, and that I was tired, and that I had plenty of time before it became critical, anyway.
Those were all lies, and I knew it, and I ached for something—someone—I couldn’t have, who’d sent me away and forgotten all about me.
At last, on the sixth day of what felt far more like real captivity than my sojourn with Enzo had, the rain stopped and the skies cleared, a bitterly chilly wind sweeping the clouds away to the south. I opened a window and peeked out, blinking in the dregs of the late afternoon sunshine, my nose and cheeks instantly stinging from the cold.
But the fresh air blew nearly a week’s worth of cobwebs out of my brain. I sucked in deep lungfuls, suddenly edgy and nervous, desperate to be moving my limbs andout.
I wrapped myself in my thickest cloak, took my lute—it might be a bit wet outside for an instrument, but I hadn’t even wanted to play in days, and now I felt like if I didn’t I might actually die—and slipped out of my rooms, ducking behind a tapestry halfway down the corridor and into a hidden door to a small staircase that Hans certainly wouldn’t even know existed.
With dust in my hair but triumphantly unobserved, I emerged into a tiny servants’ hallway on the ground floor, and thence out a back door and into the gardens.
The wind slapped me in the face, but gods, it was worth it. I practically skipped my way through the rose garden and around the pools of muddy water that marred the long gravel path between two dripping ornamental hedges, and finally found my way to a secluded grove of trees at the edge of the gardens, in the shelter of the wall surrounding the grounds. My favorite bench, set between two tall pine trees, was wet, but fuck it, I’d have damp pants. I needed to sit and play, and the grass was even wetter.
A quick tune and strum of the strings, and I launched into one of my favorite ballads, a lament for lost love with a haunting melody and a high refrain that rang out all the more melancholically for being carried off by the whistling wind.
