She pressed her lips together in anger. If she were an empress of ancient Rome, she would have thrown this man to the lions. “I will stay wherever I am led, my lord. You have no need to worry on that account.”
A drunken, cloaked man stumbled out of the rabble just as Gerhard’s lip actually curled up slightly into a smile. She was lucky for the distraction, because that small grin Gerhard had failed to hold back made her want to slap it off of his face, and she couldn’t. He still had the power to take back the mercy she had come out to beg him for.
She turned, and since she’d heard the ‘bishop’ before his name, she had expected Rennio to look something like a priest or even a monk. Instead, this man had long, not-particularly-clean-looking hair, a messy beard, and a bright nose. He was probably in his early thirties but had the bearing of a much older man. He looked like he was barely holding down his drink.
Gerhard turned from her and put his arm around Rennio, who immediately soured at whatever Gerhard was saying into his ear. Just as Rennio appeared about to complain, Gerhard grasped his shoulder hard and continued speaking to him so quietly that she could barely make out even the smallest word.
“Fine,” Rennio huffed, and then stepped forward and grabbed her arm far too hard and without apology. “Come with me, princess.”
Gerhard bowed his head when she looked at him in the hopes that he would explain why she was being taken away by the drunkest man in attendance, and merely said, “I will see you later this eve, Your Highness.”
She had no time to respond with anything as sarcastic as she’d have liked, or anything at all for that matter. Rennio, once he started moving through the sea of men, was surprisingly steady for a drunkard and very, very fast. He had the feet of a mountain goat as he stepped down the hill over stones and objects, guiding her seamlessly out of the way, nearly so quickly that she couldn’t keep up with him. She realized that she hadn’t moved as quickly as she was now since she was a child, and she wondered why he’d decided that this sort of speed was necessary.
She had expected, because of the gruff surliness of the men she’d encountered so far and the yells and insults of random soldiers around her, that she was going to be put into a stockade where men could throw rotting food or dung at her. She was very surprised, and happily so, when Rennio slowed down outside of a tall, red-canvas pavilion that was one of the largest in the entire camp. She imagined it might have suited a king just fine, and the fact that it was apparently going to be her jail cell was more than surprising. She imagined this was like her family’s liberal tradition of giving the soon-to-be-executed an extra blanket and a nice meal before they were hanged.
He pulled open the flap of an entrance wide enough for her to enter and finally let go of her arm. “After you, Your Highness,” he said, although there was a cheeky lift in his voice. She ducked her head under the heavy curtain and walked inside.
The pavilion was covered floor to ceiling in thick tapestries and heavily lighted with several hanging lanterns. It almost seemed cozy, with open trunks filled with books and what seemed to be personal belongings. She eyed a large pallet of goose down as a place to curl up into the fetal position and wish for this to all be a bad dream.
Just as her eyes were adjusting to the light within the pavilion, she heard a rough man’s voice say from behind them, “Do you plan on protecting her, bishop?”
Slowly, Rennio turned and stepped back out. She tiptoed toward the door as he answered smoothly, “Why would I have to protect her? You heard the orders—she’s not to be harmed until we get her to Vienna.”
“She’s ours. We fought for the right to the women in that castle!” a new voice hissed on the other side of the curtain.
“You want the women like a whore wants a husband. Just because that was your hope doesn’t mean it was what you were paid for,” Rennio replied in an unconcerned manner, like a man talking about the weather. “You have full rights to go and claim any of the beautiful ladies within the castle walls for wives, as the commander said.”
“That ain’t fair!” another man growled.
“Rape isn’t fair, either. Plenty of people will get fucked today, and this is just your turn. Stop stomping your feet like surly children. And if you even look at this tent again I will pluck out your eyes, I promise to God!” Rennio’s voice suddenly got extremely fierce. “And I will not perform your last rights, either.”
She blinked at the cloth in front of her eyes, then stepped toward the entrance with curiosity, wondering if she should try to leave the pavilion and race back up the hill and toward Gerhard, since it seemed impossible that Rennio could stop three men from taking anything they wanted.
The language outside soon became so foul that she wondered if they were really speaking the same language any longer, and she lost track of the argument. Her attention was grabbed again when she heard the clang of steel against steel. Then the tent flap fell aside a little and she saw a black boot step inside only to be pulled back out a moment later.
There was swearing outside now like she had never heard before in her whole life. Every word was absolutely vulgar. “Dip your wick somewhere else, or I’ll make sure it doesn’t dip into anything else again!” Rennio was now threatening, sounding like he was gritting his teeth. Again, he wasn’t sounding very… well, churchy…
She stepped forward and pulled the flap of the tent open to watch as the sword fight went on not eight feet from her. She had never seen real swordplay anywhere near this close up before, and she watched, fascinated. Despite the fact that she was almost certainly going to be sent to her death one day soon anyway, Rennio was braving three men at once on her behalf.
Rennio held the sword with such ease, and with such skill. She knew less than nothing about swordplay, but she could tell that he was vastly more skilled than any of the three men he was fighting. The men tried to hold him back several times to gang up on him, but Rennio’s quick feet paced away from them. Then he lunged dangerously and quickly toward them, parrying and slashing as if the sword were an extension of his own arm.
One of his lunges took one of the men off guard, and the man fell back onto the ground, trying desperately to scramble away to safety. But there was no escape from Rennio’s sword and the man was soon pinned to the ground by the tip of the blade. “I promised you, didn’t I?” Rennio gritted with a cruel smile at the man.
Her heart flying into her chest, she pushed herself out of the tent. “Rennio, no—don’t hurt him.”
The other men—who had paused in shock to see their friend about to be gored—jumped back in response to her scream. They stood, puzzled. Rennio, however, didn’t even flinch. “Princess, it is vital for your health that you turn about and walk back into the tent,” he said, not drawing his eyes off of the pinned man.
“Please, Your Excellency… There’s been enough blood spilt. They’re angry, and they’ve had too much to drink.” This she was merely guessing—their body odor was so strong that she couldn’t smell the scent of ale or mead over it, but they looked unsteady on their feet as she glanced at them. “Spare him, I pray you.”
Rennio finally glanced at her and then heaved a loud, heavy sigh that she supposed was to signify how much not killing the man had put him out of sorts. “Fine. Be on your way. Lady or no, the commander would not be as forgiving as I,” he told the man in low, firm tones, and then pulled the tip of his sword away.
The man and his friends scurried quickly away before Rennio could turn his body toward her. “Do you have a death wish?” he said, the corners of his eyes scrunching with skepticism and his mouth taking an unpleasant twist. He put his sword back in his sheath and then walked toward her. “I ought to take a birch to you!” he chastised, and for a moment she feared he would actually do it. His expression was that of an angry parent whose child had stepped in the way of an excited horse. He gave her arm a violent jerk. “What were you thinking? Never step out of the tent. This is the only time I will tell you. If those men had a brain be
tween them, they would have taken you then as I had the other man pinned. I cannot fight and protect at the same time.” He grabbed her upper arm and again forced her toward the pavilion.
She hadn’t thought of that, and she couldn’t now. Her knees felt shaky, and as he entered the tent with her, the only thing she could think of was how dearly she wanted to sit down and collect herself. That brief episode had moved too quickly, and though she hadn’t exerted herself much, she still felt short of breath.
As if he had read her mind, he brought her toward the down pad she had eyed earlier and let her collapse upon it. “You’re already showing yourself to be more trouble than you’re worth. You’ll be the death of us yet, mark my words.”
He marched over to where she noticed a whole cask of mead was standing. She frowned as she watched him take a mug and place it under the lever before yanking on the wooden tog, quickly filling up his mug. He stepped toward her and crouched down, passing the mug into her hand. “Drink some of this,” he ordered, then added with a grunt, “I made it myself.”
She looked into the liquid and then sniffed it. In the end she was unimpressed and put it down. She wasn’t thirsty, nor was she hungry. She was cold, and lost, and already lonely despite her company. Out of habit, she looked around for her ladies in waiting to exchange an expression and maybe a whisper or two, but then realized that of course there were none here.
She no longer had a court. She had no ladies, she had no servants, she had no castle, and she had no lands. She was an exile who would journey to Vienna, where she would die. Susanna felt as though her heart had dropped and was now beating in the pit of her stomach.
“You’re not going to cry, are you?” Rennio asked, sounding like if she cried then he would surely judge her for it.
If only she could cry. She felt like tears had been either trained or bred out of her; the last time she remembered shedding a tear was when she was ten years old. “No,” she replied, keeping her voice steady and her bottom lip stiff.
“You might as well get your crying over with. No doubt you’ll start doing it eventually and it will be awkward for everybody involved. There’s no handmaidens to clean up your tears for you and whisk you away or whatever it is they do. Now that it’s only you and myself, and I plan to ignore you in any case, cry to your heart’s content.”
Her heart still panged, her stomach still clenched, and even the smell of the mead was making her stomach roil. “I’m not going to cry,” she replied firmly. She was far more likely to vomit first, since every time she realized where she was, what had happened over the last week, and that she’d never see any of her friends again, her stomach clenched and rolled.
She lifted her chin, trying desperately to find her voice and strength again. Despite the fact that her uncle had given most of the orders, she had still been the ruler of this whole region. She had honed a regal bearing since birth, and she decided she would keep her dignity. Trying to muster her most authoritative tone, she asked, “I heard that you are a bishop. How is this possible?”
“Are you… ordering me to tell you?” he drawled, looking confused.
She supposed that it might have sounded like that. She was a princess—that’s how she was supposed to sound. In control and confident. “No, I am not,” she admitted. “But I am curious nonetheless.”
“Good. Just as long as you’re not ordering me. You’re not my princess, you know… You’re not a ruler at all anymore. You have about as much power as one of the pigs tied to the meat wagon,” he said, gesturing his own freshly-poured mug in what seemed to be a random direction.
It was then that she found herself scrambling toward the entry to the pavilion, where she vomited. The image of being slaughtered like a pig was simply too much.
Her reaction had surprised even herself. She had thought she was doing a fine job of choking down her nerves, but her stomach had apparently decided that it was under far more pressure than it had been in the past.
“Oh, damn it,” she heard in her ear somewhere as she was heaving, well aware that there were dozens of soldiers staring at her. She felt a warm hand on her back as she continued to empty her stomach. Finally, she collapsed on the ground, where she remained for a moment before she was picked up with a mighty groan into Rennio’s arms and carried back to her pallet of cushions. “Women!” he huffed to himself, as if he had predicted that she’d do this.
She didn’t respond, but instead merely curled up with a groan and a shudder, feeling like she was facing misery unlike any she could have imagined.
He left the tent, and in about an hour, she felt him return. He pressed some leaves into her hand. “I had the mess cleaned up. Take this, the mint will help the feeling and the bad taste,” he promised. “Mint helps the stomach.”
“Thank you,” she wheezed, weakly pressing the leaves into her mouth and chewing on them tentatively. The sharp taste of the mint was welcome in her mouth, making her feel slightly refreshed.
“I am a bishop,” he admitted out of nowhere after he watched her for a few long minutes.
She had no idea what he was talking about until she realized, with a trickle of annoyance, that he was keen just to pick up the conversation where it had left off more than an hour ago when he had made her ill with his cruel words.
“At least… I was. The pope decided I would be more valuable on the battlefield than behind the pulpit. Now… I’m more of a soldier than I am a man of God.” He grumbled then pressed back onto his feet, apparently to rediscover his tankard of mead. “Since then, I’ve owed my life to Gerhard more times than I care to count. All I know is I’m not doing what I thought I was going to do a decade ago. Believe it or not, my goal was to be pope by the age I am now.”
“Thirty?” she guessed, then raised an eyebrow. “Well, that was quite optimistic.”
He snorted out a laugh. “I’m an optimistic person!” he said, as if the statement itself was the punchline to a joke.
She felt herself, even if very faintly, truly smile for the first time in days. The man seemed much too dark and surly to feel happiness, let alone optimism. She couldn’t imagine anyone who looked less likely to become pope. “Are priests allowed to kill?”
“The response to that is not as simple as you might think,” he replied simply, in the same tone she had overheard used in a war room, when one of her father’s knights was explaining something to her that her mother didn’t seem to consider important to teach a young woman. “I wouldn’t worry your pretty little head on these matters,” Rennio continued.
This made her pull herself back up into sitting. “Pretty little head, indeed! If you think you have an answer that would sail above my head, then you are sorely mistaken. As my father once said, respice, adspice, prospice. I do not fear learning.” She regretting quoting Latin as soon as she remembered that he was a bishop and he surely spoke it as well. He would not be impressed.
“Oh, so there is fire in your gullet, eh?” he said with a laugh. “Though examine the past, present, and future,” he translated, “are very pretty words for someone who just lost their country, I must admit.”
Her stomach roiled again, and she clapped her hand tightly to her gut. He was right, after all—she had just lost her country. She had lost her kin—her wonderful cousins, her little sisters, and all without a suitable goodbye. She might have lived under the control of a tyrant, but at least she had known happiness with her other company. She had been so proud to have the respect so many other women would have died for. Yet, that was all a memory now; it had passed her by…
She cuddled back down on her pallet. “I keep forgetting I’m a prisoner.”
“Surely I would as well. Gerhard does have you in his private tent and not outside in the stockade, after all…” He hummed thoughtfully. She couldn’t tell any longer if Rennio was being serious or not.
“Why doesn’t he?” she huffed, tired of being bullied by a smelly drunk who just happened to be good at swordplay and insulting princesses who ha
d just lost everything. “Why doesn’t he just tie me to a block and have done with me?”
“Maybe if you ask him nicely,” he retorted, then finished his mug of mead and refilled it.
She sighed, done with talking to him and shaking her head silently as she reflected how her whole life had been tossed into complete madness. The good news about being guarded by a drunk, however, was that he was only horrible when he was awake, which wasn’t for very long. Before long, he was snoring loudly from his high-backed chair with his chin tilted up, his mouth open, and a half-full tankard of mead still resting on his lap as he slept.
She pulled herself up into standing, looking around the pavilion and getting attracted by a trunk that was overflowing with books and papers. She knelt in front of it and sat back on her feet as she began to peruse the pages and covers.
Gerhard must be extremely rich, she realized. He had more than fifteen books with him, all with perfect, handwritten pages in delicate script.
She knew she didn’t have long on this earth, but she was chomping at the bit for anything, absolutely anything, that could distract her in the few short days she had left. She would even settle for being distracted for a few short hours. Her mind was crowded with thoughts and worries, and she had no power to fix any of the problems that ailed her.
As she was pulling out books, two in French and one in Latin, she dropped a scroll out onto the floor. She carefully picked it up, but before she put it back into the trunk again, she noticed an outline that made her realize that she wasn’t holding writing or even a letter, she was holding some sort of charcoal sketch that had been blurred slightly from touch and movement.
It was the portrait of a girl, with long robes and braided hair, looking out with large, doe-like eyes, with freckles stretched across the nose. The character looked all too familiar. It looked like her, but… it couldn’t be. Then she noticed that atop the girl’s head was a crown.
Her eyes widened with awareness, and then she looked skeptically down at the portrait. There had to be a reason that he had a portrait of her, she thought. Perhaps there had been spies trying to teach him what she looked like so that he could apprehend her when he took the castle…
The Conquered Brides Collection Page 2
