He moved away from the tree and started back to the hut. He must tell Brita that he would marry her.
“You are a fool of an Englishman,” Jura hissed. “You know nothing of our ways.”
“Can you say nothing else to me?” Rowan said back to her, glaring.
They were in the woods before the hut saddling their horses and making ready for the ride back to the Irial border. Behind them were a hundred Vatell guards who looked at Rowan and Jura as if they were snake spit. And behind the guard were a hundred and fifty young men and women. Brita had given no persuasive speech to her people but had ordered her guard to gather suitable men and women and bring them. Many of them sported bruised bodies and the women’s faces were tearstained.
“Brita will not help you in your plan to unite the tribes,” Jura said. “She hopes to join forces with the Irials and conquer the whole of Lanconia, and when all is hers, she will turn on the Irials. I tell you that she hates the Irials. Thal killed her husband.”
“She will have a new husband now,” Rowan said coolly, “and a lusty one will drive away her memories of a dead one.”
“If she does not displease you and you make no vows to God,” Jura said. “You brag of your vigor but I have seen none of it. Perhaps I should pity Brita, but I am more concerned with what you will do to our country. Too many people trust you. And now you are fool enough to trust her.”
“Perhaps you are merely jealous,” he said.
“Of what? I have been married to you and I know the loneliness of that marriage. Perhaps I should warn Brita that you are without substance.” She swung into the saddle of her horse and looked down at him. “You are useful to her now, so you are safe, but watch your back for her blade when she thinks you are of no more use to her.”
Jura rode to the edge of the clearing and turned and watched the Vatells as they also watched her. Brita, this time in a gown of yellow wool with a circlet set with rubies about her head, emerged from the peasant’s hut and mounted her horse. Rowan rode to her side and Brita threw a look of triumph toward Jura as she extended her hand and Rowan kissed it.
Jura turned away and urged her horse forward. She dreaded the long journey home and she dreaded the looks on people’s faces when Rowan announced he was setting her aside. It would be easy for him to do. All he had to do was say she was unpleasing to him, and if Jura were examined and found to be a maiden, he would have no problem in having the marriage dissolved.
But Jura knew that if Rowan set her aside Daire would not be able to marry her. She could marry a lesser man but not a prince like Daire, for she would be tainted goods. But she would not tell Rowan that. Better that she had some pride, and if he did not want her, let him think another man did.
Rowan rode beside Brita while Jura rode behind them surrounded by Vatell guardsmen, the quiet, subdued Vatell people in the rear.
Brita was looking at Rowan as if she were starving and he were a royal banquet, and he found her stares unnerving.
“How did ugly old Thal breed something like you?” she said seductively, looking at his hair as if it were gold.
“My mother’s people were quite fair,” he said quickly. “Your son, Daire, will no doubt come to the wedding festivities. You must be looking forward to seeing him.”
“I am looking forward to seeing all of you. That will be our wedding night also.”
“And Jura’s to Daire,” Rowan said under his breath.
Brita laughed. “She will not be allowed to marry my son. My son is a prince. Perhaps, if he is strong enough, he will succeed me. He will not put a woman on the throne beside him who has been once rejected by a king. Why, the girl is so undesirable she cannot get a lusty man like you to bed her. She is a useless female.”
Rowan opened his mouth to defend Jura but he thought better of it. He smiled at Brita. “But Daire loves her and she him. They were children together and I think they mean to have each other.” He tried to keep the resentment out of his voice.
Brita gave him a calculating look. “Do you care for this woman who you refuse to bed? It is Irial law as well as the law of all Lanconia that if a woman is set aside because she is not pleasing to her husband then she cannot marry a man of the highest rank. My son is a prince and has never been married. Jura cannot become his wife.”
“Jura does not know this,” Rowan said.
Brita laughed. “Of course she does.” Her face changed. “Do you mean to go back on our bargain?” She halted her horse, and there was much noise and confusion as the people behind them also stopped. “If you mean to keep this woman, tell me now,” she said, her eyes sparkling hatred. “I do not mean to surrender my people to some English king and his Irial bride. Either I am to be queen of all Lanconia or I return now to my own city.”
In that instant, Rowan knew Jura was right: Brita meant to rule all of Lanconia and she meant to do it alone. A woman who left her own son in the hands of the enemy would have no qualms about killing a husband who stood in the way of her goal.
He smiled radiantly at her and reached out to take her hand and kiss the palm. He looked at her through his lashes and lowered his voice. “Have a child when I can have a woman?” he asked. He watched as Brita calmed and he realized how great her vanity was. Jura was half Brita’s age and, to Rowan’s eyes, twice her beauty, but Brita was ready to believe that a man would choose her over Jura. Perhaps Brita’s experience and power would appeal to some men, but Rowan did not want to compete with his wife.
Brita smiled and urged her horse forward. “We will make a good pair, you and I. Perhaps we will not wait until the wedding night to taste of each other.”
Rowan smiled at her but the smile did not extend to his eyes. “Tell me how a woman as beautiful as you came to command the Vatells.” He guessed right in thinking that the woman would love to talk about herself. She droned on with a hundred, “And then I’s” and gave Rowan time to think.
So! Jura could not marry Daire and she well knew it.
“Magnificent,” he murmured to Brita.
If Jura could not marry Daire, then she wanted out of her marriage to Rowan for another reason, either to give Rowan his freedom or because she truly hated him. But Rowan could not believe she hated him. She could not react to his touch as she did if she hated him.
“You are as intelligent as you are beautiful,” he said to Brita.
Was it his vow to God? Rowan thought. Surely she understood knightly vows. Every Englishwoman understood them. Englishwomen wanted knights to make vows to them.
But Jura was not English.
Rowan almost halted his horse when he thought of this. If Jura did not understand his vows, why did she think he did not bed her?
Brita put her hand on Rowan’s arm. “So strong,” she murmured. “We will do well in bed together. There is nothing…wrong with you, is there? You can pleasure a woman in bed, can you not? It is just that wife of yours who displeases you and not all women?”
Rowan blinked at Brita a few times. “I can bed a woman,” he answered.
“No injuries? Not even in your English tournaments?”
“No,” Rowan said softly. “No injuries.” He wanted to tell her, as he told everyone, that he was Lanconian, but suddenly he felt more English than Lanconian. He had made an English vow to a Lanconian woman.
Brita kept talking but Rowan didn’t listen to her. More than anything in life he wanted to go to Jura and talk to her but he dared not offend Brita. He and Jura were two Irials amid a few hundred Vatells and he was not stupid enough to anger their leader.
At noon they stopped to rest and eat. The young Vatell men and women, some of the women still crying, were given coarse bread and water while Brita and Rowan were served a feast on a white cloth. Rowan could hardly eat. He looked for Jura but she was nowhere to be seen.
After the meal he excused himself as if to make a private trip into the forest but he was no sooner in the forest than he fell to his knees and began to pray.
“You have help
ed me, God,” he said in little more than a whisper, “and now I need You again. I want Your forgiveness. Lord, I am merely a man, a foolish man who makes foolish mistakes and I have made one now. I have sworn to You that I would not touch my wife unless she begged me. But I have also sworn to love, honor, and cherish her until I die. I can’t keep both of my vows and, Lord, I ask You to release me from the first stupid vow, the one made by an angry boy, not by a man meant to be a king. Lord, I humble myself before You. I will do penance. I will rule this country to the best of my ability and I will even bring the Ultens to Christianity, but I beg You to release me from this childish vow.”
When Rowan finished his prayer and opened his eyes, the forest seemed unnaturally quiet, as if he were completely alone in the world. Then he heard a noise to his right, a branch breaking, and he went toward the sound.
Jura stood there, her knife drawn, waiting for him. “Oh, it is you,” she said, and wiped her bloody knife on the grass.
“What are you doing?” he asked, smiling at her. He was very glad to see her, for her bloody knife seemed much less dangerous than Brita’s glittering eyes and her never-ending stories about herself.
“I have killed six rabbits and I am sneaking them to those farmers.” She stood up straight and looked at him. “Or do you plan to tell Brita that I am doing this evil thing? These woods are hers and she hangs poachers.”
“I will not tell,” he said, still smiling as Jura shoved the dead rabbits into a bag.
“Why are you smiling? Do you anticipate your marriage to her already?”
Rowan reached out and grabbed her to him. He hadn’t held her in a while. She was too much temptation to him and he knew touching her would make him forget his vow. “You are my answer from God,” he said. “I asked God to release me from my vow and here you are, alone, where I am. It is the answer to my prayer.”
She pushed at him. “You are mad. And you seem to have an extraordinarily intimate relationship with God. Does He talk to you at night in little voices? Or perhaps you see Him now and again?”
Rowan chuckled and held her against him. “I am released from my vow. Jura, we can be man and wife.”
She quietened in his arms then pulled her head away to look at him. “You are to marry Brita and I am to marry Daire.”
“You cannot marry Daire and you know the law as well as I do now. Did you hope to help Lanconia by getting rid of me or did you just want out of our marriage?” He began to kiss her neck.
“Release me. I cannot think when you…”
“When I touch you? When I make love to you?” He was moving his hands up and down her body, that wonderful body that he had dreamed about. During the Honorium he had thought of nothing else but holding her and caressing her. He wanted to kiss away her bruises.
Jura had her head back and her eyes closed. “Leave me and go to Brita,” she whispered huskily.
“I do not want Brita. I have never wanted Brita. I have always wanted you and only you. Tonight, Jura. Tonight I will come to you. We will make camp and an hour later I will come to you. You will not be a maiden after tonight. And, most important of all, you will stay married to me.” He managed with difficulty to pull away from her. His body ached for hers. Her lips were soft, her eyes soft.
“Do you jest with me, Englishman?” she asked quietly. “You will lose Brita if you come to me.”
“I have never wanted her. Jura, believe me, I want only you.”
“I do not know if I can trust you.”
“You can. I swear to you that you can trust me with your life. Now go and give your rabbits away. I do not want to anger Brita’s army and get ourselves slaughtered before tonight. Go, my love.”
Jura’s confusion showed on her beautiful face but she obeyed him as she grabbed her rabbits and left him.
Rowan stood there smiling rather fatuously and thinking of the approaching night when he heard a step not far away. Instantly, he slipped behind a tree and watched. He saw a flash of brilliant yellow then nothing else.
He leaned against the tree. Brita, he thought. She had followed him and no doubt seen him with Jura. His senses had not been alert when he was touching Jura and he had not been aware of Brita sneaking through the forest to spy on them. She had been too far away to hear them but she must have seen them.
Suddenly, Rowan grew fearful. What would a power-hungry woman like Brita do to a child like Jura who was in her way?
As silently as he could, he began to follow Brita. As he moved around a tree, he halted then hid. Brita was talking in a secret way to one of her guard. The man nodded and disappeared into the trees while Brita went back to the camp.
Rowan followed the guard. The man slipped through the trees along the edge of the camp and watched the people in the camp. He stopped and crouched and Rowan moved to see what this man saw. Jura was in plain view as she moved among the Vatell people.
Rowan watched in horror as the guardsman drew a bow and arrow and took aim at Jura. Rowan did not think of the consequences of what he did; he only acted. He drew his knife, threw it, and sank it into the back of the man’s neck.
The Vatell guard fell dead without a sound.
Rowan knew he had to get rid of the man’s body quickly. He pulled his knife out of the man, picked up the body, draping it over his shoulder, and ran toward a small stream. He managed to hide the body under a rotting log. After checking that no part of the dead man was exposed, he went back to camp.
Brita was waiting for him, and although her lips smiled, her eyes glittered angrily. “You were gone a long while.”
He grinned boyishly. “I saw my wife,” he said honestly, hoping to diffuse her with the truth. “I had to soothe her.”
“And how did you soothe her?”
He moved closer to Brita. “The way I always soothe women. With my arms and my lips. Is that not the way you like to be soothed? Tell me now so I’ll know when we are married.”
“Are we to be married? If you spend your time with your wife, perhaps—”
Rowan leaned forward and kissed her. He could feel the woman’s excitement and he would have been flattered except that he knew she wanted him as a king and not as a man. “Jura is the sister of a man some say should be king. If she is angered, or worse yet, if she is harmed in any way, Geralt would raise an army. I do not want us to be killed before we have even tried to unite the tribes.”
Brita frowned. “Perhaps,” she said, “but I do not like to share what is mine.” Her head came up. “I must see to something,” she said, and hurried away.
Rowan closed his eyes for a moment. No doubt she was going to see if her guardsman had killed Jura as she had ordered. He wondered what she would think when Jura was alive and the guard was nowhere to be found. No doubt she would know exactly what had happened or at least she would suspect.
How right Jura had been, Rowan thought with a sickness in his stomach. She had warned him from the beginning of Brita’s treachery, but he had been so sure that he had known what he was doing that he had gone alone into Vatell land. Now his own life and Jura’s were in danger. They were sitting in the midst of their enemy and leading them toward the unsuspecting Irials.
Jura was right: Rowan had led them to this by his arrogance and superiority.
Now he had to get them out of this. He had to quell Brita’s suspicions long enough to get them closer to Irial land, then he and Jura could escape. Or perhaps he could somehow hold off Brita until after the Irials and Vatells had married, but however he did it, he must make Brita think he wanted her if he was to keep Jura safe.
His insides clutched together. And that meant he could not meet Jura tonight and spend the night with her. He had to stay within sight of Brita or she might send someone else to kill Jura.
Wearily, Rowan mounted his horse. It was time to ride.
Chapter Eleven
JURA MADE SURE Rowan saw her leave the camp that night and she did not go far, but he did not come to her. She moved to sit where she could watch B
rita’s tent. Rowan had entered but he had not left.
She tried to control her rage by telling herself that she never expected him to keep his word, but it didn’t help her much. At dawn her eyes were red and her heart felt as if it had turned to stone.
She mounted her horse to ride and twice she felt Rowan’s eyes on her, but she didn’t look at him.
At midday she saw Rowan dancing attendance on Brita, popping a morsel of bread in her mouth. When Rowan looked up and saw Jura, she turned away.
That night was their last night before reaching Irial land. Jura tried to keep her mind empty of thoughts as she settled into her blankets to sleep. She was awakened in the middle of the night by one hand held over her mouth and another one clamped on her right hand, in which she already held her knife.
“It is me,” Rowan said into her ear.
Jura increased her struggles and was pleased when she heard a painful exhale of breath from Rowan, but the next moment she lost consciousness as Rowan’s fist clipped her jaw.
She woke to find herself lying on the bank of a stream, Rowan pressing a cold cloth to her face. She started to rise but he pushed her back to the ground.
“Jura, please be quiet. Does your head hurt?”
“From your soft blow?” she asked, lying, for her head was pounding. “What do you plan to do now? Rid yourself of me permanently? Perhaps your beloved Brita has decided I am too much of a risk.”
“Yes she has,” Rowan said solemnly. “She saw us together yesterday and she sent one of her guard to follow you. He had an arrow aimed at you when I sank a knife into the back of his neck.”
Jura blinked at him in the darkness.
“I could not come to you last night,” he continued, “for she had me watched.”
“So you stayed and fed her and kissed her and—”
Rowan kissed her mouth to keep her from talking, as his hand moved down to her breast. “I have a plan,” he murmured, his mouth against her neck. “I am going to take Brita to Brocain. I think they might like each other.”