The Maiden

  He leaned against the window casing and took deep breaths to calm himself. There was more treachery here than he thought, and he, fool that he was, had walked directly into it.

  Tonight he must, somehow, escape these women and go to Jura. And he must figure out a plan to get all of them away from the Ultens safely.

  Chapter Sixteen

  SORE?” CILEAN ASKED Jura softly.

  Jura shrugged in answer but the truth was, her shoulders and back hurt a great deal from the whip strokes of that afternoon.

  They were alone in the little stone house again, this time their guard outside doubled because of what had happened that day. Cilean had fallen under a heavy bag of grain, and when one of the Ultens had cracked a whip over her, Jura had leaped for the woman’s throat. Jura had received a dozen lashes with a whip for that and Cilean had chided her for taking the punishment. They had been worked especially hard the rest of the day and only now, so late, were they allowed to rest.

  But Cilean’s anger, reawakened, kept her awake. “We have to escape. I saw two women talking by the gate today when they should have been watching. If we could find a way to distract them, perhaps we could—”

  She broke off at the look on Jura’s face and she turned. Standing in the doorway, lit from behind by torches, was a ghost—a thick, wide, golden ghost.

  Jura blinked to clear her vision but the ghost remained there.

  “Jura?” the ghost whispered.

  Cilean was the first to recover. In spite of her exhaustion she leaped from the cot and flung her arms around Rowan.

  Sometimes Rowan was angered by the way these Lanconians treated him. He was their king but he got no “Your Majesty’s,” merely argument and challenges about his decisions. But at this moment he was glad for their sense of equality. He’d rather have a woman’s arms about his neck than all the fawning in the world.

  He hugged Cilean back, feeling as if he were touching someone clean for the first time in days. How good it would be to hear the honest opinion of a woman instead of the meek subservience of the Ulten women.

  “You are well? Unhurt?” Rowan asked Cilean.

  She released her clasp on his neck but still kept her arm around his waist. “Tired and bruised but not hurt. It is Jura who was hurt today.”

  Rowan stared across the darkness at his wife, who still sat on her cot. Cilean slipped away from him. “You have nothing to say to me?” Rowan said softly to Jura.

  “Why are you alive?” she asked in an angry tone, her heart pounding in her ears.

  Rowan did not take offense as he smiled and stepped toward her. “You are glad to see me.”

  “We were taken captive and made into slaves,” Jura said angrily. “They use us as oxen to unload wagons full of stolen goods. I had thought that you were dead or else you would have come for us, but you are not dead.” She said the last as if it were an accusation. Somehow, she felt betrayed by him. The last time she had seen him he had been looking at her with hatred, and for days she had done little but cry because she thought he was dead. But here he was, not only alive but free as well.

  Rowan kept walking toward her, and when at last he was in front of her, he put his hand on her shoulders.

  Jura leaped off the cot and flung her body against his, holding on to him with all her might. “You are not dead. You are not dead,” she kept repeating in wonder.

  “No, my love,” he whispered, stroking her sore back. “I am not dead.”

  After a few moments, he pulled away from her. “We must talk. Come, Cilean, sit here by us. I want to have you both near me. We haven’t much time.”

  He put an arm around each woman, as if he feared they might disappear, and began to explain what had happened to him and the other men in the last few days.

  “You believed them?” Jura asked, incredulous. “These women slipped into our camp and put their hideous potion over our mouths and hit me, and you believed them when they said they had left us quietly sleeping? You are a—”

  Rowan kissed her mouth. “I have missed you, Jura. However I got us into this, I must get us out.”

  “You?” Jura said. “You are the cause of this. If you hadn’t—”

  “She thought you were dead,” Cilean interrupted, “and she has done nothing but cry since we were taken. I have never seen her cry before and now she does nothing else. She talks of nothing but how much she regrets never trying to help you unite the tribes and never being able to tell you that she loved you.”

  “This is true, Jura?” Rowan whispered.

  Jura turned away. “One says things in grief.”

  Rowan put his fingertips under her chin and kissed her tenderly. “I tried to make a decision as a king. I went with the Ultens because King Rowan wanted to unite them with the other tribes, but Rowan the man came to regret that decision. I was a fool, Jura, just as you have told me a thousand times.”

  She looked into his eyes. “But you meant well,” she whispered and he kissed her again.

  “As you did the day Keon was killed,” he whispered, and was amazed to see tears in Jura’s eyes. “You gave me strength when I would have failed my country and you let no one see me in my weakness.”

  “Rowan!” came an urgent whisper from the doorway. It was Daire, and Cilean went to him but he motioned her away. Immediately, she became a guardswoman again.

  “We must go,” Daire said. “Even Geralt is failing.”

  “Failing?” Jura asked, pushing away from Rowan and starting to rise. “Cilean and I are ready. We will leave with you.”

  Rowan cleared his throat nervously. “We cannot take you,” he said. “There are too many of them and too few of us. I could visit you only because the Fearens and Geralt are, ah, keeping the guards, ah, busy. Jura, do not look at me like that. I will get you out of here, but you cannot expect me to wage war on a city of women, my own Lanconian women.”

  “Women!” she gasped, standing and glaring at him. “These delicate little women have Cilean and me pulling rocks out of pathways, digging water mills out of mud, hauling great bags of grain, repairing stone walls. We are being used as horses while you men are…are exhausting yourselves trying to impregnate them.”

  “I am not, Jura,” Rowan said pleadingly. “I swear to you that I have not touched one of them. I am sure they will let us live as long as I the king do not give a woman my child.”

  Jura’s eyes bulged in rage. “How much you are sacrificing for us!” she half yelled.

  Rowan tried to take her in his arms but she twisted away. “Jura, please trust me.”

  “Like you trusted the Ultens? You went off with these little women and left Cilean and me and Brita to rot.”

  “That’s not true,” he began, “I—” Rowan was confused and pleased by Jura at the same time. She was hissing at him like a jealous woman. No coolheaded guardswoman was attacking him. She was an angry wife who thought her husband was sleeping with other women. She really did care more for him than for Lanconia.

  “Rowan!” Daire said urgently. “We must go. Marek will hear of this if we do not go soon. He will have all of us killed.”

  Rowan moved away from Jura with regret. Never had he wanted her so much as now. He was tempted to abdicate to Geralt and get out of Lanconia. He’d take Jura with him back to England. Even as he thought this, he knew it wasn’t possible. “Give me two days,” he whispered. “I will have you out of here in two days.”

  He left, and in the stillness he left behind, Cilean tried to talk to Jura, but she was too angry to listen. She felt betrayed one minute and the next she knew Rowan should have gone with the Ultens and left the Irial women behind. She was too confused to sleep. If she had married Daire, she would never have expected their marriage to stand in the way of what was good for Lanconia. So why did it enrage her when Rowan chose Lanconia over her?

  Before dawn she went to the doorway to look at the silhouette of Marek’s great palace, and the thought of Rowan inside and perhaps lying with another woman made
her furious. But the way she was thinking was English, not Lanconian. And this was not the way it was supposed to be. She was supposed to think first of Lanconia, not of herself.

  She leaned her head against the coolness of the stone doorway and tried to think clearly. But she could not. All she knew was that she wanted Rowan back. She did not want to wait until he grew tired of his Ulten women or until her arrogant brother had had enough. She was willing to make a wager that Geralt had never given a thought to what had happened to Cilean and Jura, much less Brita, who had humiliated him. Geralt had never had much compassion for others.

  When Jura had thought Rowan was dead, she regretted that she had never had a chance to help him with Lanconia. Now she was being given that chance.

  “Jura,” Cilean said softly, “have you been awake all night?”

  Jura turned bright eyes on her friend. “We are going to get ourselves out of here,” she said. “And we are going to use Rowan’s English weapons: words. We are not going to kill and maim, we are going to do worse. We are going to tell these women what old Marek has kept from them, that there are men, hundreds of men, out there, and that each woman can have her own man and all the male children she wants.”

  “But we don’t speak the Ulten language,” Cilean said, “and Rowan said he’d get us out in two days. Shouldn’t we do what he wants?”

  “We’re going to help him,” Jura said firmly.

  There was only one of the women guards who spoke the Irial language and it took Jura a while to get her to listen. She kept telling Jura to get back to work. But at midmorning every woman in sight came to a halt as Marek came down the street, lounging in a carriage, four beautiful young women hovering near him. Marek was old, fat, dirty, toothless, and ugly.

  Behind him in two other carriages came Rowan, Daire, Geralt, and the Fearens. Jura could feel the quiver of excitement run through the women as they looked at these strong, healthy, virile men. Jura clenched her fists at her sides as Rowan went by. A pretty little Ulten was practically sitting in his lap.

  “How weak those men look,” Jura said as if suppressing a yawn.

  The little Ulten who spoke Irial looked at her in surprise.

  “In my country we women wouldn’t look at such men, we would send them away,” Jura said as if greatly bored. “Can we return to work now? I would rather work than look at such weaklings as those.”

  Jura could feel that she had the woman’s attention, and when she heard the woman whispering to the others, she knew it was going to work.

  Not long afterward she and Cilean were back at hauling rocks from a field when the Ulten woman began asking questions about where Jura lived, and, specifically, about the men there.

  Jura wiped the sweat from her brow, leaned on her pike, and began to talk of marriages between one man and one woman. She had to pause while this was translated and to allow the women to gasp over this idea.

  By sundown she and Cilean were sitting under separate trees in the shade and drinking cool fruit juices while spinning stories about the hundreds of available men in the rest of Lanconia. The Ultens especially loved to hear of the strong Zerna men who had only ugly, big women.

  Jura answered all their questions, even the ones about how the Irial men could possibly like women as tall as Jura and Cilean. “They manage,” Jura said with a forced smile.

  That night she slept more easily than she had since being captured.

  In the morning there were over a hundred women waiting for her and Cilean outside the building, and they did nothing all day except talk. Most of the women were young and did not remember when there had been men available, so Jura’s talk seemed like a fairy tale to them.

  On this second day Jura did not just talk of the men of other tribes, but began to talk of the Ulten men and how unfair it was that the women had to worship them and obey them because of their scarcity. Jura told them of her own defiance of her husband, not mentioning that Rowan was her husband. The women had her repeat a few episodes in disbelief.

  “And he loves you still?” one woman asked through an interpreter. “You do not have to be perfect to keep a man? He does not cast you out if you are not kind and loving and sweet-tempered at all times?”

  “You can say what you actually think without fear of punishment?”

  “You can get angry at a man?”

  “Yes,” Jura answered. “And your husband is faithful to you or you have the right to complain in court. You can cast him out.”

  By nightfall, Jura’s throat was raw from talking so much, but from the expressions on the women’s faces, she knew she had made an impression. As they walked back to the town, Ulten women everywhere were pointing and nodding at them and talking seriously among themselves. Jura smiled to herself. Perhaps Rowan’s way of fighting had some advantages to it. She didn’t think she could have caused more commotion if she had attacked the city with an army of guardsmen and women.

  With a jaw-snapping yawn, she wondered what the morrow would bring.

  Rowan was just waking when the first noises sounded outside the palace. He had not been able to go to sleep until quite late for worry about how to get them out of this situation. The other men seemed content to remain with the Ulten women for the rest of their lives, but Rowan, much to his disbelief, was finding the women’s fawning annoying. Tonight he had had a great deal of difficulty persuading the women he wanted no bed partner. He smiled to himself, knowing that it wasn’t that he wouldn’t love the attentions of one of the women, but the fear of Jura’s wrath was more than he liked to contemplate.

  “Winning Lanconia is easy but winning Jura is next to impossible,” he muttered, then went back to trying to solve the problem of getting all of them out of their silken prison without having to hurt a woman or offend greasy old Marek.

  At the first sound of women’s voices raised in anger, Rowan did not react. After having spent time with the volatile Irials and then Brita, a woman shouting in rage was a commonplace occurrence. But then he remembered that he was in a land where women were in a to-the-death competition for men and they competed with soft words and languorous smiles.

  He sat up in bed. “What has Jura done now?” he asked aloud, and knew without a doubt that whatever the women were angry about was caused by Jura.

  In moments he was dressed, hurriedly wrapping his cross garters about his legs, then running along the corridors to the rooms of the other men, who were each wrapped about one, two, or in Geralt’s case, three women. He ordered the men into the great room immediately. Only Geralt gave him trouble.

  “You’ll be there or I’ll come for you,” Rowan said, slamming the door and beginning to run, Daire and the Fearens on his heels.

  What looked to be an army of women was streaming into the palace, each face angry, and in their hands they carried whatever they could use as weapons: rakes, shovels, hand axes, long bone needles, clubs of various sizes. They were such small women and armed so poorly that they were almost an amusing sight—but Rowan did not laugh.

  Rowan grabbed the arm of a woman near the front, a beautiful dark-haired wench. “What has happened?” he asked in the Ulten language.

  She sneered at him. “We have been lied to,” she yelled. “We were told that all men died of the sickness, that the only ones left were here in our city, but Jura says that is not so.”

  Rowan groaned as he released the woman then turned to translate to the other men.

  “Jura!” Geralt snorted. “I should have known she would ruin paradise.”

  Rowan grabbed his half-brother’s tunic front. “Your sister has been in slavery while you were eating figs. Now we have to stop this or we’ll have a war on our hands.”

  Geralt twisted from Rowan’s grasp. “Let them kill old Marek. What do I care? I will rule the Ultens. You have taken the Irials from me, so I will take the Ultens.”

  It was Jura, Cilean behind her, who pushed her way through the crowd just in time to hear her brother’s words. “You are not fit to rule you
rself much less a tribe,” she yelled at him. “You think only of yourself, not of your people or your country. You are not loyal to the Irials or anyone else in Lanconia. You could not even spend the night with Brita without starting a war. You may think so highly of yourself that you believe these women would love to follow you, but right now they are too angry to think.” She looked at the other men and they were now surrounded by angry Ulten women as they surged through the palace. “They are furious at Marek for lying to them over the years, and their blood is up. They may not stop at killing one man but may decide to kill all men. We have to get you out.” Jura turned to leave, but Rowan caught her arm.

  “You did not side with your brother,” he shouted to her.

  “My brother is Irial, not Lanconian,” she said, somewhat annoyed. “Is there another way out of here? Please, Rowan, do not try to talk your way out of this. These women seek blood.”

  He took a moment to caress her cheek, then turned back toward the wing of bedchambers. “Follow me,” he ordered, and only Geralt hesitated. Rowan grabbed the young man’s shoulder and pulled him with the others.

  Like a reluctant boy, Geralt fought. “Unhand me, you usurper. The women will not harm me. I am their master.”

  Quite calmly, Jura picked up a vase from a nearby table and brought it down over Geralt’s head. He crumpled gracefully to the floor.

  Rowan looked at her in disgust. “Now how do we get him out?”

  “You must carry him. Come on, we haven’t much time to lose. I think the women are looting the palace.”

  Rowan, without arguing, took an order from a woman and heaved the tall Geralt over his shoulder, then once again took the lead as he went down a corridor. There was no other door besides the front one, but in the last few years of safety the Ultens had become lax and had built a granary near one of the palace windows.

  “Daire!” Rowan said. “Take that marble and put it between the buildings.”