Page 15 of Traitor Son

She refused to acknowledge him. She had never been so embarrassed in her life, and growing up with the Hurrells had given her an extensive reservoir of experience. Biting her tongue, she looked down at her lap, furiously blinking back tears. She would not let him see her cry. That would be the final humiliation.

After a moment, he moved away without another word.

That man was going to be herhusband.In a few days, he was going to be doing worse than touching her underclothes. Ophele had no concrete idea what went on between a man and a woman—the library at Aldeburke had little information on the subject—but she had overheard the maids gossiping often enough to have a vague notion.

She would die. She would be the first person in recorded history to actually expire of mortification. He was a brute, he was a cruel, callous, heartless bully and ameanman. Snatching up her violated undergarments, she stuffed them into her bag, every jerk of her hands punctuating a growing list of adjectives.

Unfortunately, once she was packed, the only place she could go was back to that mean man. At the front of the line of horses and men, the duke mounted his black warhorse and wordlessly held out a hand, a silent order to come, and lifted her in front of him. She tried to shift toward the front of the saddle, sitting stiffly upright to touch him as little as possible.

They moved out.

He spoke to his men, but never to her. She didn’t want him to talk to her, anyway. She wanted nothing to do with him. There was nothing to look at but the rutted road and naked forest, and boredom slumped side by side with her resentment, a sore trial for a girl who had always had books for companions. The knowledge that marriage to a man who hated her waited at the end of this dreary road oppressed her.

“I had to be sure, Princess,” he said abruptly, after they had been riding in silence for at least a year.

She said nothing. Even the wordprincesswas loaded with his scorn. In one breath he was both condemning her for being the Emperor’s daughter and ridiculing her for doing it badly. It wasn’t her fault she had no dresses of her own, or that he hadn’t given her time to gather the things she needed to look less like a beggar’s brat. All she could do was try to bear it with dignity, and he wasn’t even allowing her that.

“Don’t sulk.”

“I am not sulking,” she said, her voice giving a traitorous quiver. She was too miserable even to be afraid of him. “I am humiliated.”

He was silent for a moment.

“That was not my intention.”

That was not an apology. Lady Hurrell had been punctilious about the proper parts of an apology. That had not included either an admission of error or an expression of remorse.

They rode in frigid silence until the noon meal, where he gave her a chunk of bread and cheese and told her to stay near his horse but absolutely not to touch it. When she took his hand to be lifted back in the saddle later, the worst of her anger and embarrassment had faded; Ophele had never been able to sustain a grudge. But she was desperately unhappy, and looking at a future that seemed so bleak as to hardly be worth living.

Was it always going to be like this?

It seemed impossible that it would be any other way. He was treating her like his horse, feeding her and bedding her down for the night, watching constantly to make sure she didn’t wander off. She supposed she was lucky he hadn’t tied her to a picket. But there was no chance of escape. The woods were still bare and her shoes were so big, she would have fallen flat on her face before she made it off the road. No, there was no way she could run away, and miserable though she was, she knew more than anything that she did not want to die.

How had her mother endured it? Lady Rache Pavot had never married. She had become the Empress’s lady-in-waiting when she was seventeen, and then become pregnant with the Emperor’s child, an event that precipitated the Conspiracy.

Had her motherchosento lie with the Emperor? It was impossible to square the loving, gentle woman she remembered with something so ugly and tawdry, not to mention the bitter betrayal of the Empress she had served. But perhaps that was why her mother had told her time and again:the only person you can control is you.

They would arrive in Celderline tomorrow. And she hadn’t bathed or brushed her teeth in two days and while her second dress lacked the slept-in wrinkles of the first, it was even more tatty and ill-fitting. She could see it in the duke’s eyes when he dragged her into the saddle the next morning, a slap of disapproval that made her face burn. She spent the morning anxiously dragging her fingers through her tangled hair, craning her neck toward the horizon.

She had never been to a city. She had neverseena city. Her mother had been exiled to Aldeburke before she was born, and Ophele had only seen a few pictures of cities in books. She didn’t realize the strange black clouds on the horizon belonged to the city until they connected to chimneys, and at last she saw the vague shadows of distant rooftops, unmistakably manmade in their angular lines.

“Is that it?” she asked, her fingers clutching the edge of the saddle.

“Yes.”

Her heart gave a tremendous thud.

“Are we getting married today?”

“Tomorrow.”

It felt like a nest of serpents had taken up residence in her belly. She could have cried. Could have pleaded with him to reconsider the virtues of Lisabe. She could have tried to flee when they stopped for lunch, forced him to drag her down the aisle to the altar and wailed her protest at the top of her lungs. She could make all of this as unpleasant and humiliating for him as it had been for her. It would please her father tremendously, if he heard about it.

But in her heart, she was not the Emperor’s daughter. She was the daughter of Rache Pavot, who had accepted her fate with grace.

The city drew steadily nearer. There wasn’t much to see but the high city wall and the rooftops beyond, taller than any building she had ever seen before. Around them, the duke’s knights shouted and shook out their cloaks, black lined with silver fur, and produced that ominous black standard with the bridge and crossed swords.

Distantly, she could hear shouting.

---