Page 3 of Odette's Vow

“I suggest you take a seat and break your fast with me.” He turned and eyed me again. His hands were now full with two plates, each with bread and cheese and fruits. My stomach chose that moment to betray me with a large growl. We hadn’t eaten the entire walk here.

He chuckled again and my hackles rose. The sound felt too easy, too intimate, after what he had done in the early hours of the morning.

He noticed my eyes scanning my husband’s blood still splattered on his skin. “Ah.”

He put the plates down on the pallet before grabbing a jug of water. He then went to the tent’s opening and poured water over each arm, one at a time, and scrubbed with his hands. He returned and placed the jug on the pallet, the remaining water sloshing inside as it hit the surface.

“Better?”

“How kind of you,” I remarked in Thracian.

He must have understood it, for his brow darkened. “Sit.”

Begrudgingly I agreed, because starving wasn’t going to serve me. But, to break my fast in the evening with the man who had killed my husband, to sit opposite him … My stomach may have physically needed the food, but my appetite was not there. It took conscious effort to take a bite of bread, to chew every mouthful, to swallow. Every movement felt like an act of betrayal.

The deaths of the day clearly did not affect him so much. He ate quickly, efficiently. As if the food was merely fuel for his body and nothing more. Perhaps he didn’t savour life, only death.

“So, where did you learn Greek?” he asked.

From the man you killed, I muttered in my head. But how did he know? He must have seen the question in my eyes, because he answered.

“You don’t have that glassy-eyed confused look that the other women do. I’m assuming your husband taught you? Your father?”

I didn’t bother nodding at either guess.

“Rare for a farmer to know Greek.”

It was. But my husband hadn’t wanted to be a farmer; he’d wanted to be a scholar. We’d met outside the citadel library …

I had runinto him on the library steps. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but my mother was busy chatting away to a woman who had called for her by name: Callidora. After she’d commented on how long my hair was getting, just the same shade as my mother’s, and ‘wasn’t I turning into a proper young lady’ now that my body was starting to fill out with ‘womanly hormones’ (though I didn’t know what they were), I stopped listening. So, I decided to make a game on the steps. I was only eleven. I hadn’t been watching where I was going and bumped into a much taller boy, whose flat brown hair fell into his eyes as he looked up from his book.

“Oh, hello,” he said, as he snapped the book shut and smiled at me.

Mortified, I stood there looking at him with eyes wide, afraid to blink. I think, at the time, I hoped he would mistake me for a statue, though I didn’t have the porcelain skin to pull that off.

He laughed. “Shy one, are you? Me too. That’s why I come here,” he whispered conspiratorially as he pointed at the overwhelmingly huge building behind me. I’d never been in it. My mother told me only the smartest of men got to visit. But,this one didn’t look much like a man, all long-limbed with no meat on his bones, as she would say. He definitely wasn’t as old as my father, but he was older than the boys I knew.

“You’re allowed in there?” I folded my arms over my chest and fixed him with my sternest look, the one my mother gave me when she knew I was lying.

He laughed at me again. “When I have time to study, yes.”

I hesitated. “What do you study?”

He shrugged. “All sorts. The kings, the politics, the geography of the land.”

“Geo-gra-fee?”

“The arrangement of the land.”

“Why would you want to learn a thing like that, in there? Why not just look at it?” I gestured at the land around us as if that would prove my point, and caught my mother watching us. She was wearing a peacock-blue tunic, her hair in a braid atop her head to signal she was no longer a maiden and half down her back – to shock the neighbours, my father said. She looked like a goddess surveying the steps, as if she was about to walk up into the temple herself. But, there was a strange expression on her face. I couldn’t tell if she was angry at me or not, but I could see her eyes peering intently at us from all the way over here. I turned to look back to the older boy.

“My family are farmers. My brother will inherit the land, but I thought I’d do something useful to help. Study it. See if we can’t get a bit more coin for our crops if we’re smart about it,” he continued.

“Oh.” I didn’t have anything smarter to say. I don’t think he realised I was distracted by my mother.

Luckily, she chose that moment to call my name. “Odette!”

“Bye!” I turned and rushed down the stairs as fast as my legs could carry me, which was quite fast given I was unnaturally tall for my age. According to my mother, I got myheight from my father (even though she was taller than most of the ladies around here, too).

---