Page 3 of The Captive's Curse
To my surprise, the door latch lifted without any resistance, and the door swung open. He hadn’t locked me in. Hadn’t he said something about holding me for ransom? Weren’t you supposed to secure valuable prisoners? Not to mention my magic, which made me dangerous—theoretically, anyway. How offensive.
I stepped out into a corridor that perfectly matched the room I’d been confined in: shabby, grubby, and smelling of vegetables, only overcooked rather than raw. A worn flagstone floor stretched in both directions, uneven and pitted, with heavy wooden doors set at intervals. Some hung open. Maybe they’d given up.
Down one way, I heard a low hubbub of voices. With the noise came scents of what could be charitably called cookery:roasting meats and more singed something-or-other. It was enough to make my stomach rumble and twist despite the dubious appeal of the smells.
A frigid draft swept down the corridor from the other direction.
Almost certainly, that way lay freedom. For a moment I was tempted to run for it. But I’d have to find the stables and avoid recapture, and resaddle Agnethe if she’d been properly cared for, and anyway, I didn’t have any boots or trousers.
Besides, Rivina would still be on the rampage, and she’d no doubt whipped my mother and brother into a fury on her behalf by now, too. My attempts to explain my side of what had happened had been entirely ignored. Going home might not be worth the trouble of stealing my own horse.
Well, fuck.
Anger and resentment rose up so strongly they nearly choked me. Driven out of my own home with fruit, of all things. Knocked off my horse and nearly killed. Kidnapped! Undressed by someone who didn’t appreciate how lucky he’d been to do so, stuck in a thing that barely qualified as a bed, and simply left there alone, with no one paying any attention to me whatsoever!
The whisper of my bare feet on the stones didn’t satisfy me at all as I charged down the passage. I wanted to stomp and clatter. The end of the corridor had a tall arched doorway with no door in it, and I did my very best to storm through it with nothing to fling open or slam shut, skidding to a halt at the top of a short set of stairs that led down into, apparently, the main hall of whatever miserable fortress I’d been brought to.
The high-ceilinged space before me didn’t have the cavernous grandeur of the hall at home, but it easily held four or five very long trestle tables, benches to match, and a low dais at the far end of the room. A high table fit for ten or twelve diners, empty at the moment, occupied the dais. Tall, narrow windowsran the length of the place, though most had shutters over them at present to keep out the freezing late-autumn rain—and the ones that didn’t showed nothing but blackness.
Night had fallen while I lay in my onion-infused bedchamber.
The unclothed, rough-hewn tables were about half full of people eating from wooden bowls, with communal platters of meat and bread and potatoes between them.
Most of the diners were men, and while some of them wore the plain clothing of commoners or tradesmen, many had heavy dark green wool tunics, brown trousers, and sturdy boots, and some even wore studded leather armor, as if they’d just come in from some kind of training. They looked like an army, albeit a small one, not a motley band of thieving ruffians.
There were even three or four women sitting and eating and seeming perfectly content to be there, none of them appearing to be held against their will.
In fact, no one seemed afraid or distressed, or even inappropriate in their behavior. They were a lot quieter than such a gathering would’ve been even at home in a respectable castle full of respectable people. Downright dull, now that I had a second to observe them.
And I had many seconds to observe them.
Ten. Twenty. Thirty, which crept by like as many years as I stood there on display, nasty old blanket around my waist, my usually sleek and lavender-scented pale blond hair probably dark and crusty with drying mud. It’d have been horrifically embarrassing if they’d all turned to stare.
Why the hell weren’t they turning to stare, gods damn it?
Another glance around the room confirmed that my captor wasn’t here. Good. That rude, condescending bastard didn’t need to see me standing here being completely ignored by an entire hall full of strong, lusty men.
Too bad I didn’t have Rivina here. Her screams and flung objects would’ve done the trick.
“Hello?” I said, my voice coming out thin and rusty. I cleared my throat. “Prisoner here? Shouldn’t you be keeping me from escaping?” Nothing. “Or feeding me some of that very mediocre-looking supper?”
One man near the corner of the closest table turned, glanced over his shoulder, raised his eyebrows, grunted, and went right back to his food.
“Oh,” I gasped, pulling my blanket tighter.
All the hair rose on the back of my neck an instant before I heard the quick footsteps behind me. My back, and the backs of my legs, went all warm and tingly, all the parts of me that were toward the man approaching me getting oversensitive, like a sunburn.
I spun on him as he stopped a couple of feet away from me. He’d shed the black cloak somewhere, and now he wore clothing similar to that of his men: a rich wool tunic, his a shade of deep blue rather than green, and the same brown trousers and boots—all of it pristine, without a trace of the mud and wet he’d been out in earlier in the day.
It set off his height and wide shoulders and tree-trunk legs very well. Damn him.
And double damn him for finding fresh pants for himself, but not for me.
I glanced back up from my perusal of everything below the neck to find him cocking his head and examining me in turn, a glint in his black eyes.
“Are you going to turn me into a goat now, Lord Cyril?” he asked. “Or do you need to rest up a bit more first?”
Chapter Two
