Page 33 of A Scar in the Bone
He had a wife.And she is here.
One of the guards caught me with a curse. Just as quickly, he flung me from him as though I were some contaminated bit of vermin he dared not risk touching.
“Ow!” I hit the ground and rubbed at my shoulder, glaring up at the man.
“No need for that!” Jorgen cried, reaching for me.
A guard pushed him next—clearly not listening. “Off with you!” The tent flap opened and a figure emerged. “Gentlemen,” came the softly admonishing tone. “What is all the clamor? Is something amiss?”
Deep voices rushed to explain, but I heard none of them as Jorgen pulled me to my feet.
A roaring filled my ears. I could only stare, speechless at the beautifully robed young woman. Coils of elegantly braided hair wrapped around her head in a coronet that glowed like a crown of gold in the fading dusk.
Her gaze landed on me and her delicate features lit as thoughfrom a thousand suns. “Tamsyn!” she cried, launching her smaller body against mine. And yet it was not as small as I remembered. Not as small as she once was. My bare fingers flexed, luxuriating in the soft folds of fur-trimmed velvet. Beneath the rich fabric, she was more substantial than I recalled. No more a child, but a woman’s body with the barest curves.
I was awash in the poignantly familiar perfume of fresh strawberries. I closed my eyes in a pained, bittersweet blink. Even all the way out here, she still managed to smell of her favorite fruit.
Jorgen stared at me over her head, a smug and supremely satisfied smile on his face. I heard his unspoken words.I was right.
Quivering with delight, she drew back from my arms to look up at me with unabated joy. “I never thought I would see you again. Oh, I’d hoped, fervently so, but I never really thought! Not after everything that, um … Oh, well, would you listen to me? I’m blathering on. Tammmsyn! It is you!” She squeezed my fingers with unconcealed glee. “Tam, say something!”
My voice emerged like something rusty and long out of use. “Hello, Alise.”
9
TAMSYN
STIG HAD MARRIED A TRUE ROYAL PRINCESS OF PENTERRA.
He was given the wife whom King Hamlin and the lord regent had done everything in their power to deny Fell. Stig was good enough for a royal princess. But not Fell. These facts dropped into place, one after another, in my mind. The irony of these realizations left me shaken.
Stig, the Terror, responsible for so much suffering, shared my sister’s bed.
I pinched the flesh of my arm, twisting my skin viciously, trying to wake myself from this nightmare. It did no good. I was awake and she was here.
Alise. Sweet, pure Alise … Stig’s wife.
How could she be bound to such a man? It was an absurd, cruel joke. It couldn’t be true. And yet as she sat across from me, sipping wine and delicately cutting and chewing the roasted pheasant on her plate, her beringed fingers glinting in the candlelight, jewels bobbing in her ears, the evidence was irrefutable.
“I am so glad to see you, Tamsyn. I’ve been out of my mind with worry about you. We all have.”
It took me several moments to reply, and then I could only echo: “We?”
I turned that over in my mind curiously. My father? My mother? I doubted they had been out of their minds with worry for me. They knew what they were doing when they gave me to the Beast. They knew he could do whatever he wished to me, and after thedeceit played upon him, it stood to reason whatever he wished could include all manner of horrible things. Even death.
Still, they had done it. Sacrificed me. Fed me to him. Used me as always. I was in their lives to serve, as an old plow mule serves a farmer in the field. They might have scratched me between the ears and fed me and sheltered me, but at the end of the day, I was no more than a tool to be exploited in the business of their lives.
Alise misconstrued my meaning. “Yes.” She nodded, cutting off another bite. “We’ve been sick with dread that you were dead. When word reached us of what happened, I took to bed for weeks.” I suppressed the urge to ask her what story she had been told. “I was quite cross with our parents for permitting you to marry Dryhten and sending you north with those barbarians.”
I could believe that of her, and I was struck again by the irony.
Many things had plagued me since I left the City. My life had been one trial after another. Amid all that, I had never been worried abouther. I’d imagined Alise safe and pampered and cossetted as always, fixed in her comfortable life in the palace, away from magic and menacing shadows. I hadnotimagined her here, bound to someone more demon than man.
She motioned with her fork to my plate. “Are you not eating?”
Food would not sit well in my rioting stomach.
The serving maid returned to the tent then, a basket full of fragrant, buttered rolls in her hands. She placed them between us. I reached for one, forcing myself to eat.
