Page 2 of The Huntsman's Heart
Well I don’t have to be the only one uncomfortable.
Instead of calling for my maid and having her fetch a screen, I begin unlacing the stays of my riding habit myself, holding eye contact and stubbornly refusing to be the first to look away. Luckily, it is laced at the front and the stays are simple, allowing for the greater freedom of movement needed for riding and climbing. It takes only a little fumbling, and soon I have them loose. I drop them to the floor and begin on my heavy skirt.
Alaric coughs, dropping his gaze and turning to face the other way.
My smile is triumphant as I wrestle with the rest of my outfit.
I finish changing quickly, yanking the heavy velvet skirt of my formal dress over my underthings and belting it before tugging my full corset over my arms. Of course I can’t lace this by myself; it laces at the back. But rather than call for my maid, I step close to Alaric, startled by the way he spins fast as a summer change when I get close.
To hide it, I turn my back to him, holding the corset over my breasts. “Lace me up.”
A strangled noise comes from his throat, but in a moment I feel the tug of his hands on the laces. I suck in a breath as he yanks them tight, stronger and more efficient than my maid. He has them tied in half a moment.
When I turn back, he’s already at the door. “Come. We are late.”
Rolling my eyes at the portrait of my late mother on the wall, I beg for patience. I’ll need it to get through another tedious supper with my stepmother and her ladies. “You make a goodladies’ maid,” I sneer as I pass him. “Almost as good a maid as bitch for the queen.”
It gives me satisfaction to hear his low growl from where he stalks behind me all the way to the queen’s solar.
Alaric
Princess Guinevere is a brat. Spoiled and childish.
Yet her body is not the body of a child. No, it is the body of a woman. That much I saw plainly today when she brazenly undressed in front of me.
I could have left. Could have called a maid to dress her, could have dragged her straight to the solar in her riding habit. I did none of those things. Instead, I stood there and ogled her until it became obvious I would be dealing with a problem in my breeches, which is more surprising than it sounds.
I haven’t had an erection in nearly fifty turns around the sun. I thought my barely warm corpse was long past such human functions.
Now I linger in the doorway of the queen’s solar, hidden for the most part in shadow, watching her still. The princess may have a sour attitude, but she has the sweetest face in this kingdom and the ones surrounding it. More beautiful even than her stepmother, a famed beauty in her own right.
Guinevere’s skin is pale, needing no paste to fake the look that most highborn women strive for. As she looks up and her gaze meets mine across the room, though, her cheeks bloom with a flush of high color. Her thick, dark brows lower over her blue eyes, and she lifts her chin in a show of that very same stubborn temper that plagued me this eve. The gown she selected for tonight is modest as far as ladies’ fashion in this century goes. Yet when she leans forward to lift her goblet from the table, I’m still gifted with the swell of a full bosom and more inches of her flawless skin than should be permitted.
I should not be looking. Of course she wants me to look, having sensed how it unsettles me. I’m only unused to my body’s reaction. That is all. And she is using it to her advantage, as if she needs another.
No woman since Melantha has paid me so much attention in many years. The princess certainly glares at me with the same malevolence as her stepmother.
Discomposed by my awareness of her, I step back, sinking further into the shadow where I belong. The talk around the table goes on. Melantha always did like the sound of her own voice.
Melantha’s women lap it up just as they do the decadent food she insists on feeding them night after night, even in a winter where supplies are scarce.
The monsters in the Gloamwald are restless. Their numbers have increased despite the best efforts of me and my men. Perhaps it has been a good breeding season. Perhaps they have scented the stink of death which now hangs over Blackthorn Keep and have gathered here.
In any case, game meat is hard to come by. The monsters devour anything that scampers out to sniff the sunlight.
The farmers cannot even tend their crops properly in the short daylight hours of winter before they must scurry back behind the walls or huddle around tiny fires, praying to whatever gods they serve to keep them safe from what waits for them beyond.
But no one at the queen’s table ever goes hungry.
As the first dessert course is brought in, two servants carry the king in on his chair. The old man looks more sunken every day. The dark circles beneath his eyes seem to have swallowed his whole face. He can hardly keep his head up, and I wonder that they made him get out of his bed.
Melantha claps her hands, and the musicians fall silent. She gives the table a bright smile that could freeze the petals off the hardiest of spring daffodils. “My love, you are looking so much better today. I’m so glad you could join us this evening.”
I catch the worried look Princess Guinevere shoots her father across the table, and I can’t say I blame her. The queen is devouring him as she is devouring his kingdom.
The withered old man forces his thin lips into a besotted smile.
“My dear Guin,” Melantha continues. “Your father and I have some wonderful news, and now seems like the perfect opportunity. Ladies, raise your goblets with me and congratulate my darling stepdaughter, for she is to be married this spring.”
