“You might as well get your crying over with. No doubt you’ll start doing it eventually and it will be awkward for everybody involved. There’s no handmaidens to clean up your tears for you and whisk you away or whatever it is they do. Now that it’s only you and myself, and I plan to ignore you in any case, cry to your heart’s content.”
Her heart still panged, her stomach still clenched, and even the smell of the mead was making her stomach roil. “I’m not going to cry,” she replied firmly. She was far more likely to vomit first, since every time she realized where she was, what had happened over the last week, and that she’d never see any of her friends again, her stomach clenched and rolled.
She lifted her chin, trying desperately to find her voice and strength again. Despite the fact that her uncle had given most of the orders, she had still been the ruler of this whole region. She had honed a regal bearing since birth, and she decided she would keep her dignity. Trying to muster her most authoritative tone, she asked, “I heard that you are a bishop. How is this possible?”
“Are you… ordering me to tell you?” he drawled, looking confused.
She supposed that it might have sounded like that. She was a princess—that’s how she was supposed to sound. In control and confident. “No, I am not,” she admitted. “But I am curious nonetheless.”
“Good. Just as long as you’re not ordering me. You’re not my princess, you know… You’re not a ruler at all anymore. You have about as much power as one of the pigs tied to the meat wagon,” he said, gesturing his own freshly-poured mug in what seemed to be a random direction.
It was then that she found herself scrambling toward the entry to the pavilion, where she vomited. The image of being slaughtered like a pig was simply too much.
Her reaction had surprised even herself. She had thought she was doing a fine job of choking down her nerves, but her stomach had apparently decided that it was under far more pressure than it had been in the past.
“Oh, damn it,” she heard in her ear somewhere as she was heaving, well aware that there were dozens of soldiers staring at her. She felt a warm hand on her back as she continued to empty her stomach. Finally, she collapsed on the ground, where she remained for a moment before she was picked up with a mighty groan into Rennio’s arms and carried back to her pallet of cushions. “Women!” he huffed to himself, as if he had predicted that she’d do this.
She didn’t respond, but instead merely curled up with a groan and a shudder, feeling like she was facing misery unlike any she could haveimagined.
He left the tent, and in about an hour, she felt him return. He pressed some leaves into her hand. “I had the mess cleaned up. Take this, the mint will help the feeling and the bad taste,” he promised. “Mint helps the stomach.”
“Thank you,” she wheezed, weakly pressing the leaves into her mouth and chewing on them tentatively. The sharp taste of the mint was welcome in her mouth, making her feel slightly refreshed.
“I am a bishop,” he admitted out of nowhere after he watched her for a few long minutes.
She had no idea what he was talking about until she realized, with a trickle of annoyance, that he was keen just to pick up the conversation where it had left off more than an hour ago when he had made her ill with his cruel words.
“At least… I was. The pope decided I would be more valuable on the battlefield than behind the pulpit. Now… I’m more of a soldier than I am a man of God.” He grumbled then pressed back onto his feet, apparently to rediscover his tankard of mead. “Since then, I’ve owed my life to Gerhard more times than I care to count. All I know is I’m not doing what I thought I was going to do a decade ago. Believe it or not, my goal was to be pope by the age I am now.”
“Thirty?” she guessed, then raised an eyebrow. “Well, that was quite optimistic.”
He snorted out a laugh. “I’m an optimistic person!” he said, as if the statement itself was the punchline to a joke.
She felt herself, even if very faintly, truly smile for the first time in days. The man seemed much too dark and surly to feel happiness, let alone optimism. She couldn’t imagine anyone who looked less likely to become pope. “Are priests allowed to kill?”
“The response to that is not as simple as you might think,” he replied simply, in the same tone she had overheard used in a war room, when one of her father’s knights was explaining something to her that her mother didn’t seem to consider important to teach a young woman. “I wouldn’t worry your pretty little head on these matters,” Rennio continued.
This made her pull herself back up into sitting. “Pretty little head, indeed! If you think you have an answer that would sail above my head, then you are sorely mistaken. As my father once said,respice, adspice, prospice. I do not fear learning.” She regretting quoting Latin as soon as she remembered that he was a bishop and he surely spoke it as well. He would not be impressed.
“Oh, so there is fire in your gullet, eh?” he said with a laugh. “Though examine the past, present, and future,” he translated, “are very pretty words for someone who just lost their country, I must admit.”
Her stomach roiled again, and she clapped her hand tightly to her gut. He was right, after all—she had just lost her country. She had lost her kin—herwonderful cousins, her little sisters, and all without a suitable goodbye. She might have lived under the control of a tyrant, but at least she had known happiness with her other company. She had been so proud to have the respect so many other women would have died for. Yet, that was all a memory now; it had passed her by…
She cuddled back down on her pallet. “I keep forgetting I’m a prisoner.”
“Surely I would as well. Gerhard does have you in his private tent and not outside in the stockade, after all…” He hummed thoughtfully. She couldn’t tell any longer if Rennio was being serious or not.
“Why doesn’t he?” she huffed, tired of being bullied by a smelly drunk who just happened to be good at swordplay and insulting princesses who had just lost everything. “Why doesn’t he just tie me to a block and have done with me?”
“Maybe if you ask him nicely,” he retorted, then finished his mug of mead and refilled it.
She sighed, done with talking to him and shaking her head silently as she reflected how her whole life had been tossed into complete madness. The good news about being guarded by a drunk, however, was that he was only horrible when he was awake, which wasn’t for very long. Before long, he was snoring loudly from his high-backed chair with his chin tilted up, his mouth open, and a half-full tankard of mead still resting on his lap as he slept.
She pulled herself up into standing, looking around the pavilion and getting attracted by a trunk that was overflowing with books and papers. She knelt in front of it and sat back on her feet as she began to peruse the pages and covers.
Gerhard must be extremely rich, she realized. He had more than fifteen books with him, all with perfect, handwritten pages in delicate script.
She knew she didn’t have long on this earth, but she was chomping at the bit for anything, absolutely anything, that could distract her in the few short days she had left. She would even settle for being distracted for a few short hours. Her mind was crowded with thoughts and worries, and she had no power to fix any of the problems that ailed her.
