“I’m done thinking about it,” he assured her, advancing just as quickly as she was retreating. “If you think this will give me joy, then…” he paused. “Actually, it will. Nothing is better than putting a spoiled child in her place, no matter how high she’s born.”
Her cheeks burned. “I am not a child.”
“The food wasted on the floor indicates otherwise,” he retorted, and then reached out to grab her arm.
Susanna was very used to being treated like glass, so this was an awful lot to be taking in so suddenly. Her mother made sure her nursemaid or a servant held her hand whenever she went up and down the stairs in fear of her falling. Her food was sampled by a trusted taster before it ever reached her mouth in fear of sickness or poisoning, and not even her father had ever raised a hand to her. That’s what her whipping girl had been for—and she thought it worked because she had been good friends with the whipping girl until she was married outside of the kingdom. She studied and obeyed as well as she could back then to make sure that her friend wouldn’t get whipped.
That being the truth of things, Susanna had never felt so physically threatened in her life.
“Let go of me!” she cried, trying to jerk his grip off her arm. She began to fight him with all the strength she had in her. Eventually he had to come behind her and pin her arms up against her chest as he brought her over to the desk and sat down upon it.
“The more you struggle, the more I’ll enjoy this,” he told her warningly, trying to wrestle her down across his knees.
She used all of the strength she had to wrench her body to the right and stumbled onto the ground. He made a second reach for her and she made a squealing noise she usually reserved for when she was surprised by very large rodents and very hairy spiders, and darted away from him, waving her arms in the air. Even she was surprised when she actually made it to the flap of the pavilion and into the cold winter air around them.
“My lady, not one more step!” she heard Gerhard’s voice boom from behind her. She spun in place and realized with surprise that he wasn’t as close as he had sounded. He was at the entrance of his pavilion, looking at her like she was a child standing at the edge of a cliff with a mixture of horrorand anger on his face.
Chills ran down her arms, and not because of the cold air. His anger was unbearable, mostly because she was very unused to dealing with anger from anyone but her uncle. No one else had ever dared to be angry with her, and the fact that he still had his belt in hand didn’t make her want to return to him.
She turned back around and, running as fast as she could through the sea of men, whores, swords, tents, and fires, she made for the tree line. She was already worried that she had no plan for when she got there. She couldn’t escape, she had no idea how to keep from getting hunted back down, she knew, but at the same time she couldn’t very well just submit to a punishment like she was some disobedient child.
Not used to running, she tired easily, and her toes quickly felt numb in the thin layer of snow under the soles of her slippers. She kept clipping the sides of tents and people, and eventually she tripped over a branch that jutted out from the ground and her body very ungracefully tumbled down next to a fire with two rabbits spitted atop it.
“Well, well! What do we have here?” a voice said above her. She was already beginning to acquire flashbacks from Rennio’s fight earlier that day. Two of the largest boots she’d ever seen stood in front of her face.
She put her hands out in front of her and slowly raised her upper body so that she could crane her head up toward the largest and hairiest man she’d ever encountered in her life. How her fortress had been taken had suddenly become oh-so-clear. They hadn’t needed to ram the door down. They’d just needed this man to come and smash it in himself. “It looks like you’re far from home, little girl.”
His dialect was that of eastern Bohemia, and she had the hardest time deciphering his tone, so she had to assume that he planned to eat her next—either that or something equally horrifying. Now, she was too frightened to move. “I thought they had all the maidens up in the keep?”
“Maybe they did, but some have been married off already,” another man said with a shrug. With immense relief, she was beginning to realize that they hadn’t recognized her as the princess. “Maybe she got away from her husband? Or hell, Arlo, she might be running away from the keep itself!”
“Well, she certainly got quite a ways!” Arlo hummed, but then bent down and grabbed her arm to yank her into standing. As soon as she was on her feet again, however, she felt the desire to crumple herself into the fetal position. Somehow, that position seemed safer.
She looked him in the eye, which was habit since the princess looked down to no one, but she quickly regretted it. Firstly, it strained her neck, and secondly, the eye-contact seemed to confuse the beast.
“Why, hello there, beautiful…” he finally said, grinning widely and exposing the fact that he was missing two of his front teeth. He sat down on anearby log and pulled her along with him. “Don’t you fancy a seat on my knee, love? No need to go out into the dark. You’ll get eaten by a bear!”
She felt like she was going to be eaten by a bear, anyway. Even when she jerked with all her strength she couldn’t seem to move even a single inch away from him. “Let me go!” she demanded sharply through her gritted teeth.
He laughed as if she was playing some sort of cute game, and then said, “Be nice, now. That’s no way to treat your future husband, my dear.”
“Future husband?” she echoed, narrowing her eyes at the furry brute. “You’ve got to be out of your mind! Unhand me now!”
“Future husband, aye! I’m not married, and I could see myself plowing some striking lads into this lovely belly of yours!” He reached his hands around her waist and put them up toward her breasts. “Got some tits on you, too!”
She gasped as his meaty hands grasped her breasts through her bodice, squeezing her flesh painfully. She tried to push his hands down and off of her, but he and all the other men around the fire only laughed and hooted merrily. She had a horrible feeling that everyone except her found her horror and disgust amusing.
“Let go of me this instant or I’ll scream!” she warned.
“You’ll be screaming anyway, lovely—I’m a big man!” the laughter around her was renewed. She scanned the darkness outside of the circle for Gerhard or Rennio, but she could barely make anything out of the shadows moving around. It was far too dark, far too noisy. Gerhard was never going to find her.
She grabbed the man’s thick, beefy arm and gripped downward with one hand and up with the other, as if trying to rip his skin in half.
“Oy!” he said, annoyed, gripping his arms around her even tighter. “Keep doing that, love, and I’m going to think you’re too impatient to wait for the priest in the morning! Come here and give us a kiss, now!” he leaned forward and she did the only thing she could think of: she spit on him.
Her mother—a woman who surely didn’t even know how to spit—was probably rolling around in her grave right this very moment, but in no worlds would Susanna let her first kiss be given by two lips that looked like two pink slugs. Although she hoped he would be stunned enough to let go of her, all that spitting did was stop his kissing advances. A low, worrisome ‘oooh!’ moaned through the circle as the big man held her by one arm and reached up and wiped the spit out of his eye with the other. He looked at his fingers even as she cried, “Let go of me, you boar!”
“Well, aren’t you the feisty one?” he said, his tone now low and holding no laughter. “I think I need to teach you a lesson in manners, don’t I?”
