“Well… it isn’t particularly ladylike, to be academic…”
“Have you been to court, Lady Blackfell?” he interrupted firmly.
“No,” she admitted. She’d been married at Blackfell, and had not left the boundaries of Ditmar’s land once since then.
“I do not enjoy it there,” Niel said conversationally. “Too many people scheme behind their pretty smiles and prettier words. But would you agree the Queen’s ladies must be of high breeding?”
“Well, I… should expect so,” she muttered. “But I would not know.”
“A Rogess lady serves as one of the Queen’s political advisors. One of the Emelzen daughters works for the minister of trade. Mybrother’s—” his voice hardened unaccountably for a moment— “own woman is from Isen, and she works in the infirmary. No doubt they are all ‘well bred’ by your husband’s account.”
“Just because they do not keep to the old ways…”
“Whatold ways? I have no doubt women read and thought two hundred years ago, just as they do now, and just as they’ll do in two hundred more.”
What could she say to that?
She knew he was right. That was the thing. She’d known it when she married Ditmar, when he first took her books away, except for the two he’d missed.
But if you heard a lie enough times. Over enough years. Some things became easier to believe than to fight. She dropped her head, not wanting him to see the pain in her eyes. Ayla bit theinside of her bottom lip, trying not to feel too deeply. If she opened that well, she would never contain it. The anger ran dangerously deep.
“I expect he just wanted to control you,” Lord Niel added. His voice was surprisingly gentle. “It was something to take away. And if he stripped you of it, well, it gave him all the more power. Especially if you loved to read, which… hiding books under your mattress would rather imply.”
“What does it matter to you?” she asked quietly. If she raised her voice at all it would become ragged, sharp, like an edge of broken glass.
“You keep asking that. My answer hasn’t changed.”
What was it he’d said? That he knew what it was like. That he’d been a child once living under the control of a violent man. Still, Ditmar hitting her was one thing. Confiscating her books was another entirely. For a man who’d taken over Blackfell and ended a dozen lives earlier that day, he was acting oddly concerned with her well being.
“You are not at all what I expected a traitor to be.”
Niel laughed softly.
“Oh? What did you expect, the old blood of Eyron pounding through my veins and Arevon fire at my fingertips?”
“Brutal selfishness, I should think.”
“That’s my father,” Niel told her dryly. “I just want justice. To which point, when you return to your rooms tonight, you will do so carrying a stack of books.”
Her eyes slid to Ditmar’s bookshelf, where his family dagger stood on display between rows of leather spines in various shades of dye, some embossed with titles, others plain. The real library was in his study, but the shelf in the sitting-room held two dozen volumes. Her fingers itched.
“What, ofthose?”
“Whichever you like.”
“I can’t take Ditmar’s books. He…”
“Perhaps you have forgotten whose castle this is,” Niel told her, his voice low and his dark eyes glittering in the flickering firelight. “I conquered Blackfell, my lady, and its possessions are mine—utterly. Those are my books, now, not his; and this is my order. When you have finished eating, you will select a stack of books, and you will carry them all the way back to your room. I do not care if you read them. That is for you to decide.”
She fiddled with her knife, her heart racing.
“And I can takeanyof them?” she asked quietly. “Not… not only books on certain subjects, or…”
A smile briefly quirked the edge of the knight’s mouth.
“Any,” he agreed. “I name them yours. Now eat. We cannot afford to let any meal go to waste. Not even this one.”
A Captive Knight
