“For what?”
“Your wife. And child.” I had to push the thought of those two mounds away.
“They are at peace,” he said, after a long moment.
I envied his certainty.
When we lost the light, we stopped to sleep at a monastery. As we knocked on the massive gate, Otto turned to me: “It will be easier if we say you are my wife.”
“I will not,” I replied, mildly offended.
“Then say nothing and let them assume.”
I complied. The abbot gave us a little thatched hut to sleep in, with earthen floors, along with a jug of warm beer and two small loaves of cold cheat bread. When Otto and I were left alone, we sat on two overturned crates, holding our individual loaves and sharing the jug.
“I am sorry for the room,” Otto said. “I thought we might get to an inn before nightfall. I will sleep outside.”
“You’ll freeze,” I protested. Whatever damage was done with us sharing a room had been done already, and I did not believe he would touch me. “Do you think they’re nearby?”
He knew who I meant. “They’ve got two horses and will be faster. They have a head start. But near enough.” Otto watched as I tore off a hunk of my bread and chewed it. “Which is it? Are you the mud-covered huntress from the woods or the lady of Bramley?”
“Both. Neither. I’m a brewer’s daughter. And this is a sorry excuse for beer,” I told him, holding up the jug that held a murky liquid that had gone sour. “They fermented it too long.”
He shook his head at some unspoken thought. “Do your daughters really know how to paint?”
I took a swig of the beer from the jug and did not meet his eyes, remembering how, at our picnic, he had reached for the canvases as if to test the wetness of their pigment. “Any accomplished young woman takes up an art.” It wasn’t an outright lie.
He smiled at me. “You mothers preen your daughters like racehorses.”
“Better a racehorse than a dog’s dinner.” I looked away. “We’re all just looking for some stability.”
“There’s nothing stable about life at court.” He shook his head. “What about all the options in between? Cart horse? Plow horse? Respectable pony?”
“Because the world is so plentiful with options?” I scoffed. “What are Elin’s options? What are Hemma’s?” I did not say: What are mine?Thinking of the princess reminded me of why I was sitting in a strange hut in the first place and soured me against Otto. I glared at him. “Would you really just thrust her child on someone so unsuspecting? Even if you did not know it was Simeon’s?”
Otto’s expression clouded, his face tightening. “Hemma is an innocent girl, even if, as I errantly thought, she’d made a mistake. There are worse outcomes for a baby. It was not my plan, and I did not like it, but it seemed to me—with the information I had—an all right outcome. Provided the mother was accepting. So many women would happily raise another’s child.”
“But not the noble ones. So the ball was arranged. And all the second pickings were invited.”
“Aye—not the royal cousins. Or the great families. They care too much about bloodlines.”
“Second pickings,” I reiterated. “Tell me. Did Sigrid intentionally exclude my daughters from the ball?”
“Initially, yes.” Otto spoke plainly. “Them and plenty others that suited her, or offended her somewhere along the way, or that she didn’t like the look of.”
“It’s illogical. She was trying to saddle someone with her erratic, dangerous son. Who better than an enemy, or someone she dislikes?”
“But they’d still gain. Though I suppose that’s the reasoning she looped around to, in the end.” His jaw tightened. “I tried to discourage her.”
“From the plan overall or from choosing my daughters?”
“A bit of both. Bits and parts. I am an advisor, not a puppet master. I push and prod, here and there, gently sometimes. Forcefully others. I cajole before I push.”
“A bit”—I passed him the jug of beer—“like a mother with her racehorse.”
“A bit,” he conceded.
For sleep, we’d each been provided a sack, which we stuffed with hay from the floor. When Otto’s was full, he took it to the opposite side of the hut. Lying on my own scratching, ill-shaped bag of driedgrass, I marveled: My life had been hard in many ways, but I had never not slept in a bed. I had never lain in a room with a man who was not my husband. But curled up on that sack, instead of appreciating Otto’s attempt to add some propriety to our context, as if sleeping on the other side of the dirt floor made a difference, I found myself wishing we might have settled a little bit closer—and not just for the warmth. Acutely aware of his nearby body, I found that I was glad, for just one night, not to be performing, or thinking of reputability. Despite the dirt and despite the sack, I slept well and with a sense of certainty that finally, at long last, I was doing the right thing.
