Not to mention his wife.
They entered the New Forest. It was quieter in the forest, the woods green and lush with new growth. The trees were less dense than she expected. There were even large patches of open space in which wild ponies grazed.
In Zindaria, the forest was darker, denser. Rupert’s hunting lodge was deep in the forest. She’d only been there the once.
The worst mistake of her life.
He used to go to his hunting lodge often, almost every week. Sometimes for just a night or two, sometimes for longer. It depended, he’d said, on the game.
She’d thought he meant animals.
Women weren’t allowed, he said. In those days she couldn’t bear to be parted from him. She missed him with an ache that was almost physical.
He’d been gone a week and was expected to stay another week.
But at the beginning of the second week she’d been given some wonderful news. Her courses were normally as regular as clockwork and she was two weeks overdue. Her breasts were tender and a little swollen. And three mornings in a row she’d woken up feeling nauseous.
She thought she was ill, but her maid had become all excited when she’d been nauseous in the morning. She’d questioned Callie closely, then fetched the palace physician.
Callie remembered the joy she’d felt when she’d learned she was going to have a baby.
She was so excited she couldn’t wait for Rupert to come home. He was desperate for a son, she knew. She’d ordered the carriage and had driven into the forest, to his hunting lodge.
She remembered every moment of that drive. It was spring, too, with new growth bursting all around her. There were snowy wee lambs with long, waggly tails, lanky, delicate foals hovering at their mother’s side. In the forest she’d even caught a glimpse of a doe nuzzling a shy, leggy faun. The sight had brought her almost to tears.
She’d felt joyously at one with this new precious world, fertile, bounteous, successful: she was going to be a mother.
At the hunting lodge she hadn’t let Rupert’s servants announce her. She wanted to surprise him.
She did.
He was lying half naked on a thick fur rug in front of the fire. Sitting astride him was a naked woman, a voluptuous Valkyrie of a woman, with flowing golden locks spilling down her naked back and over her full breasts. She was bent over him, rubbing her breasts against his naked chest, saying in a breathy girlish voice, “Oh, Wupert, Wupert, I love you so much, my darling Wupert, I am so happy, so happy, so happy, my beloved ickle-wickle Wupert.” She spoke in Zindarian, but Callie had no difficulty in recognizing the imitation of her own English accent, nor the subject of this cruel mimicry.
Herself.
Callie stood frozen, unable to move as the woman went on and on, talking in a ghastly baby-talk imitation of Callie.
She vaguely remembered thinking at the time that she never had called him Wupert, nor said anything like ickle-wickle, or used that horrid baby voice. The rest of it—the accent, the words, the sentiments—were horribly, shamingly, accurate. She had uttered those very phrases to Rupert—but only ever in private.
The only way the woman could have heard them was from Rupert himself. Callie’s soul shriveled with pain and mortification.
The more the woman gushed in cloying imitation of Callie, the more Rupert had laughed, deep belly laughs of the sort she’d never heard from her husband before, until finally he ordered the woman to stop, saying he got enough of that sickening pap at home, and reminding the Valkyrie that the reason he came here was to get away from all that. He wanted a woman, not a dreary, love-besotted child.
The dreary, love-besotted child had managed to clear her throat, drawing their shocked attention. They had made no move to cover themselves, just stared at her from the fur rug.
Somehow—she had no idea how—she had managed to keep her composure. Some shred of ancestral pride had stiffened her sixteen-year-old spine. She would not make a scene. She would rather die than show her hurt and distress in front of them, in front of the husband who had betrayed her so cruelly, and in front of that naked, golden, shameless creature who had imitated her so horribly.
In a cold little voice, Callie managed to announce that she had come to inform Rupert that she was expecting his child and that having done so, she would now return to the palace.
They still hadn’t moved when she turned and left.
She had walked straight out in that same distant, frozen state—she still had no idea how she had managed to find her way back to the carriage. And once safely inside, once the carriage was moving swiftly back through the forest, the tears came.
She’d sobbed all the way home, great choking sobs that scalded her throat and almost rent her chest in two, weeping until it made her almost sick.
Over and over she heard the woman’s voice scornfully uttering the precious endearments Callie had whispered into her husband’s ear. Her memory was seared with the sound of Rupert’s belly laughs.Sickening pap,he’d called it.
She had wept and wept. The forest was dense and dark and ancient and it absorbed her pain, as it had absorbed pain for millennia, and by the time the carriage approached the palace, Callie had no tears left.
