Free TheKingsViper by Janine Ashbless

immense that he felt dizzy.
    * * * * *
    “Tell me about the King,” she said to him as they camped in
the angle of a ruined field-barn one night. She was feeling oddly fractious,
despite the long hours of walking. It always made her feel jumpy when one of
Severin’s silent phases went on too long.
    He fed sticks to the fire. “What about him?”
    I might as well , she thought, ask the difficult
questions. It isn’t as if I can shock him. “Does he have a mistress?”
    Severin’s lips thinned, and he looked at her thoughtfully
before replying. “He does. The Lady Katrine of Tockforton. She’s
lady-in-waiting to the King’s own mother, and a woman of excellent lineage,
though her family is not what it once was.”
    Eloise stretched out her hands to the flames and affected
nonchalance, despite the churning in her blood. “Will he put her aside after
marrying me?”
    “I don’t know.” Severin’s voice had that clipped, cold sound
it got when he was unhappy with a conversation. She’d gotten to know his habits
of speech. “He might do, if he were to become taken with you.”
    “Am I…attractive enough for him? To become enamored of me, I
mean?”
    “Well, you certainly don’t look much like a queen now.”
    She grimaced, acknowledging that she was bundled up in
layers of peasant clothing, that her hair was uncombed and her cheeks rough and
freckled from exposure to the weather. Then she jumped at the next question
before she could think better of it and lose her nerve. “Do you think I’m
attractive?”
    “This is not a conversation we should be having,” he
growled, holding up a warning finger.
    “But do you?” It mattered to her, somehow. Oh God, it
mattered.
    “I can hardly judge. Given how long it’s been since I’ve had
any female company,” he said sourly, “I confess that even the sheep around here
are starting to look appealing to me.”
    The coarseness of his words took her breath away and she
blushed, momentarily flustered. But a moment’s pause and then she wasn’t
fooled; she realized that his brutishness was calculated to put her off
questioning him. She narrowed her eyes. “And I thought you were a man who
wasn’t scared to tell the truth.”
    “The truth?” His dark eyes looked like holes in a fire-lit
mask. His voice grew no louder, but audibly darker. “You think you want the
truth, girl?”
    She blinked. Too late, she realized that he was really
riled. Why had the subject prickled him so? “I—”
    “The truth is that women will do anything for status in the
eyes of other women, and that men will do anything to get inside a warm
cunny—and both will do anything for gold. The truth is that people are selfish
and lazy and would rather die than think for themselves. The truth is that God
never helps the weak, that love and justice and honor are stories we tell to
comfort ourselves, and that we live and die alone. Don’t ask me for the truth.
You don’t want to hear it.”
    She sat as if frozen, though her skin was hot with shock and
shame. His bleak and bitter litany, coming almost out of nowhere, horrified
her. She wanted to shout “That’s not true!” but she could only think how
childish it would sound. So she stared and stared, and Severin held her gaze
over the fire.
    “That’s not the whole truth,” she whispered at last.
    “Oh?” he cocked an eyebrow.
    “You’re proof of that yourself.”
    Something strange happened to his expression, a
near-unreadable shift that might have been only the flicker of cast firelight.
But he looked away, no longer challenging. “You’re right,” he said hoarsely.
“It’s not the whole truth. Nothing is the whole truth. There are always
complications.” Then he sighed. “Listen, you have no need to worry about the
King’s mistress. A mistress…has no authority. No power, unless the man is weak.
Do you think the Lady Katrine might threaten a queen? Arnauld is not such a
fool and, believe me, the Lady Katrine has no