Free TheKingsViper by Janine Ashbless Page B

next. She poked around in his soul, stirring the dust in long-undisturbed
corners, and it left him rattled. She shouldn’t be able to do that. No one
should.
    But then, he shouldn’t want her the way he did. He shouldn’t
knot up inside at the thought of handing her over to another man—and that man
his king.
    There were times when he felt like he was being asked to
walk up a stake that impaled him through the gut and up under his ribs and
right through his heart. Every step northward hurt.
    * * * * *
    Once they were away from the coast the land grew richer and
the farms more prosperous and well-ordered, with many servants. Ruda’s little
steading began to look in hindsight like a hovel, and her hospitality the more
generous in comparison. While they could usually find someone willing to offer
them bed and board in exchange for work, such was the time of year, they were
never treated with such concern as she had shown.
    Eloise found herself in the back scullery of a large
farmhouse one day, pounding and wringing the laundry of a household of at least
a score. This was one of the jobs she liked least—it was punishingly hard
labor, the weight of the wet sheets making her forearms ache as she wrung them
out—and for some reason that day she could not keep her mind on the task but
chased it restlessly over a dozen different things—her father back home on
Venn, the road ahead, or the pleasing way her feet and legs were growing
stronger for the walking they undertook. She wondered how Severin was doing.
He’d been sent out with the other menservants to harvest the hay. She pictured
the way he’d swung the long-handled rake across his shoulders in the yard and
stood with both arms up and resting upon it as he awaited his instructions, his
neck back at a slight angle in reaction to that yoke, one hip hitched, his eyes
watchful and patient. The ragged line of his hair on his forehead and neck. The
gape of his shirt neck, showing the first speckles of hair upon his chest. The
thought was distracting enough to make her pause at her labor over the big
stone sink and stare through the plaster of the wall, unseeing, her hands
resting loose in the water.
    “My mother told me she’d hired a new maid for the scullery.”
    Eloise jumped, turning. A man stood in the back doorway, his
hands on his hips. She had a vague recollection that the farmwife Mairy had
mentioned grown sons. This must be one. He had Mairy’s look about him.
    “Uh,” she said, paddling her hands in the water, reaching
frantically for the cloth there. “I was…”
    “Don’t worry. I’m not running to her to complain.” He walked
toward her. He was a slab of a man, handsome but fleshy, his fair hair shorn
close at the sides but loose on top in that Mendean way she found so ugly. His
neck was broader than his head, she noticed, and his skin weather-beaten. “I’m
an easygoing man. You’ll like me.”
    She wasn’t sure about that last at all, although his body
language was all affability he was getting close enough to make her nervous.
She wasn’t sure what she should say, so she only smiled weakly.
    “What’s your name?” He was at her shoulder now.
    “Ella.”
    “Ella. That’s nice. She said you were pretty. Mine’s
Duggan.” He stood with head tilted, watching as she started to draw the sheet
out of the rinse water, twisting it as it emerged. “That looks like hard work.”
    “Uh. Yes.” What did he want? “Have the men all finished in
the field then?” she asked, hoping Severin would be back soon.
    “Mmm. Mostly. Let me help you with that.”
    Since he was not a servant, and she was hired help, she
assumed that she ought to be polite to him. So she didn’t object when he took
the heavy linen from her, even though he stood behind her to do it and reached
round her with both arms. It was his house, after all. She just pressed herself
against the stone of the sink, trying to take up as little space as possible.
    He had big, muscular