The Deserter I Saved Turned Out To Be A Royal Duke — But I Refused His Proposal
Part 2
He held the heavy gold signet ring up to the pale light.
His voice dropped an octave, vibrating with centuries of unquestionable command.
He introduced himself as Lord Gregory, Duke of Westmerland, commander of the northern armies.
He ordered them to lower their weapons.
The color drained completely from Lieutenant Craig’s face.
Recognition hit the officer like a physical blow.
The flintlock pistol dropped to the floorboards with a clatter.
The five men snapped their boots together and bowed their heads in a rigid salute.
Greg commanded them to wait outside.
The lieutenant scrambled backward, pulling the broken door shut.
The immediate quiet was suffocating.
I turned toward the stone sink and plunged my hands into the freezing water.
I scrubbed my knuckles with harsh lye soap until the skin flushed red.
Heavy boots crossed the floorboards.
Greg stopped right behind me.
The word ‘liar’ ripped from my throat.
He was nothing but a lord playing dress-up in a peasant’s grave, and I made sure he knew it.
He gripped my wrists, pulling my hands out of the basin.
The hard lines around his mouth softened, and the commanding fire in his gray eyes completely vanished.
He told me I was the only real thing he had touched in ten years.
He asked me to marry him.
The words hung in the damp air, heavy and absurd.
I told him I would suffocate.
His court would smell the turnip water on my skin and the dirt beneath my nails.
I would become a feral pet he dragged back from the war.
He searched my face for a crack in my armor, but found none.
He reached into his pocket and pressed the signet ring into my palm.
He told me the land was mine, the taxes paid for the next century.
He said it wasn’t payment, but a surrender.
He walked out into the rain and mounted a massive black stallion.
I stood by the sink, listening to the thunder of hooves fading into the mud.
Would you have surrendered your freedom for a gilded cage, or was I right to let him ride away?
Part 3
The blood dried stiff, resembling rusted iron flaking into coarse wool.
Brenda learned this washing the village’s linens.
She didn’t expect to find a half-dead deserter bleeding into her turnips.
The stench of gangrene, gunpowder, and wet dog hung heavy in the air.
She truly should have abandoned him for the magistrates.
Instead, she dragged 12 stone of deadweight through the mud to her root cellar.
She pitied the wretched man.
She would not have done so if she knew his blood ran bluer than the frozen river.
Frost gripped the soil like a vise, turning the potato patch into a graveyard of hard, gray clumps.
Brenda chipped at the earth with a rusted trowel, her breath pluming in the damp November air.
Her knuckles were split, crusted with dirt and old scabs.
Hunger was a dull, persistent ache behind her ribs, a familiar lodger she ignored out of habit.
Something groaned.
It wasn’t the wind through the pines.
It was low, wet, and decidedly human.
Brenda froze.
She tightened her grip on the trowel, knuckles going white.
She didn’t call out.
Survival in the borderlands meant keeping your mouth shut and your head down.
She crept toward the bramble thicket at the edge of her property line.
A pile of dark fabric lay tangled deeply in the thorns.
At first glance, it looked like a dead deer dumped by poachers.
Suddenly, a mud-caked hand twitched.
A soldier.
His coat was a wretched, unidentifiable color, soaked through with swamp water and dried blood.
He lay face down, his breathing a ragged rattle.
“Leave him,” her mind ordered.
“He’s dead anyway.
The rot is already in his lungs.
She turned her back.
She made it three steps toward her meager, drafty cottage before a sharp intake of breath snagged her conscience.
It sounded exactly like the noise her father made when the cart crushed his chest.
A pathetic, helpless gasp.
“Damn it all to hell.”
Brenda muttered, pivoting on her worn heel.
She marched back, grabbed the man by his shoulder, and heaved him over.
He was a dead weight.
His face was obscured by a thick crust of mud, sweat, and a matted beard.
A deep gash tore through the fabric of his side, the edges of the wound black and weeping yellow fluid.
The metallic stench of old blood, mixed with the stomach-churning odor of infection.
He managed to crack a single, fever-bright eye.
It was gray, like the winter sky above them.
“Water.”
He croaked, his lips split and bleeding.
“You’re bleeding out in my turnips.”
Brenda replied, her voice flat.
“Water is the least of your concerns.”
She calculated the distance to the cottage.
50 yards.
He weighed at least 12 stone.
She was a woman of bone and sinew, fed on cabbage water and spite, but this was a fool’s errand.
If the king’s men found a deserter on her land, they would hang her from the ancient oak in the village square.
Yet, her hands were already gripping the collar of his ruined coat.
She braced her legs, her worn leather boots sinking into the frost-softened mud, and pulled.
The journey to the cottage was an agonizing blur of strained muscles and muffled curses.
He didn’t help.
He was completely limp, his boots dragging twin furrows through her dormant garden.
Sweat stung Brenda’s eyes.
Her lower back screamed.
By the time she hauled him over the threshold, she was panting, her chest heaving.
She didn’t take him to the bed.
The mattress was her only luxury.
Instead, she dragged him to the trapdoor in the corner of the kitchen.
The root cellar.
It was damp, dark, and smelled of decaying onions, but it was hidden beneath a woven rag rug.
Getting him down the wooden ladder was a nightmare.
She practically had to let him slide, his body thudding heavily onto the packed dirt floor.
He released a sharp cry of agony before losing consciousness again.
“Quiet,” she hissed into the gloom, though he couldn’t hear her.
Brenda lit a tallow candle.
The flickering yellow light threw dancing shadows across the cellar walls, illuminating the jars of pickled beets and the sagging sacks of grain.
She knelt beside him, her knees soaking up the dampness of the earth.
She needed to see the wound.
Producing a small, sharp paring knife from her apron, she sliced through the hardened wool of his coat.
It gave way with a sickening rip.
The gash was ugly, jagged and deep just below his ribs.
It looked like a bayonet thrust that had glanced off the bone.
Brenda gagged at the sudden, sharp waft of gangrene.
She pressed the back of her grimy hand to her nose, swallowing bile.
“Stupid, stupid girl,” she whispered to herself.
She should fetch the magistrate, collect a few shillings for turning over a runaway, buy a real loaf of bread.
Instead, she climbed back up the ladder, filled an iron kettle with water, and set it over the dying embers of the hearth.
She rummaged in her sewing tin for the thickest needle and a spool of coarse waxed linen thread.
From a hidden floorboard, she withdrew a half-empty bottle of cheap eye-watering gin.
When she returned to the cellar, his breathing had grown shallower.
She poured the raw spirit directly over the wound.
His back arched violently.
A primal guttural scream tore from his throat.
Brenda clamped her hand over his mouth, her palm tasting the grit and blood on his lips.
“Shut up,” she hissed, her face inches from his.
“You’ll bring the patrol down on us.
Shut your mouth, or I’ll let you rot.”
His gray eyes flew open, wide and unseeing, clouded with agony.
He stared at her, his jaw rigid under her hand.
For a second, he looked ready to bite her.
Then, slowly, the tension drained out of him.
He gave a jerky microscopic nod.
She removed her hand, wiping it on her apron.
Threading the needle in the dim candlelight was a trial.
Her hands shook, not from fear, but from the adrenaline crash of dragging him inside.
She took a deep breath, steadied her fingers, and pierced his skin.
It was truly awful work.
The skin was tough, resisting the blunt steel.
Each pull of the heavy thread produced a wet tearing sound that made her stomach turn.
He didn’t scream again.
He simply ground his teeth together so hard she thought they might shatter.
A low whine escaping his nostrils with every stitch.
Brenda didn’t look at his face.
She focused solely on the mechanics of closing the flesh, tying off the knots with brutal efficiency.
She wasn’t a nurse.
She was a seamstress repairing a torn sack.
When she finally finished, there were 11 ugly puckered stitches holding the gaping hole shut.
She wrapped his torso in strips of a boiled petticoat, tying it tight.
He had passed out once more, his skin clammy and pale beneath the grime.
Brenda sat back on her heels, exhausted.
She looked at the blood on her hands, sticky and drying fast.
She had committed a crime.
She was harboring a fugitive.
And for what?
She didn’t know him.
She didn’t even like the look of him.
Blowing out the candle, she climbed the ladder, leaving him to the dark and the smell of old onions.
Smoke from the damp peat fire stung Brenda’s eyes.
She scrubbed viciously at a cast-iron skillet, trying to ignore the muffled thumps emanating from beneath the rag rug.
Three days had passed since she dragged the nameless soldier out of the mud.
Three days of creeping down the ladder with bowls of watery gruel, wiping cold sweat from a brow that burned like a furnace.
He was deep in the grip of the fever.
His mind wandered far beyond the cramped confines of the root cellar.
He muttered incessantly.
He spoke of flank maneuvers, cavalry charges, and the biting cold of the eastern front.
But sometimes his words twisted into strange, jarring complaints.
He argued with invisible servants about the temperature of his bathwater.
He complained about the starch in his collars.
Brenda chalked it up to the delusions of a dying brain.
The fever was cooking his wits.
A sharp, authoritative knock hammered against her front door.
Brenda dropped the skillet.
It clattered against the stone hearth, the sound unnaturally loud.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, trapped bird.
She wiped her wet hands on her apron, took a steadying breath, and forced her face into a mask of bored annoyance.
She unlatched the heavy oak door.
Two men stood on her stoop.
Their scarlet coats were vivid and jarring against the drab gray landscape, though the wool was splattered with dried mud and rain spots.
The one in front held a musket slung casually over his shoulder.
He had a pockmarked face and small, cruel eyes.
“Morning, missus,” the soldier said, though his tone lacked any real courtesy.
He peered past her shoulder, trying to see into the dim interior of the cottage.
“What is it?”
Brenda asked, keeping her voice flat.
She didn’t open the door any wider than necessary.
“Looking for stragglers,” the second soldier chimed in.
He held a crumpled piece of parchment.
“Deserters from the king’s third regiment.
We tracked a blood trail a mile down the road, but it washed out in the rain.”
“I haven’t seen anyone,” Brenda said smoothly.
She leaned against the doorframe, projecting an air of weary impatience.
“Just me and the crows out here.
Unless your deserter is hiding in the cabbage patch, you’re wasting your time.”
The pockmarked soldier sniffed the air.
Smells like you’re brewing something foul.
Turnip soup, she replied without missing a beat.
You’re welcome to a bowl if you’ve a stomach for it.
It’s mostly water and salt.
The soldier sneered, taking a step back.
Keep your slop.
If you see anyone wearing a torn uniform, or if you notice anything out of the ordinary, you report to the garrison.
Harboring a traitor is a hanging offense.
I’ll keep that in mind, Brenda said.
She closed the door in their faces and threw the bolt.
For a full minute, she stood there, her forehead pressed against the rough wood, her legs trembling so violently she thought they might give out.
Once the sound of their boots squelching through the mud faded, she moved to the center of the kitchen, rolled back the rug, and hauled up the trapdoor.
She descended the ladder quickly.
The smell of the cellar was atrocious, a mix of stale sweat, sickness, and the sharp tang of the gin she kept using to clean his wound.
He was awake.
He was propped up against a sack of barley, his breathing shallow but steady.
The fever seemed to have broken, leaving him looking hollowed out and gray.
His hair, matted with dirt and dried sweat, hung limply over his forehead.
He watched her climb down, his pale eyes tracking her movements with unsettling clarity.
They’re gone, Brenda said gruffly, setting a tin cup of water on an overturned crate beside him.
I heard.
His voice was a ruined rasp, like two stones grinding together.
He reached for the cup, his hand shaking so badly water sloshed over the rim.
You lied to them.
Don’t flatter yourself.
I lied for me, she snapped, snatching the cup from his trembling fingers and holding it to his lips.
If they found you, I’d swing right beside you.
Drink.
He swallowed greedily, water spilling down his stubbled chin.
When he finished, he slumped back against the barley sack, chest heaving.
Why didn’t you hand me over?
He asked, his gaze pinning her.
I ask myself that every morning, Brenda muttered.
She pulled the soiled bandages away from his side.
The skin around the stitches was red and angry, but the gangrene hadn’t spread.
It was a small miracle.
You owe me a new rug, by the way.
You bled all over the woven one my mother made.
He let out a short, harsh sound that might have been a laugh, but it instantly degenerated into a racking cough.
He clutched his side, his face contorting in pain.
Careful, she warned, pressing a hand to his uninjured shoulder to steady him.
The muscle beneath his filthy shirt felt rock hard, but he was trembling like a beaten dog.
When the coughing subsided, he looked up at her.
The arrogance that usually accompanied a soldier’s uniform was entirely absent.
He just looked tired, deeply, fundamentally exhausted.
I don’t have any money, he rasped, his eyes dropping to the dirt floor.
I have nothing to pay you with.
I didn’t ask for payment, Brenda said, pulling a clean strip of linen from her apron pocket.
She began to rewrap his torso.
Her touch wasn’t gentle, but it was efficient.
I asked for a rug.
You can weave me one when you can stand up.
He watched her hands as she worked.
You’re a hard woman.
Soft women don’t survive out here.
She tied the bandage off with a sharp tug.
What’s your name?
He hesitated.
It was a fractional pause, barely noticeable.
But Brenda saw the way his jaw tightened, the way his eyes flicked away from hers for a split second.
A lie was forming.
Greg, he said finally.
Just Greg?
Just Greg, a private.
Brenda looked at his hands.
They were caked in mud and grime, scraped and bruised.
But the fingernails, though dirty now, were perfectly shaped.
There were no deep calluses from years of holding a plow or a hammer.
The skin, where it wasn’t coated in muck, was unwithered.
She met his gaze again.
He held it, defiant but wary.
All right, private Greg, Brenda said, standing up and brushing the dirt from her knees.
Get some sleep.
If you die of the rot down here, I’m burying you in the potato patch and you’ll make terrible fertilizer.
She climbed the ladder, pulling the trapdoor shut behind her.
She didn’t believe him for a second.
Men who carried themselves like that, even when half dead and reeking of cellar mold, were never just anything.
But it hardly mattered.
A liar was easier to manage than a madman.
And right now, her biggest concern was figuring out how to stretch one turnip into three meals.
By the 12th day, the root cellar smelled like a tomb.
The damp earth, initially a blessing against the fever, was now seeping into his joints.
His cough had returned, a dry hacking sound that rattled the floorboards under Brenda’s bare feet.
She couldn’t leave him down there, not unless she wanted to dig a grave in the frozen ground before midwinter.
“Up.”
She ordered, tossing a bundle of coarse wool down the trapdoor.
It was her father’s old hunting tunic, smelling strongly of mothballs and stale tobacco.
“The rot is out of your side, but the damp will take your lungs.
Put that on and climb.”
It took him 10 minutes.
Brenda didn’t help.
She stood by the hearth, stoking a meager peat fire, listening to his ragged breathing and the scraping of his boots against the wooden rungs.
When his head finally crested the floorboards, he looked worse than he had in the dark.
The daylight was unforgiving.
It exposed the waxy pallor of his skin, the sharp, starved jut of his cheekbones, and the dark, bruised hollows beneath his gray eyes.
He hoisted himself over the edge and collapsed onto the rag rug, chest heaving.
“You move like an old woman.”
Brenda muttered, though she pulled a sturdy, ladder-backed chair closer to the fire.
“Your hospitality remains overwhelming.”
He panted, his voice a dry rasp.
He dragged himself to the chair and sank into it, his long legs stretching toward the weak flames.
Now that he was in her living space, the cottage felt claustrophobically small.
He took up too much room.
Even hunched over and emaciated, there was a breadth to his shoulders that didn’t belong in a peasant’s kitchen.
Brenda set a wooden bowl in his lap.
It contained a lump of gray porridge, stiff as mortar.
“Eat, then you’re peeling the carrots.”
He stared at the bowl.
He didn’t complain, but the brief flicker of revulsion crossing his features was unmistakable.
He picked up the warped wooden spoon.
Brenda watched him from the corner of her eye as she scrubbed a cast iron pot.
He didn’t grip the spoon like a starving man.
He didn’t shovel the tasteless mush into his mouth.
He held the crude utensil with two fingers and a thumb.
His posture automatically straightening as he brought the food to his lips.
It was a muscle memory he couldn’t suppress.
A private in the infantry ate like a feral dog, hunched over his rations to protect them from his comrades.
This man ate like he was sitting at a banquet table waiting for the second course.
“You hold your spoon like a priest,” Brenda remarked, tossing the scrubbing brush into a bucket of gray water.
He paused, the wooden spoon halfway to his mouth.
He slowly lowered it.
“My mother was strict about manners.”
“Must have been hard to maintain in the trenches.”
“You adapt.”
He took another small measured bite.
“Or you die.”
“Or you run away,” Brenda shot back.
It was a cruel thing to say, but the cramped space was making her vicious.
His presence was a constant ticking threat.
His jaw tightened.
The gray eyes snapped to hers, shedding their exhaustion for a split second to reveal something sharp and dangerous.
It was the look of a man used to giving orders, not taking insults from a woman in a mud-stained apron.
But the flash of authority died as quickly as it came.
He slumped back into the chair, the fight draining out of him.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“Or you run away.”
Brenda felt a flicker of guilt, entirely unwelcome.
She turned her back to him, busying herself with the carrots.
She threw three of the knarled, dirt-caked vegetables into his lap.
He didn’t have a knife.
She pulled her father’s skinning blade from her belt and tossed it.
It landed point first in the floorboards, an inch from his boot.
He didn’t flinch.
He calmly reached down, pulled the blade free, and picked up a carrot.
It was agonizing to watch.
He had the brute strength to drag himself miles with a hole in his side, but his fine motor skills with the rough tools of her life were nonexistent.
He gripped the carrot too tightly, hacking away thick strips of the orange flesh along with the dirt.
He was wasting more than he was saving.
“Give me that,” Brenda snapped, crossing the room and snatching the knife from his hand.
Her fingers brushed his.
His skin was warm now, the fever entirely gone, but the contrast between them was stark.
Her hands were raw, calloused, stained permanently with earth and ash.
His hands, despite the recent grime, possessed long, elegant fingers and unmarked knuckles.
“I can do it,” he protested, trying to take the knife back.
“You’re slaughtering my supper,” she said, her shoulder bumping his as she stood over him.
He smelled of her lye soap, the smoky fire, and a strange underlying scent of clean sweat.
It was entirely distracting.
She sliced the carrot skins paper thin, the blade flashing in the dim light.
He watched her hands, his gaze intense.
“Where did you learn to handle a knife like that?”
he asked.
“Skinning rabbits, gutting fish, surviving.”
She didn’t look at him.
“Things they don’t teach strict mothers.”
“You have no family here?”
“Dead.”
She said flatly.
“Father crushed by a logging cart.
Mother took the coughing sickness two winters past.
Just me.”
“It is a hard life for a woman alone.”
Brenda slammed the flat of the blade against the table.
“Do not pity me, Greg.
Pity is a luxury for people with full bellies.
I have a roof.
I have a fire.
You have a target on your back and a hole in your gut.
Save your pity.”
He looked at the hacked, ruined carrot in his palm, then up at her fierce, soot-smudged face.
“Fair enough, Brenda.”
he murmured.
It was the first time he had used her name.
It sounded strange in his mouth.
Too soft, too formal.
It sent a highly irritating shiver down the back of her neck.
Winter arrived not with a gentle dusting, but with a howling, violent assault.
The wind battered the cottage walls, finding every crack in the wattle and daub, whistling through the gaps like a chorus of dying men.
Snow piled in drifts against the door, sealing them inside.
They were trapped.
For 3 days, the storm raged.
The daylight was a murky, bruised purple.
Inside, the temperature plummeted.
Brenda’s breath plumed in the air even when sitting directly next to the hearth.
The peat was consuming itself far too quickly.
They needed wood, but the wood pile was under 2 ft of snow outside the back door.
“I will fetch it,” he said.
Brenda looked up from the ragged sock she was darning.
He was standing near the frost-rimmed window, wrapping a thin woolen scarf around his neck.
He looked better.
The hollows in his cheeks had filled out slightly with the meager rations, and he could stand upright without wincing.
But he was far from whole.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Brenda said, biting off the end of her thread.
“You’ll tear your stitches, bleed out in the snow, and I’ll have to drag you back in.
I’m not doing that twice.”
“We are freezing, Brenda.
The fire will be dead in an hour.”
He didn’t wait for her argument.
He pulled on his stiff ruined coat, the one she had roughly stitched back together, and shoved the back door open.
The wind immediately howled into the kitchen, bringing a spray of icy white powder.
Brenda cursed, dropping her sewing and grabbing her own heavy shawl.
By the time she stepped outside, the cold hit her like a physical blow.
The snow was blinding.
She squinted through the gale, looking for him.
He was at the wood block.
He had a heavy iron axe in his hands.
He raised it over his shoulder, his face a mask of determined concentration.
But the swing was all wrong.
The motion pulled violently at his right side.
He gasped, his swing faltering midair.
The axe struck the frozen oak log at a shallow angle, glancing off and burying itself into the snowbank.
He fell to his knees, clutching his ribs, his breath coming in ragged white bursts.
“You stupid, stubborn fool!”
Brenda roared over the wind.
She waded through the knee-deep snow, grabbing him by the collar of his coat.
He tried to wave her off, his teeth gritted in pain, but she hauled him upright with surprising strength fueled by pure rage.
She shoved him toward the door.
“Inside, now!”
She didn’t follow him immediately.
She grabbed the axe handle, her bare hands stinging against the freezing iron.
She planted her boots in the snow, squared her shoulders, and brought the axe down.
It bit deep into the oak.
A sharp twist, and the wood split with a satisfying crack.
She chopped six heavy logs, her muscles burning, her breath tearing at her throat, ignoring the biting wind that whipped her unbound hair across her face.
When she finally kicked the door shut behind her, dropping the logs loudly onto the hearth, she was shaking violently.
Her fingers were numb, red, and raw.
He was sitting in the chair, leaning forward, one hand pressed hard against his side.
A fresh bloom of crimson was spreading through the fabric of his shirt.
“I told you,” Brenda panted, dropping to her knees before the fire to feed the split wood into the dying embers.
“You broke a stitch.”
“I was trying to help,” he said, his voice tight.
“You don’t know how to help.”
She didn’t look at him.
She stared at the flames, watching them lick at the dry edges of the oak.
“You don’t know how to swing an axe.
You don’t know how to peel a root.
You’re a useless burden, Greg.
The words were harsh, meant to wound.
She wanted him to argue.
She wanted him to act like the arrogant soldier she assumed he was.
Instead, the room fell silent, save for the crackle of the strengthening fire.
“I know,” he said softly.
Brenda turned her head.
He wasn’t looking at her with anger.
He was looking at his own hands, those clean, uncalloused hands with an expression of profound disgust.
“I know,” he repeated, his voice barely audible over the wind outside.
I spent my life commanding men to do things I cannot do myself.
I ordered them to march through snow.
I ordered them to build fires in the rain.
I ordered them to die.
And I cannot even chop a single log to keep you warm.”
The raw honesty in his tone caught Brenda entirely off guard.
It stripped away the cynical retort she had ready on her tongue.
The walls of the tiny cottage suddenly felt impossibly intimate.
She sighed, a long, weary sound, and pushed herself up from the hearth.
She poured a splash of warm water from the kettle into a tin basin.
“Take the shirt off,” she said.
Her voice softer now, stripped of its usual bite.
He looked up, hesitating, then slowly worked the buttons free.
He pulled the fabric back.
The lowest stitch had indeed torn through the skin.
It wasn’t deep, but it was bleeding sluggishly.
Brenda knelt beside his chair.
She dipped a clean rag into the warm water and began to wipe away the fresh blood.
Her touch was different this time.
It wasn’t the frantic, brutal work of saving a dying man.
It was careful, deliberate.
He hissed slightly as the damp cloth dragged over the inflamed skin.
She hesitated.
“Does it hurt?”
“I’ve had worse.”
He murmured, his gaze dropping to the top of her head.
“Liar.”
She whispered.
She felt him swallow.
The proximity was overwhelming.
She could feel the heat radiating from his skin, smell the damp wool of his trousers, hear the uneven thud of his heart.
She kept her eyes focused on the wound, refusing to look up into his face.
“Why did you desert?”
She asked, the question slipping out before she could stop it.
The silence stretched long enough that she thought he wouldn’t answer.
“Because,” he finally said, his voice a low, heavy rumble in his chest.
“I realized I was fighting a war for a man who didn’t care if we froze, so long as his maps looked prettier.
I couldn’t send another boy into the meat grinder, so I walked away.”
Brenda pressed a dry pad of linen against the seeping cut.
She bound it tightly, her knuckles grazing the hard plane of his stomach.
He wasn’t just a soldier who lost his nerve.
He was a man who lost his faith.
She understood that completely.
“Keep still.”
She told him, tying the knot.
“Or I’ll let you freeze.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He whispered.
She finally looked up.
He was staring back, his gray eyes dark and unreadable in the firelight.
For the first time, Brenda didn’t see a burden.
She saw a man she was entirely terrified she might want to keep.
Snow buried the cottage up to the window ledges by the fifth day, encasing them in a tomb of white.
Daylight was reduced to a dirty gray sliver slicing through the heavily frosted glass.
Inside, their world shrank to the 6 square feet around the stone hearth.
Hunger stopped being a sharp, localized pain and settled into a heavy, dull ache behind Brenda’s eyes, a constant ringing in her ears.
The turnip sack was flat, leaving only dry dirt at the bottom.
The salted pork was a distant memory.
They were surviving on weak, bitter tea made from steeped pine needles and handfuls of stale flour mixed with melted snow baked on a flat rock into tooth-breaking hardtack.
Greg sat cross-legged on the hearth rug, a piece of char plucked from the cold edges of the fire in his hand.
He was sketching on a scrap of butcher’s paper she’d used to wrap the last of their cheese months ago.
Brenda sat on the three-legged wooden stool, aggressively darning the same woolen sock for the third time, her needle flashing in the dim firelight.
The silence between them was thick, heavy with the weight of unsaid things, freezing drafts, and empty stomachs.
“You’re pressing too hard,” she muttered, not looking up from the gray wool.
“You’ll snap the char.”
He didn’t stop drawing.
“It keeps my hands busy.
If I stop moving them, I fear the joints will freeze solid.”
Brenda tied off a knot with a vicious tug and bit the coarse thread.
She finally glanced over, wiping a stray hair from her forehead.
She expected crude stick figures, military formations, or perhaps the mindless scribbles of a starving brain.
Instead, she saw a startlingly precise rendering of the cottage’s timber rafters, complete with the hanging bunches of dried thyme and the uneven sag of the central roofline.
The perspective was flawless.
The shading captured the gloomy, oppressive light perfectly.
The shadows deepening exactly where the thatch was thickest.
She stared, dropping the sock into her lap.
Where did an infantry grunt learn draftsmanship?
Greg stilled.
His fingers, smeared entirely black with soot, curled inward.
He stared at the paper as if the ink had betrayed him, his jaw tightening.
“An officer,” he said slowly, carefully measuring the cadence of his words, “took a liking to me.
Had me draw terrain maps for the artillery division.”
It was a smooth lie, delivered without a stutter, without a nervous blink.
Brenda hated how easily he did it.
“You lie like a corrupt magistrate, Greg.”
She tossed the mended sock into a woven basket by her feet.
“Maps require lines, coordinates, and topography.
They don’t teach you how to capture the exact rot in a load-bearing beam, or the texture of dried herbs.
That is a nobleman’s parlor trick.”
“A beam is just a line with texture,” he replied quietly, not meeting her eyes.
“And your hands are just meat and bone, but they’ve never seen a day of hard, honest labor.”
Brenda leaned forward, the wooden stool creaking loudly in the quiet room.
The gnawing emptiness in her belly made her reckless, stripping away her usual guarded nature.
You eat like a lord at a banquet.
You read the maker’s mark on the bottom of my cast iron skillet yesterday when you thought I wasn’t looking.
You draw like a royal architect.
You aren’t a private.
I doubt you’ve ever dug a latrine in your life.
He carefully set the charcoal down on the warm stone.
The firelight flickered across his face, casting harsh, moving shadows into the deep hollows of his cheeks.
He looked up, his gray eyes pinning her in place.
The exhaustion in them was replaced by something sharp and deeply guarded.
Does it matter?
His voice was low, entirely devoid of its usual polite veneer.
Does my supposed rank change the fact that I am starving in your kitchen?
Does it change the fact that my blood stained your root cellar?
Does it change the certainty that if the redcoats break through that door, I hang from the village oak?
It changes the risk, she snapped back, her own voice rising.
A deserting grunt gets a rope.
A deserting officer, they make a public spectacle of that.
They’ll burn this cottage to the ground with me inside it just for the sport of making an example.
Greg pushed himself up from the floor.
He was thin, battered, and wearing a patched, ruined coat.
But when he stood over her, the sheer physical presence of the man swallowed the cramped room.
He didn’t loom maliciously.
He just existed with a heavy, unmovable gravity that made Brenda’s chest tight.
He stepped closer, one step.
His worn leather boot brushed the fraying hem of her skirt.
“I will not let them touch you,” he said, the words ringing with absolute, chilling authority.
Brenda barked a dry, humorless laugh, though her heart hammered against her ribs.
She stood up to meet him, refusing to cower, even though she had to crane her neck to look him in the eye.
“You can’t even lift a wood axe without bleeding everywhere.
How are you going to stop a fully armed garrison with your charcoal sketches and your strict manners?”
He didn’t smile.
He reached out.
Brenda flinched, her body tensing instinctively for a blow she knew logically wasn’t coming, but her reactions were bred in violence and hard years.
His hand stopped inches from her face.
Then, very deliberately, he lowered it to her shoulder.
His touch was incredibly warm through the thick wool of her shawl.
“I walked 200 miles with a bayonet wound rotting in my side to get away from a slaughter,” Greg murmured, his thumb lightly brushing the coarse fabric covering her collarbone.
“Do not mistake my temporary physical ruin for a lack of will.
If they come, I will surrender myself to the magistrates long before they reach your wooden gate.”
The smell of him, stale wood smoke, sharp pine tea, and bitter, clean sweat filled her senses completely.
He was too close.
The heat radiating off his broad chest was a stark contrast to the freezing draft biting at her ankles.
She wanted to shove him away.
She wanted to lean forward into his chest.
The internal contradiction made her stomach twist violently.
“You talk too much,” Brenda whispered, her voice betraying a slight tremble.
She turned away abruptly, breaking the physical contact.
The loss of his warmth was immediate and surprisingly sharp.
She grabbed the heavy iron kettle and shoved it recklessly onto the glowing embers.
“The snow has stopped,” she said, keeping her back to him, staring blankly at the frosted glass.
“Tomorrow at dawn, I check the snares.
If there’s no meat out there, we’ll start boiling my winter boots.”
Dawn broke like a shattered pane of glass across the horizon.
It was brutally bright and painfully, dangerously cold.
Brenda strapped her feet into homemade snowshoes, woven from pliable willow branches and stiff rawhide, and shoved her shoulder against the heavy oak door.
The snowbank outside was chest-high and solidly packed.
It took 10 agonizing minutes of aggressive digging with a flat wooden shovel just to carve a narrow path to the edge of the tree line.
Every muscle in her back screamed in protest.
Her breath froze against the woolen scarf tightly wrapped around her lower face, forming a brittle, stinging crust of ice.
The forest was entirely silent.
The massive pines hung heavy, their dark green boughs drooping severely under the sheer weight of the white powder.
She trudged a mile and a half up the ridge to her snare line, checking the first three traps hidden beneath the snow-dusted brush.
Empty.
The wire loops were frozen stiff, entirely untouched by any passing animal.
Despair tasted exactly like copper pennies in the back of her throat.
If she returned empty-handed today, they wouldn’t make it to the end of the week.
Greg was already swaying dangerously when he walked.
His bayonet wound was finally healing, but the starvation was aggressively eating his muscle mass from the inside out.
At the fourth snare, tucked strategically beneath a hollowed-out birch log, a patch of mottled gray fur broke the relentless blinding white, a hare, a massive, winter-fattened hare.
The thin copper wire had caught it clean and tight around the neck.
It was frozen solid, stiff as a wooden board, but to Brenda, it was a king’s ransom in gold.
She dropped heavily to her knees in the snow, her frozen, clumsy fingers fumbling desperately with the wire mechanism.
She didn’t feel the biting wind tearing at her exposed wrists.
She only felt the heavy, glorious, life-saving weight of the carcass in her hands.
On the hike back down the ridge, her gaze caught something that made the triumph sour instantly in her belly.
A natural break in the trees overlooked the western valley road.
Half a mile down, cutting deeply through the pristine, untouched snowpack, was a wide, churning trench.
Horses.
Several of them, moving in a tight column.
The snow was far too deep for a casual merchant or traveler.
Only a heavily motivated military patrol would force their mounts through this kind of brutal weather.
They were moving south, away from the cottage, but the proximity made Brenda’s blood run cold.
They hadn’t given up.
They were methodically sweeping the perimeter of the county.
She practically ran the last half mile, her lungs burning like they were filled with crushed glass.
The dead hare thumping heavily against her hip with every step.
She burst through the door, kicking a spray of loose snow onto the floorboards.
Greg was kneeling at the hearth, carefully feeding a precious, tiny stick of kindling into the struggling fire.
He jerked upright at the violent noise, his hand instinctively dropping to the handle of the skinning knife she had left resting on the wooden table.
“Meat!”
Brenda gasped, pulling the scarf down and holding the frozen hair up by its stiff hind legs.
Greg let go of the knife.
The defensive tension drained immediately from his shoulders, replaced by a raw, naked, hungry focus.
“God above,” he breathed reverently.
Skinning and butchering the frozen animal was a silent, frantic affair.
Brenda didn’t bother preparing a slow stew to stretch the rations.
She hacked the red meat into thick, uneven chunks, skewered them aggressively on a long iron spit, and rested them directly over the hottest, glowing coals.
The heavy smell of roasting animal fat hit the stale air within minutes.
It was intoxicating.
It made Brenda’s raw hands shake uncontrollably.
They sat cross-legged on the floor, passing the hot, charred chunks of meat between them directly from the spit.
They didn’t speak a single word.
It wasn’t a civilized or polite meal.
Hot grease dripped down Brenda’s chin, and she wiped it away fiercely with the back of her grimy hand.
Greg stripped a small rib bone entirely clean, his teeth tearing at the blackened flesh with an animalistic intensity that completely erased the refined, disciplined aristocrat she had seen arguing over charcoal drawings days prior.
When the last scrap was swallowed and the bones tossed into the fire, they sat back against the rough hearthstones, breathing heavily.
The grease shining on their fingers caught the dancing firelight.
For the first time in 3 weeks, Brenda felt genuine warmth spreading from her core.
Greg let his head loll back against the stone wall.
He turned his face to look over at her.
There was a dark smudge of soot and rabbit grease across her left cheekbone.
Slowly, he reached his hand out.
This time, Brenda didn’t pull away.
His thumb brushed her cheekbone, lightly wiping away the grime.
His fingers lingered, tracing the sharp, tense line of her jaw.
His touch was rough.
His skin had hardened over the past month of chopping kindling and hauling water, but the deliberate intent behind the motion was devastatingly gentle.
“You saved my life again, Brenda,” he murmured.
The rasp in his voice deepened by the heavy meal.
“It’s just a rabbit,” she deflected instinctively, though her voice betrayed her.
It was a shaky, breathless, terrified sound.
“It is not just a rabbit.”
His hand slid smoothly to the back of her neck.
His long fingers tangling securely in the messy, unwashed knot of her dark hair.
He pulled her slightly closer, closing the distance between them.
“You are the fiercest, most magnificent thing I have ever known.”
Brenda looked down at his mouth.
She saw the split lip that was finally knitting together, the dark, unkempt stubble heavily shadowing his jaw.
All her survival instincts screamed at her to push him away.
He was temporary.
He was a hunted fugitive.
He was a polished liar with military secrets who would bring a noose to her doorstep.
He would eventually leave or he would hang and either way she would be left alone in this frozen wasteland again.
But the cottage was so quiet.
The fire was so intensely warm.
And the way he looked at her made her feel something utterly terrifying.
Entirely visible.
She leaned in.
The kiss wasn’t sweet.
And it wasn’t hesitant.
It was desperate.
It tasted of roasted meat, sharp pine smoke, and raw unspeakable need.
Brenda grabbed the lapels of his ruined military coat, holding him closer, her knuckles turning white.
Greg let out a low, rough groan, his arms wrapping tightly around her waist, pulling her flush against his chest.
His uninjured side pressed hard against her, grounding her completely.
It was a chaotic collision of sharp angles, bruised ribs, and frantic heat.
For a brief, reckless moment, the redcoats, the snow, the hunger, and the lies ceased to exist.
There was only the fire, the cold, and the desperate, breathless friction of two people trying to prove to each other they were still alive.
Regret tasted like old ash.
Brenda woke before dawn, her cheek pressed against the rough, woven fibers of the hearth rug.
The fire had died down to a singular, glowing ember, casting a faint, bloody light across the stone.
Her back ached.
Her lips were bruised, swollen from the desperate, unpolished collision of their mouths the night before.
Greg was asleep beside her, his heavy arm draped securely over her waist, anchoring her to the hard floorboards.
She carefully extracted herself from his grip, holding her breath as he shifted and let out a low grunt of pain.
His wound was healing, but sleeping on a hard surface had clearly aggravated the scarred tissue.
Brenda stood, pulling her shawl tight around her shoulders, shivering as the draft from the window bit into her skin.
She shouldn’t have touched him.
She knew better.
Hunger and isolation were a potent, intoxicating poison, making a woman believe in foolish things like salvation.
But Greg wasn’t salvation.
He was a temporary ghost haunting her kitchen.
Moving quietly, she picked up his ruined military coat from the back of the chair.
She had meant to patch the left shoulder where the wool had frayed to the lining.
She sat on the wooden stool, threading her needle in the pale gray light bleeding through the frosted glass.
As she smoothed the heavy fabric across her lap, her fingers brushed against something hard and unyielding hidden deep within the interior padding.
She paused.
The seam along the inner breast pocket was thick, re-stitched with a thread much finer than military issue.
Brenda glanced at Greg.
He was deeply asleep, his chest rising and falling in an even, exhausted rhythm.
With a sharp flick of her paring knife, she snapped the fine threads.
A small, heavy object wrapped in oilcloth slid into her palm.
She unrolled it.
It was a signet ring, massive, forged of solid gold, and set with a flat piece of dark onyx.
Engraved deeply into the black stone was a sprawling, intricate crest.
Two falcons flanking a crown resting above a crossed broadsword and a scepter.
It was heavy enough to break a man’s jaw.
It was the kind of object that bought estates, commanded armies, and severed heads.
Brenda stared at the ring, her breath hitching in her dry throat.
An officer was one thing.
A captain or a major could be born of minor gentry.
A second son sent off to bleed for a promotion.
But this this was ancient, unspeakable wealth.
This was the bloodline of kings.
She rolled the ring back into the oilcloth and shoved it deep into the lining of the coat, abandoning the repair.
Her hands were shaking.
The dirt under her fingernails suddenly looked infinitely darker, more permanent.
She was a peasant hiding a deity in her root cellar.
You found it.
Brenda flinched, the coat slipping from her lap.
Greg was awake.
He hadn’t moved from the rug, but his gray eyes were open, fixed on her from the shadows.
The exhaustion was gone from his face, replaced by a guarded, tense stillness.
“I was patching the shoulder,” she said.
Her voice sounding thin and brittle in the quiet room.
“I felt the lump.”
He slowly pushed himself up to a sitting position, leaning heavily against the stone base of the hearth.
“I was going to tell you.”
“When?”
Brenda spat, the humiliation and anger rising like bile.
She stood up, kicking the stool back.
“Before or after you played at being a starving grunt to get between my legs?”
“Did you find it amusing, my lord?
Watching the filthy spinster scrape bark for your tea?
“Stop.”
He commanded.
It wasn’t loud, but the authority in the single syllable hit her like a physical blow.
He stood, wincing slightly, and crossed the small distance between them.
He didn’t reach for her.
He kept his hands at his sides, respecting the sudden, furious boundary she had erected.
“I never mocked you, Brenda.
Not once.
I lied because a man of my station caught deserting the front lines isn’t just hanged.
He is taken to the capital, stripped of his lands, and beheaded for treason.
My family would be ruined.
I needed to disappear.”
“You don’t belong here.”
She whispered.
Her anger fracturing into a terrifying, hollow grief.
She looked at his hands, then at her own ruined, calloused fingers.
“You are a falcon.
I am a dirt scratcher.
When the snow melts, you will remember what you are.”
“I know exactly what I am.”
Greg said softly, his gaze locked on her face.
“I am a man who was bleeding to death in the mud until a woman with more courage than my entire battalion dragged me into the dark and sewed me back together.
The ring means nothing here.
I am just a man, Brenda.”
“The world outside doesn’t care about here.”
She replied, turning her back to him.
The winter light was shifting, growing brighter.
The frost on the windowpane was beginning to weep.
“And the snow is melting.”
Mud replaced the snow.
The brutal grip of winter finally shattered in late March, bringing relentless, driving rain that turned the valley into a brown, squelching swamp.
The roof of the cottage began to leak in three different places, forcing Brenda to place rusted iron pots on the floorboards to catch the steady, maddening drip.
The dampness seeped into her bones, but the isolation was finally breaking.
The valley road was thawing.
Brenda stood in the yard, a woven basket resting on her head, as she dug aggressively into the softened earth of the root vegetable patch.
She was hunting for any surviving carrots that hadn’t turned to mush beneath the frost.
Her hands were caked in cold, wet clay.
Inside, Greg was attempting to repair a broken hinge on the back door.
He was getting stronger every day, the pallor gone from his skin, his muscles hardening back into their natural, formidable shape under the cheap wool of her father’s tunic.
A sharp, unnatural sound cut through the steady drumming of the rain.
Brenda froze, her fingers buried knuckle-deep in the dirt.
It was the heavy, rhythmic thud of hooves fighting thick mud.
The unmistakable jingle of brass bridles and iron scabbards clattering against leather saddles.
She stood up slowly, her heart plummeting into her stomach.
They were coming up the ridge.
Not two men on foot this time.
It was a full patrol.
Six men on horseback wearing the dark, rain-soaked scarlet of the king’s royal guard.
Leading them was a Lieutenant Craig, his face hard and set beneath the brim of a dripping bicorn hat.
“Greg!”
Brenda screamed, dropping the basket.
Carrots scattered into the mud.
She sprinted for the door, her heavy boots slipping treacherously in the muck.
She burst into the kitchen.
He was standing by the hearth, the iron hammer lowering slowly from his hand.
He had heard them.
“Get in the cellar.”
Brenda gasped, shoving her muddy hands against his chest, trying to physically move him toward the trapdoor.
“It’s a full guard, six of them.
Move.”
He didn’t budge.
He felt like a wall of solid stone beneath her hands.
“No.”
He said calmly.
“Are you insane?”
She clawed at his tunic, panic tearing at her throat, suffocating her.
“They will kill you right here in the dirt.
Get in the hole.”
“If I hide, they will tear this cottage apart, and they will hang you for harboring me.”
He reached up, gently gripping her wrists, and pulling her muddy hands away from his chest.
His gray eyes were entirely devoid of fear.
They were cold, clear, and terrifyingly resolved.
“I am done hiding.”
The sound of the horses stopped right outside the front window.
Men shouted rough orders.
Boots hit the ground with heavy, wet thuds.
“Open the door in the name of the king.”
A voice bellowed, followed by a violent pounding on the oak that shook the entire frame.
Brenda couldn’t breathe.
She stepped back, her legs trembling so violently she nearly collapsed against the wooden table.
Greg stepped past her.
He didn’t run to the door.
He didn’t cower.
He stopped in the center of the room.
He reached down, and meticulously brushed a speck of sawdust from his patched trousers.
He straightened his spine.
It was a physical transformation that made Brenda gasp.
The exhaustion, the humility, the quiet desperation of private Greg vanished in a heartbeat.
He stood tall, his shoulders thrown back, his chin elevated.
He looked like a man who owned the earth beneath his feet and the sky above it.
The door exploded inward.
The iron latch tore from the rotted wood with a deafening crack.
The Lieutenant Craig stormed into the kitchen, a heavy flintlock pistol drawn and leveled directly at Greg’s chest.
Four soldiers crowded into the doorway behind him, muskets raised, the bayonets catching the dull gray light from the window.
The smell of wet horsehair and stale tobacco flooded the cramped room.
“Traitor!”
the Lieutenant Craig hissed, cocking the hammer of the pistol.
“I knew we’d find you rotting in one of these border hovels.
Get on your knees.”
Greg didn’t move.
He didn’t raise his hands.
He simply stared down the barrel of the gun with an expression of profound, chilling boredom.
“You forget yourself, Lieutenant Craig,” Greg said.
His voice was unrecognizable.
It dropped an octave, vibrating with centuries of absolute, unquestionable command.
It was not the voice of a man speaking to an executioner.
It was a master speaking to a disobedient hound.
The Lieutenant Craig blinked, rain dripping from his hat.
The pistol wavered a fraction of an inch.
“What did you say?”
Greg took a single, deliberate step forward, ignoring the gun pointed at his heart.
“I said, you forget yourself.”
He reached into the inner pocket of his coat.
The soldiers behind the Lieutenant Craig tensed, fingers tightening on their triggers.
Greg withdrew his hand, holding the heavy gold signet ring between his thumb and forefinger.
He held it up to the pale light.
“I am Lord Gregory, Duke of Westmerland, commander of the northern armies, and a peer of the realm,” he stated, his voice ringing off the stone walls.
“And you will lower that weapon before I have you flogged for insolence.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
The only sound was the steady drip of rain into the iron pots.
The Lieutenant Craig stared at the ring.
The color drained completely from his face, leaving his pockmarked skin a sickly, ashen gray.
He looked at the ring, then up at the sharp, aristocratic features that the mud and starvation had masked for months.
Recognition hit the officer like a physical blow to the stomach.
The flintlock pistol dropped to the floorboards with a heavy clatter.
“My lord,” the Lieutenant Craig choked out.
As one, the Lieutenant Craig and the four soldiers in the doorway snapped their boots together.
They threw their hands sharply to their foreheads, bowing their heads in a rigid, terrified salute.
Brenda stood frozen against the table, her breath completely gone, staring at the stranger in her kitchen while the king’s guard trembled before him.
Rain pounded against the broken oak door, driving a freezing spray into the kitchen.
But the silence inside was absolute.
The five men in the king’s scarlet remained rigidly bowed, their chins tucked to their chests.
They looked less like soldiers and more like terrified children caught trespassing.
Brenda backed away, her spine hitting the edge of the stone sink.
The damp cold of the masonry seeped through her thin blouse, but she barely felt it.
She stared at the man in the center of the room.
He wore her dead father’s moth-eaten tunic.
His boots were held together by mud and spite.
But the heavy, unyielding gravity of the Duke of Westmerland had entirely consumed the broken infantryman she had dragged from the turnip patch.
“Wait outside,” Gregory commanded.
His voice didn’t rise.
It didn’t need to.
The Lieutenant Craig scrambled backward, his spurs catching on the uneven floorboards, nearly tripping over his own boots in his haste to retreat.
He grabbed the ruined door by its splintered edge and hauled it as shut as it would go, leaving Gregory and Brenda alone in the dim, dripping kitchen.
The sudden silence was absolutely suffocating.
Brenda turned abruptly toward the basin.
She plunged her mud-caked hands into the freezing water.
She grabbed a block of harsh lye soap and began to scrub viciously.
Her knuckles scraped against the rough ceramic.
The water turned a murky, bruised brown.
She focused entirely on the sharp bite of the lye and the burning cold.
It was real.
It was something she understood.
Boots crossed the floorboards.
Heavy, deliberate steps.
He stopped right behind her.
She could feel the heat radiating from his chest, smell the familiar scent of wood smoke and clean sweat beneath the damp wool.
“Brenda.”
She flinched.
The sound of her name in that aristocratic cadence made her stomach twist into a hard, painful knot.
Don’t.
I am the same man who was bleeding on your floor an hour ago.
You are a liar, she snapped, her voice trembling with a feral contained rage.
She didn’t look at him.
She kept scrubbing her raw hands until the skin flushed angry red.
You are a lord playing dress-up in a peasant’s grave.
You watched me boil pine needles while you owned the very ground we were starving on.
Did it entertain you?
He reached out, his large hands closing firmly over her wet wrists.
He pulled her hands out of the freezing basin.
Brenda fought him, a short, violent jerk of her shoulders, but his grip was iron.
He turned her around to face him.
His expression wasn’t arrogant.
It was brutally exposed.
The mask of command he had worn for the soldiers was gone, leaving only the hollowed-out exhausted man she had kissed by the firelight.
“I was not playing,” Gregory said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.
“I was surviving, and you were the only real thing I have touched in 10 years.
My world is entirely comprised of sycophants, assassins, and maps covered in the blood of farm boys.
This cottage, you, were the first honest breath I have drawn since I was a child.”
“Honesty,” Brenda spat, a bitter laugh tearing from her throat.
She looked at his thumb, still bearing a faint smudge of soot from her hearth, pressing into her pale wrist.
“There is no honesty between a duke and a dirt scratcher.
What happens now, your grace?
You bundle me onto a horse, keep me in a velvet room in the capital so you can visit when the highborn ladies bore you.
Gregory flinched as if she had slapped him.
His grip loosened, but he didn’t let her go.
I would marry you.
Those words hung in the damp air, feeling heavy and absurd.
And I would suffocate, Brenda replied instantly.
The absolute certainty of it grounding her.
Your court would eat me alive.
They would smell the turnip water on my skin and the dirt beneath my nails.
I would become a curiosity, a feral pet you dragged back from the war.
I survived the frost, Greg.
I will not survive a gilded cage.
She used the fake name deliberately.
It was a knife, and she twisted it.
Gregory stared at her, his gray eyes searching her fierce, uncompromising face.
He was looking for a crack in her armor, a sign of surrender.
He found none.
She was a creature of the borderlands, hard, practical, and relentlessly proud.
Slowly, he released her wrists.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the heavy gold signet ring.
He took her wet, trembling right hand and pressed the cold metal flat into her palm, folding her fingers over it.
“There are 300 acres attached to this valley,” Gregory said, his voice entirely hollowed out.
“Show this to the magistrate in the village.
The land is yours.
The taxes are paid for the next century.
You will never boil a pine needle again.”
Brenda looked down at her clenched fist.
The gold was impossibly heavy.
“I didn’t ask for payment.”
“It is not payment,” he whispered, stepping back.
The distance between them suddenly felt like a canyon.
“It is a surrender.”
He turned and walked toward the door.
He didn’t look back.
He pulled the broken oak open, stepping out into the driving rain.
A soldier immediately brought forward a massive black stallion.
Gregory swung into the saddle, his posture instantly rigid, a lord returning to his war.
Brenda stood by the stone sink, the cold wind whipping her loose hair across her face, smelling the lingering scent of stale tobacco, and listening to the thunder of hooves fading into the mud.
She was alone.
She was wealthy beyond comprehension, and her chest ached with a hollow, bleeding ruin that no needle or thread could ever close.
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THE END
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Disclaimer
This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. If you would like to share your story, please send it to [email protected].
