Enchanting the King (The Beauty's Beast Fantasy Series)

by E. D. Walker

  “We should be making camp soon, Your Highness.”

  Aliénor chuckled and eased back in her saddle to stretch her aching muscles. “Is my weariness that obvious?”

  Noémi only smiled in response, a very politic answer.

  Aliénor shook her head, laughing again.

  The road dipped as they entered a valley with the river flowing between two small hills. Bare white stone jutted up around them oddly, with patchy green bushes and long, oval-shaped trees lining the road.

  A foul smell reached her on the air, so strong that she gagged. “What is that?” A stench like dead animals or meat left to decompose in the sun. Surely one dead animal could not be so strong, so overpowering.

  Noémi froze beside her, and took a deep, testing sniff of the air. Her face blanched. “Your Highness, we should head to the rearguard at once.”

  “Why—” Aliénor scanned the road, and the words died on her lips as she saw the first dead man ahead of them. And another. Parts of many men lay scattered along the road, their blood splashed against the stark white of the valley walls. Nearby in the center of the road lay just a man’s leg with the heavy boot still upon it, a dark spot of blood beneath. Some of the bodies were badly burned, and scorch marks darkened many of the stones nearby, a few very high up on the walls.

  “Send word to my husband at once.” Aliénor barely managed to get the words out without vomiting. The back of her throat burned.

  The column halted and called the word back to those behind. Noémi dismounted and helped Aliénor down from her own horse. Wobbly, her mouth sour with bile, Aliénor clung to her friend’s arms. “I’m all right.” A lie, and Noémi obviously knew it, for she settled a steadying arm around Aliénor’s waist.

  Noémi frowned at the gory scene ahead of them before looking away. “They appear to be men of the north like us.”

  “Could they be our men?” The more she talked, the easier it was to concentrate on something besides the overwhelming smell of death all around.

  “These men could be deserters, or they might be men from one of the colonies. Soldiers your cousin sent out to meet us.”

  “How can you tell what race they are just from…from what’s left?”

  “Their clothes. Their boots. The local tribes around here favor lighter fabric, longer tunics, lighter armor. Sandals too, usually. These men are all wearing boots like us. They look like soldiers, not poor farmers murdered on the way to market.”

  Aliénor hadn’t looked that closely. Hadn’t been able to. Her stomach clenched again. “Does nothing faze you, my iron Amazon?”

  “I held my first husband’s castle during a siege in the last war with Lyond. We ate the horses before my husband’s forces could come to relieve us.”

  Aliénor’s stomach roiled again, but she swallowed her gorge and took a small breath in through her teeth.

  Noémi flinched. “Apologies, my lady.”

  “No, no. It’s fine.” She stepped away from Noémi’s supporting arm to prove it. “My father was a warrior, but my little island was always isolated, safe from the turmoil of the wars with Lyond. Papa told me war stories, of course, sang the ballads. But he never spoke of anything like…this.” Aliénor disguised her first unsteady stumble forward as a confident step toward her guard captain. “Captain.”

  He looked up, his unguarded glance full of annoyance, which he quickly smoothed away. “Yes, Your Highness?”

  “Have you assembled a party to look for survivors yet?”

  He hesitated, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “Ah, no. Your Highness.”

  “Why not?”

  “Begging your pardon, but there doesn’t seem to be much point.”

  The image of the severed leg flashed through her mind’s eye, sending her uncertain stomach swooping again. She stared at the clear, unblemished sky, focusing on that to blank her mind out. Soon enough her gut settled. She regarded the guard captain with her most imperious glare. “It is our pious duty to look for survivors of this battle.”

  “This looks like it was a slaughter, my lady. Not a battle.”

  Aliénor felt her grip on her temper slipping again, as if her moods were an unbroken horse she had yet to tame. However, she would get nothing from this man if she threw a tantrum. Instead, she offered him her most solicitous smile. “My Amazons will undertake a search, Captain. If your men cannot be spared from their other duties.” She let her gaze flick to the two soldiers who had already dismounted and begun a game of dice on the trail.

  The guard captain let out a low, exasperated sigh, then swung back onto his own horse. He pointed to some dozen of the various men-at-arms milling about. “You lot, with me. Her Highness”—he swept her a bow just short of outright mockery—“wishes us to search for survivors until such time as the prince arrives.” We’re only doing this idiotic hunt until Prince Philippe gets here and puts his uppity wife in her place, he left unsaid, but his meaning was clear.

  She set her teeth and waved the captain on his way. She leaned close to Noémi and whispered, “Perhaps I shall get the good captain assigned to digging the latrine pits when we break for camp tonight.”

  Noémi snickered. “You handled him all right, my lady.”

  “Hmm. The captain’s correct, though. My power will last only as long as it takes for my husband to ride to the front.” A galling truth that her power was so slight and temporary, borrowed only from her husband, and that begrudgingly. “Will they find any survivors, do you think?”

  “Perhaps.” Noémi squeezed her hand. “I will go with you now to look. If you like.”

  Aliénor swallowed, flinching at the thought. Yet should she command her men to do that which she would not do herself? What sort of leader would she be if she did that?

  The sort like my husband.

  A spiteful thought. Aliénor sighed in frustration with herself. What was it about Philippe and her together that always seemed to bring out the worst in both of them? She gave Noémi a nod and swung herself into her saddle again, groaning only a little bit as her aching limps shrieked in protest.

  Noémi summoned two more of the soldiers to ride with them as guards. The young men followed the formidable Noémi’s lead when they might have hemmed and hawed at Aliénor’s authority. Perhaps that was Aliénor’s lack, not in power itself but in her confidence in exercising it. Or perhaps she still looked too young for grown men to trust her wits.

  She let Noémi lead the way with one of the soldiers beside her. The other fell in so close to Aliénor’s horse that her little palfrey started and sidled away with nerves. “Careful,” Aliénor snapped to the boy.

  He nodded apology but stayed close nonetheless. “Beg pardon, Your Highness, but there might still be raiders about. Stay close to me, eh?” He drew his sword as he said it.

  Aliénor shivered at the sight of the naked steel. The army had been marching to battle for months but had not seen any action as yet. One could almost forget they were riding to war. Until something like this happened.

  She nodded to her guard and turned her gaze away to follow Noémi’s progress. Her handmaiden had led them farther away down the road from the captain and her men, closer to the cliffs, while still staying in sight of the column. Perhaps Noémi knew if they came within calling distance of the captain he would order them back. Or perhaps she was just trying to keep Aliénor from seeing more bodies.

  I am coddled from every side. Was she anything other than a silly, useless woman if even her friend refused to let her help in this small way? If I am just a burden to be protected then I might as well turn back for home now and get out of everyone’s way.

  She scanned the horizon and let her horse pick his way where he would, for they were in rocky terrain close to the mountains now. Scrubby brush and gray-trunked trees with tight, prickling foliage dotted the landscape. Her eye caught on one the trees where it grew practically against the foot of the hill. A bright flash of pale blue fluttered in the branches. A bird? She had seen no bright-plume
d birds like that this far south.

  Her pulse kicked up as she turned her mount toward the tree. Behind her, she heard her guard follow her with a small muttered oath.

  The closer she came to that bright blue cloth, the harder her pulse beat until it was a veritable drum in her ears. Aliénor stopped short of the tree and slid off her horse.

  When she saw the man tangled in the branches of the tree, her blood jumped all at once inside her like a bright flash of heat. Bile burned the back of her throat, but she forced herself forward one unsteady step at a time.

  The man’s chest rose and fell. Alive. Thank Merciful Fate. He voiced a low groan, and she hopped back a step in surprise. She wet her dry mouth and wheeled toward the guard riding toward her. “Help! Bring help.”

  She rushed forward to the tree and reached to lift the man down. He was braced against the branches, and a sword—stained red and nicked from battle—lay among the roots of the tree. Blood had also splashed the tree all around, as if the plant needed human sacrifice instead of wholesome water to live.

  Together, Aliénor and her guard lifted the man down from the tree and laid him out on the ground to check for injuries. “Bring water from my saddle,” she told her man. Flustered, the soldier rushed back to their horses.

  The stranger stirred again, and his eyes fluttered open—a startling gray-blue color. “Getfalen hwaa?”

  Aliénor’s breath caught.

  He tried to shift in her arms and look at her, but the movement seemed to overwhelm his strength, and his eyes rolled back into his head. He’d lapsed into unconsciousness by the time the soldier had returned with a canteen.

  “What did he say?” her guard asked as he took a deep drink of water for himself.

  Aliénor cleared her throat. “Gibberish. He’s disoriented, I think.” A lie. She’d understood his words perfectly well. The problem was, he had been speaking the language of Lyond—the language of her nation’s greatest enemy.

  Chapter Two

  The wounded man did not awaken before the army stopped to make camp that night.

  Noémi tried to distract Aliénor as she waited for the rest of the army to arrive at camp, but it was no use. Aliénor had only half an ear for anything said to her. As they walked to her tent, her belly went tight from anxiety, anticipating her husband’s arrival.

  Her other lady-in-waiting, Violette, was already at the tent when they arrived. Violette was a pretty child of fifteen or so, thin and delicate-boned with dark, copper-colored skin. Her tightly curled black hair was still in a neat coronet braid atop her head despite the trials of the road. Aliénor’s own hair was a disordered mess atop her head, her braids slipping down as the hairpins fell loose from her baby-thin hair.

  Violette smiled a greeting at them and continued to direct a few of the male servants as they bustled about, arranging the two feather mattresses Aliénor slept on each night. The mattresses were a ridiculous extravagance, of course, and every time Aliénor looked at them, she felt a fresh flush of mortification. She’d been so naïve when she’d left home. Feather mattresses in this wilderness. Yet Philippe had not forbidden them. Indeed, Philippe and his closest officers slept on feather mattresses of their own.

  Noémi persuaded Aliénor to sit beside her on a camp stool, apart from the activity of Violette and the servants. “The prince might be impressed by your initiative, my lady. He might be pleased.”

  Aliénor snorted.

  “He was pleased when you helped him organize this expedition. He doesn’t always mind when you take charge of things.”

  Aliénor twisted her mouth into a smile that had nothing at all to do with happiness. “Those efforts pleased my husband because they served his ambitions. He needed my treasury to fund this adventure, and he needed my influence to convince the other lords to follow him. Without the lords loyal to me, there would not have been enough men to undertake this campaign.” Once she’d accomplished those tasks for him, raising the money and the men, Aliénor was supposed to have stayed at home, waiting for Philippe’s triumphant return.

  Aliénor rose to begin her restless pacing once more, but both ladies jumped as someone yanked the tent flap back. Philippe stormed inside, his pale skin flushed with anger. He was a slight man, slender, but the anger on his face made Aliénor recoil from him. Noémi shifted in her chair but seemed to restrain her first protective impulse to leap in front of Aliénor.

  “You, out.” He flung a hand behind him, and Noémi hustled out with a quick, worried look at Aliénor. Violette and the servants scattered as well, abandoning the mattresses in a lopsided heap for the moment.

  Philippe circled Aliénor and glowered. “You should not have risked yourself. There might have been Tiochene soldiers still about.”

  “Husband—”

  “You are meddling where you are not needed, are not wanted.”

  She folded her hands together behind her back to hide how they shook. “I found the injured man myself. My guard captain was not—”

  “Bah. One injured soldier? Is that worth the life of a princess of Jerdun? No.”

  She gritted her back teeth, feeling again like she rode an unsteady mount, and at any moment she might lose control of her wild temper. “I thought the soldier might tell us what happened, how the raiders attacked. Then we could take better precautions for ourselves on the road ahead.”

  Philippe blew his breath out through his teeth, looking deflated at this sound reasoning. But then he straightened and waggled his finger in her face. “You should not even have been riding at the front. I knew I should have made you stay in the wagon.”

  She fought to maintain her composure, but the wild stallion of her temper broke from her control. “I did not go on this quest to ride around like some fragile pearl in a jewelry box—”

  “Always you put yourself forward. Always you seek more than is proper. You are my wife. You belong to me, and you should damn well start learning to obey me.”

  Ever the same argument, ever the same problems between us. She scrubbed both hands over her face, trying to rub the fatigue away. Her efforts were in vain. This weariness went bone-deep, an infection in her blood, her very spirit, which seemed impossible to overcome.

  “Aliénor.” He must have sensed how near she was to breaking entirely, for his tone had gentled. She heard him approach but could not make herself face him. He caught her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry, my dear. I was just so worried for your safety when I heard what you had done.” He planted a chaste kiss on the back of her hand. “Join me for dinner tonight?”

  He framed it as a question, but Aliénor knew she had little choice. He was right: she was his wife. Her movements and every last detail of her life could be dictated by him should he choose to exercise that power. “Of course, my lord.”

  “No more madcap adventures, my girl.” He patted her cheek as he said it but hurried out of the tent before she could make any reply to him.

  She folded herself back into her camp stool and massaged her throbbing temples. At a rustle of cloth, she looked up. Noémi returning.

  “Well?” her handmaiden asked.

  Aliénor puffed out a mirthless laugh. “I know how thin the walls of this tent are. Don’t pretend ignorance. You know how it went.”

  “Hmm. It’s not…entirely unreasonable of him, you know.”

  “To expect better obedience from me? I know. As a loyal subject I owe that to him, and how much more so as his wife? Did you have such problems with your husbands?”

  Noémi tilted her hand in a so-so gesture. “The first one, I suppose. At first. But then he broke me to bridle. Or I broke him.” Her teeth flashed in a smile. “Or perhaps better to say we learned to work in tandem, like the horses that pull your wagon. To aim ourselves and work together rather than trying to run away in opposite directions. You only end up with a mess of tangled reins and broken legs that way, my lady.”

  “I know it.”

  “My second man, well. I married him f
or his looks, and we didn’t much leave the bedroom. We worked well enough together there.”

  Aliénor flopped back in her chair, combing her fingers through her hair and mussing her braid. “So perhaps it’s me. Perhaps I’m not made for marriage. Perhaps I lack that womanly trait, that ability to combine my will with another’s to make us both better.”

  “Yes, or—” Noémi bit the word off and pinched her lips tightly closed, as if the words might fight their way free despite her.

  “Or what?”

  Noémi shook her head, but Aliénor knew well enough what she would have said. What they were both thinking: Or perhaps you and Philippe are simply not well suited. But neither of them could say that aloud. Jerdic women married for life. To contemplate leaving Philippe, being free of him…

  Noémi touched her hand. “For both your sakes, my lady, perhaps you should try harder?”

  Aliénor flinched. Marriage is for life. I took this vow for life. However ill-considered it was, however young she’d been— This is no good. Sitting here wallowing will accomplish nothing. “Noémi, let us see if that wounded soldier is awake.”

  “An excellent idea, Your Highness.”

  ***

  Thomas awoke in pain, disoriented. When he opened his eyes and looked around, he recognized neither his surroundings nor his caretakers.

  “Easy, easy. You’re safe.” The lady had a pleasant voice, young and clear, so it took him a moment to understand the spike of alarm that arose inside him at the words. It wasn’t until she spoke again—“How are you feeling?”—that he understood his instinctive fear.

  The woman was speaking Jerdic, the language of Jerdun. Thomas eased onto his elbows and smoothed the lines of his face to stillness. When he answered her, he answered her in perfect Court Jerdic. “Where are the rest of my men?” There were a few other injured men laid out on pallets on the ground in this tent as he was, but none that he recognized.

  She tilted her head, looking surprised as her large brown eyes widened. She had a lovely face with strong cheekbones and a determined chin. Her skin was ivory pale but dotted with freckles, and her hair was a light red-gold braided in a somewhat mussed coronet atop her head after the Jerdic fashion. A married woman most likely and, judging by her cultured accent, a lady. No matter. Too young for you, old soldier. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, nearly half his age. Still, she was exceedingly pleasant to look at.