Had it been a count of sixty? I’d forgotten how long that should feel like. It seemed like ages, regardless, that I crouched there. What would I do if Harlan never came? I’d escaped from the seraglio—disobedience of such a scale that I’d be punished even by the kindest of husbands. Here, where I’d shame both my husband and my hosts… I couldn’t imagine. They’d have to make an example of me.
If Harlan didn’t come, what would I do?
It crystallized for me then—in that moment that I had no ability to even measure by a count of heartbeats, that has expanded in my mind so large that it’s edged out many other memories of that night—how utterly helpless I was to save myself.
Without Harlan’s help, I could never have escaped. My rank, my beauty, my fortune—everything I’d thought valuable about myself meant absolutely nothing, because I depended on others for everything. Even to stay alive.
No more. I might be the flower carefully raised and cut from her garden, but I refused to wither and die. I would find a way to feed myself. To survive.
And then Harlan was there.
Putting his lips against my ear, he spoke quietly. “Well done. We’re clear so far. Behind you are cloaks and packs. Feel them? The sound of the horses will cover us somewhat, but be quiet.”
I rummaged around, wondering if all that time had been truly only his count of sixty. Perhaps so, as he didn’t say otherwise. An eternity of time for me, during which I’d become someone else.
Finding the bundles of cloth, I handed them to him. He shook out one and draped it over me, then handed me something furry.
“Boots,” he explained quietly. “For your feet,” he added, as I was clearly an addle-headed idiot incapable of figuring that out.
They weren’t hard to put on, just odd feeling. My feet felt smothered and cramped, the stiffness pinching a little. Nothing like the pain Rodolf had caused me, however, so it was easy to ignore.
Harlan took my hand. “This way.”
I walked behind him, trying to keep my balance, feeling oddly as I had the night of my bethrothal with my long, jeweled toenails. The boots had soft fur on the inside, but they were awkward and slid around on my feet in odd places, grabbing in others. I also had no feeling for the ground on the other side of the thick bottoms, and the toes kept hanging up on things.
Fortunately he went slowly, pausing often to listen and watch for movement. We threaded through shadowed corridors of high posts and walls, broken by lower ones. Once a horse thrust its head at me, and I flinched, startled, but didn’t make a sound. I’d learned that lesson well enough.
We reached a far end, and Harlan led me into a large boxy room for horses, with two inside. “I put them together,” he said to me, quietly, “but didn’t saddle them yet in case a groom noticed. It will only take a moment.”
He lifted a blanket onto the patient horse, which looked so big from where I stood, then a saddle. He added a bridle, and our packs, then gestured to me. “Climb on. The back door is right here and we can ride them out.”
My heart broke a little, the shame rising at my complete uselessness. “Harlan—I can’t ride a horse. This is the closest I’ve ever been to one.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’m an idiot. We’ll take one horse and lead the other. You can ride behind me.”
I nodded, unwilling to be even more of a problem, but having no idea how I’d bear putting the horse against my sore nether regions. I would simply do it. I’d have to. Harlan quickly saddled the second horse, attaching a long lead to it, then swung into the saddle, holding a hand down to me. “Put your foot onto mine and I’ll pull you up. You have strong legs—you can do it.”
I could. And did. But, though I braced myself for it, the shock of contact against my tormented woman’s parts sent such a blaze of agony through me that blackness rose up, my gorge rising. I held onto Harlan and stayed upright through some force of will I dredged up. It might hurt, but Rodolf would never touch me again.
I might die, but Rodolf would never touch me again.
Rodolf would never touch me again.
* * * *
I don’t remember much else of that night. Perhaps it’s best that those agonizing hours are lost.
Somehow we rode out of Castle Fjaltyndar—through some unguarded back gate, it must have been. There was dark forest, lots of snow, lots of cold. My bare legs under the cloak grew numb with chill, where my klút was hiked up to allow me to sit astride, but at least my feet were warm. I locked my hands around Harlan’s waist and tried not to think about how much I hurt.
I didn’t exactly sleep—the stimulants Harlan had me drink were amazingly strong—but I fell into some kind of trance. Maybe I’d finally reached the point where I simply couldn’t handle any more, and my mind stopped working.
* * * *
Sometime after it stopped being night, but settled into a gray-white version of daylight, we stopped at some cabin. It looked very small, but the prospect of not being on the horse filled me with delirious gratitude. Harlan circled around it, coming up behind where there stood a small shed. Some snow sifted inside, but nothing like the hip-deep stuff he sank into when he slid off our mount.
He held up hands to me and I remember staring at him, unsure what to do. “Jump down,” he urged. “I’ll catch you.”
I shook my head, aware of what he’d see if I did. The shame too much to bear. For all I’d wanted off that horse more than anything—or so I’d thought—I didn’t want my baby brother to witness my feminine humiliation.
“Turn your back,” I said.
He glared at me, exasperated—and also clearly exhausted. “I’m too tired for this. You’re cold as it is. Jump down and I’ll carry you inside. We need to get a fire started. Every moment you stall out of whatever misplaced missishness is driving you, is another moment we could be resting and getting warm before we have to go again.”
The whip of impatience in his voice found my well-trained senses, and I obeyed. He caught me, carried me inside the cold and dark interior, then set me on my feet. I wobbled, and my legs gave way. Fortunately I managed it with some grace, making it look as if I folded myself onto a warm and furry rug.
Harlan fumbled in the dark, then a flicker of flame became a blaze, illuminating a pile of logs inside a stone fireplace. “Keep feeding it,” Harlan instructed, pointing at the logs in a basket nearby. “I’ll take care of the horses and be back.”
Too numb to reply, I crawled forward, horribly aware of how my soaked klút clung to my backside, wet in places, caked dry in others. Dutifully, I added a log to the fire, the wood prickly on my soft fingers. The room narrowed to that little pool of life-giving light.
“Jenna.” Harlan sounded horrified, standing somewhere behind me. I bent my face to my knees. “Jenna—you’re bleeding.” He said it more loudly, then moved up beside me, holding up the saddle blanket, the firelight revealing circles of blood, dark and dried on the rim, bright in the middle.
I only looked away, then nodded. Unbearable to see my little brother holding the fouled thing. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Sorry?” His voice, normally so deep, rose into that squeak of emotion. “Don’t be sorry. Just… why didn’t you tell me?”
“There’s nothing you can do.” I sounded dull to myself. Maybe I’d lost too much blood. I wasn’t even sure which parts of me were bleeding the most, it all hurt so much.
He folded himself to the rug beside me, putting his head in his hands. “I don’t know anything about women,” he admitted, his voice muffled. “I’ve heard things, though, that women, um… bleed sometimes, because of babies. Is that what this is?”
I laughed, feeling the bubble of hysteria rise in it. If only. “No. This isn’t that.”
“Then what?” He lifted his face and seized my wrist, making me look at him. “What did he do to you?”
I s
tared into Harlan’s kind gray eyes, so anxious—afraid, even, when he hadn’t shown any fear thus far—and found myself weeping, tears spilling down my face. “He hurt me,” I said. Was all I could say.
Harlan let me go, closing his eyes and scrubbing a hand over his face. “And I made you sit astride a horse. I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m a fool. Stupid!”
“No.” I managed to say it forcefully enough, gathering myself and sniffing up the foolish tears. “You’re smart, and clever, and so brave. You rescued me. Look—we’ve escaped!”
He shook his head. “Not yet. We’re still much too close. The snow should make it hard to track us, and they won’t expect us to have gone deeper into the mountains, but we won’t be safe until we’re truly away. And now I know how… injured you are. I don’t know. Maybe we should just stay here and take our chances.”
I was already shaking my head. Of course they’d chase us. We had to get far enough away that they couldn’t find us. “We keep going,” I said. “Or I will and you can go back to the Imperial Palace.”
“Jenna.” Harlan searched my face. “I’m not leaving you, but you have to think about this. That’s a lot of blood. You could die.”
I reached over and ruffled his hair, the impulse an old one, from when we were children. “If I’d stayed with Rodolf, I would have died. So every moment I have when he can’t touch me is a moment I treasure.”
He regarded me solemnly. “All right. I understand that. I’ll melt some snow for drinking, and we can eat. Then we’ll melt more and get you cleaned up.”
“That’s not necessary—”
“It is,” he broke in, firmly but with that innate compassion. I had no idea where that came from, in our shark-infested family, but Helva had it, too. “I know it’s embarrassing for both of us, but we’re all the other has right now. You’ll let me help you.”
“I don’t need it. It will heal on its own.”
“Jenna…” He grimaced. “There are wolves in these forests and hills. They’ll smell the blood. We have to deal with it.”
Oh. Well… oh. So many ways I was stupid in the outside. Wolves who smelled blood—who knew?
“Let’s eat,” I agreed. “Then I’ll bathe myself and… we’ll see.”
~ 18 ~
We struggled through it, my baby brother and I. It turned out that Harlan knew a little about rudimentary healing—how to seal up the worst cuts and so forth—though he cursed himself for not knowing more. “First thing I’m doing when we’re somewhere safe,” he told me at one point with a grim smile, “is learning more about both healing and women.”
“You shouldn’t need to know it ever again,” I pointed out. My embarrassment and shame had reached a point where I’d passed into another kind of numbness.
“Sure I will. If I’m going to earn a living with my sword arm, then I’ll have to know how to put people back together again, too. Especially if I have other men working for me.”
“Working for you? You’re an Imperial Prince—you’ll command them.”
He shook his head. “Not where we’re going, I won’t be a prince. In fact, we’re safer if we don’t tell anyone who we are. I’m thinking to hire as a mercenary. You can do that in Halabahna.”
“Halabahna?” I echoed.
“That’s where they have elephants.” He grinned at me. “And it’s not in the empire, so that’s all I need. I’m thinking I can learn how to be a mercenary, earn coin that way to support us, and then I’ll start my own company. This is all good experience.”
“Well, you should at least never have to deal with a woman’s body this way again.” I’d taken strips of the ruined klút and rolled them up inside me, as I would during my woman’s time, and we’d stopped the other bleeding. I was clean, and dressed in another set of Harlan’s clothes. It felt odd to wear a shirt and pants—especially ones so oversized—but I used my many scarves to cinch them up enough so they wouldn’t fall off.
“Sure I will. I want to be married someday. What kind of husband would I be if I didn’t know how to take care of my wife? I’ll need to know how to pleasure her, and stuff.”
“Oh, Harlan.” I had no idea what to say to him. “Don’t they…” Impossibly I blushed, even after our horrible enforced intimacy. “Give you lessons?”
“No.” He paused in feeding the remains of the ruined klút into the fire. “Did you get lessons?”
I nodded. “I feel weird having this conversation with my brother.”
He grinned, full of his good-hearted nature. “I think we’ve already shared more than most siblings do. Don’t hold out on me. What lessons did you get?”
I waved a hand vaguely. “Sex. How to pleasure a man. How everything … works.”
He gazed at me, astounded. “So not fair. We don’t get lessons. Well, not yet, anyway,” he amended. “That might have been the fifteenth birthday deal.”
“The deal?” I laughed. I felt surprisingly good. Of course, I’d had a fair amount of mjed, and I’d slept awhile. I was warm and clean. Soon it would be full dark and we’d move on.
Harlan’s smile went crooked. “When a guy turns fifteen there’s some kind of party. The rekjabrel were teasing me about it, saying how they planned to volunteer for mine. I think I now get some of the jokes.”
“Your birthday is late autumn,” I remembered.
“Yeah.” He poked at the fire, stirring the logs so the fabric all burned away. “No rekjabrel party for me.”
“You can still go back. Say that I escaped and you chased me, but I got away.”
“I’m not going back, Jenna. And I’m not sad about missing that party. I’d rather my first time be with a woman who actually likes me, you know? Not because she has to choose between pleasuring me or some other guy that night.”
“It’s not always that way,” I started, but I wasn’t sure that was the truth.
Harlan was watching me. “Maybe not always. But it is often enough that I wouldn’t have felt right. Now that I’ve seen… Well, I only wish I’d been able to run Rodolf through with a spear and slow roast him over a fire.” His genial face, once so earnest and full of warmth, had contorted into something grim and dark. “And they all knew what he was doing to you. Do you think I’d willingly go back to that—be a part of that?”
He looked so fierce, both enraged and wounded at once, that I went to him and embraced him. Awkwardly, he returned the hug, holding me gently. Younger than I was, but already bigger and stronger. I tipped my head back to look at him.
“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t. You’re a fine man, Harlan, and whatever woman earns your heart someday, she’ll be the luckiest woman in the world. I’m going to make sure she knows that.”
* * * *
When we left our little cabin at dark—after Harlan tossed the hot coals into the snow and laid fresh kindling for the next travelers to easily light a fire—I rode sideways across Harlan’s lap. It wasn’t ideal, but he wouldn’t hear of anything else. That way we wrapped both cloaks around us, which made us warmer.
A good thing, as we headed up the mountain, deeper snow, colder temperatures, and cruelly whipping winds. It was best that way, Harlan explained, as Rodolf wouldn’t expect it of either of us. He’d hopefully waste time chasing us back to the Imperial Palace—or down to Jofarstyrr, if he thought we might try to lose ourselves in the city, or to buy passage on one of the many ships in the harbor there.
“The one thing in our favor these first few days,” Harlan said, “is that Rodolf is a proud man. He won’t want to admit to the emperor—or anyone, really—that he’s lost you.” Harlan hadn’t referred to the man as my husband since that first night in the cabin. Nor had I.
According to Dasnarian law, however, he was my husband in fact and would remain so until one or the other of us died. I didn’t have the education to know what that might mean if I managed to leave the Dasna
rian Empire, but I wanted my exile from Dasnaria and its laws to mean my exit from the vows of marriage. Something to think about later.
We stayed in another cabin come the gray light of morning, much the same as the first. For travelers and hunters, Harlan explained. A tradition in this part of the empire, where sudden blizzards could strand people for days. We never saw any of these other people. I finally figured out that Harlan was carefully keeping clear of encountering any. We kept to the woods, where the evergreen canopy prevented the snow from being so deep, following what Harlan called deer trails.
The first time I saw actual deer, I nearly scared Harlan off the horse. The dark silhouettes ran across our trail, liquid and fleet. I squealed with surprise and delight—and our mount lifted his head and whinnied. Fortunately Harlan recovered quickly, realizing I wasn’t sounding an alarm. He reined up, and we watched them pass. One stopped, elegant and intricate antlers an echo of the tangled black branches above, the filtered moonlight silvering its fur so it looked made of more snow. A wild thing of the forest, with dark, glistening eyes that seemed to hold the wisdom I lacked.
“Just deer,” Harlan said, wrapping an arm around me and squeezing. “Nothing to fear.”
“I know. I’ve never seen them before. The outside is so much huger than I ever understood, where these creatures wander about, wild and free.”
He was quiet a while after that, but began pointing out various wildlife to me. An owl watching us solemnly from a tree. The tracks of rabbits and wolves in the snow. I didn’t say it, because I knew he’d think I was crazy—which, admittedly, I might have been a little, in my exhaustion, shock, and entirely shattered state of mind—but I hoped to see the wolves, too.
The third cabin we stopped at, we barely made it to through a blizzard so howling dense with snow we nearly missed it. That one had a cozy stable for the horses with plenty of hay—that scratchy plant stuff I’d crouched in that night we escaped—and even some grain. I’d learned how to start the fire, so I did that while Harlan settled the horses. When he came in, he gave me a broad smile and showed me a quarter of venison that had been frozen and kept in a small cellar along with some potatoes.
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