Birth: A Novella by Ann Herendeen

Author:Ann Herendeen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: bisexual men, mmf, family life, sword and sorcery, menage
Publisher: Ann Herendeen

CHAPTER 4: Domestic Disturbances

I was leery of staying at the home of Stefan’s parents, who had so resented my intrusion on their son’s great chance in life, and who had disdained me as improper and lowborn. Now that I was in sole possession of the man whom their son had cast off, they would have a genuine grievance to escalate dislike into true animosity. The sun was low in the sky; we could not reach Aranyi this day. Maybe one of their tenants could house us, I thought, and we could avoid imposing on Lord Karl and Lady Ormonde.

Dominic knew my thoughts. Where he would have scolded and frowned in Eclipsia City, he now smiled and spoke kindly. “We have no reason not to request shelter here. Stefan and I parted as friends.”

We were welcomed with elaborate and embarrassing ceremony, shown to a spacious suite with separate bedchambers and bathrooms. A maid knocked on the door of the wife’s room almost the minute after I entered, curtsied and offered her services. I looked to Katrina, who had ridden all the way astride, not being so far along in her pregnancy, and who had had to bed down where she could in the smaller houses, on the floor sometimes, or three to a bed with other servants, and decided she had earned a day off.

The Ormonde woman seemed quite distressed when I thanked her and accepted, and I was just starting to pick up her thoughts to find out why a false offer had been made, when I saw Katrina’s red face and received her own feelings of mortification. I thanked the Ormonde woman again, then dismissed her, saying that my own maid was perhaps well enough to assist me after all.

“You’re supposed to say no,” Katrina said. “My lady.”

“Then why did she offer?” I asked.

“It’s a courtesy,” Katrina said with weary patience. “You’re their guest. But that doesn’t mean you should shame me by accepting.”

“I thought you needed a rest,” I said. “You’ve had to ride, and sleep on the floor—”

“That’s my job!” she shouted. “That’s what I do!”

“Not really,” I said. “You’re stuck traveling like this because I wanted to go home all of a sudden, but your job is to help me with my clothes and my hair.”

“Oh,” Katrina said. All the fight went out of her and she turned her large brown eyes, which Kojiro the guard had so admired, to the floor. “I see. I thought—”

She had thought we were colleagues. Maybe not friends, but surely she was more to me than just a washerwoman and a hairdresser. Hadn’t she worried about me when I had my fights with Dominic? Hadn’t she sympathized with me in my estrangement from my husband, and hoped for our reconciliation? Hadn’t she walked outside with me, without guards, and endured the humiliating groping of men on the streets, and not complained, and not betrayed me?

I was much luckier than I deserved, I saw. I steeled myself for the encounter and opened my arms.

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