Cinder-Ugly by Laura Strickland

Author:Laura Strickland [Strickland, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, fantasy, novella
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Published: 2018-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

We continued to receive sporadic dispatches from the front, which is how we learned the fight went badly. First the loss of one battle, and then another. Our troops slowly gave ground and suffered devastating casualties.

I knew Rupert lived because he sent home messages, written in his own hand, to his advisors. Sometimes these were carried part of the way by ordinary people—old men, women, and once even a child.

Whenever he could, he enclosed a short note to me, often including a drawing of a flower. Real flowers no longer existed in our world—autumn hurried toward winter, and scarcity put an end to his kind gesture.

But not his love. I felt that anew every time his minister put another missive—often stained and torn, and once splashed with blood—into my hand.

My darling Cindra, how I wish I might be with you tonight, to restore myself at your deep well. Pray for us. You hold my heart—R.

Rupert’s senior advisor, an old man called Rellison who’d also served Octavius, treated me kindly. We fell into the habit of meeting each time a dispatch came in, at which point he would or would not give me my missive, depending on my fortune. Then he included me in the ensuing discussion of what could or should be done to help our men.

By then, of course, I knew I carried Rupert’s child. Our single, enchanted night together had at least achieved its state purpose. I told no one save Donella and my little maid, Gerta, who often caught me in the throes of morning sickness.

Since it remained too dangerous to send messages that might be intercepted to the front, Rupert did not know. I imagined telling him, weaving endless scenarios, and pictured the glad light taking hold in his green eyes.

I let myself think no farther than that moment, would not consider the fact that I—Cinder-Ugly—carried the next ruler of a kingdom. If we still had a kingdom seven months hence.

Chances did not seem good.

Sometimes wounded soldiers returned to the city. Sometimes the dead returned, though that happened far less often. A hospital was set up in the cathedral, and I requested a room should be reserved where the dead could be laid, that their loved ones might come and claim them.

I went there in person whenever I could, on these occasions setting aside my own discomfort. I think it was only then it struck me just how dire things must be for our men on the front. The wounds the dead—and the living, for that matter—bore were most grievous.

I did not want their wives, fathers and mothers, and sometimes children to grieve alone. I stood by and afforded them what time they might need. At the end, most of them bowed to me, or even embraced me.

I didn’t realize, on the rainy, windy afternoon another message arrived, that the dead man laid out in the room was my sister Bethessa’s betrothed. My family—all four of them—arrived when I did; we stood facing one another just inside the door.

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