Page 32 of The Scot

Chapter 14

“Tell me,” Idalia insisted.

Roysa and her sister watched from the parapets as preparations were made. Just a few days earlier, there had been little activity in either the inner or outer ward. Getting from one place to another had been a chore due to the snow.

That had changed. The men were moving with purpose; she and her sister were the sole exceptions. Both of them had wanted a bit of air, despite the cold, although Roysa now regretted that she’d come out here with Idalia. It made her sister’s questions more difficult to escape. She’d begun her inquiries earlier, at breakfast, and hadn’t stopped.

“There is naught to tell. I am tired. Worried, of course. The reason should be evident.”

They had a clear view of the training yard.

“You are not yourself.”

Nay, she was not.

Roysa looked at her sister, head hooded, cheeks pinkened with the cold. She looked younger than normal. As if they were girls still. If only the problems that had seemed so monumental to them then—getting out of lessons early and being shooed away from the kitchens by their mother—were their only worries now.

“He kissed me,” she blurted.

Idalia clearly did not understand. “He . . .”

She waited for Idalia to realize who she spoke of, and it struck her that her sister did not look well pleased. Well, that made two of them. Roysa was not very pleased with herself either.

“I did not realize . . . well, of course Terric is a very handsome man. And you sat together in the hall for quite a while the other day. But . . .”

Roysa had to laugh at Idalia’s expression. She looked . . . scandalized.

“I know,” she conceded. “I am so recently widowed—”

“By a man who had sexual relations with his sister-in-law? Who was very likely murdered by his own brother? Do you really believe you should be mourning such a man?”

Nay, Roysa did not. “Then why are you so displeased?”

Idalia did not attempt to deny it. Instead, she said, “I’ve gotten to know Terric quite well over the last several months.”

The idea that Idalia might tell her something terrible about Terric . . .

Please do not.

He’d told her they could not be, which she understood, but she could not shake the lure of what he’d said before that, about showing her pleasure. She’d thought of that all night long, tossing and turning as she did so.

She wanted to know such pleasure.

“He is a hard man,” Idalia said at last.

Roysa knew it well.

“I like him, of course. Lance thinks of him as a brother. But . . .”

Idalia looked at her with such a look of pity, she wished she had held her tongue about the kiss.

“He is like Father in some ways.”

“In many ways,” she agreed.

“He is not a man I could imagine for a husband.” The words were said gently, as if Idalia believed she were dissuading her from a dear wish.

Roysa’s shoulders sagged in relief. “That is all?”