The Hunchback's Reluctant Bride ✔

10 | Bitters

The more Vadde ate, the deeper Wyrn's frown. A time or two she tried to slow but couldn't.

"You were starved. When was the last time you'd had anything?" he asked from the chair by the bed.

Vadde hesitated. She didn't want to cast blame, mostly because she didn't understand what happened. And she didn't want to cause trouble. Anyway, what could the hunchback do about it?

She opened her mouth to lie but he said, "You are my responsibility; I brought you here. And I didn't look in on you. So, it's my fault. And I apologize for that."

He sat leaning forward with his elbow on his knees.

This close, he didn't look at all menacing. But he was fed up. All thoughts rushed to what he'd just done for her. Though Vadde sat in bed with her left leg up, the right stayed firmly on the floor.

No one seemed to have the full story about the nature of their first encounter with one another. Even now, his scowl was worrisome, but it held something more behind it, pity.

She was stealing from the pigs after all. Perhaps he didn't want anyone to know that of his bride. She certainly didn't. Shaza least of all.

"The day before I met you."

The hunchback leaned away. His mouth fell open and he marveled. "That was ten days ago."

She needed no reminder, so she went back to the food—the most delicious thing she'd ever tasted in all her life.

Her intent was to finish it before he asked her something unfavorable.

No such luck.

"Why?"

Why? Vadde paused long to take that in. Why? From where would she start? With how Prince Orm ambushed her in the hall the morning of the tournament and blocked her path to the eating room? Visions came and went of the things he did and said. Her father saw them in passing and dragged the man off her.

By the time she'd fixed her clothes and stood with her back to them, she'd expected some further protest or defense.

Nothing. King Hern ordered her to make herself presentable and that was the last time he'd directed a word to her.

She told herself that he might have admonished the prince in her absence but that was hard to believe when the man still roamed with his head affixed to his neck.

Mere hours later, she was caught while trying to escape. But where was she even to go? She didn't know, but anywhere that didn't inhabit that prince.

And then the debacle with the wagon came back to her and how she'd been too frightened to steal some of Wyrn's bird. She hadn't even eaten the apples while in the carriage because she was no thief. And then she arrived here. So, from that moment to now, why hadn't she managed to get anything called food beyond the bitters?

One name came to mind, but what would he do about his brother's wife? A woman who was here first? A woman who, despite the food issue, wasn't all that bad on the surface.

A light flickered in Wyrn's eyes. "Shaza?"

Vadde swallowed down her readied cry. "I hadn't said that."

"No need to say it." Wyrn sighed. "It's about our habits, you see. After learning them, she gets to work and it's hard to escape her efforts. She has a way of doing things to make you feel like you're the one crazy." When she narrowed her brow, he explained, "Speaking from experience."

Well, that was a relief.

"She 'welcomes' strangers." Wyrn explained. "Shaza's skill can be used to bring euphoria or hell."