opportunity to comb or plait it, nor to remove the dulling tarnish of moss and dried sand. Waiting by the heat of a fire had scorched the dampness out of the green velvet gown, but it was crushed and wrinkled beyond any hope of repair, the cloth scuffed and stiffened, the seams so weakened in places her bare flesh gaped through. She looked and felt bedraggled. Her hands trembled and her heart beat like a wild, caged thing within her breast, and she knew if she looked up, if she dared search out the Wolf’s face, she would die then and there of shattered pride.
As it was, when she heard his voice and realized he was addressing his remarks to her, she grew so faint, she needed Biddy’s quick hands to steady her upright in the saddle.
“I have been telling your betrothed what a pleasure it has been to have your company these past few days. I explained I was only trying to give you a truer idea of what might be expected of you by way of marital obligations. Hopefully your husband will not find you so difficult to thaw.”
Servanne was shocked, horrified. How could he say such things? How could he humiliate and shame her so heartlessly?
With her eyes flooding with resentment and her heart still pounding to burst, she lashed out with the only weapon available. The wide leather strap of Undine’s reins cut him sharply across the face and neck, hard enough to break the skin and raise a bright, stinging red weal on his flesh. She would have struck again, but for Undine’s confused response to a misread command. The mare caracoled sideways a step, then leaped forward in a startled attempt to avoid tangling legs with Biddy’s horse.
Wardieu reached out in a reflexive action as the mare danced close to his own snorting warhorse. For a moment their eyes met; Wardieu’s incensed and burning beneath the steel nasal of his helm, Servanne’s as bright as glass behind a thick film of outrage and defiance. They each looked away again, focusing their pain and hatred on the man who watched the exchange with grim indifference.
“A deserving bride and groom,” he murmured wryly, lowering his hand from his cheek, frowning at the spidery threads of blood on his fingers. “I bid you both a pleasant hereafter … for as long as you may live to enjoy it.”
The heat of Servanne’s anger, as well as a scalding sense of betrayal, kept her well warmed on the winding journey back through the forest. Her last sighting of the Wolf—his face turned away as he strode back to the abbey—was seared on her brain like a smouldering brand. He had not looked over his shoulder. He had not shown a trace of remorse or guilt over the cruel, callous way he had used and dismissed her.
Her eyes ached with the fullness of tears but she refused to give way, fearing if she once started to weep, she would not be able to stop again. It was her own fault; she had brought this travesty upon herself by succumbing to the very curiosity Biddy had tried to warn her against. She had wanted to know the feel of his arms around her, the press of his hot flesh against hers. She had not once tried to stop him, or stay his hands or lips from whatever wicked, depraved pleasures he sought to bestow. Her body had been his body to do with what he would, and she had shamelessly, shamefully begged him not to stop. Even now, when she should have been using all her strength to concentrate her hatred on the man, she burned with the memory of his hands, his mouth, his flesh moving over her, in her …
Servanne bowed her head to muffle the sound of her sobbed breaths in the folds of her cloak. If Wardieu heard them, or questioned their cause, he made no attempt to offer solace by word or gesture. He rode in the lead of the small, miserable procession—a sullen, brooding figure whose flowing blue mantle belled from his shoulders to his horse’s rump, giving him neither shape nor substance below the conical steel helmet.
Biddy rode in the rear, berating her own inadequacies as matron and guardian, intoning prayer upon prayer until Servanne’s nerves were stretched almost to the breaking point.
They rode through the dark mist, and, as if there was not enough grief to contend with, the skies cracked open on