Claiming Her

Surprise spiked through him, and with it, all the bodily changes that mark vigilance, as when you heard the snick of a lock in a darkened room, or felt the thud of a boot

stepping where there should only be sleeping bodies. He didn’t move, though; too much experience with being scared half to hell and never showing it.

Clever, clever Katarina.

“Not overly,” was all he said.

“And yet, here you are.”

He spread his hands, palms up, to indicate he was, indeed, here.

The fire picked up the strands of reddish-gold amid her falling brown locks. “For myself, I have discovered that for all its savage wildness, Ireland is not entirely a land of want. One discovers things that are lacking in almost every other place of the world.”

“Rain?” he suggested.

She smiled faintly.

“Cold? Darkness? The number of savages?” he went on absently, not interested in a discussion of the limited charms of Ireland. He was far more interested in the way her lips formed words. Full, wet, faintly red, and ever so slightly crooked.

“Indeed, sir, Ireland is all those things. Cold, dark, wet, although, as you say, the worst menace is the savages who paint their bodies like pages in a manuscript.”

He slid his gaze from her mouth to her eyes. “You noticed.”

Her face flushed. “Barely.”

“Ha.”

“But amid such trials,” she went on, “Ireland bears gifts too. Boons. The lining of a dark cloud.”

“For instance?” he said doubtfully.

“No one much cares what you do if you are in Ireland, so long as it does not inconvenience them. And as they are hundreds of miles and a sea away, it so rarely does.”

He sat back, slung his arm over the arm of the chair. “I see.”

“Do you? Send the receipts, ship the wool, imprison any shipwrecked Spanish soldiers you stumble across, and you become…chaff.”

“I know,” he agreed grimly.

“I mean, one may do as one wishes,” she pressed, as if it mattered that he understand her strange affection for his homeland. “One becomes…beneath notice. Blurred. A mote of dust. Taken”—she lifted a hand and let it fall—“for granted. This would not please one such as you, no doubt, but for one such as me, this absence of attention provides certain…freedoms.”

She was correct. One benefit of being in a cold hell: no one bothered you. Until they came to crush you.

“This invisibility,” she went on, “and the freedoms it brings, creates the strong, one might say intense, desire to avoid ever again becoming a thing to be done with.”

The fire crackled through a moment of silence. Then, in case she’d not been clear, she said in a low voice, “I am not a thing to be done with.”

Although, of course, she was.

He knew it, she knew it, every member of her stubborn, currently locked-up garrison knew it. There was nothing clearer in all the world than that women were chattel and plunder.

But for all the talk of Fate and Heaven and Hell, the world let a man make of himself what he would. Required him to. Men were as persuadable as sheep, and the world, be it civilized and courtier-laden, or savage and howling with wolves, responded to whatever a man made of himself. If a man acted great, a great man he was. If he sold himself as a pastry, he would be consumed as one.

How could it not be true for women as well? The world did with one as one allowed it to do. No one knew its vicious appetites better than Aodh.

So, instead of laughing at Katarina and her ridiculous statements about being something other than chattel, he said, “Then you will suit just fine.”

She smiled slowly and shook her head at him. “You are mad. And if you do not suit equally well?”