Page 35 of The Maiden

“Ulten?” Jura asked. “No one speaks that guttural mess of theirs. It is not a language but merely grunts and moans.”

Rowan leaned back on the bed, his hand under his head. “It may sound so but it is actually a form of Lanconian. For instance, your word for woman is telna while theirs is te’na. It is just a quicker way of saying the same thing.”

Jura drew her feet up under her. “A lazier way. They are lazy, slimy people. All the tribes hate the Ultens.”

“Then all the better to interbreed the tribes. The Ultens stay up in the mountains and they interbreed with each other until their brains are mush.”

“Another reason your plan of uniting the tribes will not work,” Jura said. “Who would want to marry an Ulten woman?”

Rowan looked at her with merriment in his eyes. “A Zerna man,” he said.

Jura laughed and stretched out on the bed. The map was between them as they both lay on the bed.

“During the Honorium I had nightmares about Mealla winning,” Rowan said. “The problem I have with intermarrying the tribes is wondering who will marry the Zerna women. Are they all like Mealla and the other women who entered the Honorium?”

Jura lifted her head onto her elbow. “The Fearen men might like the Zerna women. Fearen men are small, short, thin little men, and Thal always said they were angry about their size. Zerna women might appeal to the Fearens. Their children would be larger.”

Rowan grinned at her as he also lifted onto his elbow. “And the Poilens? Who shall we marry to them?”

“That’s not easy,” Jura said thoughtfully. “The Poilens believe thought is more important than food or pleasure.”

“Then we should give them some of those feisty little Fearen women. They would turn a man’s thoughts from books to more earthly delights.”

Jura was watching him. He was very good-looking and the candlelit room made that golden hair of his glow. She had an urge to touch it and even lifted her hand.

Rowan abruptly got off the bed. “You may sleep there,” he said, pointing to a seat formed in the thick stone walls. It would be barely long enough for her.

Jura started to protest the absurdity of their sleeping apart, but then she thought that this arrangement might be better. When he was killed—as he surely would be—it would be better for her not to have become attached to him. And it would be better for the succession if there was no child of his who might want to be king. And Jura didn’t know if she could deny her child a throne that would rightfully be his. No, this was better. She would stay a maiden with this man until she was widowed, then Geralt would become king and she would marry Daire and have many children.

She rose from the bed. “You say that we travel tomorrow?”

He had his back to her. “Yes, we start for the Vatells’ land, but first we stop at the Irial villages and get men and women.”

“For what?” she asked as she untied her loose trousers and slipped them off.

He turned back to her. “For marriages to—” he began but broke off at the sight of her half-nude body. He turned away again. “Go to bed,” he said in a deep voice. “Cover yourself.”

Jura smiled at his back and climbed beneath the sheepskins that were thrown across the window seat. She watched him as he undressed, his face turned away from her. He removed the tall boots and exposed his big, blond-haired calves. His embroidered tunic, which reached to just above his knees, came off next, and as he slid it over his head, Jura saw again that big, muscular body that had made her forget her senses, her present and her past, on that day at the river when she had first seen him.

The muscles in her legs began to feel as if she had just exerted them to their limit, and her breathing was deeper and slower.

Without looking at her, he blew out the candle by the bed and plunged the room into darkness.

“Rowan,” she whispered into the darkness, using his name for the first time.

“Do not speak to me,” he said loudly. “And call me ‘Englishman.’ Do not use my name.”

Jura clamped her jaws shut and cursed the stupid foreigner. With his vile temper and his unreasonableness, she gave him only a week before someone put an end to his life. Good riddance, she thought. Lanconia would be better off without him.

She turned to her stomach and thought of Daire. It would be good to be a virgin on her wedding night to Daire.

• • •

“Get up!”

Lazily, Jura turned over in the warm bed. It was still dark. Rowan was standing ten feet away from her, fully dressed and glaring at her.

“Are all Irials as lazy as you?” he snapped. “The wagons are already gathering below.”