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My heart is beating out of my chest as I wait for his answer. He doesn’t look as surprised as I thought he might at my question. His jaw clenches just before he takes a deep breath, probably biding his time while he decides what lie to tell me this time.
After I tried to escape the other day, we spent the rest of our day riding in silence. He hardly looked in my direction at all. And when he did, there was fire in his gaze. I wasn’t sure if he was angry that I tried to run, or frustrated that I even had the chance at all while under his watch.
I figured the next days would be spent in a similar reticence. However, when we woke up the next morning, his easy-going manner had returned, making jokes at Onah’s expense and telling me more ridiculous tales from his childhood and the antics his mother had to put up with.
Once the road began to climb upward into the mountains, my seat in the back became more and more optional. When Onah took her turn to nap during daylight, I was allowed to sit in the driver’s seat next to Parker.
“You remind me a little of Roan, you know,” I tell him.
“Captain Montgomery? Oh goodness. I hope not. All seriousness and tension, that one. He seems good enough. But definitely not the type you want to go bet on the horse races with after a long day. You know?” Parker responds. I chuckle at his fairly accurate description, accidentally bumping into his shoulder in the process.
There’s a side to Roan many haven’t seen. Roan Montgomery before his best friend, and my brother, died during the First Hunt. And for whatever reason, that’s how I still choose to see him. Happy, mischievous, charismatic, full of dreams.
“He wasn’t always so serious,” I say in his defense. “He used to be the biggest trickster in the palace. One time, him and my brother dressed up as their most loathsome tutors, coming to dinner pretending to be them. Even memorizing their mannerisms and particular idiosyncrasies. I thought Mother would be furious. But they had everyone in stitches by the end.”
Parker smiles, a single laugh huffing out of him. “No way. You lie.”
“I promise you, I don’t.” I smile alongside of him.
“Captain Montgomery? Are you sure we’re talking about the same person? Mister three practices a day, early to bed and early to rise, perpetual scowl man?”
“Yes. That one.”
“Huh. Well, I guess the saying is true. You never really know someone until you really know someone.” It seems a redundant phrase, but it also makes an odd amount of sense.
Our conversation dies among the methodicalclop, clop, clopof the horses’ hooves as they pull our wagon. We continue up the mountain road, our bodies swaying back and forth each time we hit a rut or uneven terrain. It’s definitely a marked path, but one that could be easily missed for those who weren’t close enough to see it.
“Do you want to marry him?” Parker asks me.
At first I think I’ve misheard him. No one has ever asked me such a forward question. If it were any other situation I would have admonished whomever asked me such an personal thing. But the longer I’m away from Turin, the more I realize just how stifled I have been. I tense, rubbing my fingers together one by one as I take my time to answer. There’s no reason not to answer. I doubt Parker Aldren even really cares, more likely just filling the time with something better than the sound of rocks hitting against our wagon’s wheels.
But it’s an honest question, one a friend might ask if they were concerned about my well-being. Is Parker my friend? No. I don’t think a captor can really be my friend. But something inside me wants to open my soul to him, this thieving stranger, if only to clear away the truth built up inside of me. To release it into the world to someone I know doesn’t care what answer I will give. And if I’m being honest, I don’t think I’ve ever had someone I could confide in, someone that didn’t have ulterior motives and biases toward my feelings, not even Aunt Margaret.
I speak before I’ve come up with a polished answer. “Roan is a good person. I know it wouldn’t be wrong to marry him. He would make a great king consort, and I know he wouldn’t love another once we said our vows.”
“Being a good person doesn’t mean you want to marry them,” he replies, his eyes firm as he finishes, “or that you love them.” He looks ahead as he says it, not even side glancing my way. “Do you? Love him I mean.”
My eyes go wide. “What?”
“I could be wrong. But it sounds as if he was a pretty flower your parents picked for your table. Not someone you actually love.” Blood rushes through my ears, drowning out every other noise except for Parker’s voice and my breathing.
How dare he. How dare he try to tell me what I do or do not feel.
As I speak my voice is eerily calm, but somehow it makes my meaning blast louder than if I screamed it at the top of my lungs. “What is it to you? Whether I do or do not love him? Why do you even care? In a few days, or weeks, or months— you will be rid of me. My heart and where it belongs will no longer be your concern.” I feel stiff after I say the words, like my body doesn’t know what to do after finally speaking my mind.
When my brother died, my parents grappled for whatever normalcy they could find. Roan grew up with us. I think they really just wanted to keep as much of their family together as they could. He had become family. And in a small way he took away the pain of my brother’s loss.
Nobody has ever asked me if I wanted to marry Roan, let alone if I loved him. And I’ve never talked about it. My mother and father told me we would be wed on my eighteenth birthday, and I was taught never to question their authority. Roan is comfortable, and I know he would be a wonderful husband when the time came.
“But if you decided you didn’t want to— that you didn’t want to marry him— could you tell them?” Parker asks, unfazed by my anger. His words take me by surprise, his ease after my admonishment. The heat rushing through me doesn’t dissolve, but a curiousness tugs at the corner of my mind.
“I’m… not sure.” And that’s the truth. I want to tell them, and might if I was actually there. Really, I want to demand that I have a choice. Not that Roan is a bad choice. I just want to decide for myself— now that I’ve had time to paint my own future with the small taste of freedom I’ve been given.
A soft laugh escapes me. When did I start to see being kidnapped and tied up in a wagon as freedom?
“I was originally betrothed to Rebecca Davenport’s son, of Fort Kotar,” I randomly tell him, but I don’t know why. “They own a large percent of the ore in Felshan. And the Kotar mines give us some of the strongest steel in all of the Four Kingdoms.”
“Turinian steel,” he replies.
