Nobody's Lady (6 page)

My wandering eyes caught Jurij’s, and my breath caught in my throat. I’d dreamed of days when he would look at me like that, albeit without the slightly drooping eyelid and the scar that ran over it, a reminder of the first time I kissed him. On his wedding day. His wedding to my sister. I coughed and turned away.

“
You
chose to love me, Noll.”

Don’t.

“And you knew there was no hope.”

I don’t want to remember.

“Yet you loved me. You refused the wealthiest, most powerful man in the village because you loved me.”

Now hold on, it wasn’t just about that.

“You looked for ways to break the curse. Noll, you
broke the curse
because you loved me.”

“Stop!” I was on my feet, not even noticing when or how I got there. “Jurij, just
stop
.” I held my hands out in front of me as if pushing against a force of air. “Who told you I broke the curse?”

Jurij gestured around the cavern like he was pointing out imaginary people. “Everyone! Everyone says it was because of you.”

“It wasn’t me.” I clutched my elbows and stared at the flickering candle at my feet.

“Sure.” Jurij didn’t sound convinced. “You just happened to be one of the last goddesses to have her man find her, the never-dying, always-watching lord of the village no less, the same lord who now says that all marriages before the break of the curse are invalid, and you have nothing to do with the fact that now every man is as free as a woman to choose who he’ll love.”

His words bit. Jurij was the last person I expected to be so accusatory. It took a lot to make him angry—to make him feel anything other than love and meekness. “I didn’t say I had nothing to do with it.” I ran a hand up my arm to my shoulder. “But it wasn’t me. It was him.”

Jurij shifted on the ground, but I didn’t look at him. The drops of distant water punctuated the silence. “Well, I
know
whatever you did played a large role in it.”

I said nothing, but I could see Jurij’s feet moving at the edge of the candlelight, his legs getting ready to stand.

“And I won’t let you tell me it had nothing to do with me.”

I’m in trouble.
I took a step back, ready to flee, but I dug in my heels.
You’re here for a reason.
“Jurij, that’s rather egotistical. It’s not like you.” He was starting to really get on my nerves.
Jurij
—on my nerves. He’d never annoyed me quite like this before.

“How do you know what I’m like? Really? Considering I was obsessed with a woman for years and had no choice in the matter?” His hands clutched both of my shoulders. “Noll, you kissed me. On my wedding day.”

I knew it would be easy to slide out of his grip, much easier than it might have been with Ailill, but I was frozen, unable to move. I swallowed.
I won’t run from it then. I’ll use it.
“I used you.” It wasn’t what I meant to say, but some part of me wondered if it was true.

Jurij didn’t seem hurt or shocked like I’d hoped. If anything, he seemed amused. And I wasn’t sure I liked the feelings his amusement stirred in me. “Used me?”

“I didn’t like being forced to love the lord. I wanted to make him angry.” It was true. I knew that now. I knew a lot of things now that I was too blind to see back then. Before I grew up.

“And making him angry would make him stop loving you?” Jurij didn’t believe a word I said. “You are aware that because of the curse we had no choice but to love, so how … ”

“He didn’t love me. He never did. The curse just forced him to think he did.” It hurt to speak the words aloud. I’d buried them so deeply amidst my peaceful day-to-day existence.

“That’s what I’ve been saying. We were all forced, Noll. But you weren’t. Not when it came to loving me.” He leaned forward, and I had to make myself take a step back out of his reach. If I’d stayed put, I might have been on the receiving end of another kiss.

“My feelings for you made my sister unhappy.”

Jurij took a step forward to close the distance between us. “And her loving me, and me loving her, made
you
unhappy.”

I moved back in time with his steps, never letting him close the gap entirely, never letting myself enter his embrace. “I caused that injury to your face by kissing you.”

“
He
caused my injury.”

The tiny blaze of the candles grew dimmer, and the red glow of the distant cavern pool mocked me, warning me to stay away. I retreated into the darkness, knowing the light of day was nearby. “I was selfish, stubborn, focused only on my own desires.”

“Sounds like just about everyone else in this village, Noll.”

I kept retreating until my back slammed against the cavern wall. He grabbed my arms again, this time a little firmer, like he didn’t ever want to let me go. I closed my eyes as his face drew nearer to mine. “All right! I loved you!” I said. His grip stiffened, and I opened first one eye and then the other. His face came to a stop near mine, but he was searching my expression, waiting for me to continue. I looked away. “But I don’t now. Not like that.”
Confused. We’re both just confused.
I peeked up at him, waiting to see if my rejection would cause him the pain Elfriede’s might have, had he still been in love with her.

Jurij’s fingers unhooked from my arms. He turned and headed back to where we left the candles. Instead of blowing them out or picking them up, he sat back down on the ground beside them. I stood watching him for a moment, confused, still reeling from our almost-kiss. “Jurij?”

“Go.” He wouldn’t look at me as I approached, and I was certain I’d never before seen the shadow of anger on my Jurij’s face like I did now.
Not
my
Jurij.

“And leave you here?”

Jurij blew out a loud, slow breath. “For a while.”

I placed my hands on my hips. “You’ve been here long enough.”

“I can’t go home. Not yet.”

“To your parents’?”

“She’ll find me at either one’s. Tell me she hasn’t looked for me there already.”

“There and at my place.”

Jurij laughed, and I saw something of his old, cheerful self dancing across his eyes, but there was no mistaking the bitterness there. “Of course she would assume I was there.”

I didn’t think she was that wrong in thinking so now, not after the way his eyes drank in mine just moments before. But I didn’t think Jurij was in the mood to hear that. Not if I hoped to steer him through his confusion back to the right path. Back to Elfriede.

“It didn’t seem like she’d be back to visit anytime soon.”
Or ever.

Jurij’s grin reached his eyes, and I could have sworn I saw the flame flicker there once more. But no, it was just the reflection of the candles. “Looks like I’ve found a place to stay.”

So much for convincing him to join the ever-growing list of people who hate me.

“Let me get this straight. Jurij expects us to pretend we don’t know where he is when Elfriede comes asking, yet somehow we’re not supposed to be panicking that he’s gone missing? Pass me some more nails, would you?” With one hand, Alvilda balanced two planks of wood for a large chest on which she’d asked me to carve a design. I rifled through her sawdust-covered workbench, found a couple of dusty iron nails, and dropped them into her extended hand.

“I know.” It sounded even more ridiculous when someone else pointed out the flaw in the plan. “But if I don’t let him stay with me, he’ll go back to the cavern.”

“You’re seventeen, Noll—eighteen in a few months.”

“Yeah … ” I hadn’t stopped to think about it, but come fall, it’d be a year since I moved into the castle. It felt like a lifetime ago.

“So you’re a grown woman. And a grown woman has needs. I get that.” Alvilda rolled the nails between her fingers. “Are you a coupling then?”

“No!
No!
” I sputtered. “I mean, I know why you might
think
that, but— No, I don’t, now that I think about it. Why would you say that?”

“All right, all right. But a man moves in with a woman? What else are people supposed to think?”Alvilda placed one of the nails in her mouth like a piece of chewing straw. She stared me down out of the corner of her eye even as she took a hammer and pounded the first nail into place. “Schounds like … ” Alvilda spat out a breath of air as she grabbed the nail from her mouth. “Sounds like he’s taking you for a fool.” She used her forearm to swat away a stray tendril of dark hair that fell across her face and went back to hammering.

I sat down on the bench beside Alvilda’s worktable. My fingers drew circles through the sawdust as I stared across the room at the dining table. I still wasn’t used to seeing that table dust-free. Mistress Tailor—no, Mistress
Carver
, or maybe now that I was on my own with my own profession I could start calling her Siofra—had taken over most of Alvilda’s house and declared it an actual
home
. “There’s work and there’s home, and some of us need a little help differentiating between the two,” she’d said to me when I first commented on how clean the place looked. “Alvilda can confine her work to the corner. No need to be dragging dust all over where the children are eating and sleeping.”

And Alvilda had actually complied without putting up much of a fuss, as far as I knew. I noticed it didn’t stop her from letting her work creep just a little bit beyond her “work corner” each and every day. It was why, at Siofra’s insistence, building a workshop nearby was on Alvilda’s to-do list. “Why not use the commune?” Siofra had suggested. “It’s just sitting there, rotting, unused. Tearing down those filthy old shacks would do the village a lot of good.”

But somehow, Alvilda had become “so busy” wrestling up projects from customers over the past few weeks that she’d barely done more than knock down the first couple of shacks, which I gladly helped with, feeling some of the painful memories fall away with each wall. Alvilda’s lack of attention to the new workspace probably had something to do with the “waste of burning wood for two fires” she kept mumbling about. Not that it was so cold out yet that she’d absolutely need a fire, but she did work late most nights. She’d changed since Siofra moved in. She was gruffer, rougher around the edges. Like she had more annoyances to work out of her system with every swing of her hammer and every twist of a nail than she had back when she’d lived alone.

Alvilda must have noticed I hadn’t responded to her remark that I was a fool. I didn’t have anything to say; at this point, I probably agreed with it. Alvilda appeared beside me and took a swig from the mug she kept between a pile of filthy rags and a chisel on her worktable. “So how exactly does this living arrangement work?”

“He’s sleeping on the floor. On some hay and blankets.”

Alvilda peered down at me over the top of her mug. “And … doing what exactly?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. We haven’t done anything.”

Alvilda raised an eyebrow and put her mug back down. “No,
you
carved this box for me. And probably carved more of your toy animals, too.” Alvilda leaned across me to grab a few more nails and went back to her box and hammer. “I want to know if Jurij is doing anything other than moping and trying to get you to make love to him.”

“Alvilda! He isn’t— We aren’t—” I coughed and made a show of covering my mouth so I could hide the blush on my cheeks at the same time. “It’s only been a few days.”

“A few days becomes a few weeks becomes a few years in time.” Alvilda whacked the hammer with probably a little more force than necessary. “Now that men don’t need to be told what to do, they seem to need to be told what to do more than ever.”

I thought about what she said for a moment, and what initially sounded like nonsense started to make sense. “Elweard still runs the tavern.”

“
Vena
still runs the tavern. And Vena being bossy just happened to work out with Elweard looking for someone to boss him around, even without the curse driving him.” Alvilda shook the hammer in my direction. “Elweard is about the only good worker left among the lot of them. Well, and Coll.” Alvilda’s brother—Jurij’s father—had both sister and former wife to make sure he didn’t slack any just because his whole life was turned upside down.

Alvilda picked up a nail. “Do you know what I had to go through to get an order of these? The blacksmith decided to use his newfound freedom to spend his days
lying in the fields
. Lying in the fields!” She shook her head and positioned the nail, taking a swing at it with her hammer. “I didn’t even dare to ask who
with
. His wife—
former
wife—told me he could rot in the fields for all she cared. But I needed my nails, so I made sure to give him a reason or two to get up off his flower-covered ass.” She swung the hammer back, resting it over her shoulder, and admired her hammering with a snarl, perhaps either intentionally or subconsciously showing me just how she convinced the man to get back to work. Then she placed the hammer down and snatched her mug up from the table like I might be tempted to steal it out of her hands. “And your father? What was his excuse to pack up shop in the last week? He’s retiring?”

I shrugged and looked away. I hadn’t been home in weeks. I wasn’t really avoiding Father or Mother, but I knew I wouldn’t be going home to a happy family reunion. Especially not with how things were with Elfriede.