The Scarecrow King: A Romantic Retelling of the King Thrushbeard Fairy Tale (10 page)

“Is it a troupe of minstrels waiting for us?” Because that was the worst thing I could imagine, therefore it was probably closest to the truth. At his silence, I continued. “Perhaps it’s a band of marauding peasants, come to steal my last dress from me? I mean, you gave all the others away.”

Aleksandr's smile became a little pained. “Still upset about that, are you?”

“Just a little,” I sniped. “So you’ll pardon me if I’m not very excited about future surprises.”

“I think you’ll like this one,” Aleksandr ventured. “This one is actually about me. It’s a secret.”

“I don’t like secrets either.”

He ignored my nasty comment, digging a finger in his collar and stretching it, as if it had grown too tight. “I haven’t been entirely truthful, Rinda. I haven’t really told you the entire truth about how we’d be getting to Lioncourt.”

Oh lovely. I tried to ignore the pit of dread forming in my stomach. “What now?”

“An escort.”

“Escort?” I stared up at him, frowning. Why would a minstrel need an escort?

But Aleksandr was all smiles, and I could hear the soft whicker of a horse in the distance, and a hint of a clearing. Smoke plumes rose from the distance – a campsite. I chewed my lip as I studied my new husband, who seemed nervous and excited all at once. Like he couldn’t wait to show me his secret because I would enjoy it so much.

We entered the clearing, though, and Aleksandr's smile disappeared entirely.

Before us, the flag of Lioncourt lay trampled on the ground. Fire and destroyed camping equipment littered the area. Armor and broken tents lay scattered across the clearing. Off to one side, a horse had been slaughtered, the hulk of it looming out of the grasses, flies buzzing around it. Aleksandr's face went white with shock, and he dropped to his knees, his hand sliding free from the lead reins of our sad horse. A campsite had been here once, but it had been destroyed and trampled to the ground.

My mouth pinched as Aleksandr knelt next to a dark stain in the dirt, and his fingers came away red. “Blood,” he said in a hard tone. “The men here have been kidnapped. Or worse.”

“Surprise,” I said in a flat voice.

~~ * ~~

I stared at Aleksandr's back with an irritated frown, watching as he worked tirelessly, creating a funeral pyre for the horse. My job was to watch our horse while he worked, and that had gotten old some time ago, but I didn’t have the heart to complain – not when worry and concern was clearly etched onto Aleksandr's normally smiling face.

For some reason, he’d taken the possible capture of these strangers very hard. Of course, I realized as he paused over each piece of armor and brushed the flag clean, that these men weren’t strangers at all. Aleksandr had been a soldier before he’d been a bard, and had come from Lioncourt. It was obvious that he’d traveled with these men. That was why they were his escort.

Or would have been, if they had not managed to get themselves captured.

The late afternoon heat was blazing overhead, and I was getting tired and hungry. Irritation made me tie the horse’s reins to a low-hanging branch and move to his side to let him know just how miserable I was. His shoulders were slumped in a pitiful way, and I hesitated. I was terrible with comforting someone, and Aleksandr obviously needed comforting. Awkwardly, I reached out to pat his back.

To my surprise, he turned and buried his face in my wrinkled skirts, wrapping his arms around my thighs. I stiffened in alarm, but Aleksandr wasn’t groping me – it was as if he desperately needed to hold someone at that moment. Blushing, I continued to pat his back, biting my lip as I stared at the now cleaned campsite where the men had been defeated.

“Did you know them well?” I finally ventured.

“Better than I know some of my own family,” he said, his voice muffled in my skirts. “They were good men. Good soldiers.”

“Do you think they’re alive?” I asked bluntly.

His breath was ragged. “I don’t know.”

I stared at the landscape around us, frowning. “Who would want to kill a band of traveling men?”

“They were traveling with the king.”

The breath escaped my lungs. The scarecrow king from Lioncourt? The one I had my sights on once I divorced the minstrel I was married to? “And is he…?” I pursed my lips, hard. If he was dead or captured, all my plans were destroyed. I had to know. There was no tactful way to broach the subject, but I had to know if my plans were ruined.

Aleksandr hesitated for a moment, then answered. “I’m not sure. Maybe he got away.”

I exhaled sharply in relief, and then felt guilty that I was so thrilled with that information.

Aleksandr eventually raised his head from my skirts and exhaled slowly, as if steeling himself for the hard road ahead. “We should get moving soon.”

“That sounds good,” I agreed. I didn’t like staying around here when there were obviously bandits on the road. “Let’s get on our way. Perhaps we have time to get to another town. You could sing a few songs for our supper–”

A hard look had set on Aleksandr's face. His jaw set and he got to his feet. “We’re not going to town.”

“We’re not?” I asked weakly. “Why ever not?”

“If the king’s party isn’t safe on the public roads, the towns certainly aren’t safe,” he said in a harder voice, a soldier’s voice. Gone was the happy-go-lucky minstrel. The man with the hard jaw before me was all soldier.

I wasn’t sure I liked that.

“We’ll move further into the woods and camp there. No fire. And then we’ll figure out where to go in the morning.”

No, I didn’t like that at all. Frowning, I grasped for any way to turn the conversation my way. “Weren’t you going to tell me something? Your secret?”

But his eyes were bleak. “It’s not important anymore. Right now, what’s important is our safety.”

~~ * ~~

We left the pyre behind and rode for a few hours, into the thick of the woods. Sometimes the trees grew so thick together that neither of us could ride the horse, and instead, we led it through the thick growth of trees. Aleksandr was not in a talking mood, and that suited me just fine.

When the sun set, we set up our tent in a small copse in the woods, in what seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. It filled me with a bit of alarm that I hadn't seen the path in hours, but Aleksandr seemed to know exactly where he was leading us. I had to trust him. Staying off the path would keep us safe, he’d told me, unlike the king's soldiers. He refused to build a fire as well, and I went to bed that night cold and hungry, and irritated at his strict orders.

The next morning, Aleksandr was awake and in a determined sort of mood. He had dark hollows under his eyes which made me think he had not slept, but you would not know it from the efficient way he broke camp. As I came to stand next to him, he handed me a piece of fruit for breakfast. I ate it in silence.

"You're going to have to learn how to defend yourself," Aleksandr announced just as I'd taken a large bite. "How good are you with swords?"

I choked on the fruit in my mouth, juice dangerously close to dripping down my chin, and me with nothing to wipe it with but my dirty sleeve. I chewed quickly and swallowed the lump. "I've never touched a sword in my life."

"We need to fix that, then."

I frowned at him, hard. "No, I don't feel we do. You seem to have mistaken me for a soldier and not a princess. I am not a swordsman."

He grinned at me. "No one could ever mistake you for a man, Princess." Then, as if realizing what he said, his face slowly colored bright red.

I didn't comment on that. Instead, I ignored him and finished eating the fruit in slow, methodical bites. Once I was done, I took the water-skin and uncorked it to wash my sticky fingers.

Aleksandr snatched it away from me. "What are you doing?"

I reached for it back, glaring at him. "I'm going to clean my hands."

"Not with our drinking water, you're not," Aleksandr said, re-corking the skin and looping it over his shoulder. "The nearest stream is too close to the road. We'll have to ration our supplies."

I stared at him with horror. I was already filthy, my dress hem encrusted with mud and dirt from dragging on the roads. My clothing smelled of horse and sweat. And he wasn't even going to allow me to clean my sticky fingers? "Are you trying to make me hate you? Because you are doing a remarkable job of it."

He grimaced and turned away from me, beginning to resaddle the horse. As he worked, he spoke over his shoulder to me. "I'm not doing anything of the sort, Rinda. I'm thinking about the safety of our travel. We need to stay in the woods. Off the roads. If the roads are not safe for the king's men, they're certainly not going to be safe for a stray princess and her husband."

My mood soured even further when he reminded me that we were married. I moved forward and wiped my fingers on the sleeve of his jerkin. "Very well, then."

He jerked in surprise, then grinned at me. "Does it bother you that much? Can't you just lick them clean?"

I wiggled a dirty finger in front of his face. "Have you seen how grimy my hands are? I even have dirt under my fingernails."

"Of course you do. You've been camping out in the open."

"It's revolting. I hate it."

He smiled at me and unslung the water, taking a kerchief from his pack. He dampened the fabric and then gestured for me to put my hand in his.

I scowled and reached for the cloth.

He pulled it out of my grasp, amused by my efforts. "You really don't like people helping you, do you?"

"Nonsense," I said in an icy voice. "I have servants at home. I prefer that they help me. Do you think I do anything on my own when a servant can perform the task? Not likely."

He ignored my prickly attitude and reached for my hand again. "What I meant was that you don't like leaving yourself vulnerable to anyone. You wear your lace-covered dresses and your jewels like armor."

Reluctantly, I extended my hand when he gestured at it again. His thumb brushed against my palm as he flipped my hand over and uncurled my fingers. Aleksandr began to gently wash my skin.

It tickled. A funny quiver worked over my skin as he stroked the cloth over my hand - part of me wanted to giggle, and part of me wanted to snatch my hand away and demand that he never touch me again. I felt exposed and open, and I wasn't sure I liked the feeling.

"You're glaring at me," he commented as he stroked the damp cloth over my hand.

"I am not," I snapped, then winced at my tone. "I just don't see why I can't take care of it myself."

"You cannot, because I enjoy doing this for you," he said in an entirely reasonable, cheerful voice. "Other hand, please."

I held it out to him.

"Still glaring," he commented, cleaning my other hand for me with gentle, sure strokes. He didn’t look at me as he worked, which helped alleviate some of my anxiety. “You know,” he said after a moment, “I think you are being very brave.”

A compliment? No one ever complimented me. Some of the stiff anger in my body melted away. “Why do you think that?”

“This is a lot to take in,” he said, the cloth stroking across my palm in a ticklish, distracting motion. “You’ve been married and taken away from your home, and it’s obvious you’ve never been in the wild before.”

“Don’t forget that you’ve given away all my worldly possessions,” I added caustically, but my anger toward him was softening. At least he somewhat understood what I was going through.

He glanced over at me and gave me that half-smile that made him look so boyish, and my heart gave a tiny flip. Why couldn’t Aleksandr have been a prince instead of a poor man?

My good feelings toward him soured in the next moment, when Alek grinned at me and held his sword out, flipping it in a casual manner until the hilt extended in my direction. “And since you’re experiencing new things, I want you to learn how to defend yourself.”

Chapter Nine

I clasped my hands behind my back, eyeing the sword like I would a snake. “I really don’t see why this is necessary. You are here to defend me.”

That was the wrong thing to say – his normally cheerful face darkened and he strode toward me, grabbing my hand in his free one and forcing the two apart. “This is necessary,” he said in a low, succinct voice. His accent – always present – was now thick with anger. “Perhaps you weren’t paying attention when we came across the remains of the battleground earlier? Were you not paying attention when I said they were captured?”

“I’m not a soldier–”

“Yes, and they
were
,” he replied, his voice firm. “Which is why you need to learn to defend yourself. Your life is in my hands. We are both in danger.” His blue eyes flashed down into my own, hard with resolve. His hand wrapped around my own, forcing it around the sword hilt. “If I could take you back to your Father’s home in safety, I would. But you cannot go back there. Do you understand?”

I stared at him, mute with pain. My father would not let me come home. He hadn’t even let me back into the castle to say goodbye to my sister Imogen. Aleksandr was all I had for now…and I needed him to get me to the king of Lioncourt. I shrugged his hand away and grasped the hilt. This was a mistake – I was not particularly skilled with coordination, and his sword looked sharp and heavy. Fine then. If he wanted to continue on with this ridiculous idea, I’d play along.

Giving him a sour look, I grasped the sword handle and hefted it. To my surprise, it was lighter than I’d anticipated – though the blade was over two feet long and curved, it didn’t feel heavy at all. I gave it an experimental swish.

“Careful,” Aleksandr said, moving around to my side and out of my striking range. “First of all, let me show you how to hold it.” His hand slid down my arm and clasped over my hand, stilling me. “You’re grasping the hilt too tightly.”

Irritation shot through me, hard and immediate. “I am not–”

“Look,” he said, and his fingers brushed over my curled ones, tickling me. His body pressed up against my own from behind, and his chin touched my shoulder.