The Heart of a Queen (A Historical Romance)

Chapter 5

This pattern repeated for many weeks. Brienna would not eat for two days, sometimes three, and then hunger would drive her down to the great hall, where she would stare at nothing while Llewellyn and Isobel ate. Once they left, she would gorge herself on what had been left on their plates, and then Lasair would help her up to bed.

Her skin grew paler than it already was and her cheeks hollowed. Even Isobel seemed to find her pitiful and bit back her customary insults, choosing instead to ply her brother with gossip she'd stripped from the peasants in the villages scattered about the castle, or with comments about the soldiers that ate across the room from them.

Llewellyn listened to her attentively but with only the barest of interest. Brienna blushed at some of the language Isobel used; if she had spoken that way back home, her father would have scalded her tongue with boiling sheep's milk.

One night, as Lasair assisted her from the room, their path was blocked by the king, who had been waiting just outside the door while Brienna scavenged her meal. As soon as she saw him standing there, she knew that he was aware of how she'd been getting her meals. She could not meet his eyes. Although she felt he had forced her into such desperate behaviour, she was still humiliated by what she had been reduced to. His waiting for her signified that he had known what she was doing all along.

"I believe that as long as you can rely on the comforts of home, you will find it hard to obey me," Llewellyn's voice rang deep in the stone hall.

"I assure you any hope of comfort has left me since I arrived here," Brienna retorted. "Besides, I brought hardly anything with me," she said, thinking of her small chest upstairs, which held nothing but a comb, sewing things, and a lock of her mother's hair.

Llewellyn, however, had something else in mind, which Brienna understood immediately as she raised her eyes and saw his gaze was directed at Lasair.

"You can't send my maid away from me," she tried to shout, but her voice was weak and it came out as more of plea.

Llewellyn ignored her, speaking only to Lasair.

"I've instructed your horseman to see you back to St Brigid's Bay. From there you shall take the first boat crossing home, where I'm sure your master can find other work for you. We have no need of you here," he finished, eyes flicking back to Brienna's stung face before he brusquely turned and disappeared up the stairs. Brienna heard the door of the war room slam behind him.

By the time they'd climbed the tower stairs to her own miserable bedroom, Brienna's white face was soaked with tears, which Lasair attended to gently, wiping them away with her bare fingertips. She too looked aghast at the idea that they were to be separated; she'd been looking after Brienna since she was a babe, and Lasair no more than a girl herself.

"I might suggest you try to bend yourself to the Laird's will, if I had an opinion on the matter," she said in her unassuming way.

"But he asks me to lower myself," Brienna protested.

"In this case," Lasair said, "perhaps it is only the body that lowers itself, and not the soul that resides within it. You can in all appearances act as a servant. Inside you'll still be a princess of Connaught."

The next morning, Brienna watched from the gates as Lasair and Ulf rode away across the plains, the gray sky glancing off the long grass so that it appeared that their horses crossed a silver sea. She pulled her cloak around her and looked up with hatred at the dark stone walls of the castle where she was now alone. She'd never felt less like a princess in all her life.