Mercedes Lackey - Wintermoon

Then, when spring came and the sea calmed enough to travel on, Massid would probably send her back to Jendara, which would be even worse. She’d be a captive among his flock of wives and concubines, none of whom would speak her language, all of whom would probably be hostile. If she wasn’t driven to insanity by such imprisonment, one or more of them would probably try to poison her out of jealousy if Massid showed the slightest bit of preference for her. Travelers’ tales of war among the women of a Jendaran chareen might be partially apocryphal, but where there was smoke, there was usually flame somewhere about.

Not a good option, for herself or her King.

Next choice—try to escape.

She wouldn’t get more than a single chance at that, and she would need to be very careful about the timing. I won’t get a chance at all once there’s a wedding, so it will have to be before then if I try it. That much she was sure of—or at least, she wouldn’t get a chance unless something completely catastrophic happened that threw the entire keep into an uproar and removed the probable guard from her door. So any attempt would have to take place after she learned as much as she could, but before a wedding.

The autumn and winter storms were on their way, and both Ferson and Massid must be as aware of that as she was, so whatever her father and the Prince were planning was probably intended to take advantage of the storms. But those same storms would also make getting to and from the keep from the landward side quite difficult. Not impossible, but it took a very determined traveler to brave the wind, snow, and above all, the ice storms that pounded the coastline by winter. If she was to escape, she’d have to plan things to a nicety, and she would have to have a great deal of luck. The closest place likely to take her in was one of the two nearest sea-keeps, but there was no telling whether or not Ferson was including the Lord of Lornetel and the Lord of Mandeles in his plans. If she fled to either of them, she might find herself handed back over. So the safest direction to flee would be inland, and it would take her at least twice as long to get to another inland keep as it would to get to the nearest sea-keeps.

Escape was not a good option. It might be the only one, but it was not much better than going through with the wedding.

Whatever the King and Countess suspected, it was nothing like this, or surely they’d have given her more warnings—and more of the sort of arcane aid that resided beneath the floor of the wardrobe.

Nevertheless, there had been a lot of thought put into this plot, whatever it was.

He must have been planning this for a while—but not for too long, or he would have summoned me earlier. This scheme could not have been hatched before this time last year.

The moment she realized that, she was certain of something else.

This had not been Lord Ferson’s idea. Or at least, it didn’t originate with him.

It wasn’t that her father wasn’t intelligent, because he was. He wasn’t clever, he wasn’t good at coming up with cunning plans, but he was intelligent. He knew how to read men, to the point where some of his underlings thought he could see what was in a man’s mind. He was also cautious. Living in a sea-keep tended to make you cautious; the sea was temperamental and unforgiving; slip once, and she tended to kill you for your carelessness.

He also hated risk. He always measured risk against gain. But he wasn’t creative, and he never initiated anything if he could help it.

Any overtures would have to have come from the Khaleem, and the promises of reward would have had to be quite substantial before he would even have considered answering the initial contact.

Whatever Lord Ferson had been promised, it had to have been something big enough to override that intelligence and native caution. And whatever was afoot, it had to be something that Lord Ferson was quite sure of bringing to fruition without being caught.

This was probably the Khaleem’s idea. He had promised her father a great deal—and might even have already paid him some of what was promised as a gesture of good faith. Until this moment, there would not have been a great deal that anyone could point to as evidence of treason. Even now—well, entertaining Massid for the winter was a dubious move, but not precisely treasonable. It could even be said, and likely Ferson would if he was caught, that he had been trying to open negotiations to end the Khaleem’s piracy.

Only if he made some more overt move, such as pledging his daughter to Massid, would he enter the realm of treason, and he had timed things so word of that was unlikely to escape before the greater plan came to fruition.

Now, something about that tickled her mind, but she couldn’t put a finger on it. Mentally, she set it aside in the back of her mind and continued pursuing her original train of thought, jumping a little as the fire popped.

Nevertheless, even with powerful incentives, and a strong likelihood of success, there was something missing from this equation. There were too many things that could go wrong, too many uncertainties. The Khaleems were not known for fidelity to their promises in the past. Lord Ferson had never been noted for being a risk taker.

Something in his life must have changed in the past year to make him even consider such an overture, much less follow through on it.

She took in a shuddering breath. This was getting more complicated by the moment. She was going to have to watch every step she took, every word she spoke.

So far her options were marriage, and escape. Both were fraught with the potential to go wrong. There was a third option—to delay—but she didn’t think that she would get very far with that—except…

Hmm.

There was a narrow path through all of this, perhaps. She had boldly told the Countess there was no way her father could force her into a marriage against her will. Legally, that is, and when she had claimed that, she had assumed any such marriage would be to a fellow countryman, who would be bound by the law and custom of the sea-keeps. But that assumed there would be someone here to oppose her father’s will; she had also assumed that no actual marriage could take place before spring, and that such a wedding would involve the invitations to the other lords of the sea-keeps. At least one of them would have answered to an appeal from her. Especially since all of them were very jealous of their equality in power, and would resent anything that made the Lord of Highclere the most powerful of the lot.

The arrival of Massid put rest to all of those assumptions.

However….

Part of what had been tickling the back of her thoughts finally bloomed into an idea. She couldn’t depend on the law…but she could use it.

She closed her eyes briefly and said a little prayer of thanks that she had managed to keep her father from knowing precisely what kind of person he had welcomed back into his keep. The good God must have been in the back of her mind, keeping her from betraying her intelligence this whole time, from the moment she had left Viridian Manor to this moment. Because using the law to delay was going to depend entirely on Lord Ferson’s impression that she was passive, ordinary, and above all, stupid. Stupid enough not to realize why Massid was here, and stupid enough to believe the law would actually protect her from a marriage to anyone she didn’t wish to wed. Stupid enough to blurt out her rights in public, thus reminding the rest of the freedmen of the keep that those rights existed, and make them feel unease that those ancient rights—as ancient as the ones that kept them free rather than serfs—were being threatened.