Laurell Hamilton - Never After

I woke up once, abruptly, when Dannette uttered an urgent cry of warning. I jerked upright, unable to see anything in the utter darkness. I heard a stir on the other side of the room—Harwin, surely, since Darius’s gentle snores went on uninterrupted.

“What’s wrong?” he asked sharply. I could see a shadow move through the blackness. “Olivia? Was that you?”

“Not me. Dannette,” I replied softly. I could tell by the way she curled in upon herself that she was still sleeping.

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I think she has nightmares. This happened last night, too.”

Now his shadow was beside the bed. I could smell the soap he had used to wash his face and the herbs from Dannette’s salve. “Should we wake her?”

“I think it will just start again when she goes back to sleep.”

I waited for him to say something like, It’s intolerable that you should have your slumbers interrupted in such a way. But, from what I could tell by staring at his silhouette in the darkness, he was merely looking down at Dannette’s restless form. Perhaps his face, if I’d been able to see it, would have been creased with compassion or concern.

“What gives her nightmares?” he asked.

Scandals. Accusations in the dead of night. Secrets . “I don’t know.”

He hesitated a moment. I didn’t need to see his face to be able to imagine his expression: serious, considering, truthful. “I like both of them better than I thought I would,” he said at last. “But they are still strangers about whom you know almost nothing. It was reckless of your father to send you off with them in such a scrambling fashion.”

“Well, you’re here now,” I said flippantly. “You can make sure they don’t harm me or lead me astray.”

“Indeed,” he said, “that is exactly what I mean to do.”

In the morning I felt absolutely dreadful. My head was pounding and my stomach clamped down when I so much as thought about breakfast. For some reason, this seemed to amuse Darius and Dannette. “Too much beer the night before makes the dawn a grievous chore,” Darius chanted. I gave him a heavy look of condemnation from eyes that felt scratchy and hot. His stupid little verse didn’t even make sense.

“I don’t think I can move,” I said, still sprawled on the bed after the other three had washed and dressed. “Let’s stay here another day.”

“You’ll feel just as bad lying here as you will sitting in the wagon, so you may as well travel on,” Darius said, with rather less sympathy than I’d hoped for. “Come on. Dannette will help you get dressed while Harwin and I go down and order a meal.”

I allowed Dannette to cajole me into a loose fitting gown, and then she combed out my hair and put it in a simple braid. I was horrified at my image in the mirror, my face pale, my eyes shot with red. “I’m ruined!” I cried.

Dannette laughed. “You’ll be fine later today and show no ill effects at all by tomorrow,” she said. “That’s because you’re twenty-one. If you drink a pitcher of beer every night until you turn fifty, well, that’s another story.”

I met her eyes in the mirror. She looked perfectly rested and cheerful as always. She’d put her own ginger blond hair back in a bun, a careless style that looked good on her since it accentuated her high cheekbones. This morning she had added small gold earrings to her ensemble, or maybe I saw them only because her hair was pulled back. I wondered if she was trying to improve her appearance in subtle ways to attract Harwin’s attention.

“Why do you cry out in the middle of the night?” I asked abruptly.

“Do I?” she said. “I’m sorry. Does it keep you awake?”

“Yes, and it kept Harwin awake last night, too,” I said, watching her closely.

She turned away from the mirror. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I will try to muffle my sounds.”

I stood up and turned to watch her as she put the last of her clothes in her bag. “But why are you so upset? What are you dreaming about?”

She merely continued to fold her skirt, carefully lining up the pleats. “Things I cannot remember in the morning,” she said.

Clearly, she was going to give me no better answer. I made a little snort of irritation, hoisted my own bag over my shoulder, spared a moment to be vexed that neither Darius nor Harwin had thought to carry it downstairs for me, and left the room. Dannette came behind me, no longer smiling.

“Let’s throw our things in the wagon before sitting down to breakfast,” she suggested, so I followed her out into the innyard.

The wagon was already in place and a groom was leading the horses up to be hitched. Ours was not the only vehicle in the yard; I saw half a dozen gigs and carts lined up, waiting for their owners to down a hasty breakfast. My attention was caught by a particularly fine black carriage pulled by a matched team. I had a moment of intense longing. Oh, if only I could travel in that , how much more tolerable this expedition would be!

When I was married to Darius and I became queen of Kallenore, I might journey around the kingdom from time to time watching him practice magic if it made him happy, but I was not traveling in a cart and I was not sleeping four to a room, listening to people breathe and snore and chatter in their sleep.

Well, of course I would hear Darius breathe. And snore.

“Hungry?” Dannette asked.

“Not really,” I said, “but let’s eat and move on.” We stepped into the crowded taproom, trying to avoid the three women and one boy threading their way through the packed tables as they delivered trays of eggs and sausage. My stomach clenched as it had this morning, but this time I thought the response might signal hunger, not nausea. I looked around for Darius and Harwin, and finally spotted them sitting at the end of a long common table. I was a little surprised to see Harwin speaking intensely to a woman sitting next to him, for he was not the type to strike up conversations with people he did not know.

I was astonished when I realized the woman was Gisele.

I marched through the taproom without bothering to get out of the way of the scurrying servers. “What are you doing here?” I cried, standing behind Darius and pointing at Gisele.

She touched a coarse napkin to her mouth and gave me a limpid look. “Having breakfast,” she said.

Dannette slipped into one of the two empty seats next to Darius. “You’re the queen, aren’t you? I saw you sitting by the king in the throne room.”

“I’m married to the king, yes,” Gisele replied with some bitterness.

“What are you doing here? Why are you following me?” I demanded.

Darius smiled at me over his shoulder. “Sit down and eat something,” he said. “The oatmeal is very good if your stomach is queasy.”

“Why should her stomach be queasy?” Gisele wanted to know.

“Too much beer last night,” Dannette said, helping herself to one of the platters handed to her by a woman sitting toward the middle of the table. “Olivia, do you want any of this? It looks like apple fritters.”

“Yes—I suppose,” I said, flopping into the seat next to her and still staring resentfully at Gisele. “You haven’t answered me.”

Harwin spoke up. “She says your father decided that Dannette would not be a sufficient chaperone. He did not know that I had come after you as well, or perhaps he would not have been so worried.”

Gisele gave him a quick, droll look. “Exactly so.”

I tried a bite of the fritters. They were excellent. When the woman to my right handed me a steaming bowl of oatmeal, I ladled out a lavish portion and passed the bowl to Dannette. “My father never worries about me,” I said.