Terri Brisbin - His Enemy's Daughter

The loom.

Blind, with her thoughts muddled and with her only plan being escape, she’d stumbled in a panic around her chamber without being able to see her route. Though she’d lived in that same room for years now, without sight it became like a foreign terrain with no path to follow. She lost more self-control with each misstep until he dragged her to the bed. But when he destroyed the loom in the corner of her room, the only remaining remnants of her world came crashing down along with the wooden structure.

It was the last thing that connected her with her father and her brother, for they’d built it for her after her mother’s death in an attempt to assuage her grief and draw her back to the daily life in their household. It had been successful; working on the loom soothed her heart and kept her busy.

Now it and every other trace of her family was gone, save her. And from the sounds of his threats floating in the air, her life was also in danger from the man to whom she was now wed.

Her appetite fled with each passing day and the only sustenance she took was what her maids forced into her in a cup. Why bother sustaining herself when there was little to live for now? And her survival meant nothing to anyone here any longer?

Any hope, any tiny flare of it, had been dowsed when Teyen had removed the bandages and she’d managed to open her swollen eyes … and faced an obliterating blackness. Nothing.

No hint of light or movement.

Nothing.

She was truly blind and time would not restore her sight to her as her faithful servants had persuaded her to believe. So she let herself sink into that darkness a little more with each passing day. She hid from all those she’d sworn to serve and to protect, unable to face them as she was. Unable to offer them anything now that she’d lost everything. Then, just when she believed she could do no more than content herself to exist in this dark oblivion, he invaded once more, using the boy to bring his commands to her.

Her maids were more nervous than her—flitting around her chambers, arranging and rearranging her hair and clothing several times and fussing over her more than ever before. As though her appearance mattered when nothing truly did.

Sybilla sat in silent darkness, waiting for his arrival. The sound of his footsteps rumbled like thunder moving closer, but she could not seem to rouse much fear or any other feeling at all. These last days had emptied her of her grief and every other emotion. Like the husks left strewn on the ground after harvest, there was nothing left within her.

She heard the door open on hinges that clearly needed to be oiled and then silence filled the chamber. The shallow breathing of those waiting by her side sounded like the horses in the stables when she sneaked in on a cold winter’s morn to visit them. Laboured, low and fast, they grew more erratic as the seconds passed.

‘Out!’ he ordered in a gruff bark.

One word and her loyal servants abandoned her to him. Whatever he did to engender such obedience did not go unrecognised by her. Fear. Deep, abiding fear.

They’d described his horrible injuries in specific gory details to her, clucking over her marriage to him and alternately praying for her deliverance. They whispered rumours of his black deeds—the innocent crushed under his heels without mercy. They exposed their fears to her without regard for her own. But it mattered not, for she felt nothing.

He closed the door with no effort to be quiet and then strode around the chamber, his steps tracing a loud path until he stood at her side. She knew because she could now hear his breathing very close to her. Standing before him in the hall, she’d felt tiny, but sitting while he stood made her feel like a dog at his feet. Sybilla would have stood, but she was as yet unsteady on her feet, her balance thrown off by the lack of sight and her injuries.

‘Lady,’ he said in a tone more respectful than she thought possible from their last encounters, ‘are you well?’

‘What does your healer report to you?’ she asked in a voice unused to speaking. She’d had little to say over these last days.

‘Teyen said your wound no longer bleeds and the dizziness is lifting. Is that true?’

Although his words seemed to show an interest in her condition, there was no concern underlying them. She could hear that much. Strange, how she noticed that now. Without sight, she had only hearing to provide her with information about the world, and people, around her. Sighing, she nodded in reply.

‘And the pain?’ he asked. Sybilla noticed a slight inflection in his voice, one she might not have if forced to look upon him.

‘‘Tis not the worst I have ever suffered through,’ she said.

He grunted instead of answering then. She listened as he moved from her side and walked to the other side of the room.

Into that corner. It stood as empty now as she was.

‘There are things we must discuss, lady.’

Sybilla tried to feel something, anything—even fear would have been welcomed to show she yet lived—but nothing was there inside. Even a fool would have been afraid of what was to come.

‘Such as?’ she asked, simply to make this audience end sooner … so that she could return to her silent, dark world.

‘Your men will not answer my questions. I tried to … encourage them to do so, but they will not betray you.’

Dark threats swirled in his voice. Her men were alive? She clutched the arms of the wooden chair, curious for the first time in days.

‘Who yet lives?’ A tiny thread of hope to hear the names of those who’d done so much to protect her tingled deep within her heart.

‘Only a handful of your men were killed in the battle,’ he answered, with a tinge of insult echoing in his words. ‘It took little time or effort to breach the puny defences of this manor and keep.’

At another time she might herself bristle at the insult offered to her as lady of this manor and keep, but none of her past pride rose to fuel her ire.

‘How do you ask them to betray me?’

If he clenched his jaws any tighter, his teeth were sure to break. Soren held his anger in check and let out a breath. Did she know she tried his scant patience with every word she spoke?

He stepped away from her, walked a few paces and turned to observe her with a bit of space between them. Teyen’s reports over the last sennight seemed accurate—the lady did not appear ill, though the bruises on her forehead and face retained the dark purple shades and swelling of a still-fresh injury. He could not see her eyes, for clean bandages covered them. Even uncovered, her eyes did not see. Now, she gripped the wooden arms of the chair in which she sat and he noticed her fingers relaxing and tightening when he’d mentioned her men. It was the only sign of interest in anything he’d witnessed from her in days.

Oh, she might not know it, but he’d watched her many times since his arrival and since that terrible outpouring of grief had happened. She sat as she did now or remained abed for hours at a time—moving hardly at all, asking for or about nothing. The spirit he’d witnessed in the hall when she tried to protect her people from him had been extinguished like the flame of a candle in the wind.

But, correctly, he’d guessed that her people would be her weakness as much as she was theirs. With a few well-placed and timed threats, he’d forced their co-operation in repairing the damage done to the walls and in organising the stores of the manor. Soren needed more information, though, information that only the lady seemed to possess.

‘I need the rolls of the manor, to find how many owe service here and how many belong to the land. You know their location.’ He would have missed the slight nod if he’d not been watching her. ‘Where have you hidden them?’