Chapter 2064: In the Garden (Part One)

The sun was warm on Jocelyn’s face.

She sat on a stone bench in the gardens of Lothian Manor, beneath a pear tree heavy with white blossoms. Bees hummed among the flowers. The air smelled of cut grass and roses, and somewhere nearby, a fountain splashed and chattered to itself.

In her arms, a baby was nursing.

She looked down at him, and her heart turned over in her chest. He was so small. A fuzz of chestnut hair, a tiny fist curled against her breast, dark lashes fanned across his round cheeks. Ashton. Her youngest. Not yet three months old.

His tiny mouth tugged hard at her breast, greedy and insistent, and the familiar ache of it pulled all the way down into her belly. Her body still hadn’t forgotten carrying him. Some mornings, her back still twinged when she rose from bed.

She loved him so much it hurt.

Five years. Had it really been five years since the wedding? She could hardly remember it now. A great temple, and cerulean silk, and Owain’s hand on hers. Everything since then had blurred together into one long, golden afternoon. Feasts and hunts and the births of her sons. Owain’s laughter echoing through the halls.

She also remembered the bruises. The long nights and the strong wine... The scent of another woman in the bed she shared with Owain. Those she remembered the most.

Like the night on the stairs, three days ago.

She’d only asked him where he’d been. That was all. She’d met him at the top of the grand staircase with a candle in her hand, and his fingers had closed around her wrist so fast that the candle fell and rolled, still burning, down the steps. He’d squeezed until the small bones ground together and her knees buckled, and she’d hung there from his grip above the long drop to the hall below.

"Careful, my pearl," he’d said, smiling, as he pulled her back from the edge. "You know how clumsy you are."

Even now, her wrist throbbed beneath her sleeve whenever she lifted Ashton.

But she had her children, she reminded herself as she looked down at Ashton’s drowsy face. At least she had her boys...

"He has your nose," Lady Adala said beside her. "And his father’s eyes. He’ll be a charmer when he’s grown," she teased. "The ladies of Lothian will follow him all the way to Blackwell just to sigh in disappointment when he chooses someone else. His father will be beside himself with grief when his sons best him at his favorite hunt," she said a touch more sharply than was proper.

"Adala!" Jocelynn hissed even as she fought to contain her laughter. Then she glanced quickly around the garden to be sure no one had heard what Adala had said. Thankfully, no one had. They were alone on the bench beneath the blossoms, the two of them, while the nursemaids gossiped by the fountain.

Adala smiled. She’d woven silver threads through her dark braids today, and they caught the sunlight when she moved. She was sharper than any of Jocelynn’s other ladies, sharper than most of the men at court, and she missed nothing.

"And what about Caleb?" Jocelynn asked, arching a brow at her. "Will the ladies follow him to Blackwell too?"

"Caleb?" Adala snorted. "Caleb will charge after them on a pony, waving a wooden sword in hand, demanding their surrender. The poor ladies won’t stand a chance."

Jocelynn laughed, and Ashton startled at the sound, then went back to nursing with renewed determination.

"I never thanked you properly," Jocelynn said. "For coming to serve me. After Samira..."

She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.

Samira had gone with Owain’s retinue to Otker Barony in the autumn the year after Caleb was born, ostensibly to see to some matter of the Baron’s. She’d never come back. Owain said she’d run off with a merchant from Keating. He’d told her over breakfast, buttering his bread, and he hadn’t looked up from his plate once while he said it. Jocelynn had wanted to believe him.

She still did. Most days.

"You don’t need to thank me," Adala said. "If anything, I should thank you. Do you know how many times my father has tried to marry me off in the past few years? Five. Five, Jocelynn. Old men with gout and young men with no chins. One of them was older than my grandfather and smelled like horse liniment. Another spent an entire supper telling me about his hounds, and asked my name twice before the cheese was served." She leaned back on the bench with a contented sigh.

"He even tried to match me with Serge Otker," Adala said with a catch in her voice that suggested she might have accepted it, but not because of any affection toward the infamous drunkard.

"But no one would dare arrange a match for the Marchioness’s own lady-in-waiting without her blessing," Adala said, shaking off thoughts of what might have been. "So here I am. Free."

"Free," Jocelynn repeated softly.

"Mostly." Adala’s sharp eyes softened. "Charlotte writes every week. She says Otker’s grown so dreary she’s started reading her father’s ledgers for entertainment, tracking down his ’errors’ and tidying them up. She found three hundred sovereigns he’d ’misplaced’ last month alone," Adala added with a wicked little smile. "Her father hasn’t decided yet whether to thank her or lock her in a tower. I’ve told her she’s welcome to visit whenever she likes."

"Of course she is," Jocelynn said.

She reached up to adjust Ashton’s blanket, and the sleeve of her gown slipped back from her wrist. Adala’s eyes went to it at once. To the four dark, finger-shaped marks that wrapped around the pale skin like a bracelet. They had gone a sickly yellow at the edges, but at their centers the bruises were still fresh and purple, darker where they overlapped older marks that had never quite faded.

Jocelynn tugged the sleeve back down. The silk dragged across the tender skin and she flinched, and Ashton broke away from her breast with a thin, unhappy wail. She jiggled him gently, hushing him, until he settled.

"Jocelynn," Adala said quietly. "What happened to your wrist?"

"I slipped on the stairs," she said lightly. "I was lucky that Owain caught me. You know how clumsy I am."