Married to a Sea Lord - Deluxe Hardcover

There was a time Julia did not shiver at the
sound of those heavy footsteps. There was a time she dreamed of escape -
planned it meticulously, in fact. A great tale of her own, a triumphant ending.

Except the tale had come and gone, and the ending
was washed away by the waves. Now, here she remained - among the debris.

“Yes, father?” She raised her head from her
embroidery. The light was still good in the solar, but it was quite clear that
soon - too soon - the day is going to tilt into the darkness. The too-early
winter darkness.

“I have good news for you,” Lord Milburn said
briskly. He avoided looking at her directly, instead directing his gaze upon
the tapestried walls, straight and sharp as a deadly arrow. ”You are
strangely flushed”.

“I have been washing my face, and the water
was cold.” The lie came easily and smoothly to her tongue. Well-practiced lies
were the only way she could survive here – the only way she had been able to
survive for the last three years.

“Were you? You have not been walking in the
gardens unchaperoned, were you?”

“Of course not”. Julia’s smile was as demure
as it was false.

He looked at the pitcher with water standing
on the nearest table, walked over, touched the linen towel nearby. Julia found
herself watching her father’s movements like a hawk – or a frightened wife,
numb with apprehension of what was to come if her deception were discovered.

But she knew what she was dealing with. She
had shored up her story beforehand, and her father stepped away from the table,
clearly satisfied that the towels have indeed been wet.

Julia released a breath. Her pulse was beating
wildly at her temple.

She knew that, in a few hours, she was to
expect another headache.

“You wanted to tell me something…” She would
have hated the way her voice sounded so halting, but she was used to the sound
by now. Years could accustom one to many things.

Her father turned to her.

“We have made a match for you, and a great one
indeed. I didn’t think it would be possible, given... everything.”

“Does he not mind my - history?” Julia
blinked. That was a surprise.

“He only knows about it in the most general
terms. A young damsel, brought up with too much indulgence, misbehaving. I
dearly hope you would at least be clever enough to make sure it stays this way.”

She swallowed the rage. She smiled with an
effort.

“Who is the man in question?”

“He is connected to the new dynasty. As I’ve
said, we have been fortunate.”

“It is not...” 

Once upon a time, she might have been
considered an eligible enough bride - highborn and beautiful and well-dowered -
to be chosen by a young monarch, especially one who rose to power merely a year
before that conversation. His Majesty King Orwyn, after all, had once been a
mere lord of middling lands, before his revolt catapulted him upon the throne.

“No,” her father cut this line of thought
curtly. “When His Majesty is going to choose a bride, she would have to be
without blemish. For you, his younger brother is more than a blessing already.”

He must have been glad that his daughter was
finally going to be off his hands, respectably married, and giving him a link
to the new royal family at that. He must have been. Still Lord Milburn clearly
could not help but speak with bewilderment of the fact that anyone above an
outlaw had decreed her good enough.

“Lord Athelstan Waite, then?” Julia paused. “But
he had never seen me”.

She could not help but slip a note of reproach
into her tone. After all, whose fault was it that she was now cooped up in the
family seat, with nary a chance to visit the capital or the new court? 

“He knows you come from a blue-blooded and
suitably fertile family. He doesn’t want anything beyond that”.

“Anything in a wife beyond bringing him good
connections and healthy children? What, nothing at all?”

“Few men do.” He lingered, as though wanting
to say something else. Call her by her name, perhaps, as he did sometimes in
the days before her disgrace. 

But nothing happened, and Lord Milburn turned
his face away from his daughter:

“The negotiations for your dowry have just
been concluded. You are going to be wed in two months.”

***

“I have very little desire to take a wife,
brother.” Athelstan Waite glared at his now-crowned sibling, wondering at what
on earth, by the will of the Virgin, the Lady, or the Fate would make the other
man at least stop his horse.

Who on earth delivered such news laughing at a
gallop? 

Orwyn Waite, apparently. The man who
approached the whole world as though it were his glorious feasting-table.

“What on earth is stopping you? The pleasures
of the flesh you cannot tear yourself away from?” Orwyn laughed, a bright and
booming sound. “I have heard the reports, Athelstan. You live in the kind of
grim chastity that would horrify some priests.”

“You concern yourself too much with my
chastity. I would have thought one is usually perturbed by its lack. Just ask
the selfsame priests.”

“They would tell me the married state is
blissful and natural.”

“Then it’s a great enigma that you are in no
hurry to assume it.”

“I will, with time. The interests of the state
demand it, after all,” for a second, Orwyn did stay his mount, and such a wince
of displeasure ran through his expression as though he had just eaten a lemon
whole. “They demand the same from you. The Milburns are an ancient family. Let’s
be honest, Athelstan - half the country is looking at us as parvenus. Minor
lordlings from a bleak shore, propelled to the golden throne, no idea what to
do with it. We must prove them wrong”.

“We will, if you rule wisely.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you swallowed one of
those conduct books whole when you were a child. That would have explained a
lot about why are like that. I hadn’t seen their Lady Julia myself, but I’ve
seen the portrait - she is quite easy on the eye. I am not marrying you off to
a deformed creature.”

Athelstan thought of the time of the campaign,
the dire days of winter and the hunger gnawing on the innards, and the orchards
now fed with buried bones. He did not succumb to despair then, as countless
other men did - there was no room for despair in him, only for a grim, plodding
sense of duty.

He had done that. If the interests of the
realm and their family truly demanded it, he told himself, he could stomach
wedding a woman he had never seen before. He had come through blood-soaked
bandages; he won’t be defeated by a cloth-of-gold.