Sebat was gone on a raiding campaign in the north, near Dwoerth Province. The Bentari were breaching peace agreements by invading the province's mountain villages and pillaging their winter stores and burning their homes to the ground. He was to join the soldiers there and put an end to the raids.
The night before he left, he came to my room and walked in my bathing room as I listened to Alice read from an old text in the tongue of Portsmere, my home. He stood there, in the doorway, smiling as I piled the bubbles from my bath upon my body.
"Wyn," he called, " there is a raiding party coming towards the palace. I want you to take Ysvelda to Portsmere. An escort would draw too much attention, so I've places supplies out at the temple. Go after my party leaves. And alone."
I nodded. "Do I take a cart and horse or just horses?"
He sat down beside the bathing pool and dipped his hand in, plucking at my hair, "Go pick flowers, vere into the woodlands and you'll find our place." He smiled, rubbing the strands between his finger tips. He kissed my forehead absentmindedly, allowing his blue eyes to run down my body and he left, drying his hands on his black breaches.
As he spoke, I remembered "our place", an old one room cabin with one bed and a small kitchen outfitted with a two person table. It used to be whitewashed and housed a small barn long since abandoned. It had been a couple of years since we last used it and I smiled at the memory fondly as those had been pleasant times. Times before when he'd try to seduce me and pleasure me before himself. That was the location of my lost virginity.
After having Alice pour the rosewater over my head, I climbed out of the bathing pool and grabbed a rough, hand woven towel to dry with and stood behind a curtain partition.
Home, take her home? And a raiding party was to come here? We would need to leave during the flurry of activity and be dressed down until we came to Portsmere, my province with its own estate. The place of my birth already, after becoming courtesan to the heir to the throne I was given, by Sebat and his father, the province and estate house for Midsummer Solstice.
The estate itself was a small port city, populated by the more seafaring, hardy and stout of heart people of the nation tended to live there as Portsmere was readily accessible by sea, but by land… There was only one mountain pass that was able to be crossed in only the summer.
We would follow the trails from the cabin towards the main road then follow that to the sea town of Eyrthin. And Lane would take us on the Skipper to Portsmere.
That was the plan.