It was a no-name kingdom, with a king no one’d heard of in more civilized lands. There was a palace, but the palace was more like a hunting lodge with pretensions; it was long and low, with a central great hall in which sat a throne which deserved the name only by virtue of being a rather larger chair than the others. The great hall was pillared and smoke-stained; at times of feast, they dragged in long tables and benches and set them up down the middle of the hall and hunting dogs foraged for bones and lapped up spilled ale among the feet of the kingdom’s nobles and warriors.
But it was a kingdom, and it was a palace; and Renfri was most certainly a princess, and her current paramour was most certainly a king. A newly minted one, maybe, having only recently decided (under Renfri’s suggestion) to throw a lovely little coup as a surprise for his father, but a king, regardless. He wore leather, and woven wool, and a heavy bronze torc around his neck; his crown was also of bronze, and there were bronze antlers rising from it.
Where his father had been a barrel-chested man, whose stained wool tunics had strained over his girth – he had gone to fat, as many once muscular men did – and whose greying beard had been yellowed with grease, the new king was slim and strong, a vigorous man who was young enough to fancy he loved her and old enough to know what to do with her in bed. She’d landed well, for the meanwhile; she’d make the best of it while she was able.
And that included such niceties as wardrobe. King Balendin might prefer hunting leathers even when sitting his throne, but Renfri had been a princess in a different sort of land altogether; she demanded fine fabrics, and Balendin was too besotted still to deny her.
Thus, the tailor, brought in from another kingdom at great expense to Balendin’s coffers. Renfri held her arms out from her sides as he measured and muttered and made his little notes, slipping pins into the roughly blocked-out drapes of fabric as he went about his arcane and complicated business.
“Tell me,” she said. “Do you craft undergarments as well? I require cambric, for such.”
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