On the dais, Owain’s face grew darker and darker as he listened to the performance his discarded plaything was putting on. Looking around the hall, he could see the eyes of uncomfortable men who couldn’t bear up under the pressure of their own wives’ glares.

Elsewhere in the crowd, he spotted self-righteous fools, postering before their families as though they’d never taken a tumble with their own servants or hidden a bastard of their own. But among the men who mattered, men like Preden Saliou and the traitors, Wes Iriso and Loghlan Dunn, who clung ’faithfully’ to their wives, he saw a growing contempt in their eyes.

Ashlynn was naive if she thought that bringing out this trollop with her padded belly and ’heartwrenching’ story was going to gain her the universal sympathy of the powerful and wealthy rulers of the march. But that didn’t mean the wench’s story was harmless, and there was a limit to how long Owain was willing to let the charade play out.

"I thought, " Samira said as her voice cracked. Isabell’s hand on her back provided a soft, soothing warmth that helped her to regain her composure, and she drew a deep breath that smelled faintly of evergreen needles before pushing on again.

"I thought, at first, that he loved me," Samira admitted. "Or, more like, he might come to love me. We’ve all heard the fairy story growing up, the ones about the noble lord who falls in love with the servant girl and raises her up, and we’ve even seen men like Baron Iriso who married a commoner instead of someone highborn."

"So when Lord Owain came to my bed and called me by his lady’s name," Samira said. "I, I felt like I was inside that story. I thought if I did well, if I bore him an heir, he would keep me when the deception was over. He would have to. The child would be his own flesh and blood. His firstborn," she said as she gently stroked her belly. "Since I look like Lady Ashlynn, at least a little bit, I even thought that, if he wanted to, he could present our child as his legitimate heir... That I could be the next Marquis after him," she said, shaking her head at her own foolishness.

"That was the choice I made," she said. "I am not proud of it. But it is the choice I made. I conceived Lord Owain’s child during one of those nights, but I never told him that the child that was supposed to be a lie was real. I, I didn’t want to tell him until I was certain I’d won his heart..."

"Lies!" Owain interrupted as he finally reached his limit. Fairy story? The maid and the prince? It was utter nonsense!

"This is a fiction," Owain said. "A pleasant fiction, and well-rehearsed at that. The girl is who she says she is. I will not insult the court by pretending otherwise. But the rest is theater. She was paid to wear Ashlynn’s clothes and stand at the windows so that the demons watching the villa would believe my wife was alive. That much, at least, is true," he said.

He couldn’t deny that there’d been some deception. There were too many people who had visited the Summer Villa and encountered Samira as she played at being Ashlynn, including Jocelynn. He would never convince anyone that the march hadn’t been deceived about Ashlynn’s death. But the idea that she was carrying his child was preposterous.

"How long have you been planning this scheme, Ashlynn?" Owain asked. "Did the two of you concoct this when you stole into the Summer Villa and murdered my Steward, Kaefin? Don’t think that I’ve forgotten the debt I owe to ’Lynnda’ for killing my men and setting fire to the Villa."

"How much did you have to pay this woman to tell your tale?" Owain asked, raising his brow at Ashlynn. "It couldn’t have been much. You’d have been better off looking for a performer from a theater troupe. No one believes her story or her tears," Owain declared. "This whole pregnancy is nothing but theater. The child is a pillow."

Around the hall, several men began to nod while a few whispered to their neighbors. Hands were raised with pointing fingers, and doubt began to spread.

"It happened to my cousin," one man said quietly. "One night with a tavern maid, and then she shows up at his door months later with her hand out for silver and a threat to tell his wife. The bump in her belly was nothing but straw..."

"She doesn’t talk like any chambermaid I’ve ever known," a knight’s wife told her husband. "She’s far too proper and refined. Lady Ashlynn must have written her a script to practice..."

Others, however, weren’t swayed by Owain’s words.

"The poor thing," Melsinde said, gripping Serle’s hand under the table. "She must have been overwhelmed by all of this. What kind of beast could toy with a woman like that..."

"Hush," Serle said, glancing at Owain, who was less than a dozen paces away. "We, we don’t know who’s telling the truth right now. It, it could be, as Lord Owain says," he said, mopping the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

Samira couldn’t hear it all, but she heard enough, and when it seemed like the entire Great Hall had become caught up in speculation, she made her move. She didn’t speak; she didn’t have to.

Instead, while the entire hall watched, she loosened the laces of her blouse and pulled the hem up high, revealing the taught, bare flesh of her pregnant belly.

Lady Heila said it would be soon now, just a matter of weeks before she could welcome her child into the world. The shape of her body had changed over the course of the past several months, but there was no mistaking what she showed the hall for a bit of pudge and most certainly not for a pillow.

The child she bore was very real, and both the mothers and the fathers in the hall could tell from one look at her that it would be born very, very soon. Which meant that the time she must have conceived was exactly when she said she had... just days or weeks after Owain tried and failed to murder his wife.