mug. As she leaned over the table, just slightly, Lord Angus, sitting to Duncan’s right, cupped her ass in one hand.
Alva did nothing. What could she do? She was fairly certain that the repulsive, cruel Lord Duncan wanted her maidenhead for himself, a fate that she could feel growing closer by the day.
“Aye, that’s ripe,” said Lord Angus. He gave her an extra squeeze, his hand traveling lower, the layers of Alva’s skirts the only thing separating his thick, dirty fingers from her flesh.
The long table full of men, most at least fifteen years older than her, laughed and leered at Alva. She grit her teeth together, but did her best to ignore it. After all, these men — her Lord’s friends and underlords, a disgusting collection — had been talking about her like this ever since she’d come to serve Lord Duncan as a girl of seven with nowhere else to go.
It had gotten worse the past few years, of course. Alva had been a late bloomer, physically speaking, but now she was a young woman, and all the men who constantly vied for Duncan’s attention had noticed.
She took three empty mugs back into the kitchen and began refilling them, one by one, from the cask full of ale. As she did, she listened idly to the conversation still going on in the great room.
“Did you hear that Aberdale was sacked,” someone said. It was a newer voice, one that Alva couldn’t place immediately.
“Bunch of milk-drinking cunts,” said another voice, this one from Lord Colum, another of Duncan’s closest advisors.
Everyone else laughed uproariously.
A shudder went down Alva’s spine as she filled the second mug full of beer. As bad as she knew serving in Lord Duncan’s house was — and how much she dreaded the night, soon now, she knew, when he ordered her to his bed — it was still better than the vikings. They were rough, unwashed barbarians who sailed along the coast, ransacking towns, stealing children and raping women as they saw fit.
However bad her life was now, she was alive, fed, and sheltered. Better than dead, and better than being the only person left alive in the burnt-out shell of a village — she had already experienced that once, and it was more than enough.
“They took Finhorn as well,” the first voice said. “Finhorn had quite a wall.”
There was a moment of silence around the table. Then, another loud belch, followed by raucous laughter.
“Finhorn fell because Cormac’s daughters can barely lift a sword,” said Duncan. “They all run and hide behind their mother’s skirts.”
Alva thought she heard a note of desperation in his loud, obnoxious voice. Finhorn was only a day’s ride away, and no matter what Duncan might say to his friends while he was drunk, everyone knew that Lord Cormac had seven big, strapping sons.
Had, past tense. News from Finhorn was that all seven had been mown down, defending their home. They’d also heard that his mother had been found dead in the wreckage, and that their two sisters had simply disappeared. Probably taken by the vikings.
Alva had never heard of anyone being taken by the vikings and coming back.
Someone pounded on the table.
“Where’s my ale?” Duncan roared.
Alva allowed herself a modicum of relief. Over the years she’d become acutely attuned to the levels of his drunkenness, and she she that after this mug, he’d be drunk enough to fall asleep the moment he got into bed — certainly too drunk for his manhood to work.
Clutching the three mugs, Alva carried them back into the large room where the men sat around the table, a roaring fire behind them. She set them on the table, ignoring as always the way all the men leered at her.
“Where’d you get this one?” one of the men roared at Lord Duncan. “Got green eyes and a pretty bosom, can’t be one of our local girls.”
The men at the table laughed, even though Alva knew that they all liked the local girls well enough.
“Some of my men found her alone in the rubble when
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