None of what had happened was his fault. And while I might have hoped that he would be better for my sake, I couldn’t really blame him for the hurt he’d been living with these past few years.
Still, birthing calves wasn’t the sort of thing young women should be doing on their own, but I had done it more times than I could count. The only job I was supposed to do on the farm was milking the heifers, but over the years I had taken on more and more responsibilities as my father had fallen deeper and deeper into his melancholy.
Nobody else would tend to the livestock, and so it was left to me. In truth, it was all fascinating to me, but I often found myself far outside of my knowledge or experience, unsure what to do or how. I carried the weight of our entire livelihood on my shoulders. As one of the few royal freehold stables and farms, it was of the utmost importance that everything at least appear to be running smoothly and prosperously.
If the royal council, who oversaw the freeholds, discovered that this whole endeavor came down to a nineteen-year-old milkmaid who was leagues out of her depth, we’d be stripped of our tenancy in an instant. For the royal family, appearances were everything. So long as everything appeared to be in good order, that was all that mattered.
Things were most certainly not in good order at that moment. Nellie needed help this instant. Her breathing was becoming increasingly labored and panicked.
“Shhhh, shhhh,” I told her, scratching behind her ear to calm her.
It had no effect; it even seemed to upset her more, because she started not to roll away from me but rather further onto my body.
When she began to roll toward me, I heard the sound of footsteps squelching in the mud. I knew straight away it wasn’t my father; whoever it was, was moving too fast and with too much purpose to be a drunkard.
Struggling to turn my head, I was confronted with an absolutely enormous man, crossing the muddy farmyard with huge strides. From where I lay, he looked like a brawny giant, ripped right from a fairy tale. His arms were as big as my legs at least. His neck was like an oak trunk. His bare forearms rippled in the sunshine, wrapped in massive muscles and interlaced with a network of pronounced veins.
It was hard for me to get a sense of his face, shrouded as he was in an oversized hood. But whoever he was, he was huge. Few human beings would be able to shift a full-grown cow in labor… but he just might.
“Hold still,” he said, squelching through the mud, leaving bear-sized footprints behind him. His thunder-like voice sent every nerve in my body twitching, some I hadn’t known existed until that moment. “I’ll be right there.”
Nellie was as startled by this newcomer as I had been, and thankfully she attempted to turn her head to face him, shifting some of her weight off of me momentarily. Cows, like horses, have an immediate sense about a person’s intentions and nature. Close as I was to Nellie right then, I could feel her every movement and response.
Even in her distress, she wasn’t alarmed by this stranger—exactly the opposite. His presence seemed to calm her instantly. I felt the same way, for even only just having laid eyes on him, not even knowing his name, I knew without a doubt he was a kindhearted and helpful man who meant us no harm.
When Nellie writhed in a new wave of pain with a new set of contractions, I winced in a stomach-turning wave of my own agony.
I breathed through it and managed to say, “We need to help her; she’ll die if we don’t.”
He stood above me, pulling his hood off and tossing his cloak on the fence post nearby. As he did, I got my first good glimpse at his face. Burn scars disfigured his neck and one cheek.
He wore his dark hair tight and short, and a scar cut through his eyebrow, across his forehead, and into his hairline. His jaw was angular and square, strong like the rest of him. And his eyes…even his scars seemed to disappear when his eyes, the same blue-green as the sea on a summer’s day, looked into mine.
Oh, my goodness. I was shocked, not so much by his appearance, but by how much he must have suffered to come to look as he did.
He glanced down at me, and in his clear turquoise eyes I could see he was ashamed of how he looked, perhaps expecting me to gasp or recoil. But I would never have done either.
He squatted down beside me and grasped my hand. Then he began to wedge his elbow under Nellie’s flank to give me a little wiggle room to begin to free myself. His muscles bulged startlingly against the fabric of his shirt, and I was almost certain a thread snapped somewhere in the seams. But all my thoughts of his rippling body vanished from my mind when the pain from my leg roared up and through me, making me groan.