Chapter 703: What Happened Last Night?
Faint morning light filtered through heavy curtains and soft lace drapes, gently tugging at Isabell’s consciousness as the needs of her body grew increasingly persistent in banishing sleep from her mind.
The bed she woke in was one of the largest she’d ever slept in and the most comfortable by far. The sheets were soft and silky and the blankets were fluffy with a weight to them that made it feel almost like she’d fallen asleep in Casquas’ gentle embrace. The lace curtains that hung from the bed frame were intricately woven and dyed a pale blue that grew darker the further up the curtain she looked.
It would have been a glorious morning to wake up to, if not for the pounding headache that felt like horses stampeding across her skull and the pain in her eyes that felt like someone had stuffed fistfulls of coarse salt under her eyelids every time she blinked.
Isabell was no stranger to strong wine. Long years spent fighting to exist in a world where few women existed taught her that she had to keep up with the men dinking around her if she wanted to be taken seriously when they finally got down to business. It didn’t matter if it was an evening with the lords of the Emerald Prince’s army or a day of intense negotiations with the masters of other guilds, being able to hold her liquor was a skill that Isabell had honed over decades of her career as an engineer.
But when confronted by Ashlynn’s strange thornberry wine, she felt like she’d become a young woman again, out for her first real drink with the adults. Only, the first time she’d spent a night out drinking, while she remembered the hangover being bad, her memories of that hangover felt pale in comparison to the pounding in her head that she felt now.
Slowly, cradling her head beneath a pillow as she struggled against the headache, Isabell tried to piece together the events of the night before that led her here. The carriage ride lasted for hours and at some point, Tiernan, Isabell and Lady Ashlynn had fallen into discussions of their romantic partners over cups of wine that seemed to grow deeper instead of shallower as the night went on.
"Casquas has it so easy," Isabell had said as the carriage trundled down the road. The soft lighting in the carriage and the elegant carved woods combined with the plush upholstery in the carriage to make it feel more like they were sitting in an intimate private dining room at an upscale restaurant than in a cramped carriage riding through the dark of night.
It was an illusion that Isabell clung to as she prompted Ashlynn to refill her wooden cup with more of the strong thornberry wine as she told her tale of romantic woes.
"When his hair was dark, dark as mine, even or darker than dark," she said, carefully enunciating her words to avoid slurring as she spoke. "When his hair was dark, all the women of the royal court, they all called him ’suave’ and ’dashing.’"