Sold Into Marriage by Sue Lyndon

nice to discover she would’ve been able to survive just fine if he’d actually followed through with those threats.
    She also supposed she was lucky to have been rescued from the pirates by a warship from Himma, but it was difficult to feel anything but absolute desolation. She often wanted to lay down in her bed and never rise up again. But the will to survive somehow persisted within her. Maybe because she thought Varron would want her to be happy and move on. If she had died during the pirates’ attack and he had been the one to live, she would have wished the same for him. Sometimes she was so miserable that she wished it had happened that way, but it was too late to change the past.
    She finished dressing and wandered downstairs to the tavern. As customers trickled in, she waited on them, bringing them the shepherd’s pie the cook had prepared for today’s meal, and making sure their cups remained filled with mead. The people of this island, known as Manacover, were more welcoming to strangers than on the mainland, at least. When the warship that had rescued her docked to take on supplies here, she’d slipped off and disappeared into the streets, not wishing to return to Himma.
    There was nothing for her there. She had no wish to live in Varron’s house in the capital city, where she would be reminded of his absence even more so on a daily basis. She also had no wish to return to Monnak a. She had no family left and no friends either. It was a lonely existence.
    Sometimes she pretended Varron wasn’t really dead. Sometimes she daydreamed that he was only away, leading his troops to war, and that he would return to her in a few years.
    She considered saving up her meager wages from working at the tavern to book passage to Geshema Providence, and perhaps she would one day just so she could glimpse the land Varron had called home as a child, but for now she was content enough to remain on Manacover. No one knew her name or her story here, and she liked that she could tell everyone she’d traveled from the mainland to Manacover just because she’d heard stories about the island’s beauty and wanted to live here for a few years before her travels took her elsewhere.
    Being a young woman, she got strange looks whenever she told this tale, and many a person asked why her father and brothers hadn’t stopped her from setting out on her own, but she always smiled and said her family supported her adventures. No one needed to know her real father was dead, and her mother too, or that she was an only child, or that her stepfather had treated her cruelly and met his death at the end of a rope.
    No, it was much better to invent stories and pretend all was well, and much easier to cry alone in her chamber above the tavern after the last customer left for the night.
    Though only a month had passed since she became a widow and the loss of Varron still cut deep, she couldn’t imagine ever moving on and finding love again. Yes, she knew now that she had indeed grown to love him in the short time they’d had together. He’d saved her from a lifetime of slavery, and he’d gone on to treat her with kindness though she’d been but a stranger to him. He could have viewed her as a nuisance, or he could’ve stood by and allowed her stepfather to sell her to the crown. No other man could compare to Varron. He’d been a good man; the kind of man she’d been lucky to find herself married to.
    If only they’d had more time together. If only they’d waited another week to sail to Geshema Providence and hadn’t met with the pirates.
    She shivered at the memory of her time in their captivity. The captain had taken a liking to her and forced her to sleep in his quarters. But by the grace of God, when he’d come at her in the night, groping at her and trying to kiss her, he hadn’t been able to remain hard. He hadn’t been able to enter her, especially with her fighting him.
    After three nights of keeping her locked in his