FIFTEEN
Father threw the scroll down on the table with a sigh. "Portia, do we have everything we need to put on a lavish feast? The sort we'd do for an important guest?"
Portia's heart leaped within her. "A guest?"
With her sisters married and gone to live with their husbands, that left just her and Father in the huge longhouse, and sometimes not even him, when another council meeting was called. Oh, she had her men, as Father called them, but they slept in the barracks across the yard. A barracks they'd built, to protect her honour, they said, though she suspected she had Grieve to thank for that.
He had this habit of asking her, oh so politely, every morning how she'd slept. After one particularly noisy night, she'd confessed that the men's snoring had kept her awake, and they'd sta
