Yanora gaped at the peasant who'd uttered such a shocking notion, too stunned to even explode in a rage at his sheer arrogance. At last she managed to sputter at Kheldor, "is this how you treat your Queen?" Her eyes flashed in fury as she glared at the fat man dressed in the fine robes her treasury had paid for. The golden chain of his office still hung about his pudgy neck.

Kheldor stared back at the Queen, and there was a moment of silent introspection. The many minor slights and insults did not even merit a discussion. Nor was it likely that the time Kheldor's daughter had been whipped for mistakes made as a serving girl would register as a possible reason for his treason. Even Jordan had only grudgingly accepted Kheldor's insistence that he had done what little he could to mitigate the spoiled, self-centered matriarch's habit of using the kingdom's treasury for her own luxuries and entertainments; Yanora was hardly likely to agree serving her had been nothing short of hell with richly furnished decorations in the background. And so Kheldor simply replied in a calm voice, "yes. Yes, it is."

Yanora was struck speechless by this simple response. Taking advantage of the silence, Kheldor turned back to Jordan. "I shall leave it to you to persuade her of the necessity, your Majesty." A slight emphasis of the honorific, for the benefit of both Yanora and Jordan. A warning to Yanora of how things had changed, and a reminder to Jordan that he had a duty. He bowed to the conquering peasant, making a show of facing the man and not the deposed queen, then backpedalled out the door, shutting the heavy wooden portal to grant them both their privacy.

Jordan looked at the woman who had been the source of so much misery for the people for so long. She had hardly ruled alone; her husband had been the tyrant wearing the armor and wielding the weapons that had slain so many of his comrades during the uprising. But Yanora had been the wastrel whose love of parties and sumptuous living had been financed by taxation of starving peasants. And yet, looking at her, Jordan couldn't help but think how attractive she really was.

For Yanora's part, the man in her view was like some twisted blending of everything she might have despised. Unlike her late husband, with his belly and his brutishness, the peasant in her midst had limbs thickly corded with muscles grown in spite of hunger, purely from the endless labors of his life. Lean and hard, and if he was an inch or so shorter than even she herself was, he seemed to loom with a quiet menace.

She'd heard about the death of her husband, but had hardly paid attention to the details beyond the nebulous understanding that the scion of a royal bloodline, married to her by arrangement between families, was dead before he'd had the opportunity to fill her womb with an heir. Details of bloodshed and brutality and screams of pain and hate were beyond her; even to Jordan it was obvious that she was somehow removed from such things. Her world was one in which a lack of entertainment was considered an unreasonable torment.

He lunged for her then, and Yanora could scarcely do more than gasp in surprise, frozen on the spot by lack of experience with violent assaults. His thick fingers curled in the bodice of her gown, and thickly callused pads dug into the embroidered fabric for a moment before the muscles in his arms and shoulders bulged with the effort of ripping her finery down the front. Yanora gave a soft scream at this, the corseted undergarment beneath now bared by this desecration of her dress, but she made no attempt to pull away. The look in his eyes! Those eyes, burning with a terrible fire beyond anything she'd ever seen before. Brutal, harsh reality had invaded her soft world at last.