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The feast had, on many levels, worked out better for Embla than she could ever have expected. For one thing, she had the petty pleasure of her tetchy exchange with Fastarr, an encounter where she felt she had the advantage. And now, she had been given a task by her anxious husband – to shadow the strange female, Jord.
Embla paid little attention to the intense and anxious conversations which followed Khandr’s spying plan. Instead, she mulled over her own assignment – an assignment which pleased her greatly. Firstly, this Jord was the person in the settlement who interested her the most. Obsessed with her own situation, thinking herself little more than Khandr’s chattel, Embla assumed that Jord’s s relation to the Lord Uldor was something similar. But yet the woman Jord carried herself with an air of pride and independence. This in itself excited Embla’s interest, even envy. Naturally inclined to subterfuge, she relished the prospect of stalking of this dark, strange woman. Whether she would then share any of her insights or observations with her much-resented lord was of course another matter.
But there was another, more healthy side to Embla’s pleasure in her task. This suggestion of her husband gave her an unprecedented licence to roam, a personal liberty she had long yearned for. One of Embla’s chief grievances about her life as a Borrim wife was the restrictions placed on her movements and interests. Women like Briga, Borrim born and bred, happily accepted their restricted sphere. But it was not what she, Embla, had been accustomed to, and the confinement chafed her to distraction. Now, Khandr had as good as told his second wife she could wander as her fancy took her – with his blessing. Embla smiled to herself in anticipation – and for once it really was a smile, not a smirk.
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