A Need to Suffer

Melody

Chapter Twenty-six

Melody

It hadn’t taken long for the servant to appear with another two that ushered in a chair designed to lean back specifically for shaving. Ramsay’s blood ran cold to see the one holding the basket of shaving supplies was none other than the scullery maid that often attended his needs in the morning times bringing him changes of clothes, buckets of water for washing, and that crooked smile that he’d grown to loathe as a sign of mockery.

Ramsay didn’t know it, but the maid’s smile was not born of contempt but of a sense of displaced nerves. She, Melody Brent, had been quite terrified of Ramsay, having heard well of his reputation and observed the corpses littering the courtyard, flayed of their skin and placed on display as a statement that it was more than unwise to displease the bastard of Bolton. Melody’s mother had served House Stark in the fledgling years of her life but had retired to live on their own homestead when their father had earned enough coin to buy a meager plot of land in a province that lay on the outskirts of the White Knife River. Her mother had taken ill herself in the spring, and Melody had to take up the mantle of sole provider for the two of them. She had had three other siblings, but like her father, when a particular bout of illness had swept through their quaint village, it had taken the lives of all but Melody and her mother.

Forced off of their land by the new levied taxes the Boltons had enforced they pay, Melody’s mother had no other choice than to sell the land for the owed taxes and seek out employment from the new lord of Winterfell, Roose Bolton. The two were granted room and board with nicer accommodations for servants due to her mother’s prior experience at the Stark keep. Weak as she became, Melody’s mother still pushed herself working from sunup to sundown helping to direct the staff and washing endless loads of linens to prove her worth and keep their private room within the castle’s walls. Melody was seventeen then, and knowing the reputation of the Boltons, her mother had managed to get her assigned to jobs in the kitchens and areas of the castle where she was markedly safer from possible assault. Melody was a plain girl, but she was not unattractive, and her mother often feared for her safety not just from the likes of Ramsay but from all men.

Her mother had created a jagged fear within Melody of the horrors this castle could deliver and of men and their propensity for wickedness towards women. It wasn’t hard to assume the worst with the rampant speculations that echoed about the keep, and when her mother, still carrying a lingering cough from the village, had passed at the onset of the fall, Melody would have gone anywhere else had she the ability, but where was she to go?

Her mother’s body was removed from the small room that they had shared to be burned before anymore sickness could spread, and Melody (once it was apparent she was not ill like her mother) had been shifted into another, less accommodating room, to share her living space with three other young maids. No longer sheltered by her mother’s weighty contribution to the hold, she was given new tasks that sent her to work empting chamber pots, cleaning fire pits, and changing bed linens. She still worked in the kitchens and had even served the Boltons food on numerous occasions. There were times then that the bastard would look up from his goblet of wine to give her a tawdry smirk, but he’d otherwise given Melody no further notice. One of the girls that she had roomed with, a pretty sort with a graceful stride and cherry lips, wasn’t as lucky. That girl used to fill Ramsay’s baths in the evenings, but she mysteriously disappeared one night; all that had trailed her disappearance was the bays of Ramsay’s dogs howling into the moonlight. The girl was never seen again, and Melody hadn’t slept well for many weeks that followed. None of the staff really had.

After the battle on the ridge had proven the Starks to be victorious in reclaiming Winterfell, Melody was relieved beyond words, but as with most of the serving staff was more than puzzled that the Bolton bastard had not been put to death in the first evening or the morning that followed. As time had went on and rumors circled, Melody found herself more and more curious as to what had transpired within the walls of the dungeon.