by Nancy Morse
She might have to give up the shed, or at least share, but the thought of them touching her, of physically forcing her to leave or do things….
“Fia?”
The deeply spoken name rattled her so badly she dropped both the blade and the file and nearly sprawled on the floor like a newborn calf as she bolted off the stool. The silhouette of a man all but filled the open side of the shed. There was something familiar about the confidence with which he held himself. She squinted, saw the glint of red the sun brought out in his hair.
“Rowan?” The name caught in her throat.
“Yes,” he said warily.
Without thought, she flung herself against him and wrapped her arms around his sturdy ribs. Before the burning of Paris, she’d have kept her distance, held back by their history. She’d have been embarrassed by the clothes and soot she’d worn for the last month, aware of her stench and utter wretchedness.
Yet she burrowed against him as if he were a tree trunk with a hollow she could hide in, protected forever. He was familiar and solid, and she needed someone — anyone! — who fit that description right now. Here he stood, exactly what he should be.
Crying did not help, but she was powerless to stop it.
“You are safe now,” he said softly. The truth of his words would have burst her into a dozen shards, like red hot metal with a measure of water trapped within, except Rowan’s arms firmly kept her in one piece while the grief and relief exploded out of her. He did not stroke her back or even talk much. He simply held her tight to his chest and absorbed her convulsive sobs.
She had no idea how long the storm lasted, only that she came out the other side exhausted and cradled across his lap, with him in a position that must have been terribly uncomfortable, his tall frame folded up on the short stool, back propped against the rough edge of the work table.
“I’m sorry,” she croaked as she pulled away from him, noticing a hint of resistance when it seemed he didn’t want to let go. “I smell terrible.” She wobbled as she found her feet.
Thankfully, he kept his seat on the stool, even surrendering his light support of her elbow once she’d steadied. His easy smile was so out of place here, so welcome yet unwelcome. Yes, she felt as if she were indeed on the other side of a horrible storm, a weeks-long nightmare she could finally imagine waking from.
The last time he had been at the beginning of the nightmare. This time he’d arrived at the end.
“I’ve been on a horse for ten days,” he said. “My odor completely overwhelms yours, if you have any.”
Her mouth didn’t remember how to smile yet. And you are not to smile at him, ever, she reminded herself. She wiped her face with her palms then tried to straighten her veil with trembling hands. “How have you come to be here? Mam got the message and sent for you?”
He thrust a skin of water at her. She sucked at it, not noticing her thirst until the tepid liquid hit her fiery throat.
He watched approvingly as he answered. “There was no message that I know of. My father and I heard about Paris while in camp near Metz. Father knew Heric planned to work here this summer. When your mother confirmed he was here, and you had come with him, we decided I should continue on to see how you both fared.”
“He is….” She could not say the word. She could not even keep her gaze locked on Rowan’s steady, pitying eyes.
“I know. I was told when asking your whereabouts,” he said. “Though I think I would have guessed. There are few things that could drive Fia the Defiant to such grief. Your father is worthy of your tears.” He cleared his throat against his own emotions. “He was a good man.”
Whereas Victor was unworthy of your tears. She heard the unspoken words even if he might not be thinking them. The old fight must be set aside for now. “What do we do? How soon can we leave?”
“Is tomorrow morning soon enough?”
“I would like nothing more,” she said with a tearful quiver in her voice.
“Then we should water the horses well, and I, for one, would like to rinse at least the top layers of road dirt off me. Perhaps a walk to the river?”
“Horses?” she asked, confused.
He pointed to a heavily muscled warhorse and a gray farm cob, both dozing in the late afternoon heat a few steps away from the shed.
Rowan didn’t argue when Fia grabbed all her belongings, even though they could see the sparkle of the river from here, with only a few rows of rickety houses between them and the water. Large swathes of the city looked like the devil himself had fired it, but by some miracle this little crescent along the river had been spared. They piled saddles and Rowan’s bags and her few parcels on the bank where she could guard them. He dug through one of his packs and offered her two carrots — “Your mother sent them” — before he doffed his boots to lead the horses through the mud and clouds of insects, into the shallows of the fast-flowing river.
Fia gnawed the roots hungrily, nearly brought to tears again with the thought that Mam had touched them not so many days ago. Poor Mam, who might or might not know the fates of her husband and child.
The horses drank what must have been a cask of water each. Rowan used her bucket to rinse their matted hides. They pranced with pleasure in the cool water then shook like wet dogs, spraying him with droplets of dirty water.
Fia watched all this, thinking how odd it was to be out of the shed, eating, with Rowan’s laughter and splashing horses in front of her.
It had all happened so suddenly.
“You’ve ended up worse than you started,” she said as he slogged back to her through the sucking mud.
Rowan deftly loaded the horses with all their belongings for the short walk back. The predatory children were already slinking away by the time Fia noticed them. She glanced up at Rowan and realized it had taken only a warning glare from him to drive the group off.
“Were they —?”
“Do not worry,” Rowan said, interrupting her. “They are gone now and will be welcome to move in tomorrow night, in any case.”
He hobbled the animals by the shed, then wiped them down with a rough cloth, finding time in the middle to hand her a hunk of yellow cheese. Her mouth watered but she held it out for him to take.
“We should save it for the trip,” she said half-heartedly.
“Tomorrow will be a hard day. You need to build your strength.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Saints preserve me, you sound like my father,” he retorted, his air of calm companionship cracking for the first time since he’d arrived. “You are not fine. You’re skin and bones. ’Tis not obvious from looking at you, but you’ve got things hidden under that tent of a tunic fattening you up. What’s under there?”
“How dare you even think —” She stopped blustering, realizing he wasn’t being improper. He’d have felt the bulges and bumps when he’d comforted her. “Tools.” She sighed.
He frowned, and even after all these years she recognized the silent, deafening expression of his lordship’s high and mighty disapproval. What did he care what she hid under her clothes?
“I couldn’t risk them being stolen,” she said. “We brought nearly everything with us. And I had to wear this to fit them underneath, and now my other clothes are…gone.”
His expression softened to pity, damn him.
“Eat the cheese,” he said. “Food will be easy enough to buy once we are in the countryside.” He watched until she took a tentative bite. “When you’re done with that, start unloading your…unpacking your…do whatever you must to relieve yourself of the tools,” he finally managed with an embarrassed wave of his hand. “I’ll bring a bucket of water from the well so you can wash. Call out if anyone bothers you.”
The moment he turned away the cheese disappeared into her mouth as if she were a starving rat. The portion no bigger than two fingers gave her a fat fullness she hadn’t felt in a month. She plopped onto the stool, leaned her head back on
the table, and felt the chisel dig into her flesh. It would be wonderful to get this extra weight off her, not to mention relief for the sores worn in her skin.
She reached under her clothes to unwind the strips of cloth binding eight of Papa’s heaviest and most valuable tools to her legs and torso. The tidy rank they made across the table was familiar and, somehow, comforting.
With these tools, her family had hope of attracting a journeyman weaponsmith until Julius was old enough to do the work himself. It was a pitiful, unrealistic plan, but this morning she’d thought returning to Metz an insurmountable dream, and by tomorrow at this time Rowan would have her well clear of Paris, a wretched town she vowed to never set foot in again.
She checked to make sure Rowan still sat with his back turned before sticking her whole head in the bucket again, her modesty protected in the pitch dark of the shed’s deepest corner. Her fingertips massaged her scalp with heavenly pressure though the sharp smell of Papa’s harsh soap brought her straight back to the hard earth beneath her knees. She washed twice to rid her hair of the vermin she suspected had taken up residence. After wrapping her head in a reasonably clean piece of linen, she settled in to scrub the rest of her, appalled by the black dirt hiding behind her ears and on the back of her neck.
She was just considering the questionable color of the water in the bucket when Rowan asked, without turning from his task of cleaning a patina of rust from the tools, “Do you need clean water?”
Oh, how she hated to be beholden to this man. “If it isn’t too much trouble,” she answered honestly. He was going to save her life, that much was clear, so she might as well get a full measure for her indebtedness.
In a thrice he placed the refilled bucket at her feet.
“Thank you,” she said. She watched him settle on the stool again and kept a careful eye on him as she unlaced her tunic to expose just one side of her body. She sighed with bliss as the water ran in cold but cleansing rivulets down her arm, switched to the other side until her top half was at least less pungent, then regretfully tied the laces again. Her face flushed as she lifted the hems of both her tunic and undertunic to her waist to give furtive attention to her bottom half. In her haste, she swiped carelessly at that particularly tender spot where the point of the chisel had jabbed into the top of her buttock. A sharp intake of breath betrayed her.
Rowan stiffened but did not turn. “Are you well?”
“My skin is a bit raw from one of the tools,” she said lightly, dropping her hem in case he got curious. “It will heal.”
“By the saints,” he cursed under his breath as he slipped the offending tool he’d just oiled into the leather sack with the others. He rummaged in another sack and she thought he meant to force more food on her, but instead he offered a tiny wooden jar, holding it out while keeping his back turned. “This is an ointment my mother begs me to carry around. ’Twill be good to have a use for it.”
“I’d forgotten your mother is a healer,” she said as she tiptoed forward to take it. Removing the lid released a scent only slightly better than Papa’s soap. When the greasy green mixture touched the sore that Fia suspected was open and oozing, however, the relief was immediate. “That is wonderful,” she breathed and thought she saw a faint smile soften his profile.
With her rinsing complete, and the precious remedy applied to several other raw spots, she wished she could rid herself of her wretched clothes long enough to wash and dry them, hating to have their filthy stench against her, but it was the only set that had outlasted the thieves. She compromised by stripping off both layers, leaving her naked for a breathtaking moment before she re-donned Papa’s tunic.
The undertunic practically crackled in her hands when she picked it up. She forced it into the bucket, swirled and rubbed the fabric against itself to launder it as best as she could and hung it from a wooden peg near the front of the shed. As an afterthought she also washed her veil, wrung it almost dry, then placed it back on her head.
Her eyes drooped and muscles quivered with exhaustion by the time she was done, but she tried to look bright as she faced Rowan. “I’ll fill the bucket for you now,” she offered.
“That won’t be necessary. I shall dive right in the river.”
“Very well then, I’ll just…oh, here is your mother’s ointment.”
“Keep it in your pack so you’ll have it when you need it.”
She fumed for a moment. “There must be something I can do to help,” she finally insisted.
The corner of his mouth lifted. “Assemble a proper meal. I think there is some salted pork in here somewhere,” he said as he handed a heavy sack to her.
She found the pork, dried apples she couldn’t resist, and dense, stale bread. The feast, the sense of cleanliness, the unweighting of the tools that really had been quite heavy, made her chest so tight she feared she would burst into tears again. Rowan had removed so many worries at once. But she simply refused to cry and swallowed the lump of emotion.
“Have you ridden a horse often?” Rowan asked, apparently fascinated by a bit of core left on one of the apple pieces.
“Not often, but I can manage the cob.”
“I have no doubt.” He hesitated, still picking at the shiny piece of seed chamber, more fastidious about his food than she remembered. “I think we should pretend to be husband and wife while we travel.”
Disgust replaced relief, and she reared back as if he’d slapped her. He may as well have. Pretend to be married to him, of all people? The idea was so offensive, so dismissive of Victor’s memory, she could only gape at him in disdain.
Rowan held both his hands up, apparently as adept at reading her as she was him. “Hear me. We are a man and woman traveling alone. I would gladly pretend to be your servant, but people would instantly see the lie in my horse and my clothing.”
“Then I will act as your servant,” she said, nearly gagging on the words, though they were far more tolerable than I will act as your wife.
He gave her that insufferable frown again. “Men do not travel alone with female servants, except women of a certain kind, and I will not have other men making assumptions like that about you.”
“Then I will ride your horse so you can be the servant.”
“Hah!” He barked out a sharp laugh. “Faxon is well-trained, but he is schooled to my hand and my strength. Not to mention my feet would be dragging if I rode that short pony. The poor animal would collapse the first day.”
She glared. “Brother and sister then.”
He pointed at her face, then at his own. “Look at us! Your mother has given you the darkness of the south while I am red-haired and pale. No one would believe it.”
“I will be more believable as your sister than your bride,” she said, purposely lacing her tone with poisonous cruelty.
His eyes, nearly black in the light of their lone torch, glittered as her barb struck its mark, but he responded calmly. “This is for your safety, Fia. ’Twill not be difficult. Simply follow my lead and keep quiet.”
“Keep quiet,” she said with her teeth clenched. “What a phrase to come from you, of all people.” She rose slowly, shaking, driven up, up, up, by years of impotent anger, nearly drunk with the volume of emotions assaulting her in the last hours. Good, bad, righteous, wrong, all brought on by him. “You twist everything to suit you, and now you twist this journey into a way to bend me to what you always wanted.”
He sat, slack-jawed, staring at her across dry crusts of bread, all that was left of their dinner. His hands slapped down on his thighs. “I shall have my bath in the river, then I’m going to sleep near the horses so no one steals them. I’d suggest you get some rest too, but I wouldn’t want you to blindly follow my twisted opinion.”
Dirty water sloshed over the side of the bucket as he lifted it before disappearing into the darkness.
She bent to the task of cleaning up the food, making certain his supplies went back in his bags. She would tra
vel with him and thank him when she was safely at home, and her debt to him would lodge in her craw for the rest of her life, but she would never betray Victor, even in the tiniest way, with the man who had ruined everything.
Chapter Four
The dive into the Seine eased the boiling in Rowan’s mind and cooled the simmer of anger fairly radiating off his skin, then he realized he was swimming against the current of an unfamiliar river in the middle of the night. If he drowned, where would that leave Fia, he asked himself as he stroked toward the shore barely visible under the half moon.
His death would probably delight her, the ingrate. As if this was where he wanted to be, separated from the army for most of the summer, riding in territory where the Vikings could pop out at every turn in the road, all for the glory of saving someone who would continue to despise him.
The daft woman.
When Rowan thought of her with Heric’s tools lashed against her skin — tools made rusty from her sweat — thought of what the Northmen would have done when they’d found the first implement. They’d have ripped her clothing off in search of the rest and checked every other part of her where she might have hidden something of value. They wouldn’t have been quick or delicate about it, then they’d either have taken her as a slave or left her dead.
He thought she might have preferred a whole boatload of Vikings to one of him. Fool that he was, in those first moments when she’d cried in his arms, he’d believed she’d finally let go of her hatred of him, perhaps even forgiven him.
It appeared not. Fool, indeed.
He trudged through the mud, donned his tunic, made certain all was peaceful up the hill, then walked to the well for what felt like the hundredth time so he could wash the muck from his feet. Back at the shed, he saw she had followed his advice and gone to sleep, or more likely, dropped from exhaustion.
Stubborn, beautiful, daft woman. Her skin had always been her most beautiful feature, smooth, darker than his, with a warm, golden cast even in the dead of winter. Then again, he’d only seen her hair once before, when Julius had mischievously dragged her veil off her head. It had been lovely then, when she was sixteen, but not as glorious as this. Dark and thick, falling in glossy waves that drew his eyes to her face, full lips, brows with just the tiniest arch as she slept. Taken as a whole, it was impossible to choose her best feature.
