by Jacobs Delle
The Peregrine scanned the castle folk surrounding him. Leonie hunched down. But her height, her great bane, betrayed her once again. In the entire courtyard, no man save the Peregrine towered over her.
She cast down her gaze again, forcing herself to focus on her unsteady hands, but her eyes rebelled. Again and again, they shot back up and sought out the knight.
The compelling brown eyes landed their gaze on her, questioning, assessing, perhaps laughing at her once more.
Why? Couldn’t he just forget he’d ever met her? She was nothing to him. She knew the stories told about him, the knight who wandered, by his own desire having no fief. Monkish in his ways, vowing never to let a kiss pass his lips, but explaining nothing. People said he remained faithful to his murdered wife. He would never love another, they said.
Leonie certainly believed it, and was certain that love would never be hers. When last he had been here, she had foolishly challenged him and beaten him at targets. All the castle had known what the Peregrine had not, that she was the best archer for miles around. It was bad enough that she had so easily beaten him, but then, even more foolishly, she had demanded a kiss as forfeit.
“Take my bow, my arrows, my quiver. Take the ring from my finger as your prize. But I have no kisses to give to guileful maids.” Then he had turned and stalked away.
That was how she had learned. Up to that moment, what fun it had been to play the silly trick on him! But from then on, her cheeks would turn red with shame at the mere thought of him. Five years had gone by since then, and even now, the sight of him brought fire to her face.
Philippe le Peregrine advanced on his quarry. She squirmed.
He sauntered easily, not like his namesake hunter that could dive from the sky faster than a horse could run, but with the grace of a cat, his square, masculine hips lightly swaggering. Hoping at least to hide her stained kirtle, Leonie slipped behind Ealga, who was as short as Leonie was tall. But Ealga knew her place. No servant would stand where a knight wished to go. With a meek bow, the elderly maid stepped aside.
A deceptive softness warmed the Peregrine’s honey-brown eyes as a smile curled on his lips. It made her want to trust him. To please him, to melt. It was said he could talk the birds out of the sky, and she believed it, but when forced to fight was as fierce as his namesake falcon. The men of this keep trusted him as completely as did the king. Everyone did.
She did not. She had seen how he could turn.
“Ah, Leonie,” he said. The smile broadened, as if he had come to a friend. “The little lioness of Castle Brodin.”
She licked her suddenly parched lips. “None other calls me little, sir knight, though surely your great height excuses you.”
The brown eyes widened and lost some of their softness. “Ah. Have you claws now, little lioness? But you have grown. Even taller.” He ran his gaze over her.
She was no stranger to the assessing eyes of men, as if they wondered whether such a long-legged woman might be fair enough in bed. She swallowed. Her great height, with her ugly, gangly legs. Folk rarely mentioned it, but she knew they all measured her difference by it.
“Do you still play at targets, little lioness?”
“Aye.” She gulped and hung her head. Did he have to bring that up? “It’s but a game, sir knight.” She need not mention she practiced every day.
“Is it? And can you still best a man?”
Leonie licked her dry lips again, but her mouth was equally dry. Did he challenge her or insult her? “If the man has neglected his practice, haps. Though not many a knight trifles with a bow, I’m told.”
“I do.”
Uncle Geoffrey stepped up, chuckling, and took the knight by his arm. “You ought not try her again, Philippe,” he said. “Would that I had a hundred archers who could shoot as straight. My men best her only in their strength. Come now, let us be off to the hall, where it is cool. This heat is fine enough for harvest, but not so fine after a long ride.”
Philippe’s dark eyes sparked with the boldness only a great knight would have. “Later, then, little lioness, but I cannot let my honor go unchallenged.”
“Better to let it go unchallenged than to face defeat at a woman’s hands, no?” A smile skimmed over Uncle Geoffrey’s face as he again tugged at the knight’s arm.
“Not I,” Philippe replied, but he returned Uncle Geoffrey’s smile. “I confess, I would rather be bested by a woman than let my chance for redemption pass me by.”
The king’s knights were eager for the ale and cool air beneath the high roof of the hall, and they clapped Philippe on the shoulder and begged him to hurry. He turned away from Leonie, suddenly immersed again in the knightly camaraderie. The attention she had not wanted now felt cruelly absent. Her throat tightened and ached.
When the Peregrine disappeared through the high, rounded doors into the hall, Leonie whirled around and sprinted toward the chapel and up the outer stairs along its wall to the solar, taking them two at a time. She dashed through the solar to the ladies’ chamber she shared with Claire.
Ealga had reached the chamber before her. Leonie turned her eyes away. Nothing could be hidden from the elderly Scot servant who had been with her all her life, and with her mother before, but that didn’t mean Leonie had to brandish her humiliation.
Ealga squinted suspiciously at her. “’Tis a good thing ye dinna have the gaze.”
Use the gaze on Philippe le Peregrine? “I—I would not, Ealga. Even if I had it.”
Ealga wiped her brow. The old woman always worried too much. But Leonie had few of the Faerie talents. She had the Faerie sight that lit the dimmest night like the light of the full moon, and that ability that so vexed the Peregrine, to shoot better than any man. The closing of wounds—well, they didn’t know where that had come from. Ealga said Herzeloyde had had no such talent to pass to her daughter.
“And not him, anyway,” Leonie added. “I do not want him. I do not like him.”
Ealga harrumphed. “Ye’re too careless with your ways, lassie. Someday ye’ll be finding yourself roasting on a fire like a suckling pig.”
Aye, she knew. The gaze was the power, Ealga said, that had bound her father to her mother, but it had brought only tragedy and hatred in the end.
She wondered, had her mother left for fear of burning as a witch? Had her father accused Herzeloyde? She would never know. They were both gone, and Ealga knew too little, or would not tell.
“Ye’ll be wanting your green kirtle,” said the old Scotswoman, nodding toward the high bed where she had laid out the garment.
The kirtle was Leonie’s favorite, dyed from the forest’s club mosses. Beside it lay a pale green veil that could all but conceal her face when they supped with the castle’s guests, if she adjusted it just right. Tonight she would be more than glad for it.
“’Tis a brutal hot day, though,” Ealga continued. “Ye’ll be wanting to wash up first, and then I’ll comb out your curls. Comb ’em about me fingers, round and round, make ’em the most glorious mass of curls a man has e’er seen. Ye’ll do your uncle proud.”
Leonie sighed and submitted to Ealga’s gentle help. Soon enough, she must return to her uncle’s hall to sup and tend his guests. Somehow she must manage to appear properly demure, almost an impossibility for her. For though she was only half Faerie, sometimes it seemed she was not human at all.
Philippe le Peregrine paused at the door to Geoffrey’s hall, catching a glimpse of the girl racing toward the chapel in an unseemly fashion. He shook his head, trying to remember when he had ever met one so unmaidenly. No other maid shot a bow so well. None drew one, for that matter. Even riding up the winding track to the castle, he had recognized her from a distance as she strode across the meadow in long, manlike steps, carrying a child in her arms, unseemly though it was for an heiress so wealthy. Any other maid would have sought a servant to carry the child.
Everything about her was unseemly.
“A beauty, is she not?”
He
frowned as he looked at the girl’s uncle. Not a beauty, yet she caught and held his attention like no woman had in many a year. Too thin, too tall, yet with breasts too full and ripe, in ways they had not been when they had first met. Too much hair, enough for three maids, with its long and wildly tangled ringlets that reminded him of golden wheat spread willy-nilly on the threshing floor. Huge eyes, far too green, like the very depths of the forest. Everything about her beckoned, but was not beautiful. Nose, ears, eyes, everything. She was too—everything.
“Nay,” he replied. “I cannot deny there is something about her, but I do not find her beautiful.” And he became as hard as granite immediately, imagining those long legs wrapped around him.
“I would not have guessed.” The lyrical tone of Geoffrey’s voice spoke of amusement.
Philippe’s face instantly reddened. He was behaving like a moonstruck youth, and he should have known the older man would notice.
“Still, men cannot keep from gaping after her.”
Philippe shook his head, knowing he had been gaping too, with heart speeding and entire body tensing. He ordered his mind to squelch the lurid thoughts. That was the way of men, but he had forsworn such things. He would have no love, ever again. And it was not wise for a man sworn to be celibate to have such thoughts. “But she is an heiress,” he said, “not a common woman. A knight would wish a more modest wife.”
Geoffrey sighed. “I know the world is changing, my friend. But this is still the North. Here a lady does not merely sit with her embroidery. I am not ashamed of either of my girls, who will know how to do much more than manage a household when they marry.”
“Make her cover her hair. It’s too intriguing. And she should be more demure. I saw her walking with a child, striding like a man. The boy must have bled on her clothing.”
“Aye. Sigge, the blacksmith’s boy. The lad has a way of finding trouble and seems it’s always Leonie who rescues him.”
Philippe shook his head. “In all my travels, I’ve never seen a woman like her.”
“She has her mother’s look, although Herzeloyde’s hair was paler. She was Saxon, you know. Many here in the North still admire those Saxon women who were not afraid to fight alongside their men. It is from her mother that she has the archer’s skills. She has none of her father in her, and though he was my brother, I happily say I am glad for it.”
Geoffrey led him deep into the cool hall, which sent a sweet chill over Philippe’s sweat-drenched scalp.
Philippe stopped as his squire came up, and he stood still while the boy helped him out of his hauberk. The weight of the mail garment removed from his shoulders was as refreshing as the coolness.
“What happened to her mother?” he asked as he and Geoffrey resumed their journey the length of the hall.
“She walked into the wood one day and disappeared. The baby girl was sent to us, and her father never saw her again.”
“Many men have no interest in daughters.”
“Aye, more’s the pity.”
“You don’t agree, then?”
“Did I agree, I would not have taken her in. She has become as dear to me as my own daughter. I pity the man who cannot love his kin. His life is an empty shell.”
Philippe had to smile at Geoffrey’s revelations. Powerful baron though he was, Geoffrey of Brodin was not as wealthy as most, for he was too good-hearted. He trusted too much and gave away too much.
“And what of you, my friend?” asked the baron. “Do you still choose a solitary life?”
“Aye,” he said quietly.
“It has been a long time.”
Philippe frowned in his silence. Six years. And like yesterday. Not a night passed that he did not relive in his dreams the horror of his wife’s flaming body falling from the double-arched window. Not a night passed that he did not hear her screams.
“Do you not long for family of your own?”
Nor did a day pass that his heart did not ache so deeply, he thought it would rend itself from his chest. Nor one that he did not dream of revenge and ridding the world of the sorcerer Clodomir’s evil. Someday he would find Clodomir and make him feel pain never before felt by any man. But in six years he had found no sign or clue of the man.
“Nay,” Philippe replied, making his voice bland, and he smiled lightly. “I am doomed to wander.”
Philippe detected sadness in Geoffrey’s smile. But he could not know; he thought his own path was the one every man should walk.
“Ah,” replied the baron with a hand to Philippe’s shoulder. “Well, haps you would like to go refresh yourself before the evening meal. You have been riding long on a very hot day.”
Philippe nodded. “We are all too drenched with sweat to make good dinner companions. I saw a place in the beck where it forms a pool, just beyond the rapids. A likely spot for us to bathe, sheltered so as not to offend the womenfolk of the castle.”
“If you chase away the laundresses. Remind your men I want no spare babes to support next spring.”
Philippe raised a brow. “You would not turn them out?”
“I take care of my own.”
“An unscrupulous man might take advantage of your generosity, knowing his bastards would be cared for.”
“Unscrupulous men, I kill.”
“But not the king’s knights.”
“Over them, I would treat with the king. He gives me justice.”
Ah, and that was why he liked Geoffrey of Brodin so much. A man of wisdom and quiet courage. “You need not worry, my friend. My knights are under my control. They do not raid like Danes, nor even carouse like Normans.”
Leonie stepped out the solar door and glanced in all directions at the castle folk, who were all too busy providing for the king’s knights and supper. And the knights had left the castle to bathe in the river. She could surely get to the forest and back and find that stray scrap of metal that had cut Sigge’s foot. She knew the boy too well. If she didn’t find it first, his curiosity would compel him to look for it, and she had no doubt he would manage to cut something else.
Ealga would have a fit, after all her hard work getting the tangles out of her curls. Leonie promised herself she would just be careful. She slipped down the stairs and crossed the courtyard to the postern gate and the steep steps down to the harvested fields and the meadow. Already the cows were turning back to the village for their milking. She would have to hurry.
As soon as she stepped into the woods, the breeze turned cool, a welcome change from the stifling air in the solar. She hurried down the path to the huge old beech where Sigge had cradled his bleeding foot.
His blood still stained the ground. Frowning, she followed the drops of blood. A rusty scrap of metal could be hard to spot amid the dry leaves that littered the forest floor. Carefully, she pushed the leaves about with a stick. She saw nothing.
A sharp breeze tossed the branches of the old beech and something metallic flashed. Not rusty at all, but bright, shiny, as if it had been dropped only yesterday. The glint vanished as the sun shifted behind a cloud. She knelt and began sweeping the leaves with her hands, cautiously, lest she also cut herself.
There it was. The point of a knife, protruding from the earth. It was honed so sharp she was surprised Sigge had not cut his foot off.
But it couldn’t be. Anything buried here would have been here a long time, perhaps from the Danish invaders so long ago. It would have to be rusted, wouldn’t it?
With her stick, Leonie scraped away the leaves and dirt along the sides of the blade. The sharp edge, showing more and more as she dug, slanted into the soft soil, a longer and longer blade. A sword, one with an old, plain look to it, not like the decorated ones knights carried today, yet it was as shiny as if it were new.
Puzzled, she kept on digging, and as the dry soil crumbled back into the channel she had dug, she widened her hole, scooping the dirt aside. She found a bigger stick and dug the hole deeper.
She hit a rock. Using the big stick like a spade,
she carved out the soil from around the edges of the rock, slowly exposing its rounded white surface.
White? It was not the color of any rock she had seen. She frowned and renewed her efforts, instead concentrating on the lower end of the sword, for it was nearly free of the soil now.
Bone! The bones of a hand, wrapped about the hilt of the sword!
Her heart pounded as she returned to the rock near the sword’s point, scraping and digging rapidly, and scooping away the dirt. Who was this who had been buried so shallowly? Recently? Very old? The stick gouged around the outer edges, and the outline of a skull became visible. She dug around a jawbone. With her hand, she smoothed away the soil from the face, revealing nose bones, teeth, eye sockets.
Two bloody eyeballs stared from their sockets at her.
She shrieked, sat back, scrambled to her feet. It could not be! But it was! A skull, its jawbone gaping, but with eyes that followed her!
Leonie dropped everything and ran, the pace of terror pounding her heart.
To the beck! She’d be safe there. She could circle around back to the castle, away from that corpse thing. Dodging low branches along the narrow trail, she fled through the forest toward the increasing sound of raucous male laughter, toward the slowly brightening light and the sandy banks of the beck.
She stopped cold.
No, wait, she couldn’t go there. The knights were bathing. She could hear them.
She leaned against a skinny young oak, forcing herself to take several deep, slow breaths.
How silly she was! She was a mature woman of eighteen winters, yet she still imagined things like a hare-witted maiden. It was all wrong. There couldn’t have been a shiny-bright sword buried in the soil, even less a skeleton! Everyone knew one did not bury bodies at the foot of a tree. The roots would get in the way. It was nigh impossible. People were always buried in the churchyard, anyway.
Unless someone died and the tree grew up over him.
