Faerie (2 page)

Sucking in a breath, she swept her thumb over the wound and the light-headed, foggy feeling filled her head as if part of her life abandoned her. But it was nothing like the near faint that had overcome her as a small child when old Ealga had first discovered Leonie’s hidden talent. Ealga would turn white from fear when she learned she had once again been disobeyed.

“Oh, look, Sigge!” Leonie smiled as sweetly as if she were pointing to a fawn bounding across the meadow. “It’s stopping already. I told you it would be all right.” But before he could really see, she wrapped her veil tightly around the child’s foot. “Now, hold your thumb against the cut while I get my basket.”

He shook his head, and his voice trembled. “I can’t. It hurts.”

“I know. Imagine yourself a brave knight. You’ve always wanted to be a knight, haven’t you? Well, now you must act like one. We’ll keep the bandage on tight, and you mustn’t walk on it, and by tomorrow, you will be much better.” For the rest of this day, she must mask her worry. Pretend it only looked like a lot of blood. Pretend there was nothing to fear. But that was not new to her.

Leaving the boy where he sat and grimaced, she hurried back to the beeches and snatched up the basket she had spilled. She rushed back to the boy. Already he looked better.

“Up, now,” she said, and lifted him to her hip. With his arms wrapped around her neck, they started out of the woods just as Claire came running up the path.

“Leonie, where have you been? I’ve been calling for you.” Then Claire stopped and gasped, her pretty blue eyes round like plates.

Leonie looked at her blood-soaked kirtle and grimaced. “He’s cut his foot,” she said. “It bled a lot at first. He will be all right now if he doesn’t walk on it.”

“But your clothes! What will Mama say? Papa has visitors. The king’s knights!”

“I’ll hurry up and change, then.”

“But your veil!”

“I’ll wash it myself.” That was not what Claire was thinking, Leonie knew, but it would deflect her for now. Claire was like her mother sometimes.

With long strides, Leonie bounded over the meadow toward the castle, knowing Claire’s short legs would have to work hard to keep up. “What do you suppose is so important that the king sends his knights?”

“Maybe he’s chosen a husband for you. ’Tis about time.”

Leonie shook her head and snickered, once again playing the carefree maiden. “He wouldn’t send knights to tell us that. More like, he has his mind on war. Again.”

Claire giggled. “Or trouble in Normandy. Again. And the king seeks a new levy to pay for it.”

Leonie smirked. “Uncle Geoffrey will not be pleased.”

“Mama will be angry with me, Leonie,” Sigge said, tightening his hold around Leonie’s neck.

“Your mama loves you, child,” Claire said, patting the boy’s shoulder. “She worries when you sneak off to the wood.”

“I was only helping Leonie. And looking for mushrooms.”

Leonie shuddered. “And don’t you do that again. You don’t know a good mushroom from a bad one. It’s not the time of year for the good ones. A bad one could kill you.”

She strode past grazing sheep toward the castle, Claire panting behind her. Pausing at the edge of the village, Leonie spotted the brightly garmented knights approaching, with the king’s flamboyant pennon of gold and crimson signaling their status. Helms, swords, and shields flashed bright stars of sunlight. Apprehension tickled in her chest. This was no ordinary visit. Everyone would be expected to be in attendance of the guests. She must not embarrass her uncle with her disheveled appearance.

“I’ll go through the postern gate and up the back way to the solar,” she said to Claire. “You go around to the barbican.”

Claire gasped for breath and nodded, probably grateful for the easier route. Claire was not the sort to tromp about in the wood like her cousin, nor run up the steep hill, but Leonie could walk even faster if she didn’t have to worry about Claire. With Sigge’s legs locked about her waist, Leonie climbed the steep steps on the castle’s north side to the postern gate.

She emerged into the lower bailey, but too late, for she could already be seen by the knights who had passed through the barbican and now dismounted in the bare ground. Sigge’s father, the blacksmith, broke away from the gathering crowd to run to his child.

“He is not hurt badly,” she said as Harald took the child from her arms. “He has a kinship to metals, I think. His foot must have found the only piece of discarded metal in the entire forest. Do not unbind his foot for a day, and do not let him walk on it, and he will be fine.”

“My thanks, lady.”

If Harald followed her directions, he would never know how bad it had been. If he ignored them...

Well, she had done what she had to do.

Leonie turned to sneak past the upper bailey gate, intent on the outer steps of the hall that led to the solar. But Uncle Geoffrey caught her eye and motioned to her to join the crowd. She sighed. She was not fond of looking foolish. As it was she was different enough, with her long, thin legs and arms, funny pointed ears, and wild hair that looked like curly straw.

With her eyes downcast in a vain attempt to look maidenly, she sidled toward the back of the crowd, hoping to be unseen. An interesting feat since she stood head and shoulders above every woman and most of the men.

“Mother in Heaven, girl! What has happened to you?”

Aunt Beatrice. Leonie’s face heated, knowing the rumpled, blood-streaked, dirt-smudged state of her kirtle. Sigge was not the cleanest child who inhabited the castle.

“She had to rescue Sigge, Mother,” said Claire, still gasping deeply as she hurried up. “Again.”

“Again? What will that child do next? Where is your veil, Leonie? Your hair is a shambles!”

“Wrapped around Sigge’s foot,” she mumbled, her face growing even hotter, remembering how she had left off the veil for most of the hot afternoon to let the occasional sultry breeze toss her long curls. Even after entering the cool shade of the forest, she had left it draping over her shoulder.

Aunt Beatrice flung the back of her hand to her forehead, and although she was not one to faint, Leonie feared this time she might. “You’ll be the death of me, child. Of all the times, Leonie, why now? It is the king’s Peregrine himself who has ridden all the way from Gloucester to sup with us.”

Oh no. The hot flush fled Leonie’s cheeks as fast as it had come on her. Philippe le Peregrine. It wasn’t bad enough already. Did it have to be him?

Aye, there he was, standing beside his great brindled grey warhorse, the knight of her dreams and her nightmares, his huge, brawny body dwarfing his companions.

He lifted off his helm and handed it to his squire, then shook out his tousled golden hair—Viking hair, more golden than the sun. But he had Frankish eyes, warm and mellow brown like meadow honey, and they made her feel as if her bones were melting.

She’d been but thirteen years old, barely budding into adulthood, when she had so thoroughly humiliated herself over him that she had hoped never to see his face again. Now, here she was, with her disheveled kirtle and hair tossed like a tumbled haystack, once again about to make a fool of herself.

If only she were a true Faerie, not merely a secret halfling! For then—so Ealga had told her—Leonie would have been born knowing how to fade into the stones at her back and be safely unseen and forgotten. But she didn’t know. All she could do was stand there, tangling her slender fingers together like spun wool attacked by a kitten.

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.