Faerie (3 page)

“’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.

Her heart started to pound wildly again.

Nay, it was still nonsense. The sword would be rusty. She’d better get control over herself, now. She inhaled deeply and laughed at herself.

The eyes.

Rocks that looked like eyes. Had to be.

But she shuddered. And now she had a worse problem. How was she going to get back to the castle without the knights thinking she was spying on them? Oh, she would die of embarrassment if the Peregrine saw her!

She relaxed, bit by bit, telling herself it was all nonsense. Once she calmed, she’d go the long way around to the castle.

The knights splashed about in the sparkling water, some swimming, some wading waist-deep, and others standing near the shallow water or on shore. Clothing littered the banks of the beck and draped over branches of bushes by the forest’s edge. Their flesh was not the pale white of hers beneath her kirtle, but the golden hue of skin that had seen many hours in the sun. She suspected they made a habit of bathing in streams on hot summer days.

Near the bend in the beck, Philippe le Peregrine emerged from the water, his tall, hard-muscled body taking easy, powerful strides across the sand, his long shaft at rest, surrounded with golden-brown curls. Leonie was no more ignorant of men’s bodies than any woman who lived within the confines of a hall. Men made little effort to hide their bodies, nor did women pretend they did not see. Nor was she stranger to the tendrils of desire that sometimes arose in her when unusual sounds and movements of lovers came from some dark corner. Perhaps it was her Faerie blood, for she knew their kind was different in those ways, too, but she had at least the good sense not to make her desires known to others. But for the most part her glimpses of men showed little more than a stub of a shaft. One this large when at rest wouldn’t be a mere stub when erect.