Thief (25 page)

“So you’re a cook now, as well as soldier and sailor?”

Caden cut her a sharp look and snorted. “I know I don’t like onions and berries in the same bite.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Owain was not in the tavern. But after the horse trader Gabon vowed he’d never heard of the man, Caden wasn’t surprised. In fact no one they spoke to had ever heard of a fisherman who trapped eels downriver between Hahlton and Din Guardi. Caden had Sorcha check her bag as soon as they’d left Gabon’s barn, but her
fortune
at least
was intact. Their safety was another matter of concern if greed for their capture was an issue. For all Caden knew, Owain was recruiting help to detain them.

Yet the tavern keeper’s son, a pock-faced youth with a shaggy mop of brown hair, told them an uncommonly tall blond stranger had come in and ordered a cup of hot water with which he’d prepared a brew for a beautiful copper-haired lady. He paid the lad a silver coin worth ten times the stoneware cup itself to let it cool and to hold it till the lady appeared. The boy, who was born and raised in Hahlton, had never seen Owain before.

Caden left Sorcha to drink her tea while he purchased supplies for the remaining two-day journey. Telling the curious villagers that he was escorting a lady home to her ailing Cymri mother seemed to answer the inevitable questions. Isolated as they were, they were eager to hear any news from strangers passing through. And of course, having come upriver from Din Guardi, Caden was plied with questions regarding the royal wedding, especially from the women. He’d denied having seen anything but the continuous flow of carts laden with supplies headed up the causeway for the royals and their guests.

It was only after Hahlton lay in their wake and the forested green of the Cheviots met the cloudless blue of the sky in the distance, that the tension in Caden’s neck and shoulders eased. Still, he continually swept the heathland scrub and lacework of marsh grass and water behind them with eagle eyes.

While Sorcha maintained her role in their semicharade, she would not hear any of Caden’s suspicions regarding Owain.

“That is the most ridiculous notion I’ve ever heard of,” she declared from the back of the underfed warhorse that Gabon had sold them for the remainder of Tunwulf’s torque. A warhorse! Caden still couldn’t believe their luck.

“Big as she is, she’s not fit for the plow,” the old man had told them. “An’ if she’s sick, I won’t take her back.” Gabon couldn’t have known just what he had, or he’d have made straightway to Din Guardi to sell the mare for more than all his little marsh ponies were worth, instead of feeding it the heath grasses that sustained his stock until the poor mare’s ribs showed.

But very few Saxons fought on horseback. They were swift and deadly enough afoot, although the prestige of owning such a steed in good condition would have guaranteed a fat purse. This animal had surely belonged to a fallen Cymri cavalryman from Arthur’s late summer campaign to drive the Saxons back across the Tweed, so it only seemed right that Caden should rescue it, while it rescued them. Elfwyn—the name Sorcha had bestowed upon the chestnut mare—would fill out with the right care. For now, she had a belly full of grain, and Caden walked beside her to preserve her strength to carry two, in case they were given chase.

“You saw my wrist this morning,” Sorcha continued to argue, all the while combing out Elfwyn’s copper-gold mane with her fingers. “Owain is a physician and a scholar.”

That morning, when Owain applied a new poultice, the wrist was still a bit swollen, but the redness was reduced to pink. Whatever was in Sorcha’s stinking medicinal tea and the paste he applied in the wrappings was working better than anything Caden had ever seen for such infections.

“Besides, why would Owain offer us such hospitality and care if he hoped to gain from our situation?”

“Greed,” Caden told her simply. “We are wanted for the murder of one of the king’s most trusted thanes. It doesn’t matter that we’re innocent.”

“I think he left abruptly because he was afraid we’d try to pay him for his trouble. There are good people like that.” She lapsed into silence for a moment and stared off at a rise of heathland where scrawny cattle grazed amidst scrub pine and thorn bush. “What if he was also hiding?”

“What?”

“What if he’d done something that forced him into hiding? That would explain a man of his learning living in such isolation. Maybe he accidentally killed someone.”

The only cloud in sight on the fair autumn day settled over Sorcha’s face. Caden knew she thought of Rhianon.

He snorted in exasperation. “You have an amazing capacity for worrying more about others than about your own hide.”

“
My
hide is well protected by your muscle and sword.” The smile she gave Caden warmed him straight to the toes … and elsewhere. “And my dagger, of course,” she added impishly.

So help him, Caden could have skipped, her flirtation knocked him so giddy. He forced Delg’s blade deeper into its leather scabbard, as though to pin his feet to the ground. “’Twill take more than my muscle and sword, I fear, when we reach Trebold,” he said gruffly.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that Tunwulf will likely be waiting for us.” The possibility had plagued Caden for the last few days of delay.

Sorcha paled. “How would he know where we are going?”

“I believe Trebold was mentioned before Hussa in verifying the reason you were going with me back to Lothian.”

“But—” Sorcha fell silent again.

Caden was instantly sorry he’d even brought up what might lie ahead. He liked Sorcha when she was playful. Or when she sang. Or even when she was in a temper. There was a time—

When Rhianon had made him feel the same way. As if his heart would take flight and lift him into the heavens with it.

But Caden knew the end to such feelings. Sooner or later one had to come back to earth, sometimes with a terrible crash. He’d barely survived the last one. Had often wished he hadn’t. Now he wasn’t sure.

Sorcha was no Rhianon by any stretch of the imagination, but she deserved more than a misfit without a home. Myrna and Trebold deserved more, no matter the old chief’s ramblings about how Caden might make a fine husband for Sorcha, if he brought her home.

Hope and despair wrestled mightily in his mind.
Why
was he even allowing his mind to wander down that tangled path? Even if God had forgiven him his past, Caden could not forget it. He was born to fight, not love.

“Caden, slow down. You’re forcing poor Elfwyn into a trot and rattling every tooth in my head!”

Aye, slow down,
he told himself. Though he hadn’t been aware that his thoughts had urged him into a run. He couldn’t run away from this, but he could make sure Sorcha entertained no nonsense that they were more than escort and lady. He was no more than a protector till she was delivered and safe. He deserved no more, she no less.

By nightfall, they’d reached a ford on the Tweed where a small hostel that had once been a Roman villa served a delicious venison stew. The hostel was run by a Cymri couple who served anyone who could pay. The borderlands between the Saxon-held coast and Lothian’s hills were a no-man’s-land, where Saxon and Cymri lived to survive any way they could. Under Rome’s peace, it had supported villas like the hostel with farms, but now it was a haven for criminals, outcasts of both peoples.

There were only four other guests passing through, two men and a young woman with a child, allowing for ample room under the tiled roof of what had once been a salon. Secondary rooms were built in a square around an overgrown courtyard, its tiles long removed. Chickens occupied the remnants of a long-dry fountain partially covered with wicker-based turf, while the rest of the building served as a stable. Caden opted to sleep in one of the stalls with Elfwyn after the innkeeper’s wife put up a screen for the women and child to have their pallets near the fire built in the center of the main room and vented through a hole knocked into the turf-patched roof.

Even a poor warhorse was a tempting treasure, and Caden trusted no one to watch the mare. But Sorcha needed a warm fire and comfortable pallet, for winter’s bite came at night, hinting of the harsher weather to come. With plenty of straw heaped in the enclosed stable, Caden would be more than comfortable. As a soldier, he’d slept in far worse conditions. And always with Delg’s blade close by.

But not even a prayer to Abba would still the battling thoughts in his mind. If Tunwulf was at Trebold …

“You should have killed Tunwulf when you had the chance,” Sorcha fretted the following day as they entered the forested hills to the Tweed’s north.

Behind them lay tattered farms and grazing cattle on the rolling grasslands where people struggled to eke out a living between this or that army’s locust-like sweep through the river valley, consuming the fruits of their labors. Above them bronze oak and red beech shed their colors, creating a vibrant carpet that winter’s breath would soon turn brown.

“I’ve sent many a man to the Other Side, but never one who couldn’t defend himself,” Caden retorted. Though part of him agreed with her. He’d just postponed the inevitable, unless he could convince Sorcha to bypass Trebold in the event Tunwulf did await them. If he’d left immediately after being discovered, chances were he’d not have his full warband with him. Caden might challenge him to settle this with his sword, man to man. Even as he thought it, Caden didn’t have much hope for an honorable resolution.

“I should have killed him, then,” she said wearily.

“You’re a thief, not a murderer. And killing an unconscious man would be murder.”

“If Tunwulf is in Trebold, we have no choice but to kill him. And if he’s harmed my mother—”

“He has no reason to harm her. He only knows Trebold is your home. Hopefully Myrna can keep the fact that she’s your mother from him.”

“He’s wily as a fox.”

“That’s an insult to a fox.”

Despite the gravity of their plight, Sorcha laughed. “Why don’t we pray that Tunwulf hasn’t come after us?” she said upon sobering. “Or that if he did, he gave up and went home when he saw we weren’t there?”

That surprised Caden. “So you’re a Christian now?”

“I think so.” The way Sorcha answered, Caden wasn’t the only one bemused. “I’ve been talking in my mind to your God. So I must believe in Him,” she reasoned. “And Father Martin said He forgave thieves. So that means He forgives me, right? If I
try
not to steal anymore?”

Caden laughed. It was the wrong response, exacting a scowl from her, but he couldn’t help himself. What a pair of misfits they were.

“You’ve asked the wrong person, I fear. I’m barely on speaking terms with God myself,” he explained. “I’ve done a lot of bad things.”

“To your family.” It wasn’t a question. Evidently Sorcha had remembered the confrontation with Rhianon and Tunwulf and pieced his guilt together.

“Yes. That’s the worst of it.”

“And you’re forgiven, right?”

“So Father Martin says.” Caden wanted to believe that. “That day we danced on the beach … just before, I found myself crying out to Jesus for help. I was frightened, and, God knows, I needed a father. A real father.”

“
You
were frightened?”

“You’d have been unnerved as well if the woman you saw jump over a cliff and thought was dead suddenly appeared as alive and calculating as ever.” Caden shuddered. “And I saw her and her demon-calling nurse do things I cannot speak of. Worse, I let them.”

The words spilled out of Caden’s mouth like a flood tide. There was no stopping them, nor did Sorcha try. She listened. Gently prompted him to continue. Caden bared everything he’d felt the morning he’d discovered Rhianon was alive, from the fear and anguish to the joy and euphoria.

“So that’s what happened,” Sorcha murmured in wonder when he was spent of story and emotion.

Caden cocked his head up at her, belatedly self-conscious. “What do you mean, lassie?” She looked at him strangely, as though seeing him for the first time. What had he been thinking to open his soul to her, his fears and insecurities? He’d not even done that for Rhianon.

“You were so different that morning from the way you’d been the night before.” She shook her head as though searching for the right words. “The night you came to the tavern, you were older than your years, a man hardened by pain and with a mission—one you would accomplish, no matter how.” A hint of a smile pulled at her lips. “And yet, even then I knew that I’d not seen the last of you. Not because of what you said, but what you left unsaid.”