Knight and the Witch 02 - A Summer Bewitchment (7 page)

Elfrida could not miss the staff the woman carried.
What now? Does she want to beat me, outside my own house, in front of my own people? Why? To humiliate me? Is this how noble womenfolk behave?

Knights, she knew, were bred to fight, but it appeared their ladies were equally belligerent.

“Here.” Lady Astrid threw her the staff, smiling as Elfrida caught it while almost dropping the wool off her spindle and the whole skein of thread into the dust. “Let us start with simple things first. Do you know how to attack? To defend? Come at me.”

One of Lady Astrid’s men, crouched close to the bench playing a solitary game of dice, looked up and smirked.
He expects me to lose or draw back and be whispered a coward.

Another of the lady’s men, a squire with one half of his head shaved, perhaps because of previous illness or worms, called out a warning and encouragement in Norman French.

Lady Astrid has maneuvered this so whatever I do I will be in the wrong. If I am defeated, her party will consider me and possibly even Magnus as weaklings and her pride will know no bounds. If I best her, I will fail in my duty as host.

Enough. I have not brawled hand-to-hand since I was Rowena’s age
. Tempted to smash the staff into her adversary’s ribs, Elfrida touched her own body with her arm. She could do no more because her hands were full.

I do not need any lessons in chess or tactics.

Paling, Lady Astrid gasped and clutched at her waist. “Stitch. I have a dreadful stitch in my side,” she hissed in French.

Nodding to the lady’s maids to tend her, Elfrida guessed what Astrid had said. She felt the same discomfort as a perfect mirror within her body. There was a justice in enduring the twisting pain, she decided, because she had willed it onto Astrid. Calmer now, she mastered the stitch in her side by imagining the bloody wounds that Magnus had endured and the courage he had so lavishly spent, fighting for his comrades.

“Mint tisane will ease you, my lady,” she reassured Astrid. “Sit with Githa in the sunshine. I shall make it for all of us.”

Praying her face was expressionless, Elfrida walked inside.

Let Magnus be having a better morning. Please
.

Magnus knew of many ways to persuade a knight to talk. He could show disbelief or mild interest, so the fellow would brag. He could drink with him, share food with him, spin a tale so the knight would feel compelled to cap or crown it. Bribery remained effective with some, respect inspired a few more to speak out. Straight fear worked on all of them.

In his experience, however, the one with the most to say about everything was the disgruntled, overlooked older man. Searching on foot by then, Magnus had a balding, red-faced older man toiling beside him as they prodded the bushes and grasses near to the church and priest’s house at Warren Bruer. So far, Mark, arriving earlier with hounds, had found nothing, and his own dogs had discovered no worthwhile scent trail. Disappointingly, neither had his trackers located fresh signs of Rowena or her abductor.

Guy, the older knight beside him, had a reason for that.

“We have tried all this already for Master ‘I am going to pray in the church,’ and found nothing. This wastes time.”

“Did Father Jerome search with you, then?” Magnus asked, peering through the cobwebbed leaves of a holly tree to its dry, cracked-earth center.

Guy shook his shiny, peeling head. He was as lean as a hunter’s whip but his jaws were flabby and he had a turned-down mouth. “He searched the church and his house and yelled at me when my lady’s ward did not come running to him. I told him that the other maids had been looked for in their homes and not found. That the search wasted time.”

“What did he say to that?”

Guy scowled, jabbing a branch into a mass of brambles. “He disliked it but he knew I was right.”

“When were the other maids taken? How long ago?”

“Seven, ten days, maybe, before my lady’s ward was seized. The serfs made a great stir of it, and threatened to stop working. Father Jerome promised to bring help to find the girls. When days passed and no help came, the serfs laid down their harvest tools…”

So the other girls were missed
. Magnus was glad of that.

“My lady herself had to go to the harvest fields and promise the serfs that she would engage a mighty tracker to recover their daughters and sisters. By then the Lady Rowena had vanished, so my lady was believed and they cheered her.”

“And now?”

“You are come. Your men search wells, woods, fields, old houses, ditches and more. The serfs see this and work.” A sly look slithered across Guy’s face. “My lady’s men are busy, too, sending and receiving messages and riding out. I do not think they troubled about the other maids, but they strive for my lady’s ward.”

So much for my searching skills, then. As I suspected, Lady Astrid has her own men seeking and her own plots in hand. She sought me out merely to placate her serfs. I am here to ensure this year’s harvest, nothing more useful than that. Better yet, if I do not find the other girls, the lady can blame me and her serfs will go on working.

“What of Lady Rowena’s father? Where is he?”

The shorter man scratched his head and flecks of skin fell onto his narrow shoulders. “Dead? Five days ago, the same day that Lady Rowena vanished, I heard a tale that Lord William, his wife and his three sons had perished in a great fire, far away in Winchester. Although I have also heard it said that they died somewhere here in the north, of the small pox.”

“But dead?” Magnus could scarcely believe it.

“I do not see William the fair in this company. Nor his overlord, Lord Percival.”

The Percivals. Splendor in Christendom, the Giffords and the Percivals, two of the most powerful families in England! No wonder Lady Astrid is hedging her bets, delaying all she can, but she plays a dangerous game and now Elfrida and I are part of it.

Has the Lady Astrid any unmarried brothers on the lookout for heiress brides-to-be?
Magnus was about to ask the question, but at that moment, rushing through the copse on his pony, dragging Rowena’s pony, Apple, by its reins and a hound on a leash, Tancred burst through a stand of flowering elder.

“My lord!” he yelled, as Magnus grabbed his pony’s reins. “My lor—Magnus! Mark has found one of the missing girls!”

“Alive and unharmed?”

“Yes, yes.”

This was stupendous news, if true. Glad for the child, for her family, for Elfrida, Magnus bellowed a roar of triumph, but Tancred was interested in one thing only.

“Do you not understand yet? This girl will know where Rowena is!”

“So have you told Father Jerome? He may know the girl.”
And she will speak more readily to him than me.

Tancred stared at him as if he had spoken in ancient Greek. “Do you not remember, man…I mean, Magnus?” He checked himself, before he said anything more scornful after
man
. “Father Jerome went off before noon to do death rites.”

In his furious searching, Magnus had forgotten that the priest had been summoned to give faith and consolation at a terrible end—the village plowman had broken his back. And now Tancred was at him again, shaking his arm.

“Come on, Magnus, you must order the girl to talk. She must tell us where Rowena is!”

That afternoon, while Lady Astrid dined in the great hall, Elfrida sought out the squire Baldwin. He had been with her and Magnus the previous winter, during their dangerous search for her sister Christina and the other missing brides. He knew she had magic.

A tall, slim young man who enjoyed his food, Baldwin listened closely to her request. Too courtly to pull a face, he nonetheless made his feelings clear.

“To ride with you now to Warren Bruer? Why, my lady?” He did not say them, but the words
our lord will not like it
also hovered on his lips
.

“It is necessary. I sense my lord has need of me.” She did not want to say more or admit to the storm cloud that seemed to have coiled itself in the middle of her chest.

This is not my seething disappointment. It is Magnus’s, poor love.

“Our lord needs me, Pie,” she repeated, giving Baldwin the nickname she had made for him the previous winter.

“What of your guest?”

“Piers can attend her. Or if she wishes, Lady Astrid can ride on with Piers and join us. But we should leave now. The steward can give our excuses.”

Baldwin studied her a moment longer, drawing his brows together, then smiled, revealing the chipped tooth Elfrida found endearing.

“Do I try to protect you from my lord, or do you protect me from him, my lady?”

Relief flooded through Elfrida. “We ride and see.”

And pray we reach the place before whatever is troubling Magnus bursts like a pricked boil.

Bundled in his cloak, with his saddle cloth as pallet and pillow, the girl slept, curled over like a fern frond. Magnus was glad to see her at peace but felt sick at heart. She had screamed herself hoarse when first spotting him, shrieked herself into utter helpless weariness before fleeing into sleep.

She was a redhead, too, which scraped his sense of shame even more rawly. He wanted to blame Tancred for cantering on ahead and hauling the girl to her feet to face him before any had troubled to tell her that he was maimed. He longed to rage at Mark, who had discovered her cowering in a thicket and done such a poor job of soothing her.

Most of all he wanted to be veiled like an eastern woman. Then he would not have inflicted his ruined, bestial looks on this terrified, confused lass.

Is she even one of the kidnapped girls? Tancred seems convinced of it, but we have no proof. We do not even have her name. How did she come here? Where did she escape from?

Questioning his second in command, he learned that Mark had come upon the girl without any warning, when the dogs had discovered her in the thicket and barked. The child would not or could not say how she had got there.

Magnus did what he could. He ordered Mark to set the hounds tracking again, using the girl’s scent. Tancred he sent off with another two of his men to the hamlets and villages, taking a lock of the girl’s red hair. He had made Tancred repeat to him what the girl looked like—small, slim, about fourteen, freckles, red hair, blue eyes—until he was certain the lad would remember.

Bad enough for the parents of these missing girls to have their hopes raised by a poor description.
His men also knew what the lass looked like, and they would be tactful in speaking to the people.

Perhaps I should have kept Tancred with me, but he would keep jabbing the girl, wanting her to wake.
The boy was anxious for his young kinswoman, well enough, but he seemed to think this harried, unconscious girl had no right to any finer feelings. “She is a peasant,” he answered, thrusting out his lower lip, when Magnus had warned him to go gently.

Was I ever such a thickheaded one as Tancred?

Giving orders, searching where the girl had first been found, those tasks he was glad to do. Returning to the stony roadway that skirted the little wood, Magnus spotted a new cartwheel groove in a seam of mud, but the cart or carriage had long vanished. Had she escaped from the cart? He could not tell.

Rising awkwardly from his crouch, Magnus turned on the road to check on his reluctant sleeper. The man guarding her nodded to him as she dozed still beneath the spreading branches of an oak tree. As he watched her, the flashing gilts of her hair pierced him. His heart ached and his missing foot hurt as he tried to recall what he should do next.

I am lost.

The worst of it was that he wanted Elfrida here. His caring, fighting warrior of magic was so much better than him at consoling the shy and suffering. He imagined her running along the road to meet him. Both would be united, striving, understanding each other, giving aid to one another.

He heard a drumming of hooves and guessed it was one of his men from the lack of shouts or challenges. Farther along the rutted road, into a faint shimmer of heat, pounded a gray horse with lanky Baldwin as rider.

“To me!” Magnus shouted, before he realized that his squire was galloping toward him anyway—and not just Baldwin.

Peeping from behind Baldwin’s back, her face clenched in concentration as she gripped the squire’s middle and clung on, was his Elfrida. Impossibly, she had known he needed her. She had known and come.
She comes for me
. Shame of his earlier fears concerning his wife, riding, and pregnancy scorched through him.

Magnus started, then began to run toward her. With every sprinting, skidding step, his heart expanded. She waved at him, her veil flapping like a sail, her long hair gleaming like flames, her mouth busy with an inevitable apology.

She smiles her love at me even as she calls sorry. She thinks I may be angry, the foolish, brave little wretch.

He caught her as Baldwin reined in and before she tumbled from the horse.

I am so very glad she is here but why has she come? What news is she bringing?