Meriel Fuller - Her Battle-Scarred Knight

Whisking back to her chamber, Brianna snatched up her cloak and knife-belt from the bed. Her mind rattled with details; she had to seize her chance to travel to Winchester now, whilst Giseux slept. As she tiptoed past him, a sudden nausea roiled in her belly at her daring and she trembled with the horrible notion of him leaping up suddenly, catching her red-handed. He could not, must not, catch her. She kept her gaze pinned to the door at the far end of the great hall, taking deliberate, considered steps, picking up her hem so she didn’t trip. Every muscle in her body strained, held taut in the moment, alert to the slightest movement, the slightest sound from the chair. After what seemed like an eternity, her hand lifted the latch and she slipped into the entrance hall like a ghost, closing the door behind her. Her suppressed breath released; she sagged against the wall in relief.

Alys emerged from the stair that led to the guest chamber above the kitchens, eyes wide in her pale, wizened face. ‘My lady? What’s happening?’ she whispered, frowning at Brianna’s change of clothes, her cloak.

‘Shh.’ Brianna put a finger to her lips, seizing the maidservant by the hand and pulling her through the main entrance door, out, out into the frosty air, down the steps, down to the vaulted stables below the first floor. The smell of crushed straw, of faint, stale horse filled the air.

‘Oh, mistress, nay, you cannot!’ In the white slant of moonlight that poured through the archway into the stables, Alys brought her gnarled, arthritic hands to sunken cheeks when Brianna told her of her plans.

‘It’s the only way,’ Brianna announced briskly, heart knocking against her chest, the image of the big man sprawled upstairs, asleep, tripping dangerously around the edges of her consciousness.

‘At least let me come with you, mistress.’

In the startling brightness of the moon, Alys suddenly looked old, her gaunt frame bent over with exhaustion. Guilt surged through Brianna and she placed two hands on Alys’s shoulders. ‘Nay, Alys, I can’t ask you to do that. You’ve put up with so much from me, you need to rest now. Go to bed, sleep. Lord Giseux can take care of himself.’

‘But …?’

‘Winchester is not above twenty miles from here … I know the way.’ Well, most of it, Brianna added silently.

‘But how will you travel?’ Alys’s gaze swept the empty stable. ‘We have no horses left to ride.’

Brianna grinned, the metal bosses on her cloak glinting in the dim light. ‘Aye, we don’t,’ she pointed out towards to fringes of the forest, where Giseux’s large destrier was patiently cropping the grass, the reins conveniently looped around a low branch, ‘but he does.’

It was the cold that finally woke him, digging into his bones like icy fingers, relentlessly, endlessly, so at last after a great deal of tossing and turning and trying to will his exhausted body back to sleep, Giseux reluctantly opened his eyes. The barest trickle of moonlight squeezed through the gaps in the long wooden shutters, enough to see by. The fire had burnt out, but not long ago, ashes smouldering dismally in the grate.

The chair cradled his body at a stiff, unyielding angle, compressing his bones. His right hand had gone numb; he gritted his teeth, flexing his fingers as the blood returned with a painful prickling. Shaking off the shrouds of sleep, his mind jumped into action, remembering, remembering the task that Hugh had set him. He recalled the spark of determination in Lady Brianna’s eyes, the stubborn set of her mouth when he had informed her that they would not leave until morning.

Propelling himself from the chair, he strode over to the door of the solar, wrenching the door open. In normal circumstances, he probably would have knocked, but up to this point everything about Lady Brianna had been anything but normal. He knew, he just knew, before he’d even looked at the bed and saw that the furs lay flat, unused, that she had gone. Little witch! He had offered to come to Sefanoc as a favour to Hugh; in reality it was turning out to be an ordeal.

Stepping over to the bed, he hauled the covers back; the spotless, empty white sheet shone back at him, the slight indentation in the mattress where she would have slept mocking him. The scent of crushed lavender rose from the bedlinens, delicious, seductive, reminding him of those long, hot summers in Poitiers, and his heart jerked in memory. That all seemed so long ago now.

A small sound on the other side of the bed caught his attention.

‘She’s not here, my lord.’ Alys sat up on low pallet bed, clutching the covers to her bony chest. Her frizzled hair stuck out from her head like grey lace. Her veins traced blue ridges on the backs of her hands.

‘I can see that,’ Giseux replied bluntly, his cheeks sculptured hollows in the sepulchral light. ‘And against my better judgement I’m about to go after her.’

Big fat tears welled up in the maidservant’s eyes. ‘Oh, my lord, don’t be too harsh on her.’

‘Why on earth not?’ he growled back. ‘The woman’s a prize fool, putting herself at risk.’

‘She hasn’t seen Hugh for such a long time. Once she has a plan in her head …’ Alys trailed off miserably, her voice rising on a half-sob.

‘She’s difficult to rein in, I can see that,’ Giseux replied, grimacing. ‘When did she leave?’

‘Not long after you fell asleep, my lord.’

‘She hasn’t had much of a head start.’ He thought of the dying embers in the fireplace, calculating rapidly. ‘What does she ride … a palfrey? She wouldn’t go above a trot on one of those. I’ll easily catch her up.’

The maidservant was silent, staring at him like a ghost, her knotted fingers still clutching the coverlet against her. ‘She … she took your horse, my lord.’

Through the dark tracery of bare branches, the moon appeared sporadically, shifting behind veils of cloud, dribbling a faint light down to the forest floor. A rising breeze sifted through the trees, a sibilant sound that spoke of the old stories surrounding the forest of Sefanoc, the drifting ghosts. The woods held little mystery for Brianna; she had grown up in this place, had laughed and played through the woodland with Hugh. She felt no fear as the giant skeletal shapes of the trees rose up before her, no fear as she glimpsed the deep pools silvered by the light of the moon and heard the twitterings and rustlings of the animals in the undergrowth. Nay, the forest did not scare her. But being caught by Lord Giseux de St-Loup did.

In despair, she kicked the rounded flanks of the horse beneath her once more. In her haste to leave for Winchester, she had failed to adjust the stirrups to the length of her leg and now they bumped uselessly against the horse’s sides, polished metal hoops shining in the darkness. Even without the use of the stirrups, she considered herself to be an excellent horsewoman, but this animal simply refused to move at anything greater than a sporadic, half-hearted trot! Really, it was as if his master was controlling him from afar!

All of a sudden, the animal stopped, pointed ears moving round as if to locate a sound. And then she heard it—a shout on the wind. She failed to decipher the words, but she knew, knew it was him. Knuckles rounding tautly on the reins, her heart lodged in her throat—how had he managed to catch up with her so quickly? The horse begun to turn in response to his master’s voice, Brianna yanking desperately on the reins to point his head back in the right direction, but to no avail. The horse turned abruptly in the narrow, muddy track, almost throwing her off in its excitement. In the last moment before the horse took off, Brianna managed to throw her leg over the horse’s neck and slip in a flurry of skirts to the ground.