Beitris Ramsey was a thin and delicate woman, who had greeted her kindly, but seemed cautious and curious like a bird on a window sill, which made the meeting more than awkward at first. As the women ate together and attended Glenna, Lady Beitris soon relaxed.
Her first impression was striking and unique, made so perhaps by what she chose to mask. Dressed beautifully, in a gown of deep blue and gold brocade with velvet braided trim, she moved around the room with grace and elegance, a quiet step and straight, high back. Her belled sleeves long and elegant, yet she wore a tight silken glove on one hand. To cover the burnt, puckered skin? That she was scarred was made apparent by her manner of dress. But Mairi had warned her, and Glenna understood it was to protect Lady Beitris as much as to prepare Glenna.
Half her face was covered with a dark veil connected to a circular cap that tied tightly under her chin and again at her neckline with a wide collar. The visible half of her face was lovelywith her soft white skin, wide eyes the exact blue color of Lyall’s, and a full mouth that showed little age and was as pink as late summer’s campion bloom. Her red curly hair hung down her back in a bright, thick braid encased in a slip of icy blue silk and wrapped with gold and copper braided ribbands. As she sat near Glenna, the braid draped over her shoulder, hanging past the chair on which she sat, and there were small gold pendants in the shapes of crosses, stars, suns and birds decorating the twists of ribbands.
“What he shows the world is a mask to protect who he is inside,” Lady Beitris said, a woman who certainly understood the art of masking things. “The idea he is a coward?” She shook her head. “That is not my son.”
“Not the brother who saved me,” Mairi said, and when Glenna asked a question, the women told her the whole story of the day Dunkeldon burned.
“He was ten years old,” Mairi finished, “when he carried me on his back and took mother’s hand and we traveled alone to Rossi. He was ten years when he faced the wolves who attacked me. He saved me,” Mairi said quietly.
“And lost Atholl,” her mother added.
“Atholl was his beloved hound,” Mairi explained. “They were always together, my brother and that big hound. It slept at Lyall’s feet, followed his shadow, obeyed his every command.”
“We had been walking for two days by then, and we were resting against some tree at the edge of the great woods,” Lady Beitris told her. “My burns were so painful, I could not go on, and Lyall was trying to cool my skin with a cool rag. I was crying. My skin felt as if it was still on fire.” Lady Beitris looked down, the memory obviously still painful in a different way. “Mairi wandered off into the woods.”
“I was chasing butterflies, or something equally foolish.”
“Atholl followed her,” Lyall’s mother continued. “We had not noticed she was gone, until we heard the wolves. My heart was inmy throat. All we had lost and then Mairi, too? ‘Twas too much for me.”
"I had no idea what danger I was in until I looked up. Before me was a line of them, snarling, and so close I could smell their fur.” Mairi shuddered. “They pounced, but Lyall beat them off and carried me back to mother. But Atholl…” She paused. “He could not save us both.“
“Lyall never said a word but he never spoke his name again. He merely grew more quiet and inward. At some point Donnald tried to give him another hound from one of the litters here at Rossi, but Lyall refused. He never wanted another pet.”
And, Glenna thought, he never again named another animal.
“’Tis a sign of a great heart, and his greatest curse, that my son does not forget those he loved.”
Lyall could not forget her.He tried. His stepfather’s words haunted him, echoed about his mind in an eternal headache, and defied who he thought he was, while keeping alive some part of him that still had the essence of a conscience. He ate little, under the assessing eyes of Ramsey and the worried glances of his mother, but went back to pace the parapets again, walked the halls of Rossi, and finally sat down and played chess with an old knight he found sitting in front of the huge hearth near the keep’s back entrance, long after the castle was quiet and abed.
“You have lost thrice now. If an old man did not know better, I would think you were throwing the game, lad.” Sir Magnus had been with Ramsey for more decades than Lyall knew and had trained Lyall in service when he was first at Rossi. “Get yourself to bed.”
Lyall rubbed a hand over his face in frustration, then rested his hands on his knees and stared at the fire. “I cannot sleep.”
“What is this sleeping excuse from one as young and strongas you? I am old, which is a fine excuse to be awake at this hour--too many aches to sleep through the night, too many broken bones.”
And I have a broken heart.Until he had just thought the words, he had avoided the core of his troubles and what was truly bothering him. Now it was there for him to chew on.
“Based on the confounded look you wear, I will venture a guess that a fine ankle and a pair of breasts are involved,” he laughed wearily. “ ‘Tis only women that inspire in a man such utter despair and complete confusion.”
Lyall gave a wry laugh. “A fortunate guess.”
“In my six hard fought decades, I have seen too many men felled to their knees by a fair maid. Few men are immune. Kings and princes, earls and freeman, even the baron himself.
“Ramsey?” Lyall laughed.
“Aye, he suffers still.”
Lyall doubted that piece of frippery. He shook his head. “He is a large part of my problem. The lady is willing. My stepfather threatens me to not act on it…on her.”
“I am not surprised,” was all Magnus said.
“My orders are to keep her safe.”
“Safe? Matters of the heart are seldom safe, and power, title, name and wealth provide no armor. My own dear Aileen ran me a merry and frustratingly long race from a nunnery to the Cairngorms, to Normandy, Outremer and back. Aye, ‘tis a lass who gives a man that lost look. “
“I look lost?” Lyall said, not really a question. Was he that weak. A lost lamb? He’d rather think of himself as a coward.
