And yet the worst of them is still to come.
He dared not go there and try to live with himself, so he took a linen towel from a stack of them warming by the hearth and rubbed it briskly over her cold, damp limbs. But thoughts of his sworn promises would not wane. He could justify his actions, all men did so, his mother claimed many times when she was sorely disappointed. ‘Men can always justify their actions.‘
But then he did not think women could ever understand a man’s ties to land.
At that moment, Lyall felt trapped by the politics of kings and men; he did not like the plot he was involved in.
Dunkelden….Dunkelden… Dunkelden…
Always in the back of his mind, the land was always there to remind him of what drove him. He continued to rub dry her whole body and then covered her with layers of rough woolen blankets, tucking them tightly around her.
For all his scheming and planning, he had not thought about how she would weather the road. Of course he was used to riding hard; knights were trained to withstand hardship, tiredness and hunger, along with the most extremes of weather, both hot and cold.
He’d even worn out her hound. Looking like a giant, soaking wet pile of freshly sheered lamb’s wool, the poor dog lay sprawled out by the fire, as if his legs and body had given out at that very spot. The huge beast’s eyes were closed. The hound wasn’t dead; he was snoring.
The door swung open and Pater Bancho shuffled in carrying a tray of cold mutton, barley bread and honey, and cups filled with dark mead.
Fergus awakened to the smells, eyed the mutton on the tray, then grunted and went back to sleep.
“Do you need anything else, my lord?” Pater Bancho asked him.
“Nay,” Lyall said and thanked him. “Here.” He handed him silver. “For your coffers,” he said, paying with enough coin to be named a benefactor, and grateful that on this night they were the lone travelers in the public room.
The abbeys, monasteries, and small priories scattered across the shires took in travelers of all kind and pilgrims. They fed the hungry and healed the sick. They were safe havens, for even the worst of enemies were hesitant to jeopardize their hereafterjourney. The power of the Church was great, and not only over men's souls.
Behind abbey walls and in the loft rooms and scriptoriums, the clerics and scribes put nib to parchment and wrote manuscripts and contracts, creating hand-scribed treaties and agreements into something more tangible than merely words between men, words which would often change over time and weak memory, and with whatever way the winds of the lands would blow. Not merely houses of God, of education and prayer, they were villages unto themselves, with workshops and store rooms, animals, cattle and barns, farms and grain fields, vegetable and herb gardens, orchards and even mills if built on a water source. Often they provided the only medicine and cures available to the nearby region.
A knight with his servant stopping at an abbey would have raised no questions. But a knight and his lady? Noble couples most often stayed with other landed nobility, those who owned the local manor houses. It was too late now. He could not go back and secure her hat to pass for a lad. It was what it was….
He moved the tray over near the pallet and knelt down by Glenna. “Wake up,” he said quietly and touched her shoulder and said her name.
She did not respond. He shook her slightly but she slept on.
He used to awaken his sister this way: he took a finger and traced it down the bridge of her straight nose, and she wrinkled it. “Glenna, come now. Wake up, sweet…”
Nothing again.
He moved his fingertip along the soft sweet line of her lips, because he was powerless not to do so, and her mouth parted slightly. Only his sense and concern for her kept him from lowering his head to her open mouth and sipping at her sweet lips, tasting and drinking his fill of her.
“Glenna?”
“Sleep,” she said in a half moan, then she sighed and merely pulled the blankets tighter around her chin. Her face was flushednow from the heat of the fire, looking as she had that morning when he had taken advantage of her.
He did not like that he had lost control, when the point had been to teach her who held the power. He sat back on the floor, his legs bent, resting his arms casually on his knees. Lying to himself did no good.
She called to him like the most dangerous of sirens--he, a man crashing into the deadly rocks. Try was he might, he could not control the powerful pull she had on him, the ebony fire he saw when he looked into her eyes, so black at times they held him captive, him unable to move for fear he would lose what passed between them in those few, oddly binding moments when he was reduced to nothing but a man starved for her, only for her.
What was it that drew him to her without thought or reason?
Whatever it was, it was there in her very coloring, the light and dark of her, as if by merely looking at her his heart was at war.
Her beauty was not the pale, angelic comeliness of Mairi, all silver and golden and light, but a stark, almost shocking--an untouchable loveliness. Forbidden to him, this beauty of the night at its darkest penultimate moment, and stormy, like the souls of lost men who had tried and failed to live down the name of traitor.
She opened her eyes then and the world fell completely silent. It was long time before she spoke, her voice like a whisper, her lips so pale and still tinged blue. “Fergus?”
“He is over there. Asleep by the fire. When he wakens I’ll feed him. Do not worry. He is fine. I know I pushed you both too hard,” he paused then, searching for something to say. “Glenna?"
“Sleep is good,” she murmured.
