“Oh is that so? Tell me…how much should one use?” she asked casually.
He held up two fingers. “One can never use more than two leaves.”
Finally, she thought, studying the red plant. Her means of escape.
13
The bells chimed for the next prayer hour, and Brother Leviticus pulled off his dirty gloves, tucked his weeding tools under his arm, and bid Glenna farewell as he bustled towards one of the doors. Alone, she waited, looking around the garden, past the beds and furrows of cabbages and turnips, beans and leeks, off to the distant orchard where before bells, two oblates atop a slim ladder had been picking peaches while supervised by a tall thin monk.
There was no one left. She stood then, brushed the blades of grass off her clothes. The grass grew between cracks in the stacked flat stones that formed a garden bench. Casually she looked around and moved slowly toward the bloodbane, then bent quickly and snatched a few leaves, slipping them into the woolen purse at her belt. She turned around and almost jumped out of her skin.
A ginger-haired boy stood right there, hardly an arm’s length away, a wide, toothsome grin upon his face. “You are well, my lady.” He sounded pleased, assured in speaking to her, and vaguely familiar, and that intrigued her.
That he wasn’t looking at her hands or purse told her he had not seen what she had done. “Aye,” she said cautiously.
“You do not remember me.” His shoulders fell slightly.
“You took my horse when we arrived. I doused you with rainwater. Forgive me.”
He shook his head.
“She frowned. You will not accept my apology?”
“We have met before,” he said looking disheartened.
Glenna studied him, then something struck. “Ruari?” She paused, then saw plainly the answer to her own question. “Not remember you? Ruari!”
He grinned and she threw her arms around him and pulled him against her, laughing. She stepped back, hands on his shoulders, now broader. “Look at you.”
“I expect looking at me is more easily done when I no longer look like a bruised pig.”
Another image of him flashed through her mind and she felt a pang of pity and a mixture of emotions deep in the pit of her belly, even now, more than three years past. The beating she had witnessed was unforgettably horrible. He had been so young.
With a wan smile, she studied his face and pale skin, bright with a milkmaid’s color on his cheeks, not features that were dark blue with bruises or overly-swollen past recognition. His nose had healed and without crusted blood, cuts, and swelling, was quite narrow and was larger as he had grown, with a crook like a falcon; it still bore the breaks from the punches and cudgel swings.
Yet the boy’s sweetness had not changed and it was a joy not to see sheer fear in his eyes when he looked at her.
“And you are now wed to a great lord,” he said brightly.
She wanted to groan ‘No!’ but remained silent. Lying to the boy was cruel, but she could not tell him the truth and put him in the path of trouble. Lies were always trouble, even if you were fairly skilled at the telling of them. This boy who stood in front of her had already lived through too much. She reached out to touch his brow, smiling. “You have straw in your hair.” She picked it off his tousled hair.
“I tend the stable and animals there,” he said with excited pride, standing straight and taller, no longer cowering in fear and awaiting the next blow. He was a far cry from beaten, half-dead seven year old lad she had happened upon in the woods. “And Pater Bancho teaches me to read.”
“So you are now here.” She remembered his young mother, the pale woman only a few years older than Glenna, thin and sobbing, with deep dark shadows under her eyes and who cried for her child while the sheriff, Munro the Horrible, beat him so cruelly. Glenna asked quietly, “What happened to your mother?”
“She is dead. Three years now. Her lungs were weak. She did not live long past that summer, though we were safe in the high forest at that time, and she was grateful to you for that. By Michelmas she could not sleep. She coughed all night. Soon, she brought me here. Pater Magoon could not save her.”
“I am sorry, Ruari.”
“She is better where she is now,” he said with far more maturity and acceptance than one would expect from a lad his age. “Horrible Munro would have not stopped until he found us.” He shrugged. “He believes we are dead. I am safe here.”
The abbey bells rang again.
He looked over his shoulder and back at her sheepishly. “I cannot stay. I gave my word to the prior I would not again miss prayer and reflection.”
“Then run along with you, Ruari of Beauly,” Glenna said kindly, waving her hand as he turned and ran from the gardens, zigzagging on the paths and leaping over small bushes and a bed of pease, only to plop into a small puddle of water from the stormy days before. He disappeared around a corner and left her to believe the boy’s bright spirit and curiosity would make that promise to the prior difficult to keep.
She turned to pick up her comb, when she heard Fergus barking from inside the stables and spun around. Was Fergus alone in there? “Ruari?” She called out to ask him, but he wasgone. She put her comb in the purse with the precious red-leafed herb, pulled the strings closed and headed for the stable.
