What if he could teach her that not all knights were fiends and knaves? It was a legacy Bartholomew wished very much to leave her, but their paths would likely part on the morrow.
Could he see her avenged? Would she name the villain? Or was that man long gone from Haynesdale?
Bartholomew should have been planning his own triumphant claim of his father’s holding, but instead, he found himself thinking of Anna. What token hung from the lace upon her neck? It had a weight, to be sure, and he thought he had seen it glimmer through her chemise.
What jewel could she possess that she would not sell to see her brother fed and warm? It would be sentimental, to be sure, a token of her parents, perhaps.
But her father had been a smith, not a jeweler.
It was yet another riddle in all the many riddles of his unexpected companion. Bartholomew wished to unravel them all, though he knew he would not have the opportunity.
He dozed hours later, when the keep was quiet all around him.
He should have anticipated that the nightmare would return.
*
They were running in the darkness, his hand held fast within his mother’s own. It was dark and cold, the ground wet beneath his feet. There was only darkness ahead. He looked back to see fire blazing behind them, consuming all within view. He had been awakened in haste, seized by his mother and hastened from their home.
Was that what burned?
Where was Papa?
Where were the men who guarded the hall? He heard the clash of steel upon steel but could not see anything beyond the fire. His mother fairly dragged him onward, her feet bare and her hair unbound. Her breath was frantic and she murmured his father’s name like a prayer. He could taste her fear and ran as fast as he could, not wanting to disappoint her. Her hand was soft and warm, her breast softer when she finally swept him into her arms.
Still she ran, her arms wrapped tightly around him. She was weeping, he could tell by the sound of her breath, and he reached up to feel the wetness on her cheeks. He could see the fire over her shoulder, the way it spread, the hunger and the brilliance of it.
“Papa,” he said and she shook her head.
“Not now,” she whispered to him in French. “Not now.”
She stumbled into a cabin, the darkness closing around them so suddenly that he blinked. “Help me,” she appealed and he was passed to the embrace of another. It was a man, his arms thick and heavily muscled, his skin smelling of iron and fire.
The smith! He smiled for he liked this man well and often came to watch him work. The smith handed him to his wife, who always smelled of fresh bread, and fired up his forge. A smaller fire lit there, burning brighter and whiter with the smith’s every mighty push of the bellows.
He was transfixed by this fire, controlled and contained, yet just as fiery and powerful as the one that had raged behind them. His mother offered a token to the smith, who accepted it with a nod.
It was a ring.
It was his father’s ring.
“He must be able to prove his birthright,” she said softly. “Mark him, over his heart.”
The smith hesitated for a moment, but the sound of swordplay came closer. He exchanged a look with his wife, then worked the bellows with greater vigor. The fire was hot. It was white. It made them all narrow their eyes against its power.
The smith took the ring with his great tongs, and plunged it into the fire on his forge. The ring seemed to glow. It heated like a spark of the sun snared within the greater fire. He wanted to watch it but his mother opened his chemise as the smith’s wife held him fast on a table.
“You will be quiet,” his mother urged. “As silent as a hare hiding from a fox.”
He nodded agreement, not really comprehending. The smith removed the ring from the fire and it was glowing. He was fascinated by the way it had changed, how it looked like a star, but in the shape of his father’s ring.
The smith took it in his smaller tongs, then pressed it into the skin over his heart.
There was pain, radiating consuming pain, and the smell of burning flesh. He opened his mouth, then recalled his mother’s request, choking back the scream that he wanted to make.
The pain.
The burning.
