“But if I turn you away,” he said over her words, “‘tis likely you’ll only give away our place.”
“I wouldn’t,” Alys insisted. “I couldn’t find it myself—I have no idea where we are, where the road is, the river. I’m completely lost.”
“Think you I believe your lies,lady?”he spat nastily. “I can’t ken why you’d be with a commoner such as the man who lies above us but I would wager that it’s not but for your own greedy gain.”
“I love him,” Alys said. She hadn’t intended the confession, but there it was, and it was true. She wanted to tell Ira that Piers was her husband, but if Ira asked Piers, in his current state of delirium—and even once he was completely clearheaded—he would likely only deny her. “I’ve held my tongue in thanks for the aid you are giving us, but it is grossly unfair the horrid things you assume about me, simply because of my birth. You know me not, Ira.”
“I know enough of your kind,” he said, as if she were a terrible poison. “And a young woman run off from her rich family can only mean so many things.” He looked her up and down and Alys wanted to cringe. “Have his child in your belly, do you?”
“No!” Alys said, horrified. Her skin crawled with stinging heat.
Ira’s eyes narrowed and then he chuckled. “No? Perhaps not. But, surrounded by limp lords as you are, ‘tis likely what you love about him is in his breeches, you noble whore.”
Alys struck him. Ira’s old face snapped to the side with her sharp blow, but when his head came round again, his whole body followed. He grabbed Alys by her upperarms, his gnarled fingers biting into her sore muscles. Layla jumped screeching to the ground, and Ira began marching away from the tree, pushing Alys backward in front of him while she struggled and flailed and tried not to drop Piers’s pack.
“Let go of me!”
Ira approached the swell of ground that sloped away from where their village hid and then shoved her over, grabbing Piers’s pack in the last instant. Alys windmilled her arms before falling and tumbling down the slight grade, Layla scampering through the leaves after her.
Alys slid to a stop on her side, her hips and back already weeping pain from her encounter with the old man’s snare. Layla scurried nimbly over to her and crouched behind her body. Alys looked up the hill to where Ira glared down at her, and eight or so of the wood people from deeper in the village had come to flank him. They stared down at her with blank faces, as if they were not at all surprised to see her there or by Ira’s treatment of her.
“Hah!” Ira growled and flung his hand at her as if he was shooing away a troublesome dog. Piers’s bag was already slung over one of the old man’s bony shoulders. “Get you from here,whore,”he emphasized. “Dare you not return, else I break with the oath I swore my father and kill a woman.” The old man turned and disappeared from the brink of the hill, while the wood people filled in the void of his presence, all still staring at her and none of them speaking.
“Are none of you going to help me?” she demanded, astounded.
No one so much as flinched.
Alys wanted to lay her numb face on her frozen forearms and simply cry. She felt as though she were living in a nightmare, lost in a dangerous wood, starving, injured,and surrounded by rough social deviants who now had possession of a very ill and helpless Piers, not to mention his precious ring. No one would listen to her, no one would help her.
Her brow lowered.
Alys pushed herself to stand with her palms—sore and reddened from the cold and her death grip on the branch from earlier. She stared right back at the wood people while she snapped her fingers at Layla, calling the monkey to her shoulder. Alys began to climb the hillock in stuttering strides, one arm flailing out to the side for balance, the other clutching her bag at her hip. Layla clung to her like a barnacle.
When she reached the lowly summit, the wood people gave way for her to stand. She looked around at their faces, blowing hair out of her face. Her stomach was in a knot, but she was not about to let this group of people see her fear.
“Which way did he go?” she asked.
A middle-aged looking man pointed a leather clad arm toward the tree the brothers had climbed with Piers. Alys glanced at the double rope ladders hanging down and then back at the cluster of faces appraising her interestedly.
“None of you will try to stop me?”
“Why should we?” the man asked mildly. “You want to get tossed out of a tree …” He crossed his arms, shrugged. “Your neck.”
Alys squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “Thank you.” She began marching toward the dangling ladders as if approaching a battlefield.
“She’s really going up there,” Alys heard the man say to his companions, as if he couldn’t believe her brazenness.
“Child, wait!” a woman’s voice called from behindAlys, but she kept walking. She would not be turned away from the one thing in her life that was important, that mattered more than anything ever had. Piers. If she had to physically fight the old man, she would.
“Child!” Alys’s elbow was seized and she was pulled to a halt by a woman perhaps ten years her senior, with rich brown hair partially hidden by her hood, and eyes with kind tridents at their corners. The woman hesitated and looked askance at Layla for an instant. “Don’t go above. When Ira’s in a temper, he’s apt to say and do aught which he heartily regrets come the morrow.”
“My—” Alys again wanted to say husband, but she was unsure how the wood people would take her declaration. Would they then mark Piers as related to nobility and turn him away? “My friend is very ill, and he is up there alone with strangers, including one very mean old man, who has stolen a bag not belonging to him.”
“Your friend is in fine, fine hands. No better than Linny’s for a thousand fathoms,” the woman insisted, her grip gentling, but becoming more insistent all the same. “Ira is not a bad man, and if he’s taken your friend to Linny, no harm will come to him or his possessions by hand of those who dwell here.” The woman seemed to hesitate and then asked, “Did he fall?”
Alys shook her head. “No. It’s a fever.”
“God have mercy! Was he cut? Bitten?”
