Are you certain he’s dead? Hit him again.
“Oh, I will be certain, Judith,” Piers muttered aloudas he climbed the last hillock leading up to the ruin. “I will be quite certain he is dead.”
Alys passed the lonely, still time at the Foxe Ring by alternately crying and shivering on the fallen-down slab of rock in the center of the ring. She fancied that perhaps it had long ago been used for pagan sacrifices, and she thought how fitting the idea was as gooseflesh overtook her. She was offering herself up this night, partly in faith, partly in desperation.
Her newly acquired monkey now kept residence with her other quickly gathered possessions inside the drawstring sack, snuggled up against Alys’s belly. She’d packed a spare amount of clothing, food, and miscellany for herself and the monkey, quite certain that the two of them were hardy enough to spend as many as three nights at the ruin—long enough for Sybilla to feel the shameful pinch of what she’d done and apologize.
But now Alys cried more out of self-pity than anger at her sister. ‘Twas dreadfully cold—much colder than it had seemed when she’d departed Fallstowe through the herders’ gate. And much colder than she could ever remember being while scurrying about the bailey with her friends in her disobedience to Sybilla. Alys suspected she’d never really felt the cold then because she had no reason to fear it. There was always a warm, comfortable shelter only steps away from wherever she chose to adventure and she’d never given a thought to the idea that she might be unable to retreat to a warm haven once she’d felt the desire.
She felt like a fool. Like the child Sybilla accused her of being. And so she also cried because she knew she would not last longer than morning at the ruin. She wouldreturn to Fallstowe once the gates were open for the day, defeated, humiliated, and likely with Sybilla never even knowing Alys had spent a cold, lonely night at the old keep. Her defiance had been for naught. Her will, weak. Perhaps simple, watery, whispery Clement Cobb was her ideal match, after all.
The sack shifted and a small hand poked out of the drawn opening. Alys rose to sit on one hip while she liberated her pet.
“I’ll wager you won’t like it out here any more than in there,” she said ruefully, pushing the sack aside as the monkey clambered up her chest. “‘Tis colder than Sybilla’s frozen heart.”
The monkey clung to Alys’s bodice with warm hands and feet, and tucked its head under her chin.
Alys sniffed and then sighed. “What are we to do then, little monkey?” She paused, tucked her chin to look down at the small, pink face. “Hmm. I can’t continue calling you Monkey, now can I? ‘Tis what that dreadful, nasty, ugly witch called you. Let’s have a good look at you.”
Alys held the animal away from her for a moment, liking the way it curled itself around her hands. “From the Holy Lands, are you? A girl,” she mused, tucking the animal back into her body when it leaned that way. And perhaps because of her melancholy, Alys called to mind a sad romance from Persia itself, overheard while listening outside the soldiers’ garrison.
“How do you fancy ‘Layla’?” Alys asked the monkey, feeling very much like old Graves who only ever spoke in questions. The monkey didn’t try to bite her, so she took that as agreement. “Very well, then. You shall hereby be known as Layla. A fine choice, and my congratulations to you.”
That important detail resolved, Alys now appraised thering of stones tossed seemingly haphazardly around her, trying to keep her mind off of the incessant shivering of her body. Still no heavenly glow from any of the towering gray pillars, no ethereal music, no shimmering voice of wisdom calling to her through the ages, heralding the arrival of her true love.
The fabled Foxe Ring was no magic place, after all. Yet another thing Sybilla had been right about. Alys had been in the very center of the frigid circle for ages it seemed, the moon lighting her like a beacon, and the only visitor she’d received was some sort of nocturnal animal scurrying out of sight in the ruined keep’s interior.
It seemed everyone in the land had either tried the Foxe Ring, or knew someone who’d used it, as a last desperate act to find love, and all the stories had told of its wise success. Men and women, brought together alone within the circle of standing stones upon a full moon were fated for a lifetime of love together. So respected was the belief that many couples who met in the Foxe Ring never even bothered with an official ceremony. They entered the ring alone, but they departed a couple, for the rest of their lives and even into eternity, if the tales were to be believed fully. The ring had brought her own mother and father together, and so Alys did believe, God help her foolish, girlish heart.
But for Alys, it was a failure. Or perhaps ‘twas she who had failed. Perhaps the stones felt her unworthy of a magical, forever union. Or perhaps Clement Cobb and old Lord John Hart were simply the only two remaining eligible men in the whole of England. Any matter, Alys couldn’t so much as slink back to Fallstowe to crawl into her own bed at this hour—she’d be forced to beat at the gates for someone to admit her, and her pride could not tolerate another stiff blow this night. Better to sneak backin with the sun, and simply avoid meeting with her future husband for as long as Sybilla would allow.
“Alys Cobb, Lady of Blodshire,” she said aloud, and then pretended a retching sound. “Horrid.”
Alys reached for her sack with one hand and plumped the contents. Then she lay down on her side once more, snuggling Layla into her midsection and cushioning the monkey with her arms. She pulled her cloak around them both, flicked up her hood with one finger, and then rubbed her face against Layla’s soft hair. Her nose was numb. She closed her eyes lest they begin to leak once more.
There was a girl sleeping inside the ruin.
A golden haired girl, lit up with moonlight until it seemed to Piers that she glowed. Asleep on a cold slab of rock as if it was her royal fairy bed, her hood shielding all but a sliver of her creamy face and a single, thick lock of yellow hair trapped beneath her cheekbone.
He closed his eyes tightly, took a deep breath, and then looked again.
He blew out his breath in a weak huff. She was still there.
Piers’s eyes narrowed and he quickly looked around the standing stones and over both shoulders, even spinning around to take on any would-be attackers. He had gained enough experience in brawling for coin that his instincts for ambush were sharper than most men’s. Piers knew there was almost no level too low for an opponent to sink to when a heavy purse was the wager.
But no, he was alone, standing just outside the ring, looking at the enchanting golden girl asleep on the stone slab.
Perhaps the final blow from Bevan had rattled Piers’s brains irreversibly—by all that was holy, his head still hurt like the very devil, the healing wounds itching on his butchered scalp. There could be little other explanation for the girl’s presence save madness. Certainly she wasn’t a fairy—there couldn’t be fucking fairies on Fallstowe lands. That was absurd. And he couldn’t see any wings, any matter.
Piers recognized that he was debating the existence of a mythical woman-creature in an unlikely area of England, as if there were other regions more hospitable for the fey. This disturbed him enough so that he squared his shoulders and stepped into the ring fully, determined to either discover the woman’s origin, or jump entirely over the farthest edge of insanity.
The atmosphere within the standing stones seemed oddly thick, and Piers didn’t think it was his imagination. Warmer here, too, although the fallen and standing stones—most two yards wide and twice that tall—were no shelter from the now burst open, sparkling sky. Piers hadn’t noticed the clouds disappearing, but now the moonlight seemed to rival the very sun in its brightness. He reached up to the cowled neck of his borrowed monk’s robe and pulled it away from his skin. He was starting to sweat.
“Ho there,” he called out, dismayed at the timid whisper that barely stirred the air in front of his face.
Her arms, crossed in front of her bosom and covered by her cloak, shifted.
Piers moved slowly to the stone slab, until he stood over the woman. She seemed very small to Piers. Curled on her side, the toes of her dainty slippers peeked out from beneath the hem of her fur-lined cloak, and he fancied he could scoop her up from the slab with one swipeof his arm. The tips of her profile—browbone, nose, lips, chin—seemed like polished ivory in the moonlight, and her dark lashes rested on her cheeks like the smallest black under feathers of a tiny bird. He shrugged out of his pack and let it slide soundlessly to the ground.
