Without raising an alarm, he moved through the keep searching for Fayth, but there was no sign of her. Now that the sun was down, there was no way to search the village or the roads.
Dear God, he prayed she was not on the road!
Eudes had left for Huard’s keep not an hour before, and he could not even think about what could happen if the knight came upon her alone. More likely, she was in the chapel speaking with Father Henry. Giles would not be happy that she disobeyed him yet again, but if it was to seek the good priest’s counsel or to give her confession he would not object.
He alerted Brice and they made their way throughout the rest of Taerford Manor, finding no one who could remember speaking to her that day. On circling back to the keep and talking to all the guards, they still could find no sign of her.
Now Giles was really worried. He went back to their chambers and searched again with more candles and Brice’s help. When he realised that the carved wooden casket that she kept her ribbons and other personal belongings in was no longer in her clothing chest, he grew more concerned. But when he found her parents’ betrothal rings on the floor next to the bed, he was terrified for her.
If she’d left him, if Edmund had come for her while she believed her husband would take no action to help Siward and the others, and if she still believed him to be just a heartless Norman lord, she would not have left this behind.
Not willingly.
And while his heart pounded with terror at the thought of losing her, he also fought the fear that she would leave him for Edmund. No, she had said she loved him. Though the thought of a lady such as her loving a bastard knight such as him would have been impossible just months before, now he knew it could happen.
He needed to find her.
Chapter Twenty
Fayth was hungry, tired and hurting.
And her nose itched.
They’d been riding since he’d taken her from Taerford, using every hour of daylight they had to get as far away as possible from Giles. At least her hands were tied in front of her now, and one of Edmund’s men held her before him in the saddle, instead of slung over it.
When she woke to find him in her chambers, Fayth did not know what to do. How he’d managed to get in without being seen, what he hoped to accomplish by his visit, and how he planned on getting out all became clear when the chaos broke out in the yards. Every man in the keep and the yard somehow became involved, either trying to stop the fighting or jumping straight into it. A noisy distraction initiated to cover Edmund’s entrance and their exit from the keep.
But she’d fallen for the worst distraction of all: Edmund claimed to have a witness to Giles’s murder of her father and claiming of his ring. He’d brought a second man in who told of fighting near her father at Hastings and seeing Giles attack and kill him from behind. Then, Giles did not, they said, simply remove the ring, but hacked off her father’s finger to get at it.
Thinking to disprove Edmund’s allegation for good, she retrieved the ring from Giles’s chest and showed it to them. Sure enough the crack the man described was there. But her doubt of the man’s tale must have shown on her face because he began adding details to support his claim, including something that made her only more suspicious—her father’s location during the battle.
She realised, as one of Harold’s vassals, her father would fight with the division from Wessex, nearest to Harold, second only in importance to his housecarls and the shield wall. And Wessex always fought to the left of his standard.
Giles had fought on his duke’s left flank, nowhere near her father’s position.
She knew they suspected she did not believe so she pretended to gather some things together until she could figure out a way to attract attention. Edmund noticed the box he’d made for her, so she began to stuff it in the sack with some clothes. But before she did, she slipped out the rings tied together and dropped them on the floor, pushing them nearer the bed so that Giles could find them.
Hoping he would understand her message, she turned to find the men ready with rope and blankets and, before she could fight them, she was gagged, wrapped, bound and tossed over the other man’s shoulder. With no hopes of being heard over the fighting in the yard, she was spirited away before anyone could notice.
They made a brief stop at the outlaws’ camp she had intended to tell Giles about before continuing on towards the north. She saw some familiar faces at the camp and suspected Edmund did not wish to chance one of them intervening in his plan. When Edmund handed her up to his man, she caught a glimpse of someone who looked like Siward, but that was not possible. That poor man was most likely dead now at Eudes’s hands.
Now, hours and hours later, they drew to a halt in front of a small cottage and she was handed down like a sack of flour. Put on her feet for the first time in too long, she wobbled until she nearly fell. Edmund’s man untied her hands and feet and unwrapped the blankets that held her.
The first thing she did was scratch her nose.
The second thing she did was run.
But the hours without moving her legs had left them painful and a burning ache filled them, making it impossible for her to take more than a couple of steps before she fell to the ground. Edmund picked her up and carried her inside, ducking through the door and placing her on a pallet in the corner. When she had rubbed and shaken the burning out, he handed her a skin of wine and accepted a torch from one of his men.
‘Why, Edmund? Why did you bring me here?’ she asked, trying to figure out where they were. She only knew they were far from Taerford lands. Pushing her hair out of her face, she waited for his explanation. After placing the torch into a holder on the wall, he took the skin and drank from it. Then he crouched down next to her.
‘You are the key to saving my father’s lands and mayhap even his kingdom, Fayth.’
‘I cannot marry you, Edmund.’ She shook her head, not wanting him to consider that as an option at all.
‘I do not plan on marrying you, fair one. I had planned that when I made it alive to Taerford. I thought that holding your lands would be a good place from which to stage our resistance. But now there is someone to whom I have promised you in exchange for the coin and knights we need to push the Normans back.’
The words he’d used had been almost the exact ones Giles had used when explaining the foolhardiness of continuing to support Edmund. She was no more than a foolish woman who saw more in herself than the lands she brought.
