The knight was silent for a long moment. She stared at where his fist rested on the table, curled so tightly around his quill she thought he’d snap the shaft. His other hand pushed aside the paper he’d been working on, then grabbed the fresh one she’d pushed away from her.
“Speak, then. I will write.” His voice was hard. Disdain at her, she wondered, for being a lowborn fool? Surely not at Ditmar for wanting a proper wife who kept the old ways.
Either way, she could hardly get out of sending Ditmar a letter, now that the knight had offered to write it himself.
“My Lord Blackfell,” Ayla said slowly. Niel quickly dipped his quill again, then scratched the salutation across the page. Even from upside down, she could see his handwriting was sharp and heavy, the lines angular and not particularly neat. He left a small splotch of ink after the comma. “I am alive,” she continued slowly.
He wrote the words and waited for her to continue.
“...and?” he prompted, when she did not.
“You might add my name,” she suggested charitably.
The knight frowned at her like she was a puzzle.
“You don’t wish to tell your husbandanythingelse? I told you, Lady Blackfell, you may write whatever you wish.”
“Just the name will do.”
His frown deepened.
“I do not know it. Unless you wish me to sign ‘Lady Blackfell.’ I presume he calls you more familiarly than that.”
“I suppose you should put ‘Ayla,’” she offered.
“A-i-l-a-h?” He said each letter like a punch.
“However you like.” She shrugged.
She noted the subtle, exasperated shake of his head, but the big knight bowed his head and quickly scratched her misspelled name.
Then he moved his hand further down the letter and quickly scrawled another line of text, this one much longer than her letter. She squinted, but the text was upside down, messy, and all the way across the table. His hand held the parchment in place, blocking part of her view. Was he writing something that would calm Ditmar, or that would stoke her husband’s rage?
Perhaps, when Ditmar got her back, she ought to throw herself at his feet, fake some tears, and make a grand show of how glad she was to be back in his protection. Perhapsthatwould work, to quell his rage.
The only other plan she could think up was to kill Lord Niel as a means of proving her loyalty. But that seemed impossible. The man was a giant, and a knight. She’d never even butchered an animal before. And what about all his men? If she killed their leader, she might find herself in worse straits than she already was.
When Lord Niel looked up at her she tried her best to appear vacant and glassy-eyed.
“We will exchange demands this afternoon,” he told her.
“You and I?” Ayla asked him, purposefully dull.
His fingers drummed against the table for a moment as he stared at her, studying her. He wasn’t going to find anything there. She stared flatly back, using the same distant expression on him as she did on Ditmar during his rages.
“Yourhusband, and I,” Niel said, very slowly. Good; he thought she was as much of a fool as she was pretending to be. “He will demand his castle back, and likely offer to jail instead of kill me if I agree, which I will not. As I already control his castle, I have decided to ransom you for the horses in the town.”
Ayla blinked at him. Never mind that Ditmar probably valued those horses, which included the ones he and his men had rode out on, more than his wife: was the knight trying to insult her by comparing her value to livestock? She wondered if he was planning to offer more, before learning she was common born, incapable of birthing a child with the magical Hulder old blood most nobles carried traces of, and not even educated enough to sign her own name.
Perhaps Lord Niel thought a string of horses was a generous price.
The knight gave her another exasperated look as she stared vacantly at him. His fingers drummed the table again as the frown on his chiseled face slowly deepened.
“Go, then,” he at last instructed, as if he were annoyed she hadn’t already left.
If the knight had learned nothing, well, neither had Ayla. She prayed Ditmar was slow to ransom her. She was not prepared to face that fury just yet.
Plots and Pastries
