Erika turned from tossing pebbles in the lake to see a short, dark-haired man-at-arms at the top of the bank. She didn’t recognize him, but then, Wyndhurst had so many soldiers, and she would know by sight only those she had traveled with from East Anglia.
“Who are you?”
“Ogden, my lady. Your husband has issued a challenge and would like to speak with you before he fights. He has men searching for you every—”
“Whois he fighting? That Lord Durwyn who masquerades as a thief?”
She was rushing up the embankment too quickly to note the man’s clenched jaw and baleful stare. “Aye, Lord Durwyn,” he answered tightly. “You will have to ride with me. We must make haste.”
Haste? Her heart was already racing. She would have run all the way back to Wyndhurst had it been necessary. And in fact, she did run past Ogden to the waiting horses. Another man stood with them. Still another was already riding hell-bent back toward Wyndhurst, obviously to inform others that she had been found.
“Well, hurry!” she snapped at the two who had been left to escort her, trying to mount one of the animals without assistance.
She was boosted up to the saddle before she had managed it herself, and Ogden mounted behind her. They set out immediately, and at a gallop that matched her state of urgency. She was frantic with dread.Whywould Selig want to speak to her before he fought? Did he think he might not survive? Did he have things to tell her that she had longed to hear, but would be hearing too late?
At the speed they were making, it took only a few minutes for Erika to realize that they weren’t riding toward Wyndhurst. “Where do they fight, if not at the manor?” she turned to ask Ogden.
“We are almost there,” was his only answer.
No sooner had he said it than she saw the camp in the distance. She didn’t bother to wonder why this place on the edge of a woods had been chosen for the challenge. She would find out in moments, and in fact, it was only another minute or so until they burst into the camp, retaining their speed until the last second.
Erika was practically thrown from the saddle, the horse had stopped so abruptly, and then she was tossed down, literally, and just barely caught by one of the men on the ground. When she regained her balance, she started to upbraid her escort, but didn’t get the chance, his orders issuing first.
“Bind her and put her in the pit. I trust you have had time to finish it?”
“’Tis almost done,” replied the man who had caught Erika and was still holding her arms.
“Then that is done enough,” Ogden said. “She is a woman, so it does not have to be as deep as the others, and we cannot take the chance of someone coming by and finding her. See to it immediately.”
Erika tried to jerk loose of the man at her back, but he was a stocky fellow and too strong. His hold only tightened to a painful grip.
“What means this?” she demanded, glaring up at Ogden. “You lied?”
“Only about who sent me to find you. My Lord Durwynwaschallenged, and if your husband cannot be made to retract it for your sake, you die.”
“Is your lord such a coward, then, that he fears to fight in single combat?”
“You jest, lady. I was told your husband is nigh a giant, and a Viking berserker besides. Any man would be a fool to face him in battle.”
It was amazing that she could feel pride in those words even as impotent rage rushed through her. Her being here washerfault, for going down to the hall this morning without stopping by Turgeis’s room to tell him, for leaving Wyndhurst alone, for being so gullible that she had come right along with her kidnappers, had even urged them to hurry—so she could be thrown into a pit. A pit! Odinhelp her, she was afraid theirs would have no resemblance to the one at Gronwood, but would be an actual hole in the ground.
Having said all he intended to, Ogden rode off, back to Wyndhurst, she assumed, to tell his cowardly lord that she had been captured as ordered. And Erika was dragged over to the start of the tree line, where, a few feet beyond, two men were pouring dirt into a crate that another man waited to carry off into the woods to dispose of, thereby leaving no evidence that a hole had been dug.
The pit was there, three feet long by two feet wide. Near it was a plank of wood the same size, and on top of that, the grass that had been carefully cut away from the top of the hole, so that when it was replaced, there would be little or no evidence that a hole was beneath it—or anyone inside it.
“You heard?”
“Aye,” one of the diggers replied, the one standing hip-deep in the hole in the ground.
“Then get out of there,” the man holding Erika said, then called loudly over his shoulder, “I need some rope over here and some thing for a gag.”
Erika fought to keep from trembling. They were going to put her in that pit. There were at least twenty men in that camp. She wasn’t going to get away. And she could conceivably die in that hole if she was never let out.
“You dig pits everywhere you make camp?”
She said it to be sarcastic, to take her mind off her mounting fear, but the one holding hertook her question seriously. “Always. We have found them most useful, and they are never discovered.”
“But how can you dig it so quickly? Your lord just came this morn.”
