She knelt close to Zander’s hip, with their hands grasped on his stomach. Even thus, wounded and in pain, he looked magnificent. His dark, wavy locks now hung with damp, and his pallor worried her, but his eyes gazed into hers with warmth and humor.
Angus returned and knelt again. Elinor glanced over and almost swooned. He carried a knife by a cloth-wrapped hilt, its blade red hot from time in the fire outside.
“Must you?” she asked, almost crying while she imagined the pain.
“He must,” Zander said. “Better a burn than the corruption that might start. Now look me in the eyes, pretty Elinor, so I have visions of heaven and not hell.”
She looked deeply in his eyes, and refused to watch Angus. She knew when the knife touched flesh, however. She smelt it, and saw for a second how all the lights in Zander’s eyes died, buried in a kind of horror that terrified her. Then the hot flames returned, the angry ones. While the stench from the knife continued, he grabbed her with his right arm and pulled her roughly down to his chest and kissed her hard, furiously. She felt his gritting teeth beneath her lips.
Then it was over. Angus knelt back on his heels. Zander’s whole body went slack, and he slowly transformed into the Zander she knew.
Angus gathered the bloody cloths and left the tent, closing the flap behind him. Zander still clutched her hand.
“You were very brave,” he said.
“I did nothing.”
“You did not get all womanish and weepy, or faint.”
“You were the one who was brave.”
“You helped that part of it.”
“It was all the talk, how you defeated him. He is well known as a great champion. He never loses, it was said.”
“From the looks of his arms, he rarely does.” He glanced to where plate and arms rested. “I think I will keep them. If he never loses, he has many more.”
Light suddenly sliced through the tent’s space. “Sir!” a young voice cried.
“Welcome, Harold. Good of you to visit.”
“I came as fast as I could, sir.”
“Well, it is a long way from those little tents near the river.”
Elinor looked over her shoulder to see a youth of perhaps six and ten blushing beneath his sandy hair.
Zander did not look in that direction at all. “Leave us, Harold. Find Angus and see if he needs help washing those cloths.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Harold—Don’t go catching the pox with one of those whores. I don’t want your mother complaining to my lord that I did not guard your soul sufficiently.”
“Yes, sir.”
The light disappeared, leaving them in the shadows again.
“Perhaps you should guard his soul better,” she said. “You all but gave him permission.”
He shrugged. “Squires practice at many things.”
“Did you? When you left Sir Morris’s hall, is that where you went?”
“Never. I was as chaste as the castle priest.”
They both laughed since the castle priest had been most unchaste.
He cocked a small grin at her. “Don’t you need to return to your father?”
