“Oh, my, Maire!” Matilda laughed as she came in with her bag of embroidery beneath her arm. “Aren’t you looking like a raven among these fair birds?”
Maire sat in her hall with Lady Eadgith, Lady Hilda, and Lady Estrid arrayed around her, and she did indeed look dark by comparison.
“Would you mind waiting here?” Egelric asked awkwardly once he and Alred had reached the edge of the clearing. “I think it best that you meet her outside. You should try to avoid standing between her and the door when we go inside.”
“Is she so very shy, Egelric?”
Sigrid sat at the opposite end of the long bench from Estrid, with Synne in between. The latter two girls bickered merrily over the selection of threads for the broad panel they were embroidering, but Sigrid felt herself shut out of this, as she did out of all things. In any case, she would be gone long before the panel was ever hung on the wall.
She had not anticipated any of this.
“Are you letting your hair grow?” Alred asked, squinting closely at Egelric’s head.
“Perhaps I’ve been too occupied to cut it,” Egelric said sheepishly.
“I like the beard,” Sigefrith said approvingly as he came into the hall.
“Oh!” the young knight chuckled and stroked his chin. “A bit of a bother to shave on the road.”
Egelric met Sela soon after sunset, while the sky still glowed with a chill blue-green light that was brightened further by the full moon. He was relieved to find her already waiting for him. They would lose no time.
“Sela, do you like horses?” he asked her after she had greeted him with a long kiss, for which he did not mind losing a little time.
Alred was surprised to find his wife sitting on the couch in their bedroom, alone, in the middle of the afternoon, and without any work to occupy her hands. It reminded him very much of Iylaine, who could sit for hours staring at the wall, and he did not like it. Matilda was even beginning to have the same sort of shadows around her eyes in certain lights. The eerie green glow of the colored windows of the bedroom was one of them.
“Only name what foul dragon has you imprisoned here, my lady, and I shall slay it.”
“What are they doing?” Yware hissed.
Selwyn stepped back into the shadows with him and whispered, “Quit asking me! They’re still talking. They’re still looking at that horse.”
Egelric dismounted at the edge of the forest and tied his horse where it might crop the scrubby grass of the downs. He couldn’t stay long, of course, and he did not like to meet her when the sky still glowed with evening light, but he had to see her before he went home.
He hurried down the deer path that had narrowed again in his month’s absence, down into the clearing whose ferns had grown and then yellowed since he had been away.
Egelric was allowed to step down into the grassy court nearly unmolested, aside from Yware’s attempt to flip up the hem of his kilt as he ran by, but Malcolm was almost tackled by the Prince and the two young pages of the castle, who swarmed him like a pack of yelping dogs. His twin brother had received similar treatment upon arriving at their father’s house, so it was gratifying to Malcolm to be reminded that there were boys who liked him better.
“What are you doing in Father Brandt’s bed?”
“And what are you doing naked in Father Brandt’s room?”
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