“Why, Sigefrith! I was coming to tell you how we might cheer up our old friend Egelric, and I find a man who looks to need a little cheering up himself. What ails the old beast?”
Sigefrith smiled ruefully up at him. “I don’t suppose you want to talk about that.”
“Alred!” Matilda said mournfully.
Alred looked up from his accounts. “What is this sorrowful face that must needs be kissed at once?” he asked as he rose.
“My, my, old man—you’re in a merry mood this morning,” Alred said as Sigefrith strolled in, whistling a jaunty tune.
Sigefrith picked up his sword and shield. “You had better beware, old man, for I feel like a fifteen-year-old today.”
Sigefrith cracked a twig from a nearby branch and twisted it idly in his hands as he followed Colban down the path to the garden. He had not lived long enough at the castle for the garden to have become indissociable from Maud, and so he was one of the few people who still came there, although only at the request of Colban. He lacked the imagination necessary to believe in ghosts, in any event.
“Slow down, Cubby!” he called as the boy rounded the corner at a run and disappeared behind the wall. Colban was not the ball of fire that Britamund was, but he still had more energy than many children of nearly four, and Sigefrith was particularly exhausted from his baby son’s frequent nighttime awakenings.
“Alred!”
A soft voice was calling him, and a pair of light, slippered feet were running after him. He smiled to himself before he turned. Wouldn’t it be something to be fifteen again?
Her husband’s horse had not been in his stall when Edris came home, so she was surprised to see the door to his study cracked open when she climbed the steps in the tower. He always kept that door locked when he was away.
But just as she laid her hand on the knob, she noticed him sitting at his desk.
“Good afternoon, ladies!” Alred beamed. “Edris, I wasn’t hoping to see you until this evening. Today I count myself fortunate.” He kissed her hand and kissed Matilda’s cheek and then pulled up a chair beside his wife. “Am I interrupting anything important?”
“Yes!” Matilda said. “We were talking about babies.”
“Let me see,” Brede whispered.
“No no no,” Estrid repeated, and she embraced him tightly, trapping his hand between the two of them—not a disagreeable place to have it, but it did put a halt to his attempts to open the front of her gown.
Lily slowed as she reached the edge of the woods. There was a field to cross, and then she would have to slip between the wall and the back of a barn before reaching the garden. This was the hardest part.
She licked the tip of her nose and then trotted anxiously along the edge of the field. The earth had been recently harrowed and lay half-hidden beneath a sparkling mist. It was difficult, dangerous going. If a dog came after her as she crossed the field…
“Llen is a turd.”
“If turds could somehow instill both fear and phowar, then I would 100% agree with that statement.”
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