Emma was a princess—a royal princess—and it had not stricken her as so very odd that a mere Serene Highness would present herself at her father’s court. Was he not called a king from Edinburh to Rome? If anything, she was insulted that Eadgith, Ralf, and the girls had seemed so surprised.
Nevertheless, even Emma was troubled to see a Serene Highness fall to her knees upon the entrance of the Queen.
“Spit it out, Ralf,” Emma said.
“Or swallow it,” Margaret added, “but you’ve been chewing on it long enough.”
“There, my lady! Did you keep this feckless Wyn out of trouble for a while?” Alred tapped Brunhilde’s nose with his finger, leaving a smudge of dirt that would have horrified the tidy little girl if she had been cross-eyed enough to see it.
“He was good,” she sniffed. “Did you win at least?”
Abbot Aelfden heard the bang of the chapel door slamming shut, followed by the small, startled cry of someone unfamiliar with the trickery of its crooked hinges.
He hugged the folded alb against his chest and waited for a moment. He heard nothing, so at last he said loudly, though without shouting, “I’m in the vestry if I’m needed.”
A dark hand had pulled the blankets down her legs and was already pushing her nightgown up.
Eithne woke with a squeak and jerked her legs away, but she could do no more. At once her body went rigid with more than fright. Even her lungs were lost to her; she could breathe, but not on her own. She felt a crushing weight on her chest: an invisible hand working her lungs like bellows.
Eithne’s mind was elsewhere than on her feet, and she nearly walked into her father when she turned the corner.
“Ho!” he laughed. “You’re the one I should have called Cat. We never hear you coming.”
Aelfden let himself fall back against the wall. He could already hear footsteps coming to the door, but he was desperate for even a few seconds of rest. Yet again his work was pushing him to the limits of his strength just when he was already artificially pushing the limits through fasting!
“Oh, Father!” It was not Paul but Osh. “We heard the horse and thought it was… anybody else.”
Father Aelfden looked up at the blank wall and said a brief prayer of thanks—not thanks that he was home, but that he had been granted the strength to make it all the way to the abbey. His body felt oddly hollow, little more than skin stretched over a frame, and his vision was blurred around the edges.
“Oh, Lar,” Dre smiled, “you truly are something of a tease.”
“What—” Lar cried. He recovered quickly enough to finish in a hiss: “—is that supposed to mean?”
“Druze!”
The cry sounded babyish to his own ears—almost like a sob—and it shamed him.
“So kiss me one more time and then go back to your bed like the good girl you are not.”
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