In the Shadow of Midnight

by Marsha Canham

  Her teeth set in a grimace, she pulled another arrow and slotted it to the string. Eduard saw her, saw what she was doing, and was shocked enough to do what the pair of attackers had been unable to manage thus far—he turned his back on one of their swords. Ariel heard Eduard’s shout and fired her arrow just as the swordsman started to lunge with his blade. The steel tip of her arrow caught him just under the hook of his nose, splitting the cartilage and bone, and plowing upward into his skull.

  Eduard whirled, then whirled again, his sword flashing in a deadly arc that cut through his remaining attacker’s wrist, parting flesh and bone, then sliced through the exposed stretch of his throat, severing all but a narrow flap of sinew at the nape. Head and shoulder split apart in a fount of blood, and as the body fell, it sprayed the leaves with a crimson fan.

  Eduard ran over to where Ariel was standing. The bow was still raised to shoulder height, the string was still humming in the sudden, dead silence. Eduard followed her gaze and saw where her third arrow had taken the crossbowman high in the chest, the tip punching through the bullhide armour like a knife through cheese.

  She looked up at FitzRandwulf, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed. She had lost her hat somewhere in the excitement and her hair lay uncoiled over her shoulder in a thick, sleek braid.

  With her heart pounding in her throat, she watched him reach up and unhook the scaled pennyplate camail. His breath had caused spickets of moisture to become trapped in the hammered links and as he lowered the flap, it glittered in folds of burnished silver beneath his jaw. The iced gray coldness of his eyes combined with the harsh, uncompromising lines of his mouth sent the blood rushing through her veins with enough force to bring on a moment of dizziness.

  “The next time I give you an order and you do not obey it,” he snarled, “I will strip a six-foot willow lash and flay such a pattern on your arse, you will be unable to sit for a month.”

  Two stormy spots of colour darkened Ariel’s cheeks. “You are very welcome, my lord. And the next time I see you in ambush, I will indeed sit by and take pleasure in seeing you laid to ground.”

  His eyes narrowed but his retort was lost under the thundering beat of horses’ hooves churning through the woods. Henry and Robin were the first to arrive in the gully. They brought their beasts to a skidding, rearing halt when they saw Ariel and FitzRandwulf standing unhurt by the river, then drew abreast at a slower pace, their swords in their hands, their heads swivelling as they appraised the carnage on the forest floor.

  “Well,” said Henry, “it seems we did not have to hurry back after all.”

  “The four Sparrow counted were dead,” Robin explained breathlessly. “And not too long.”

  “Aye,” Henry nodded grimly. “We must have surprised these curs before they could finish their grisly work. Christ’s blood, how many—?”

  While he took a silent count, moving lips and gauntleted fingers, Sedrick and Lord Dafydd came riding around the bend in the gully, herding the injured forester in front of them.

  He was young for an outlaw, not more than sixteen or seventeen years of age. Long and lanky, his legs accounted for nigh on most of his seven feet of height. Sparrow stalked in his shadow, taking four steps to every one of his, in danger of putting a crimp in his neck from trying to see above the bony shoulders. There was not much to see. The makings of a sparse beard were sprouting over the lower half of his face; the upper was dominated by a pair of deep-set eyes as dark a blue as the midnight sky. His clothes were threadbare, not improved by a vest of matted hare’s fur that stank as badly as it was stitched together.

  The shaft of Eduard’s arrow was stuck through his arm, splintered near the fletching where he must have fallen in his efforts to evade the two pursuing knights.

  Eduard went to each body in turn, checking for signs of life and salvaging the valuable steel arrowheads. At the first body, because the shaft had met no resistance from bullhide or armour, he nudged the corpse onto its side and used his boot to snap the protruding arrowhead free. The next two men were as dead as the first, the eyes wide and staring, offering no protest as Eduard twisted and pried his arrows from their bodies. Robin had already ridden down the gully to retrieve the arrow intact from the trunk of a tree, leaving only Ariel’s last kill for inspection. The arrow was too deeply wedged in flesh and gristle to pull free, and while Eduard debated digging for it, Sedrick and Dafydd arrived by his side.

  Their prisoner had stopped as well, his face grim through the layers of filth, his mouth curled in a sneer as he looked down at his slain comrade.

  “Greedy bastards,” he spat. “I warned them no good would come from ambushing men who wore the Holy Cross. Show me a pilgrim with two coins to rub together, I said, and I’ll show you a monk with ten wives. But no. They were not satisfied with the four fat routiers who were addled enough to build a cook fire in these woods. They wanted more, and so they got it.”

  Eduard was frowning at the gangly youth. The lad had muttered to himself in Saxon English, not a common occurrence in the forests of Normandy. “Where are you from, boy?”

  “England,” was the dry response.

  “Where in England?”

  The midnight blue eyes screwed into wary slits, for FitzRandwulf had addressed him in his own language. “Nowhere a fine Norman pricker like yourself might be acquainted with. ’Tis a small village, though, if it should please you to know. Small and poor and worked by men who are kept half-starved to pay for the king’s follies.”

  “Is that why you have come to Normandy? To make an honest, decent living for yourself?”

  “I was not brought here willingly,” the boy hissed. “I was forced to come, forced to leave my family, with my father a cripple and my mother coughing blood, so the king of soft swords could claim a loyal army behind him. As for wages—” He stopped and snorted disgustedly. “We were paid with strokes of the lash and with such frequent generosity you can be assured we praised our valiant king’s bountifulness nightly.”

  Proud and defiant, he was showing no inclination to guard his tongue, no fear of having it slit from his mouth for uttering treasonous words. He must have assumed he was already a dead man in the eyes of these Norman knights, with nothing to be gained or lost by holding his silence or his contempt.

  “What is your name, boy, and how did you come to be here in the forest, robbing honest pilgrims?” Eduard asked evenly.

  The lad drew himself straight and matched FitzRandwulf’s uncompromising tone. “My name, if it holds such importance to you, is Alan, son of Tom, yeoman of the Dale of Sherwood in Nottingham, and if it will please you to know, I came by way of breaking a guard’s head. Split it in two, I did, for him thinking he could use me like a whore. When he came for me, I butted him, all right, with the top of my head against the top of his. Doubtless the sodomizing bastards would have called it murder, so I cut for the forest—a place I thought I knew well enough.” He paused and gazed about him with a gravely disparaging look on his face. “’Tis not like an English forest, though. The trees here are thin and unfriendly, the ground too hard for a good night’s sleep. As for finding fit companionship—” He gave the corpses another black look. “Faugh! I’ve only been with them a day and a night and look where they have brought me. All I wanted was someone to show me the way home.”

  “Ye didn’t know they were thieves and freebooters?” Sedrick scoffed. “Ye thought they would show ye the way home on the blunt of an arrow?”

  “Aye, well, they might have called themselves bowmen, but there was not one of them who could bung the side of a cart at more than ten paces.”

  Eduard smiled faintly. “Should I presume, then, it was your skill that nearly carried away my ear?”

  The boy hawked and spat. “If I’d wanted your ear, my lord, or the nail on your little finger, I could have had it. Even with a great bloody piece of lumber and iron like that,” he added, indicating the crossbow clutched in the dead man’s hands.

  He was not bragging but ma
king a simple statement of fact, and while Eduard debated whether to be amused or annoyed, Ariel de Glare came up behind them. Having overheard the latter part of the exchange, and understanding enough of the Saxon tongue to follow the gist of the insult, she cast about her with a heavy sigh.

  “Would that your own aim had been better, FitzRandwulf, then we would not have the need to waste valuable time explaining these rogues to the local warden.”

  Sedrick and Dafydd, still on horseback, turned their heads toward her in unison, their helms creaking ominously with the movement. Sparrow sucked in enough air to give a fair impression of a beetle about to explode, while Eduard directed the far less kindly force of his unvisored eyes on her, skewering her as neatly as his arrow had skewered the outlaw’s arm. She realized her blunder at once, of course, letting a name slip when so many precautions had been taken to guard against easy identification. Of secondary import, but equally remiss on her part, was the fact that she had not retrieved her hat or made any attempt to conceal the shocking red proof that she was a woman in squire’s clothing.

  “Since you seem to be so concerned with waste,” Eduard said evenly, “perhaps you could busy yourself by retrieving my arrowhead.”

  Ariel glanced down at the body. From the depth of the shaft, she judged the tip to be lodged between the knuckles of the villain’s spine. Freeing it would probably require some digging and cutting … a job worthy of making the strongest of stomachs turn in revulsion. She looked up at Henry, but saw no mercy in his frown. Sedrick, who could usually be counted on for a soft heart, merely shook his head and muttered something unintelligible under his breath. There was no appealing to Sparrow, who would have emblazoned the scene on a tapestry had he been in possession of needle and thread. Robin was off chasing down the rouncies and Dafydd’s protest was choked back on a cold glance from FitzRandwulf’s steely gray eyes.

  She drew a calming breath and stared down at the body again. If the Bastard was hoping to humiliate her by seeing her weep or run from the task with her stomach spilling into her hands, he was sorely ignorant of the De Clare bloodlines. Squaring her shoulders, she dropped down onto one knee and gave the shaft of the arrow a halfhearted tug, feeling her gorge lurch into her throat as the steel tip grated on two discs of bone.

  Eduard observed for a moment, then turned back to their prisoner.

  “Well, Alan, son of Tom, yeoman of the Dale of Sherwood, think you you could find your way back to England without joining company with any more unlucky villains?”

  The youth looked over suspiciously.

  “Moreover, if we felt inclined to let you keep your eyes and tongue as well as your life, could you give your word not to make me regret denying the carrions another corpse to feed upon?”

  “You would let me go free?”

  “I see no benefit in keeping you. Nor, as has been so sagely pointed out to me, have we the time or energy to waste in finding the local justicar and making endless explanations.”

  “Would it not be easier just to shoot him?” Sparrow asked.

  “Aye, Puck, it would. And we will if he feels we cannot trust his word … and his silence.”

  If the young giant read more into FitzRandwulf’s generous offer than was intended, or if he began to suspect these knights and their “squire” were reluctant to draw any more attention to themselves, he wisely kept silent.

  “Well? Do we have your word?”

  “Aye. If you will take it, then you shall have it.”

  “Go then. I give you your life … and whatever coin you can trade for a fine, twice-tempered arrowhead. It should be more than enough to buy you your way home.”

  The lad glanced down at the arrow stuck in his arm. The fletching dangled by a splinter, which he snapped off and flung aside. With the faintest grunt to mark its passage through, he grasped the barbed arrowhead and pulled the shortened length of ashwood out the back of his arm, gripping it tight for a moment while a shudder of pain passed through him.

  “The one debt will be enough to repay,” he said, placing the bloodied shaft with its valuable steel tip in Eduard’s hand. “And repay it I will, my lord. You have my word on that as well.”

  The erstwhile outlaw touched his hand to a greasy forelock before turning and ambling off down the gully. Although his arm must have been screaming with pain, a thin and merrily whistled tune drifted back through the trees as he made his way into deeper shadows.

  “You are just letting him walk away?”

  Eduard took a firmer grip on his patience before he responded to the disbelieving accusation. Ariel had worked the arrowhead free and was standing behind FitzRandwulf with the dripping trophy clutched in her hand.

  “I thought we had made enough corpses for one day.”

  “But … he knows who you are.”

  “So he does. Not, however, because of anything I have said or done.”

  “He is a murderer; he admitted as much. And a thief. And a traitor to the king.”

  Eduard folded his arms across his chest. “A traitor, is he? For speaking ill of his sovereign? For choosing to boast openly of his contempt for our good king’s methods of winning loyalty. What of the others who have chosen not to obey the king’s will—indeed, who have gone to extraordinary lengths to defy him outright? Are you suggesting there should be one set of laws for those who wear peasant’s rags and another for those who wear ermine? If so, my lady—” He reached up and took Dafydd’s longbow out of his hands and thrust it into hers. “By all means, exact your justice. See, he is still well within range. If you so strongly disagree with my decision, feel free to remedy it yourself.”

  With a parting look of disgust, Eduard started walking back toward the river. He had gone no more than ten broad paces when he heard Henry’s warning shout, followed almost instantly by the distinct twanging of a bowstring. He leaped to one side a split second before a lick of hot air shot past him and thonk-ed into a tree.

  For an inordinately long, throbbing minute, no one moved. Eduard gaped at the tall, slender woman who still stood with her feet braced apart and her body at right angles to the humming longbow.

  “There are many things I may indeed be tempted to remedy, sirrah,” she said through her teeth, “beginning with your manners. A mistake was made; I will be the first to admit it. It was made the moment I trusted myself into your care.”

  Ariel cast the bow aside and stormed past the dumbstruck knight, unmindful of the dirt and leaves she kicked up in her anger. Eduard stared intently after her, his face ruddy, his eyebrows drawn together in a single, unbroken line. A small vein in his temple was beating furiously. His fists curled and uncurled, and there was a distinctly menacing gleam in his eyes.

  Lord Henry leaned forward and draped his forearm over the front of his saddle. “In case I neglected to mention it, my sister tends to react poorly to anyone who treats her as if her head is filled with nothing but twattle and birdsong. It makes for an unfortunate lesson for any man who tries to tame her.”

  “Be assured I have no wish to tame her,” Eduard replied tautly. “Only to severely hamper her abilities to walk and talk. As for warnings, you would do well to issue one to her, for the next time she dares to raise a weapon to me … it will be the last.”

  Chapter 11

  When the sun set that evening it pulled a heavy layer of cloud across the skies behind it, blotting out the sunset, shrouding the forest in a chilling mist. FitzRandwulf had decided, with so many dead bodies littering the road behind them, it would be best to keep riding well into the darkness, but when the mist became a fog and the fog a heavy downpour too solid to see past a horse’s nose, they followed the sound of a droning monastery bell and begged shelter under the roof of the almonry.

  Sedrick had refused to leave the perfectly good and fully cooked haunch of venison behind, and it was partly due to the savoury aroma accompanying them that they were readily admitted so late after dark. The monks accepted their explanation of having come across poachers in the woo
ds, and were in solemn agreement that it would have been a waste to leave such a fine roast to rot.

  It was deemed best to keep Ariel’s gender hidden from the monks, thereby relieving the good fathers of any responsibility they might feel to mention there had been a woman travelling in the company of the knights. Since it would have seemed odd to request a separate sleeping cubicle for a mere squire, Ariel found herself sequestered in the same large pilgrim’s hall offered as shelter for the men.

  The hall was long and narrow, the stone walls holding in a dampness that was unrelieved by the two tallow candles supplied by the spartan monks. A double row of low pallets lined each side of the chamber; over their heads, the arched beams of the roof glowed like the yellowed ribs of some decaying skeleton. There were only two windows, neither more than slits in the wall, and a single vaulted doorway, the height of which would have made Sparrow seem tall.

  Sparrow, by his own choice, elected to remain in the forest for the night, preferring the company of owls, he claimed, to pointy-faced doomsayers who spent their days toiling on their knees and their nights counting sins.

  At least the pilgrim’s hall was dry, and, when Sedrick scrounged wood to build a fire, it would be warm. In the meantime, the air was rank with the smell of sodden wool and wet armour. Ariel stood shivering off to one side and watched in forlorn silence as the men divested themselves of their hauberks and chausses, then shrugged their heavy gambesons blissfully aside. She was just as wet and dank-smelling as the others. In their three full days of travel, she had not had an opportunity to undress completely or to steal a decent wash. Her skin flamed with rashes in a dozen places, some of them too private to earn even the briefest reprieve from a good scratching.

  Not once since leaving Chateau d’Amboise had anyone deigned to inquire after her comfort. Henry had undoubtedly assumed she would complain if she had cause. Sedrick and Dafydd had already seen her travel from Pembroke to Normandy with ease and would not suppose this travail would pose any greater hardships. It would not occur to them that she had chosen her own clothes on the initial journey, or that none of them had been coarse or confining, none encrusted with filth or infested with lice. She had worn soft chamois leggings and fine linen camlet next to her skin. She had not been strapped and buckled into garments designed to make the simple task of tending to body functions an exercise in frustration. The hose alone were a nightmare. A maid had initially helped bind her into the innumerable leather points that held the hose snug to the tops of her thighs, seemingly with an easy twist of the fingers. But the art of unfastening and tying them properly again had eluded Ariel, and her handiwork had begun to sag more obviously and more comically each passing day. And the byrnie … ! Buckles that were double-looped and twice bound? They were impossible contraptions, invented by the French and fostered on the Normans in the true spirit of vindictiveness.