Highland Legend

by Kathryn Le Veque

  Still, she had to discover the truth.

  She had to go home.

  It was a bright morning outside, promising to be a warm day. Since she’d dirtied one of the sheets from the day before when she fell on it, she dragged it outside to wash again. Lucia was already outside with both infants, and she joined Diantha as the woman prepared to wash the sheet again. Diantha learned that Isabail wasn’t feeling well, but it was still a morning of laughter and conversation, just her and Lucia. As the morning waned, the infants grew restless and Lucia took them indoors for a nap.

  That left Diantha alone, but she didn’t mind. She put the linen sheet up on a branch so it could dry and headed back to the cottage to see if there was anything else that needed washing. She also found herself taking a look at the cottage itself. It was made from stone with window frames of wood and a sod roof. She didn’t think it needed repairs or cleaning from the outside, but she leaned in one of the window frames, peering at what she thought was a crack.

  And that’s when she saw it.

  A big black-and-yellow bumblebee.

  There were wildflowers growing around the cottage, and nearly everywhere else in the Ludus Caledonia this summer season, and she noticed a big bumblebee on the ground, lying on its back. Its legs were flailing about, showing its panic about being on its back.

  Diantha was a lover of all living creatures, even those that could sting. As a child, she’d had pet lizards and tame birds, even a pet goat. Her father had called their home la casa de fieras, or the menagerie, because she collected so many creatures. Therefore, a bumblebee on its back warranted her sympathy.

  Crouching down, she took a stick and gently flipped it over.

  The little bee began to crawl around frantically, and as she studied it, she could see that it was missing a wing. It couldn’t fly. She tried to get it to crawl onto the stick so she could put it back in the flowers, but it kept crawling in her direction. Timidly, she put her hand down to it and it promptly crawled upon one of her fingers.

  “My poor little friend,” she murmured in Spanish. “It seems that you are injured.”

  The bee seemed quite happy on her fingers. Diantha watched him for a few minutes, speaking softly to him as one did to tiny creatures, before putting him onto one of the wildflowers around the cottage. With her little friend safely on a yellow bloom, she headed back into the cottage to reconnoiter for more laundry.

  Finding nothing left, she made her way up to the kitchen by the vegetable garden, bringing back the iron pot and having it filled with a delicious-smelling soup made from smashed peas and carrots. She collected more bread, some cheese, a jug of watered ale, and took it all back to the cottage for Magnus when he returned.

  As the day peaked and the afternoon set in, Diantha did more sweeping and cleaning, including the ashes out of the hearth. When she went back outside, she noticed that her bumblebee friend had fallen from his bloom, so she brought him inside with a few flowers for nourishment and put him in a bowl on the windowsill.

  With the bee tended to, she straightened out the pallet that Magnus had slept on. She felt guilty about taking his bed last night, wondering why he should choose to sleep on the floor when he had a perfectly good mattress waiting for him. Surely it had been temporary madness.

  Or chivalry.

  The thought made her smile. Though she didn’t know what was going on in his head, she knew what was going on in hers. That arrogant warrior with the hidden heart who charmed an arena full of people last night had her interest.

  She couldn’t deny it.

  Emerging from the cottage to shake out the broom, she caught sight of Magnus as he headed in her direction.

  ***

  The flowers grew everywhere.

  Lor said that women liked flowers, and there were bushels of them along the edges of the Fields of Mars. White, purple, yellow—many kinds. His friends told him to be kind and sweet, and Magnus saw those flowers as his opportunity. Perhaps he would give their suggestions a try because, after all, they had wives. They knew what he didn’t.

  He was in uncharted territory.

  Leaving Lor and Bane and the rest of them going through some exercises in the staging area, Magnus headed back to his cottage to sleep for a few hours before the bouts that night, but not before he picked a giant bouquet of wildflowers for Diantha. It was a warm day and the winds had picked up a little, coming in off the sea to the east.

  Strange how he’d never really noticed things like that before—the brightness of the day, the beauty of the landscape. But he was noticing them now. The world looked beautiful in a way he’d never noticed before.

  Inside, he felt…happy.

  He was going to see Diantha again.

  With thoughts of her on his mind, he was halfway through the warriors’ village when he realized that people were giving him strange looks. It occurred to him that he was parading through the village with a giant bouquet of flowers and looking like a fool. He didn’t look like the fearsome warrior with the fearsome reputation. Everyone he passed looked at him oddly to the point where he was so embarrassed that he tossed the flowers aside.

  But that didn’t solve the problem.

  With the wind whipping up, one of the flowers blew up behind him and stuck in his hair, so as he was closing the distance toward his cottage, he had a yellow daisy sticking up out of the back of his head. Now, people were looking at him and laughing, and he had no idea why. It got to the point where he was starting to scowl at people, who quickly averted their gazes, but somehow, he could feel them laughing behind his back.

  Lor and his stupid suggestion of flowers!

  Magnus’s cottage was ahead on the rise. He could see Diantha outside, smacking a broom against the side of the cottage. Puffs of dirt flew into the air, disappearing in the breeze. She turned around and caught sight of him, and he would never forget the expression on her face. Something between surprise and delight.

  Was it possible she was actually glad to see him?

  He was sorry that he’d tossed away the flowers.

  “Buenos días,” she said. “That means ‘good day.’”

  He couldn’t help the smile on his lips as he closed the distance between them. “Good day,” he said. “Busy, I see.”

  She nodded eagerly. “More cleaning, more washing,” she said, but her gaze was inevitably drawn to his head. “And may I say that you are looking quite lovely today.”

  He frowned. “What do ye mean?”

  Reaching up, she plucked the flower from his dark hair, her eyes twinkling at she showed it to him. Magnus took one look at it and rolled his eyes.

  “So that’s why everyone was looking at me strangely,” he said. “I had a weed in my hair.”

  She laughed softly. “I think it looked rather pretty.”

  He ran his hand up the back of his head just to make sure there were no more green stragglers.

  “Then put it in yer hair,” he said. “It’ll look better.”

  She did, tucking it behind one ear, and Magnus thought it was about the sweetest thing he’d ever seen. “Like that?” she asked.

  A smile played on his lips as he looked at her. “Like that.”

  He wanted to say more to her, but he wasn’t sure what, exactly, to say. Lor had told him to tell her she was lovely, and he thought he had. Sort of. He told her the flower would look better on her, hadn’t he? But he wasn’t sure what more he needed to say and it made him nervous. In a desperate bid to change the subject, he pointed to the broom.

  “I thought ye did the cleaning yesterday,” he said.

  Diantha was still smiling as she looked at the broom in her hand. “Oh, I know,” she said. “I did quite a bit of it, but there is always something more to sweep or clean. Truthfully, I am enjoying it immensely.”

  “Are ye?”

  She nodded, tendrils
of dark hair in her eyes. “At Culroy, all we did was sit around and watch each other sing or paint or dance,” she said. “Did you know that about Lady Ayr? She never believed in labor for noblewomen. We could only have refined interests, which is why I can read and write so well. When I wasn’t reading, I was writing.”

  “Oh?” he said, warming to the conversation quickly. “What did ye write?”

  She shrugged bashfully. “Poems, mostly,” she said. “Sometimes memories of my life at Santacara. I even wrote a story once.”

  “What about?”

  “A little Roman boy from the Roman ruins at Santacara,” she said. “He lost his dog and set out with his friends to find it.”

  “Did he?”

  She grinned. “He did,” she said. “A terrible woman had stolen the dog and refused to give him back, so the little boy and his friends outsmarted her. Confidentially, the woman in my story was a duchess with a mean husband.”

  She meant like Lady Ayr and he chuckled. “Good on ye,” he said. “She deserved it.”

  Diantha laughed, a tinkling sound that set Magnus’s heart to racing. “She did, indeed,” she said. “She deserved that and much more. But Lady Ayr aside, are you hungry? I have food inside if you are.”

  He was but mostly he was just glad to see her again. Each day found her more charming than the last.

  “I can eat,” he said. “Will ye eat with me?”

  Diantha nodded. “I will,” she said, gathering the broom and heading for the door. “I thought that I might ask the cooks here to teach me how to cook. Do you think that is a good idea?”

  She pushed open the door, entering, and he followed close behind. “If ye wish it,” he said, shutting the cottage door. “But I told ye that I dunna expect ye tae cook for me.”

  “I know,” she said, setting the broom aside. “But I would like to learn. One should never stop learning, you know. There is always something new to know.”

  He sat down at the table as she went over to the hearth, stirring something in the pot over the low flame.

  “I suppose that is true,” he said. “That is why I train every day. It keeps my skills sharp, but sometimes I learn something new. But dunna tell the others. I dunna want them tae think they can teach me anything.”

  She snorted. “Is that where you went this morning? To train?”

  He nodded, realizing there was a pitcher of watered ale on the table, and he poured himself a cup. “Aye,” he said, smacking his lips after taking a drink. “That is what every warrior at the Cal does, every morning. We train.”

  Diantha began spooning the thick pottage into bowls. “Is it permissible to watch you train?”

  “If ye wish.”

  She nodded. “I would like to,” she said. “I find it fascinating to watch you fight. And as I watched you last night, I realized something.”

  “That I am the greatest fighter ye’ve ever seen?”

  She grinned. “That is true,” she said. “But I realized something else.”

  “What?”

  “That there is great strategy involved.”

  He leaned back in the chair, a lazy smile on his face. “Lass, that’s most of the battle,” he said. “I can be the strongest man in the world, but that’s not going tae win over brains.”

  She approached the table, setting the soup bowls down—one in front of him, one in front of her. “I saw that last night,” she said. “That man you were fighting in your last bout was twice your size. He was big and mean and angry. But you used your head and not your brawn when you defeated him.”

  Magnus dug into the pottage with gusto. “I had no choice,” he said, mouth full. “The man was going tae kill me, so I had tae be smarter—and faster—than him.”

  She looked up from her soup, watching him as he shoveled food into his mouth. “You knew he was going to kill you?”

  “Aye.”

  He didn’t seem concerned about it and she couldn’t understand why. “Didn’t your commanders know?” she asked. “And they still let him fight you?”

  Magnus shrugged. “Of course they did.”

  “But why?”

  “Because they knew I could defeat him.”

  Diantha thought about that, but she realized that she didn’t like any of it. Magnus was allowed to fight against a man who wanted to kill him? What if he had succeeded?

  What if she had witnessed it?

  The thought made her shudder. She had been excited to watch the games again tonight, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  “Will he be back tonight?” she asked. “To fight you again, I mean.”

  He glanced at her as he tore up a loaf of bread. “Nay,” he said after a moment, handing her the soft, white middle. “He willna be back.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “That is good,” she said, visibly relieved. “But there are more fights tonight, correct?”

  He nodded. “Four nights a week,” he said. “After tonight, there will be two days of rest before the next fight night.”

  Since Magnus wasn’t fighting that beast of a man tonight, Diantha felt a little better about it. She settled down to her meal.

  “What do you do on the days you are not fighting?” she asked.

  “Train.”

  “Do you always train?”

  He nodded. “I do,” he said. “Tae be the best, you must work at it.”

  “There is nothing else you do?”

  “Nothing else.”

  She took a sip of her soup before replying. “You said you wanted to travel,” she said. “Do you not want to go places and see things when you have time away from fighting?”

  “There is not enough time to do that in just a few short days.”

  “But you think about it?”

  He was halfway finished with his soup, now dipping bread into it and taking big bites. “Mayhap a wee bit,” he said. “But the time for travel is not now. The time now is for work. It sounds strange, but when I was first released from Culroy, I felt…lost. Lost until the Ludus Antonine gave me a sense of belonging. It gives me a sense of security, of purpose. This is my home. My friends and I were speaking about it today—we are a clan. We are brothers, if not in blood, in spirit. It is the time now tae be with them.”

  She understood what he was saying, in theory. “I envy you,” she said. “I do not belong to anyone or anything, which is why I immediately started working here. I need that sense of purpose, too. I want to feel as if I belong, at least for the time I am here. That reminds me… Have you asked around to see if anyone wants to learn to read and write?”

  He sopped up the last of his soup with the bread. “Not yet,” he said. “But I will.”

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling. He was almost done with his food so she jumped up, taking his bowl away. “Let me bring you more.”

  He waved her off. “Not now,” he said. “I am going tae sleep a few hours before the bouts tonight. I’ll eat a little when I awaken.”

  She nodded, setting the bowl aside so she could rinse it out. Magnus was finishing off the last of his watered ale when he noticed the bowl with flowers in it. Then he noticed the crippled bumblebee. Setting his cup down, he peered into the bowl.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  Diantha went over to him, standing next to him as he took the bowl from the ledge. “That is my new friend,” she said proudly. “He is missing a wing and cannot fly. I put him in the bowl so he would not be eaten by birds.”

  As Magnus watched, she put her hand into the bowl and the bumblebee climbed into her palm, scooting around. Magnus leaned over, watching the bee as he moved around.

  “And he doesna sting ye?” he asked, incredulous.

  She grinned. “Nay,” she said. “I think he likes being in my hand. It is warm and comforting.
I think he likes me.”

  Magnus watched as she crouched down next to the table, holding the little bee in her hand and speaking softly to it. In truth, his gaze was on her and not the bee. He’d never seen anything so sweet and lovely and nurturing, pure in every sense of the word. He’d never known a woman like Diantha, and more and more he was becoming enchanted by everything about her.

  The rescue of a bee seemed like something small and insignificant, but in truth it was not insignificant at all. It reflected a compassionate nature that he had never seen before, someone with so great a heart and soul that even a little bee meant something to her.

  For a moment, he just sat there and stared at her. He couldn’t seem to do anything else. Then he gently grasped her chin, leaned over, and kissed her tenderly on the cheek.

  It was a thanks for showing him something he’d never seen before.

  Beauty in its finest form.

  “I think he does, too,” he whispered.

  Without another word, he headed into the smaller chamber to sleep, shutting the door behind him.

  It took Diantha a solid hour to catch her breath.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The fights that night had been full of dust and sweat and blood.

  In the fading heat of the August night, the torches of the Fields of Mars were ablaze and the arena seats packed with patrons. It was so crowded that people were sitting in the aisles. The purses were big this night because it was Theme Night, meaning the warriors had selected a favored country or favored legendary hero, and they were fighting on behalf of that country or hero.

  Clegg de Lave had returned to his primus venue, and he walked the arena floor before the fights began like a conquering caesar. He was swathed in white robes and had a turban on his head in the style that Diantha had seen in her youth when caravans would cross from the Mediterranean coast on their way to Portugal. Clegg lifted his hands benevolently, and the crowd cheered wildly for the man who made this entire way of life possible.

  Diantha didn’t see much of Clegg because he quickly retreated into his private box above the staging area where he could watch the fights unimpeded. The bouts soon began, and she discovered that there were a good deal of Englishmen in the lists this night. When a young warrior by the name of Warenne de Soulant, fighting for English honor, won his first bout against a novicius Scotsman, the English patrons erupted in victory, which turned into a brawl with the Scots patrons.