Chapter 14
AMELIA
After breakfast, Edith cheerfully put her to work. This was Edith’s solution to sorrow, confusion, scandal, and probably the plague. If a person was breathing, Edith could find a task for them.
She was handed a basket of torn linen, told to take it to the women mending in the yard, then sent back for a list of missing stores, then sent to Walter with a count of loaves, then to the dairy to ask whether the morning’s cheese would hold until market, then back to Edith, who added three more things as if Amelia had grown extra arms.
By midmorning, she had a wax tablet in one hand, a stylus in the other, and a veil that refused to stay properly pinned over her hair.
The gown she wore today was a faded green, plain enough for household work but better fitted than the brown one.
It laced at the sides over a linen shift, and though Amelia still resented the concept of side laces on principle, she had at least managed not to tie herself into a human knot.
Her hair, however, was a losing battle.
She had braided it, pinned it, veiled it, and threatened it under her breath, but the damp air and her own natural rebellion had worked together.
Curls escaped along her temples and down the back of her neck, fox-red and springing, as if they too had decided this century was unreasonable and should be mocked.
Alyson loved them.
Every time Amelia bent near the child, Alyson touched one curl with the cautious awe of someone petting a baby bird.
“You’ll pull it out,” Wat said after the fourth time.
“I will not.”
“You will. Then our mistress will be bald on one side.”
Alyson gasped, stricken.
“I won’t be bald,” Amelia said.
Wat considered her hair with grave expertise. “You have much more than other ladies.”
“Thank you.”
“Too much, mayhap.”
“Less thank you.”
Alyson leaned against her skirt. “I like it. It looks like the fox that steals hens from Old Nan.”
“Wonderful. I have poultry-thief hair.”
Wat brightened. “That fox is clever.”
“I accept the compliment.”
Edith, passing with a covered crock, muttered, “Do not compliment foxes. It encourages them.”
The morning rolled on in warmth, noise, and the steady clamor of a castle trying not to come apart at the seams. Chickens scattered underfoot, indignant at the notion that humans had business in their yard.
A pig escaped from a pen and was chased by three boys, one dog, and a woman with a ladle.
Walter argued with the reeve over the south field while jabbing at his tablet as though the wax itself had committed treason.
From the kitchens came the scent of onions, yesterday’s beef, and flat loaves of bread baking near the embers.
Amelia carried messages, counted sacks, made notes, and began a new list titled Things That Need Doing Before Everyone Forgets, which Walter found offensive until she showed him that she had placed his name beside nearly half of them.
“I have not forgotten these things,” he said.
“No, but now I can bother other people about them before they come bother you.”
Walter paused. His eyes narrowed.
“That,” he said slowly, “may have some use.”
From Walter, this was practically a parade thrown in her honor.
She was scratching a note about needing more soap when the first great clang of metal sounded from beyond the stables.
A second clang rang out, followed by a burst of male laughter, a shout, and the dull thud of something heavy hitting the packed earth.
Alyson appeared beside her, face bright. “The lists.”
“The what?”
“The garrison.” Wat shoved a heel of bread into his mouth and talked around it. “They’re fighting.”
Amelia nearly dropped the stylus. “They’re what?”
“Not proper fighting,” Alyson said, as if Amelia were being silly. “Practice fighting.”
“That is not as reassuring as you think it is.”
Another clash of steel sounded, sharp enough to send a jolt up her spine.
The logical part of her knew that Thomas was a soldier.
She had known it since the moment he found her in the hay, since she had seen the sword at his hip, the scars on his hands, the way men moved when he spoke.
She had heard enough from Hob, Edith, Walter, and the silences that gathered around Evesham to understand that Thomas had not merely survived battle. He had been shaped by it.
Still, there was a difference between knowing a man had fought and hearing steel ring in his yard. Somehow, she’d missed the sound of steel and the practices during her time here thus far.
Amelia found herself walking toward the sound before she’d decided to.
The lists lay beyond the stables, in a cleared stretch of hard-packed earth enclosed by a rough rail.
It wasn’t the grand tournament field her mind had conjured out of too many movies and half-remembered museum exhibits.
There were no bright pavilions, no ladies leaning over embroidered banners, no trumpets or polished armor gleaming in the sun.
This was a working place, scarred by hoofprints and boot marks, bordered by barrels of blunted practice weapons, shields hanging on a rack, and a post so hacked and battered it looked as if generations of men had taken out their grievances upon it.
The smell hit her first. Sweat, leather, dust, horse, oiled metal, and the faint green sweetness of trampled grass where the field met the yard.
Men stood in shirtsleeves or padded gambesons, some with mail hoods shoved back from red faces, others bareheaded, hair damp at the temples.
Their hose were dusty at the knees, boots scuffed, belts heavy with knives and small pouches.
A bucket of water and another of ale sat under the shade of an ash tree, beside a board holding bread, hard cheese, and a crock of something that smelled like onions and vinegar.
Hob stood at the rail, arms folded, watching two men in the center trade blows with wooden wasters.
No. One man traded blows. The other endured Thomas.
Amelia stopped so abruptly that Wat collided with the back of her legs.
He moved like nothing she’d ever seen.
Not flashy or cinematic. There were no spinning leaps, no heroic flourishes, no dramatic pauses in which the hero smiled at the camera. He was brutal and economical and terrifyingly beautiful in the way a storm was beautiful when one was foolish enough to stand beneath it.
He wore no mail, only a linen shirt open at the throat beneath a sleeveless leather jerkin, his forearms bare, the muscles shifting under sun-browned skin as he moved. Sweat had darkened the hair at his temples. The scar along his jaw looked sharper in the light.
His opponent swung high. Thomas stepped inside the blow, turned it with a crack of wood on wood, and tapped the man’s ribs with the flat of his practice blade hard enough to make him grunt.
“Dead,” Thomas said.
The man backed away, breathing hard. “Again.”
Thomas tilted his head. “You died.”
“Aye, but I’d like to improve before the grave.”
A few men laughed.
Thomas’s mouth twitched. He reset his stance. “Then do not leave your ribs open as if you hope to cool them.”
Amelia pressed her lips together.
The man came again, more cautious this time.
Thomas let him close. For three heartbeats there was only movement, quick and hard, wood striking wood, dust rising around their boots.
Thomas shifted his weight, feinted left, caught the other man’s blade, turned it aside, and somehow had the tip of his waster beneath the man’s chin before Amelia had even understood the sequence.
“Dead again,” Thomas said.
The man sighed. “That’s becoming tedious, my lord.”
“Dying often is.”
Hob made a pleased sound. “Next.”
Another man stepped in.
Then another.
And another.
Amelia told herself she was observing for cultural understanding. This was research. Immersive learning. A practical study of martial customs in thirteenth-century England, which any reasonable woman flung through time ought to conduct if she wanted to survive.
She was absolutely not standing there with her mouth slightly open because Thomas’s shirt clung to his shoulders and his pale eyes went cold and focused when he held a blade.
No, that would be inappropriate, unhelpful, and probably visible from France.
Wat leaned toward her. “He’s the best.”
“I can see that.”
“No, the best,” Wat insisted. “Hob says Lord Thomas could split a man’s wishbone before the man finished drawing breath.”
“Colorful.”
“Hob says many colorful things.”
“I’ve noticed.”
Alyson, who had climbed onto the lower rail, whispered, “Mistress Amelia, your cheeks are pink.”
Amelia snapped her mouth closed. “It’s hot.”
Wat squinted at the sky. “Not that warm.”
“Children are supposed to be sweet and kind.”
Wat looked alarmed. “Who told you that?”
In the lists, Thomas faced Osbern now, a broad-shouldered man with a scar through one eyebrow and a grin that suggested either bravery or an insufficient sense of self-preservation. They used dulled steel this time instead of wood, and the sound of blade against blade went through Amelia’s bones.
She had seen stage combat. She’d once planned a charity gala where a historical fencing group performed between the salad course and dessert, and one of the fencers had spent twenty minutes explaining longsword technique while Amelia nodded and wondered whether the chocolate mousse would hold in the warm ballroom.
This was not that.
Thomas didn’t rage when he fought. That was almost worse.
He didn’t waste a single breath on snarls or swagger.
He watched. Waited. Struck. Every movement seemed spare until the moment it became violence.
Osbern was good. Amelia could see that much.
He was strong, quick, and aggressive, forcing Thomas backward three steps.
The watching men shifted with interest.
Hob’s brows rose.
Thomas let Osbern drive him, let the man believe he had won ground, and then he moved.
It happened fast enough that Amelia made an undignified sound in the back of her throat.
One heartbeat Thomas was retreating. The next his blade had hooked Osbern’s, his shoulder had turned, and Osbern was flat on his back in the dust with Thomas’s boot planted lightly beside his ribs and the dulled point of steel at his throat.
There was a moment of silence, then the men roared.
Osbern lay there staring at the sky. “I dislike you.”
Thomas stepped back and offered a hand. “So you have said.”
Osbern accepted it, and Thomas hauled him to his feet as if the man weighed nothing.
Amelia swallowed. That was the problem with competence.
Real competence. Not a man loudly explaining how much he knew while everyone else quietly fixed his mistakes.
The kind that lived in the body and bones.
The kind that didn’t need applause. Thomas wasn’t handsome in a polished way.
He was too hard for that, too scarred, too grim, too weathered by grief and sun and war.
But here, with dust on his boots and a blade in his hand, he was so entirely himself that Amelia could hardly look straight at him.
Which was inconvenient, because she also couldn’t look away.
Then he turned his head. Across the lists, through men and dust and mid-morning light, his gaze found hers.
Amelia’s heart stumbled like a drunk bridesmaid in heels.
For one second, Thomas went very still.
His eyes moved over her face, caught perhaps on her wide eyes, her parted lips, the veil slipping back from her hair, the tablet forgotten in her hand.
Something shifted in his expression, a tiny fracture in the sternness.
Surprise first. Then warmth. Then a rough, pleased look he smothered so quickly she almost doubted it had been there.
Almost.
Hob saw it too. The man seemed to have been carved out of old oak and gossip.
“Well,” Hob said.
Amelia didn’t look at him. “Don’t.”
“I said naught.”
“You said well.”
“A small word.”
“A dangerous one.”
Hob’s grin deepened inside his beard. “Aye.”
Thomas turned away, barked for the next man, and took up his stance as if he had not just been caught being watched and enjoyed it.
But the back of his neck had gone red.
A delighted little spark flared in her chest.