Chapter 20 A Loyal Girl
A Loyal Girl
It was only when her head cleared that Ayla remembered Isalde had been with her, until someone had taken the girl away.
Ayla was certain it was no coincidence Isalde had been in the pantry when the Enarian soldiers came in.
The question was whether the knight had come to the same conclusion—and what he’d decided to do about it.
Still shaken by the attack and by Niel himself, she wanted nothing more than to hide in the safety of her room as she’d spent the last three years doing.
But Ayla had already failed the folk in the kitchen by doing so after the poisoning.
True, the knight hadn’t hurt any of them then, which was odd enough, but would he act differently when he knew exactly who was at fault?
Ayla tried the kitchens first. They were a flurry of activity.
Nyven and Sarella were cooking supper for the castle, Nyven inconsolable as he prepared a haunch of smoked meat, Sarella’s eyes rimmed with red as she separated preserved quince from shards of the shattered ceramic jar the fruit had been in.
They were both terrified what might become of Isalde, and neither knew where she was.
Soldiers and servants from other parts of the castle streamed up and down the cellar stairs, carrying foods that needed to be stored anew if there was any hope of avoiding spoilage.
The soldiers couldn't tell Ayla where Isalde was either. They’d been sent immediately to repair the mess in the pantry, since food was a precious resource in a siege. And they had too many questions about what had happened down there, questions she had no appetite to answer.
Outside the kitchen she found another soldier, a short man with large ears and a dark trim beard, carrying a basket of laundered clothes down the corridor. It seemed like an unlikely activity for a man in chain mail, but she supposed with the servants in short supply it had become a necessity.
“That girl who was down there?” he asked when she gave him Isalde’s name. Ayla nodded and clutched at her skirts. “You want the floor below. In that room with all the linens.”
“What, folding them?” If Isalde had been set to house work, she had nothing to worry about.
“As a holding cell. Since we can’t use the dungeons.”
“Ah,” Ayla said, and wondered if the chapel was a good enough hiding place for the keys, or whether she ought to drop them down the privy-chute to keep the knight from ever being able to use the dungeon. “Well. Thank you. Good day.”
She descended the narrow, winding stair. Two soldiers worked in the laundry, singing a bawdy song loudly and off-key. They sloshed their laundry-poles in the water in time with their song. A third lounged in front of a closed doorway, picking at his nails and humming along.
“Is she in there?” Ayla asked, approaching from the side.
“What’s that?” The man straightened up off the wall, gripping his spear like a staff. He was a tall man, with crooked teeth and scars on his cheeks, and he spoke with the thick, almost incomprehensible accent of one who’d grown up in an isolated Kettalist village. “Go on back upstairs.”
“I need to speak with Isalde,” she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt.
The man didn’t seem impressed; no reaction showed on his face.
Unease prickled her spine. The urge to turn tail and race back up to her room was a strong one, but it was not, as far as Ayla was concerned, an option. “So I’d like to go in.”
“I’m sure you’d like many things.” He smirked at her.
“She’s only fourteen, a child still. She’ll be frightened,” Ayla tried.
“So?” His eyes narrowed lazily, the smirk still there.
Fear of men wasn’t enough to stop her from wanting to smack him across the face. It was only enough to stop her from actually doing it.
“You must at the very least let me see that she is unharmed. I am the lady of this castle, and I would like to speak to my servant for a minute.” She could hear her voice trembling, weak when she needed most to be strong, but she managed the whole speech.
Isalde hadn’t done anything worse than Ayla; Mercy, the child had merely—what, helped pry the stones from the walls to usher the warriors in? It was Ayla who’d tried to kill.
“Told you, go back upstairs.”
“I cannot. I am the lady of—”
“Not anymore,” the man said. “You aren’t shit, Enarian bitch. Go back to your kennel before I make you.”
She flinched at the words, feeling the familiar fear rise up in her like bile.
But Ayla couldn’t make her feet move. Isalde was on the other side of the door.
What if they’d beaten her? What if they were going to kill her?
The girl wouldn’t even have stayed in the castle, if it weren’t for Ayla and the other servants who’d decided to remain.
She stared at the doorknob behind the man.
“Please,” she whispered. “Have you no sisters, no mother? A girl cannot—”
“Are your ears broken?” he said, and straightened, an angry twist of his lips replacing the smirk. The soldier straightened. “She's troublesome. Move her,” he called, loudly, looking over her shoulder.
She spun. The singing in the laundry had stopped. One of the men was walking her way now, his thumbs hooked into his belt. He wasn’t as tall as the man guarding the door, but he was a soldier all the same.
Being dragged upstairs by her hair wasn’t going to help Isalde, and the men could do far worse if they wanted, down on this lower floor where they were alone.
She hitched her skirts and ran, heart pounding hard in her chest and ears straining, worried the men would chase her.
But no other footsteps chased her up the stairs.
By the time she burst, trembling, into the great hall, nobody had grabbed her.
The blonde captain, Kerr, sat at one of the long tables with a group of other soldiers, eating a late lunch of bread and stew. Ayla braced her hand against one of the wide black wood pillars, her whole body trembling with fear and fury.
“Lady Blackfell?” Kerr asked, his spoon half raised. He set it down and stood from the bench in one fluid motion, his eyes narrowed on her. “Trouble?” The other men looked up, too, but continued to eat.
“Downstairs,” she said.
“More men?” his words snapped like a whip as he strode towards her. “Bode—”
“Your men,” she corrected. Please, don’t let him be part of it all. Let him be kind. “Isalde. What are they doing to her?”
“Who? The kitchen girl?” He stopped, his expression shifting to confusion. “What happened?”
“They would not let me see her.”
“She’s a prisoner, Lady Blackfell,” the man explained, with all the weary patience of a man soothing a child. It was better than the anger she’d encountered from the man guarding the door, but not by much. “She won’t be harmed until his lordship decides what to do with her.”
“I need to speak with her.”
“You, of all people, have no need…”
“She’s fourteen,” Ayla said, her fingers digging into the hard wooden column at her side. “She’s in my employ. I must know she is unharmed. Untouched. Please. I am begging you. You can be there, if it is a matter of not wanting any plans exchanged. This is my duty.”
Her eyes watered, but she clenched her teeth and kept her chin raised.
Kerr swiped a gloved hand across his face and sighed, hard.
“Damnit,” she heard him mutter. “Just… stop crying, alright?”
Five minutes later, and she was squatting in the linen closet, her back pressed against a shelf that cut across her spine.
Isalde perched on a stack of bed sheets, her arms around her knees and her small face weary and red-eyed.
Three feet separated them; the room was small.
Despite her offer, Kerr had closed the door behind the two of them rather than listening in.
The lamp Ayla had insisted on rested on the floor between them. Isalde had been in the dark before.
“Is he going to kill me?” the girl whispered, her voice high. Her face was tear-stained and her hands looked scratched red, like she’d been worrying at them.
“I will argue for your life,” Ayla answered quietly. “But I think not. If he wanted you dead, he could have done it already.” She still saw the bodies every time she closed her eyes.
Isalde didn’t answer, except to bury her face in her arms, bending over to rest both elbows on her knees.
“How did this happen, Isalde?” Ayla whispered. “How did you come to help them?”
Isalde kept her face buried and did not answer. Ayla chewed her bottom lip lightly, then frowned and shifted her weight.
“Were you in communication? I need to know,” she whispered.
Isalde sniffed and lifted her head.
“His lordship sent a message for me, through the tunnel.”
“For you? You mean for the servants.”
“For me. He trusts me.”
Ayla blinked. Isalde had worked in the castle for all of a month. She was years yet from being considered a woman. And Ditmar was a monster, but surely he was not that kind of monster…
“Ditmar, you mean,” she asked slowly. Isalde nodded. “Why?”
“I do not keep secrets,” Isalde said, her voice small but sharp. “Unlike…”
Ayla studied the girl in front of her for a long moment as another thought occurred to her, one that was at least less sickening, but unpleasant nonetheless.
“I suppose you told him something, recently. Something he found useful to know,” Ayla said dryly.
Isalde closed her mouth.
“Isalde. You told him about the contraceptive, didn’t you?” The words came out angrier than she meant to say them. Rage boiled beneath the surface of her skin, but that was of no use now.
The girl’s chin was stubborn as she lifted her face, her eyes hard on Ayla.
“It was your duty as a wife. You aren’t even nobleborn. He deserved to—”
With a sigh, Ayla gripped the edge of her sleeve and wrenched it up, revealing the fading bruises, all yellowing now. It was not as dramatic a sight as it had once been.
“Do you see this?” Ayla said sharply, turning her arm so Isalde could see it was more than one or two marks. “He isn’t a good man.”
She could see Isalde’s eyes wavering, and the girl fighting to keep the expression off her face.
“Surely if you were…”
“No,” Ayla interrupted firmly. “It wouldn’t matter what I did or how I acted, or how I’d been born. It’s who he is. Mercy forbid I bore him a daughter.” She dragged the sleeve back down. “And that box wasn’t your secret to tell.”
“So, what?” Isalde said, turning away with her lower lip trembling. “Now you will see I’m killed.”
“No. Of course not.” Ayla sighed, feeling suddenly exhausted instead of furious.
“I’m not going to abandon you, child. But someday you are going to understand why women must keep each other’s confidences, and that most men cannot be trusted.
I pray you learn by watching, and not by enduring a pain of your own. ”
“Perhaps if you did not disobey so, he would not have to.”
“You still think it’s my fault,” Ayla observed flatly.
She pursed her lips and stared straight at Isalde.
“Fine. Think whatever fool thoughts have been put into your head by someone else.” Ayla stood.
She couldn’t forgive the pain the child had caused, and she couldn’t make herself like the girl, but Isalde wouldn't come to adulthood for another four years.
Ayla had made her own mistakes at that age; held beliefs that would make her shudder now.
She didn’t have to like the girl. She’d still fight to see her returned safely to her parents instead of executed. Ayla left the lantern on the floor, gave Kerr a stiff nod of thanks, and returned upstairs.