Chapter 33 Snow Games
Snow Games
Gemshorn hung his dapple-gray head over the door to his stall, whuffing hot air in puffs of steam.
With a smile, Ayla held up two fists to the gelding.
He snuffled at one, then the other, the whiskers of his velvet muzzle grazing her bright-blue cloth mittens.
With a giggle, she opened her left hand, showing him the empty fabric covering her palm.
“Not there,” she murmured, as he lipped her hand.
Footsteps, to her left, soft but just audible.
Hurriedly Ayla opened her right hand and let the gelding snag the dried raspberries before anybody else could see.
She’d smuggled the fruit from the pantry for Gemshorn.
She didn’t think the soldiers would like it if they heard she’d brought her horse a treat while they were under siege, but there was no difference in the world five berries could make to Niel’s army.
And she felt bad for the horses still within the castle walls, their lives suddenly confined to stalls and trotting in circles around the courtyard paths for exercise.
Raspberries nothing but a memory, Gemshorn lipped her hands, looking for more. Ayla giggled and held up both hands to him.
A shadow moved into her vision. Ayla glanced to the side.
Niel stood four feet to her left, arms crossed over his broad chest, his dark eyes sharply focused on her. The smile on her lips died as her heart skipped a beat.
There were two Niels, she was certain. The one who kept an injured man locked in a dungeon because of his bloodline was the same Niel who’d broken faith with the crown.
But the one standing in front of her, the one who’d wiped the sweat from her brow in illness, was everything a knight should be.
Handsome, deadly, the perfect mix of war-ready and tender.
It was a dangerous way of thinking about him, and one she kept slipping into more and more.
“Lady Ayla,” he told her, his voice solemn.
Anchor, the chestnut mare with a stall next to Gemshorn’s, stretched her head out to snuffle at the knight’s hair, somewhat ruining Niel’s serious expression.
The knight reached over to scratch Anchor’s cheek, but his eyes didn’t leave Ayla’s. “You’re finally wearing gloves.”
“Lord Niel,” she murmured. He wasn’t wearing a hat, but a heavy cloak covered his armor. His dark hair was half-tied back, kept clear of his chiseled face while still falling around his shoulders. Black leather gloves covered his calloused hands.
“I told you to let me know before leaving the safety of the keep,” he reminded her sternly.
“You were hauling water for the kitchen,” she reminded him. He hadn’t even noticed her slipping out to the stable.
“Then you should have gotten one of the men. What if they shoot on the castle again while you’re out here?”
She didn’t answer, except to nod quietly.
It was nothing like life with Ditmar, but she had spent so long having her pleasures stripped away, to leave only a cage.
The outdoors had been her escape from her husband.
She’d already lost the mountains and the outer wall.
Was she to lose the courtyard, now, too, in the name of her own safety?
She tangled a hand into Gemshorn’s mane, gritting her teeth.
“I don’t wish to trouble you,” Ayla whispered. “Every time I desire to breathe fresh air.”
“It’s no trouble,” he said, turning away from her to give Anchor one last pat. “Did you mean to exercise him?”
“One of your men already did this morning,” Ayla said wistfully.
It had quickly become a favorite chore among the soldiers, who understandably would rather be with the horses than churning laundry or scouring chamberpots.
They always seemed to beat her to the stable.
She exhaled softly. “Must I go back inside?”
“No,” Niel said. His voice was uncertain. “I have some time. If you’d like to stay here—or—if you prefer one of my men escort you instead of me, then…”
“No,” Ayla said quickly. She was getting used to the soldiers, but she wasn’t comfortable with them like she’d become with him. “If I cannot be alone, your company will suit me fine.”
“I don’t mean to become a jailor,” Niel told her quietly.
The knight’s brow was knitted, but he was still looking at Anchor instead of her, even as the mare drew back into her stall box.
He was only twenty, a handful of years younger than she was.
At that age, Ayla hadn’t been wed to Ditmar yet.
She’d troubled herself with her father’s accounts and the attentions of the baker’s son and with apprenticing to the glass-house outside of Carinth, learning to work with a blowpipe and molten glass.
Not war, treason, and retribution.
“I know,” she reassured him. “You’re sure you can afford to entertain me?”
“It would be a welcome distraction.” His jaw was tense.
“What news did the griffon-rider bring?” Whatever it had been, it must have been urgent. The man had arrived and left so quickly Ayla had barely gotten a look at the majestic griffons in the courtyard. She’d never seen one up close before.
“Nothing. My father got my message. That’s all,” Niel said, a little too quickly.
There was something there. But she could hardly ask her captor to share every point of his strategy with her. Ayla nodded.
“Would you walk with me, then? On the inner wall?”
He nodded, and stepped back to let her pass.
It was a nice day. The sun was out, the snow wet and heavy on the ground where it hadn’t been shoveled or tramped down.
The Kettalist’s cruel winds had calmed; no breeze stirred her hair.
She led the way towards the inner wall that hugged the stone keep, more protected than the curtain wall where the sentries watched the Queen’s army.
On the stairs up, Niel paused to push a small pile of snow off the edge of one of the steps with his boot.
“I didn’t realize there’d be so much snow this low in the cradle,” he admitted.
“We’re practically in the Kettalist,” she informed him. They reached the top of the stairs.
Niel looked around, his face knotted in either distaste or skepticism. She couldn’t tell.
“This isn’t the Kettalist,” he told her.
“It’s as good as.” She could see the mountains directly to their north, so large they took up the whole sky.
“It’s next to the Kettalist,” he said, his tone final.
“Then what do you call these slopes?” she gestured to the terrain beyond the warcamp, the rolling forests that comprised fief Blackfell.
“Hills. I call them hills,” he told her dismissively.
“As you say, then,” she said with a laugh. The soldiers had cleared the walk, but left a foot of snow topping the decorative stone railing. She paused to scoop a handful of it into her mittens, then compacted it as they walked. “We get plenty enough snow here for me.”
“You don’t like it either?” Niel asked.
“Oh, no,” Ayla said, looking at him with surprise, her snowball cupped between both hands. It radiated cold through her mittens. “I used to love the snow.”
Before it meant being trapped inside with Ditmar, anyways.
“Truly? Why?” Niel asked, eyebrows raised. She shrugged, tossed her snowball over the ledge, and kept walking. Ayla brushed the bits of snow that remained on her mittens loose. She didn’t want to dwell on the horrors of the last few years. Her husband had taken enough of her life from her.
“It’s beautiful,” she admitted. “The whole world turns to black and white, like a blanket laid over the land.” She trailed a hand down an icicle hanging off an overhang of the balustrade, her voice dreamy.
“There’s a quiet to it, too. And with the roads closed, my papa would be home instead of traveling.
Those were my happiest times, as a child. ”
“He traveled a lot?”
“Merchants tend to.” Her throat didn't close up as much as usual at the mention of her family. “But don’t you like the snow? You’re such a northerner in every other way.”
“Mercy, no,” Niel grumbled. “Fighting in it is a bitch. It’s cold, it’s wet, it slows you down.
And where I’m from, in the real Kettalist mountains—” he gave her a look.
Ayla pursed her lips at him. “Heavy snow meant we couldn’t go outside at all.
Nothing to do but combat training, and nurse broken bones until we could fight some more. ”
“How grim. Surely you played snow-games as a child.” She studied a long icicle hanging off the balustrade, glittering in the sunlight like a dagger made of stars.
“I haven’t a clue what that means,” Niel said. He paused to snap off the icicle Ayla had been admiring and tossed it over the wall with workmanlike purpose. She opened her lips to complain, to tell him it had been beautiful, then shook her head with a wry smile.
“Come, now. Didn’t you ever build snow-castles?” she asked him.
Niel frowned and reached for another icicle.
It cracked off the balustrade. The inner wall was short, hugging the keep on one side and looking out over the courtyard on the other, with a long staircase down on either end.
They’d nearly reached the far stair, where they could choose to descend to the courtyard, or to turn back and pace the wall again.
“My father taught me how to make a fort that could keep me alive in a blizzard. Or provide cover from an enemy. I suppose that’s the same thing.” He snapped the icicle in half with his hands.
“Not… quite, I think,” Ayla said, stopping beside him. “Tobogganing, then?”
Surely in the mountains, the children had sleds. If she had made sport from the gentle hills around Carinth, she could only imagine what grand adventures were had by the children of the mighty Kettalist.
“I watched the village children sledding from the window,” Niel told her stiffly. He didn’t meet her eyes, and he folded his arms over his breastplate.
“Snow fights, then. That seems like something you’d be good at,” Ayla tried again, determined to find some happy memory buried under the debris of his upbringing.