Chapter Three
Piers shook his head as if perhaps the motion might clear it, for surely the girl had not just said that they were married.
Had she?
He squinted and leaned toward her slightly, pointing to his ear. “My apologies, but could you say again? I’ve just recently taken a sharp blow to the head. Several blows, actually.”
The little golden-haired thing leaned in, giggling, her monkey sitting surely on her shoulder. “We’re married. You know”—she spread her arms and looked around the circle of stones briefly—“here in the Foxe Ring.”
Piers stood upright once more, completely perplexed. “As I understood the situation, you were cross with me for trespassing on your family’s lands and nearly getting my fingers bitten off by your ridiculous animal.”
“I was waiting for you, Piers,” Alys said, her face softening in a manner that caused an uncomfortable sensation in Piers’s gut.
“Only I didn’t know ‘twas you, of course. It could have been anyone, any man in the whole of the land, but”—she took a deep breath and let it out happily around her bright smile—“it’s you. ”
Then Piers felt his eyes narrow. Surely this could not be a trap laid by Bevan and Judith Angwedd. Regardless, he would not take any chances.
“You obviously have me confused with someone else,” he said to the still-smiling girl. “Good … er, night, Lady Alys.”
“Wait!” she called to him again, but this time, Piers kept walking, out of the ring and down the opposite side of the hill to the south east. He had no time to decipher the riddles of a female just out of the nursery.
She was obviously anathema to her family, having been sent off to the old ruin in the middle of the night alone.
Perhaps they wanted someone to abscond with her, and take the brat off their hands. Well, it would not be Piers.
Christ! He was exhausted enough to drop, but now it looked as if his rest was yet miles away. He was not relishing sleeping in an open forest again.
“Would you wait?”
He glanced over his shoulder and was surprised to see the girl running to catch up with him, dragging her sack behind her with one hand and holding on to her monkey with the other. Her fine, long cloak flapped around her legs. Clearly, she was not dressed for foot travel.
“Go back to the ruin and wait for morning, Lady Alys,” he commanded, never slowing his pace. “I’ll not wait for you, and should you become disoriented and lose your way, you’ll die in the open alone.”
“Won’t you at least accompany me back to Fallstowe?” she gasped exasperatedly.
“No.” Absolutely not. As he had already told the girl, he had heard tales of the powerful Sybilla Foxe.
And he also knew of her cat and mouse with King Edward.
The lady would demand his name and then likely imprison him as a kidnapper and defiler of women.
Or mayhap she would listen to his tale and then turn him over to Judith Angwedd.
Any matter, Piers doubted Sybilla Foxe would want the slightest connection with a man who had serious business with the monarch sniffing around Fallstowe’s walls, looking for a chink in which to topple the woman’s hold on her family’s demesne.
Piers had enough problems of his own to deal with. He only needed to get to London, as quickly as he could, and alone.
“I’ll not go back!” she called the warning to him while still struggling to keep pace. “You can’t leave me—I’m your wife!”
Piers didn’t answer her, only kept walking.
His head started to pound again. She was clearly unstable.
If she continued to follow him, she would be parallel to Fallstowe again within the hour.
Having likely fallen far enough behind as to become frightened by that time—not to mention cold and tired—she would see her family home and give up.
Good-bye, Alys Foxe. And good riddance.
The forest was dangerously bright when Piers found a suitable den in which to sleep the majority of the daylight away.
In the juncture of two massive, fallen trees, a dam of old pine branches and dead leaves had made a natural lean-to and Piers threw his pack into the fortuitous shelter with a sigh.
He would not risk even a small fire now.
He stretched his arms above his head, hearing every muscle in his body moan. He would climb into the den that looked just big enough to accommodate his body, eat some of the old bread and the last bit of the cold, salted fish from his pack, and then gratefully fall into unconsciousness.
At least he had shaken silly little Alys Foxe. She had disappeared from Piers’s rear horizon along with Fallstowe’s dark, foggy silhouette, and he was relieved that he would not have to contend with her disjointed ramblings about the two of them being married.
Piers shook his head in disbelief as he crouched down to inspect the wounds received by the unusual Layla.
The bites weren’t as deep as he’d first feared, although they throbbed like black hell.
The cuts were already scabbed over within rings of vivid bruises, and so he simply wrapped them tightly in some of the bandages given to him by the monk.
Married. Lady Alys Foxe, married to Piers Mallory, common dairy master and notorious bastard son of the lord of Gillwick Manor. If little Alys had only known what a close call she’d had, she’d likely have wet her underdress. And he was certain Lady Sybilla would not have been amused in the least.
Married! Ha!
No one would marry you save a goatherd, or mayhap one of the goats. Crude, penniless bastard.
So now he was to contend with the voices in his head alone, but at least with them Piers felt no compulsion to answer. He heaved a great sigh as he rocked from his heels to his backside, drawing up his knees and pulling his pack toward him, rifling through it for his sustenance.
Warin was to have you drowned upon your birth, but his heart had been softened by our little Bevan. He chose to simply forget all about you! Isn’t that amusing? You should thank my son for saving your life!
Even though Piers was relatively certain that his father’d had no such malicious intentions toward him after his birth, it was true that Warin Mallory had largely forgotten his second son was alive.
Piers’s mother had died when he was only six, and Warin had the decency to keep him in the manor’s dairy.
Now he was master of that enterprise, but he knew it was not a courtesy stemming from the circumstances of his birth.
He was simply the best at what he did, and even cruel Judith Angwedd had made begrudging mention of his talent.
“Peasant blood will tell,” she’d sneered.
He could still remember that first, traumatic year without his mother, leaning his face against the warm side-belly of a cow and sobbing soundlessly while he milked.
Sleeping with the other village orphans in the lofts of the stables, learning to fight for what was his out of necessity, and then later, for coin.
There had been no one to protect him after his mother was dead, and there was no one to aid him now.
He choked down the last bite of the day’s ration of bread—the stuff was like eating wet wool—and took a swig of wine from his jug. He sighed and corked the jug, replacing it in his pack and shoving the bag deep into the tree den. At least now he could escape into sleep.
He had just crawled into his makeshift bed when he heard a horrendous crashing through the underbrush of the forest. Satisfied that his hiding place would not be discovered by any happening by on the road just beyond the tree line, Piers squirmed farther back into the shadows and closed his eyes.
He heard a squealing chattering, and more rustling of leaves.
Likely just some forest creature, out to break the fast, he told himself and squeezed his eyes shut more tightly.
“Piers! Piers, where are you? Do you see him, Layla? Neither do I. Pie—eers!”
His eyes snapped open. Surely not.
“Piers, I’m tired and I’m cold and I’m frightened.”
Piers frowned. She did sound rather fearful.
“Where are you, dammit?”
Or perhaps she wasn’t.
He couldn’t let her wander farther into the woods to die.
Well, no, he could, but then he would be no better than Judith Angwedd.
He would point her back toward Fallstowe, grudgingly give her a bit of his dear supply of bread and wine, and send her on her way.
‘Twas full daylight now, and she would be on Foxe lands within the hour.
Two, at most, should she wander a bit from the straightaway.
He was just about to undertake the massive task of moving his exhausted body when the monkey dashed into his den, scrambling over him to sit on his bicep, and then screaming like the devil, bouncing up and down and flailing at him with her long, surprisingly powerful arms.
Piers shouted with surprise and, yes, a bit of fear—he didn’t want the fucking thing to bite him again.
He threw the beast out of his den with a swipe of his arm that sent the monkey rolling with an outraged shriek and then fought his own way out of the shelter.
Better to face the fiery little thing out in the open.
The monkey, as well.
When Alys saw Layla streak from beneath the fallen trees, chattering indignantly, she knew her wayward husband was found. She dropped her sack, crossed her arms over her chest, and tapped her foot, waiting for him to emerge from behind his curtain of curses.