Chapter 6
Goats and Cats
Roark spent the morning fencing off half the
brooding stall for the three nanny goats chosen to be Ash’s milk
donors, while Fergus and Gare built two hay mangers, one for the
foal and one for the goats. According to Alina, the foal was days,
if not a fortnight, away from feeding on his own, but Roark figured
it never hurt to be prepared or optimistic.
He’d spoken with Roger earlier that morning
before breakfast, and Roger had agreed to let Alina continue
tending to the foal. When she came back to the stables after
breaking her fast, she’d changed into the tunic and breeches she’d
worn on The Rover, which Roark had to admit were much more
practical for mucking about in a stable.
They also showed off her legs and backside,
which didn’t go unnoticed by either of the guards Roger had posted
outside the stable’s door despite Roark’s promise to keep watch
over her. He’d seen their dropped jaws and open leers when she’d
walked past them, and Gare and Fergus both were having a hard time
keeping their eyes off her bottom, though they at least had the
good grace to look abashed when Roark caught them ogling.
Roark was nailing the gate separating the
goat pen from the foal’s pen into place when Alina, who’d been
tending to Etain, entered the pen and Ash whinnied and stood on
shaky, spindly legs. The first time he’d stood without help.
Alina beamed. “Look at you, my big, strong
lad.” She petted the foal, who stumbled over to her and pushed his
nose into her leg. “It’s coming, you little tyrant,” she said
good-naturedly as she poured milk into the horn, for which Roark
had built a holder so she could fill it by herself. She grinned as
Ash let out a loud whinny and then plopped down in the straw. “Did
you wear yourself out?” she cooed, sitting down next to him and
holding the horn so he could latch on, without her having to hold
his head up.
“He’s already much stronger than he was
yesterday,” Roark said, swinging the finished gate back and
forth.
“He is,” Alina agreed with a happy sigh.
“Thank you for thinking of penning the goats here. That’ll make
feedings go much easier.”
Roark chuckled. “You should’ve seen Fergus’s
face when he realized he wouldn’t have to be hauling buckets of
milk half a league twice a day.”
Alina laughed, the happiest he’d seen her
since they’d kidnapped her.
“When Ash is stronger, he and the goats can
be kept together,” she said. “It’ll give him the sense of being
part of a herd.”
“Speaking of his herd.” Roark lifted his chin
toward the door where Fergus walked in with three goats on lead
ropes. Roark waved him over to the new pen, where the goats went
straight to the manger filled with fresh hay and alfalfa. Ash
glanced sideways at them, never slowing his suckling.
“Beer,” Alina said.
“What?” Roark wasn’t sure he’d heard her
right.
“Beer,” she repeated. “It’ll help the goats
produce more milk. They should get a cup each every day.”
Roark translated for Fergus.
“Me da used to give ale to sows who werena
making enow milk to feed their piglets,” Fergus said, grinning and
nodding at Alina, who was doing her best to act like she didn’t
understand a word he was saying. “I’m on it,” he told Roark.
“Though cook’ll likely be asking you ’bout it later, making sure
I’m not swindling the laird’s ale stores.” He tipped his cap to
them and headed out of the stables.
“You’ve earned yourself another admirer,”
Roark told Alina.
“Another?”
“Aye, lass,” Roark said in his Green Isles
tongue. “Along with Ash and meself.”
Her cheeks flushed a becoming pink before she
turned her attention back to the foal who was still suckling away.
The door creaked open and Roark looked up.
“Roger and Leif are here,” he warned Alina,
and then stepped out of the pen to greet them. “Laird Roger,
Leif.”
“We met Fergus on our way over,” Roger said
in the Northern tongue. “He said you ordered beer for the
goats.”
“I did,” Alina answered him. “It’ll help them
produce more milk for the foal, who, as you can see, has improved
greatly.”
“I see.” Roger flicked a quick glance at the
foal and beaded his eyes on Alina. “I suppose it helps to have
someone born and bred with the blood of a stable hand tending to
the foal.”
Alina ignored the slur to her parentage, at
least outwardly. “The dam, Etain, is doing better as well,” she
reported.
“Humph.” Roger flicked his hand toward the
mare’s stall. “She’d better take to her next foal, else she’s of no
use to me.”
“She’s young, she’ll do better if you wait
out her next breeding season,” Alina told him. “Let her recover
from this foal while watching and learning from experienced
broodmares with their foals.”
“Is that what your stablemaster father taught
you?” Roger said with a sneer.
“It is what Hamar taught me,” she said, and
then she turned her back to Roger and tended to Ash, who’d drained
his horn. Roger turned and strode out of the stables with Leif on
his heels.
***
“Wait your turn, mama,” Roark told the
yowling stable cat whose newborn kittens were sleeping in the box
he’d made them in the vacant stall across from Ash and the goats.
He dipped a bowl into the milk bucket and set it down for the cat,
smiling as she lapped it up. He’d learned from Alina a nursing
mother always needed extra food, and over the past three days, mama
cat had learned Roark and Alina were easy touches. As had Smokey, a
gray and white newly weaned kid who’d been bullied by the other
goats and brought over to be a stable companion for Ash, and was
now stuffing his nose into the pocket of Roark’s breeches, where he
kept special treats like pieces of carrots or apple. “You are
incorrigible,” he said, laughing as he pulled a carrot top out and
gave it to the bleating kid.
He reached for Ash’s nursing horn to refill
it and stopped. The foal had his head in the bucket of milk and was
drinking on his own. “I don’t suppose you could keep this new
accomplishment a secret?”
“Keep what a secret?” Alina said, startling
Roark. She stood outside the gate and he stepped aside and motioned
toward the foal, who still had his head in the bucket, drinking his
fill. Alina beamed. “This is good news, it means he…oh. It means he
doesn’t need me here day and night feeding him. I have no reason to
stay out here away from the manor house and the people in it.” She
met Roark’s bittersweet gaze. “You and I can go back to sleeping in
our own bedchambers. Alone.”
Staying out here with the horses, the goats,
and the cats, practically living in the stables together for the
past four days, had been a reprieve neither of them wanted to end.
“How long do you think we can hide this?” Roark asked.
She shrugged. “If Ash continues to nurse from
the horn as well, Gare and Fergus may not notice for another three
or four days. Do you think they’d help keep it a secret if they
knew?”
“I think they’d want to, for your sake,”
Roark told her. “For their own, they dare not. Roger wouldn’t take
it kindly if he found out they’d kept it from him.”
“They’ve been so kind to me,” she said. “I
wouldn’t want them in trouble.”
Roark sat down in the straw, leaned his back
against the wall, and patted the space next to him. Alina slouched
down beside him, petting mama cat as she bumped and purred, rubbing
against her breeches. Breeches he knew she liked wearing, and
wouldn’t be allowed to once back in the manor house.
He took her hand in his, twined his fingers
through hers, and lifted her hand to his lips. He hadn’t kissed her
on the mouth since the lake, though they’d spent the last four
nights holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes, using them
to say what they dared not speak or act on.
“We’ll keep it our secret as long as
possible,” he vowed. He tucked their hands in his lap, looked
around, and grinned. “Horses, goats, and cats.” He chuckled. “I’ll
miss our little world here when it’s gone.”