Chapter Two #2
kneaded below his ears. Eyes of honed steel stared straight into
Lara’s over Sophie’s head, and she was halfway up and out of her
seat before she realized that not only Sophie but several soldiers
were watching her. She sat back down.
“As I said,” she told
Anglbert, “Sophie will take care of him better than I. She’s a very
learned healer.”
Sophie cleared her throat, her drawn
brows telling Lara she may not have known what, exactly, was going
on here, but she knew something was. And she would be expecting
answers from Lara the next time they were alone. Lara looked around
the hall. The soldiers who’d needed tending had been seen to. So
while Sophie and the captain were discussing his lack of symptoms
for the strange fever Anglbert claimed he suffered from, she took
the opportunity to pack her bag and slip away from the table and
out the kitchen door..
Walking quickly past Berta and Enid,
Lara didn’t call Wolf to heel when he stopped to beg treats from
them. He’d be along shortly. Once inside the stable, she spied Gaea
and Honey, Sophie’s little dun mare, together in a stall past the
soldier’s horses and headed over.
“Hey, boy.” Distracted,
she stopped at the stall housing the captain’s black steed and held
her palm out. The stallion sniffed and blew at her hand and looked
almost as large and imposing standing in its stall, munching hay,
as it had in full armor at the river yesterday. She rubbed his
velvet muzzle and stared into big, intelligent eyes almost as black
as his coat. A smile chased her lips as his master’s piercing gaze
stole her thoughts. The hard line of his jaw … big, strong hands
plucking the rose from her hair… “You’re a handsome beast,” she
told the horse. “Much like your master. Maybe you can tell me why
you both chase me night after night.”
The stallion pricked his ears, and the
hairs on the back of Lara’s neck stood on end as she slowly turned
around to find a squat man with a turnip nose and rheumy eyes
swaying on his feet behind her with an ugly, lascivious leer on his
fleshy face. The same man that had been lounging outside of the
stables when they’d ridden in.
“I ken tell ye.” Even his
sweat reeked of stale spirits. “I ken tell ya why mens would chase
ye, mishy.”
Lara looked toward the open door to
the stables. The drunkard’s beefy body blocked her way out.
Instinctively, she glanced around for Wolf, but he wasn’t there.
She met the man’s beady, bloodshot gaze, her back up against the
gate to the stallion’s stall. “Please, sir.” She tried to keep her
voice calm. “I’ve no wish for trouble.”
“Trouble?” The man swayed
closer to her. “Ish not trouble I’ll be givin ye,
mishy.”
Lara smiled as sweetly as she could
manage, then pushed off the gate to run by the man, but his arm
caught her around the waist. She let out one shrill whistle as the
man fell, taking her with him and knocking the breath from her as
she hit the ground. A ham-fisted hand clamped over her mouth, and
she bit down, hard. The man jerked his hand away with a string of
oaths as foul as his breath. Lara scrambled up, then turned to run
for the door as he grabbed a fistful of her skirt and yanked her
back, causing her to stumble and step with the full weight of her
body on his knee, which gave way beneath her sandaled foot with a
sickening snap of bone. Bellowing in pain, the man let go of her
skirt and grabbed above his knee, then his scream turned
high-pitched and wordless as a snarling Wolf came bounding straight
for him.
***
Talon
Talon grabbed his longsword at the
first scream and bolted halfway out the hall by the second, a
primal wail that sent shivers up his spine, which was nothing to
the sudden quiet after. He was out the kitchens’ door when a shrill
voice called from the stables amidst the frenzied whinnies of
horses, followed by Lara running out of them with Wolf at her
heels. She glanced Talon’s way, then raced across the courtyard for
the back gate as if a horde of bloodthirsty Saracens were after
her.
Talon ran over to the open door of the
stables and found a man writhing on the floor in front of the
Black’s gate while the stallion stomped and snorted at him from his
stall. Fulrad.
“In the stables,” Talon
yelled to the men pouring out of the hall. He looked toward the
back gate, which was only large enough for one person to pass
through and unguarded, in time to see Lara throw it open, so he
doubled his pace.
The girl could run on those long legs
of hers, he’d give her that. She’d made it the hundred feet to the
river by the time he’d made it through the gate, holding her skirts
high and wading across the knee-deep water to disappear beyond the
tree line as he made his first splash. Matching his stride to his
breath, Talon concentrated on the trail she was leading him on.
He’d grown up hunting and tracking game in the wilds of Neustria
with his father and older brother, and he’d tracked men as a scout
for the army. Tracking a woman with a dog shouldn’t prove too
difficult.
The snapping of twigs and
crackling of leaves ahead told him she wasn’t gaining any ground on
him, though she wasn’t losing any either. He thought again of her
long, lean, well-muscled legs as she’d stood him off in the river
yesterday, and he was hard-pressed between admiring and cursing
them. Hell, he was hard-pressed between admiring and cursing
her, as she had him. And