Chapter Five #2
known me my entire life, you know that I haven’t always had this
scar.” He twisted his head from side to side as the stewards made a
show of inspecting his whiskerless chin, then he turned to face
Lara and the captain, whose grip on her elbow tightened. “It was
the accused, the witch Lara, who marked me with her
knife.”
He stepped closer, his chin high for
the captain’s perusal, and Wolf growled. Lara laid her hand on the
dog’s head. “Down, Wolf.” He stopped growling, but still stood at
the ready, his intent gaze following Ranulf as he smartly backed
away.
“Captain,” Count Nithard
said. “If you would put the dog at a safe distance. We wouldn’t
want the beast to bite through my son’s throat now, would
we?”
Lara chuffed, and the captain gave her
a warning glare before he glanced over his shoulder and nodded to
Sophie, who stepped up and took Wolf by his collar. Sophie leveled
her gaze on the count until he gulped and ran a shaky finger along
the neckline of his robe as if it had suddenly become too tight,
then she stepped back and stood behind Lara and the captain with
Wolf firmly in her grasp.
“Ahem.” Count Nithard
cleared his throat and tugged on his robe’s hems. “You may
continue,” he told Ranulf.
“It was the summer of my
seventeenth year.” Ranulf swaggered back and forth in front of the
assembly. “I was on my way to study with the Abbot Rogert, a
birthday present from my esteemed father.”
Lara snorted as Ranulf stopped and
bowed low to the count. It was common knowledge that Ranulf had
never studied anything except women and swordplay. He bragged about
it often enough.
“I came upon the accused,
the witch, Lara, alone and standing stark naked in the river.” He
paused as gasps and whispers filled the hall. The captain tightened
the hold of his scarred hand on Lara’s elbow. “Lured by the sight
and promise of her flesh, as any young man would be, I went to her,
and she kissed me. I fell into a strange, hazy dream, from which I
awoke to find her cutting at my purse string. I pushed her away and
she lashed out with her knife at my throat.” He paused again, his
gaze sweeping over the assembly. “It was only by the grace of God
that I escaped with my purse and my life.”
“And the proof?” the
captain demanded.
“The proof is this witch’s
mark I now carry.” Ranulf flicked his fingers at the scar that ran
across his chin, marring his pretty face. “It reminds me daily of
her treachery.”
“A man earns many scars,
boy,” the captain growled, the scar on his cheek gone white. “That
piddling scratch proves nothing.”
Ranulf stood speechless, his hand on
the jeweled hilt of the knife at his waist. The count coughed once,
twice, and Ranulf looked to his father, then lifted his hand from
his knife and his lips into a semblance of a smile. “The witch will
show her own proof against her,” he said with a smug sneer. “For
her skin was the tanned bronze of a pagan’s used to traipsing naked
in the woods, not pale and untouched by the sun as a good, pure,
Christian maid’s should be.”
He moved toward Lara, and the captain
pulled her behind him, standing between her and Ranulf, as solid
and stalwart as a stone wall.
“No need to get your
hackles up, Guiscard,” Ranulf said. “I’ve only to show her legs to
prove my words.”
“You will show nothing of
her, Midered.” The captain’s voice was low, and his big, corded
hand was on the hilt of his longsword. “I have seen her legs,” he
said loud enough for all to hear. “And I say they are lily white.
Perhaps you truly were dreaming and fell down and cut your
chin?”
Lara couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.
If Ranulf challenged the captain’s assertion and the count demanded
she show her legs, she was as good as hung. She instinctively
stepped in closer to the captain, her nose no more than a
handsbreadth from his broad back, and he stood even taller and
squared his formidable shoulders.
“Perhaps I was dreaming,”
Ranulf ceded with a shrug of his much slenderer shoulders. “Perhaps
not. Yet who can blame me, for a dish once tasted…”
Lara sucked her breath in, and the
captain’s entire body tensed and stilled.
“It is, of course, the
magistrate’s decision,” Ranulf finished with a bow to his
father.
Lara peeked over the captain’s
shoulder at Nithard, whose gaze was fixed on something or someone
behind her. She turned around and gave a feral grin. The count was
staring at Sophie, who stared right back at him with her sure,
Sophie the Sixth half-smile.
“We will accept Captain
Guiscard’s word on the witch’s legs,” Nithard announced. “And
whatever other parts of her body he’s had the opportunity to see
unclothed.” A grassfire of whispers swept through the hall, and
Lara’s cheeks burned. “The accused will come forward.”
Lara stepped out from behind the
captain, her shoulder just touching his arm.
“Was it you who scarred
Ranulf’s chin with your knife?”
Lara lengthened her spine and lifted
her chin. “It was,” she said. “I cut him when he accosted me in the
river.”
Nithard pressed his lips together and
narrowed his beady gaze on her. “Do you truly expect this court to
believe that twice—” He held up two fingers and waved them in the
air. “—twice now, you have been accosted by men of good standing,
without provocation, and that both times you have walked away
without so much as a scratch whilst leaving one man, a seasoned
soldier, with grave injuries, and the other, a young nobleman
schooled by sword masters, with a witch’s mark? That you, a mere
woman, a healer schooled in the old arts, did so without trickery
or evil intent?”
“If I had gone after yon
nobleman with evil intent,” Lara spat toward Ranulf, “he would not
be here spewing lies. And you and he both know it.”
Nithard smiled as smug as a cat about
to spring on a mouse, and Lara bit her lower lip. She’d meant to
stay calm and keep her temper, as Sophie had warned her to do. Not
to let herself be goaded into a display of anger such as she’d just
shown. She glanced at the captain, who stood rigid, the muscle on
the side of his clamped jaw ticking triple time.
Nithard cleared his throat and held a
hand up. The assembly went quiet. “Though the accused claims she
did but defend herself in the case of her attack on Fulrad Demonte,
she has failed to prove it to this court. Therefore, we pronounce
her guilty. Guilty of excessive force against a king’s soldier and
kinsman, which caused him grievous, and possibly lifelong,
injury.”
Lara went numb, the count’s words
buzzing in her ears as if from a distance. She could neither move
or speak and barely remembered to breathe as Sophie stepped up to
stand beside her on the opposite side of the captain, Wolf in hand.
The count held Sophie’s gaze for a long moment, then coughed and
tugged on his robes.
“Therefore,” he announced,
“this court declares her lidi
to the king’s garrison and its captain until such
time as the soldier Fulrad can once again take the field for his
king, or the full wergeld of three hundred gold solidi is
paid.”
The assembly sucked its
collective breath in as Lara released hers. The count could have
ordered her to be hung by the neck until she was dead, and would
have, she was certain, were it not for Sophie the Sixth standing
beside her. As it was, he’d made her lidi, an indentured servant to the
captain and his company.
Nithard held his hand up and the
assemblage went quiet. “As for the dog, Wolf, we declare him
vicious and a danger to all men and sentence him to immediate
death.”
“Wolf vicious?” Lara
grasped the captain’s arm with both hands. “Please. He did nothing
but protect me. You know this. You know Wolf.”
Steel-gray eyes held hers, eyes she
found impossible to read. The captain pulled his arm from her grasp
and addressed the count, his voice as tight as his jaw. “Sir Count,
I will take responsibility for the dog and see to its punishment
personally.”
It was a request in wording only; even
in her frantic state, Lara could tell that much. As, apparently,
could the count.
“So be it,” Nithard said.
With a wave of his hand, Mallus concluded.