Chapter Seventeen
Foretold
Lara
It was market day, half a month since
Sophie had passed. Ten days since Lara had forbidden Talon from
staying the night at her house, and ten nights straight of her
waking from her dreams calling out his name.
He still came by her house daily and
often rode with her as she made her rounds of the valley. It eased
her heart and her grief to reminisce with the villagers about
Sophie, and she was sent on her way with more food gifts than she
could ever eat on her own, which Denys and Talon were both happy to
help her consume. This morning, Talon had business at the garrison,
so Lara set off on her own, her wagon laden with cheeses, herbs,
soaps, tubs of liniments, and vials of love potion.
She’d sold all but two vials of love
potion by noon when Ravenna sauntered over to her wagon, flanked by
the steward Roumel’s two daughters.
“Is that all you have?”
Ravenna eyed the vials as the blonde-haired sisters preened and
giggled.
“It is.”
“I suppose they’ll have to
do.” She set her coppers down on the wagon’s tailboard, then handed
a vial to each sister. “Happy hunting, ladies,” she called out
after them as they practically skipped off toward the square where
musicians were setting up for the harvest dance. “I’m afraid they
have their caps set on the captain,” she told Lara with a false
concern matched by her fake smile. “Since he’s apparently finished
with you, I admit I’ve encouraged them in their pursuit. I do hope
you don’t mind.”
“Why should I mind?” Lara
answered just as falsely. “The captain is free to do whatever he
chooses, as am I.”
“My brother will be so
pleased to hear it,” Ravenna said as she sauntered off to join the
sisters.
Lara busied herself rearranging what
goods she had left to sell, when the high-pitched squeals of the
sisters rang over from across the square. Talon had arrived, along
with Phillipe and several other soldiers. They tied their horses
off at a post and surveyed the square, and though Lara didn’t
squeal out loud at his approach, she couldn’t help but grin as he
strode toward her wagon, ignoring the loud sighs and fluttering
eyelashes of not only the steward’s daughters, but several of the
women selling their wares in the stalls he passed.
“I’d like to purchase a
bar of soap.” Talon stopped at her wagon and looked over her wares.
“A very special bar infused with the attar of rose I understand can
only be purchased from a beautiful but thorny west end witch. Would
you happen to know where she might be?”
Lara’s grin grew, and damned if she
wasn’t fluttering her eyelashes at Talon. “I might. Are you sure
you can afford such a bar?”
Talon laughed lightly and jangled his
purse, heavy with coin. “Why, I am such a wealthy man, I will buy
two.”
“A big spender, eh?
That’ll be two coppers a bar.” She made a point of counting his
coin before pocketing it and handed him two bars of her favorite
rose soap. The soap he’d lathered her body with in the river on the
march to Roncesvalles. Her cheeks heated at the memory of his big,
strong fingers rubbing delicious circles into her back and other
places. She coughed and busied herself with arranging the remaining
bars.
“How goes the marketplace
today?” he asked as he tucked the bars into his tunic pocket. “How
many love potions have you sold?”
“Two dozen. The last two
to the steward Roumel’s daughters there.” She indicated the dance
floor, where the women stood watching them and whispering in each
other’s ears. “In anticipation of dancing with you.”
“Me?”
You should go over there, talk with
them, dance with them.”
“What? Why?”
Why indeed? Because what
she’d told Ravenna was true. He was free to live his own life and
she, hers. Even if it meant letting her
heart crack a little. Better that than have it broken into a
thousand cutting shards when he rode out of her life
forever.
“You don’t have to watch
over me all the time.” She tried to reason with him, leaving her
heart out of it. “I’ll be fine.”
He snorted. “Of course, you will. You
get in and out of trouble as easily as a cat with nine
lives.”
Lara lifted her chin. “While I
appreciate your sense of honor and duty, your oath was made to
Sophie, and Sophie is…” She swallowed and swiped at the hot tears
welling in her eyes. “I can look after myself, Captain. I release
you from your oath.”
He stood stiff and silent for a long
moment, the muscle in the side of his jaw ticking. “If you think
that’s why I stay, then I may as well go.”
Lara’s heart thudded to her feet as he
strode straight for the steward’s daughters, who simpered and
giggled at his approach, clutching their vials of love potion in
their lily-white fists. Ravenna and Ranulf, who were sitting to the
side of the dance floor with Lothair and Fulrad, who’d taken up
residence at Oloron Manor after Charles cut him loose, watched with
amused grins as the sisters practically swooned over
Talon.
After giving the entire group her
back, Lara packed up her wagon. The musicians started playing as
she finished and hitched Gaea up to the wagon, and she couldn’t
help but take a peek before she left.
The sisters were draped all over
Talon, hanging on to him as if they’d faint dead away without his
big, strong arms holding them up. Phillipe and Dardinel joined the
cozy trio, and soon the square filled with the sisters’ high trills
and the deeper, coarser laughter of the men, Talon’s baritone
booming out over the others.
Damn him for dancing with them. Double
damn herself for suggesting it.
She’d freed him from being her
protector as he’d freed her from being his lidi, because it was the
right thing to do. Yet Lara felt neither noble nor right, only
jealous and miserably wrong. She’d told him to go away, and he had,
and he wouldn’t be back because she’d insulted him, his friendship,
his honor. She saw that as clearly as she saw him wrap an arm
around each of the sisters and walk them over to the barrels of
ale.
“Come on, Wolf,” she said,
climbing up onto the wagon’s seat and clucking her tongue. “Gaea,
let’s go.”
As the wagon plodded along the road to
her house, Lara couldn’t decide whether to continue home, pull her
bedcovers over her head and cry her heart out, or turn back and
tell Talon she’d been wrong to send him away from her, to invite
him to her house for supper this night and every night he remained
in Oloron. But what if he accepted? What if he came for supper and
stayed for breakfast? Would she have the will to keep him from her
bed? Would she even try?
If she didn’t, and they became lovers
again, just the thought of which made her body flush and an ache
begin to throb between her legs, she feared Sophie’s warnings
would’ve been for naught, and she could still end up alone with his
babe in her belly and lose him. She thought of how he fell in her
dreams and laid a protective hand over her womb. She’d be a fool to
make herself grieve him or leave her child a fatherless
bastard.
No. It was better this way. Less
grief. Fewer complications. For both of them. She gave Gaea’s
harness a shake, determined to continue down the road she had
chosen, to move forward with her life, a life she chose of her own
free will, a freedom she had fought hard to regain, when Wolf’s low
growl had her pulling up on the reins.
The hound stood in the middle of the
road, staring back in the direction of the village, his growl
growing louder as four horsemen rode toward them. For one brief,
ecstatic moment, Lara thought Talon had left the sisters and
followed her, but as they drew nearer, none of the horses were
black and the tallest of the riders was too thick-set to be
Talon.
“Lothair,” she hissed. A
chill ran through her as she recognized Fulrad astride his rangy
bay.
She was out of the wagon and
unbuckling Gaea’s harness before conscious thought told her to, and
on the mare’s back as the riders broke into a gallop.
“Come, Wolf,” she cried,
urging Gaea into a run. After turning onto a game path, she pulled
the mare up behind a thick patch of bramble a hundred paces in,
hoping she’d panicked for nothing. Then the shouts of men and
pounding of hooves came over her own panting. Her heart in her
throat, she turned Gaea uphill and rode hard and fast. She was on
her own. There was no Sophie protecting her from Nithard now, no
Talon saving her from Lothair. She would have to get herself out of
this mess, and her best, her only, hope was to outrun them and seek
the safety of the Hollow.
***
Talon
Talon peeled the two simpering blonde
sisters from his arms. Without Lara glaring at him from across the
square for doing exactly as she told him to and dancing with them,
there was no reason for him to put up with their high-pitched
squeals and twitters. “Phillipe, Dardinel, I’m off for the
keep.”
“Off to Lara’s you mean,”
Phillipe said, and Talon didn’t bother to challenge his second’s
assumption.
He’d been keeping watch over her for
three months now, and despite her protests and assurances that she
could take care of herself, he knew he’d sleep better tonight if he
made sure she got home safe and in one piece. He glanced around the
gathering. Ranulf and Ravenna watched him from under the beech tree
in the center of the square, but Lothair and Fulrad and two other
men-at-arms were no longer with them. In fact, they were nowhere to
be seen.
A niggling took hold in his belly and
clawed its way up his spine as he set the Black to an easy gallop
on the road west, keeping his eyes on the heavy tracks of four
horses carrying riders overlaying those of a small wagon. A league
from town, he spied a wagon sitting in the middle of the road.
Lara’s wagon. With no Lara, no Gaea or Wolf in sight, only Lara’s
boot prints next to Gaea’s harness in the dirt.
He followed Wolf’s and the mare’s
hoofprints, the latter set deeper now, as if carrying a rider, to a
turn onto a game path that led into the wooded hillside. Heavier
tracks of the four mounted horses joined them.
“Bloody hell, Lara, what
trouble have you gotten into now?”
He looped back to her wagon and