Chapter Twenty-three #4
“Aye, friend,” Talon said
with a wry smile hard earned. “And so it is. A silken noose tighter
and stronger than any rope, but soft and giving too. You must trust
your wife will not pull too tight or sever the tie, but keep it
bound with love and tenderness, and honor and loyalty.”
“You think she will have
me?” Phillipe said with such a pathetic edge to his voice that
every man at the table burst out laughing.
“Good God,” Talon asked
the table at large. “Was I this bad?”
“Worse,” Anglbert
chortled. “Kept brooding about, snapping our heads off, and falling
off your horse.” He turned to Phillipe. “Of course she’ll have you.
Though her father may not give his consent as easily.”
“Aye,” Oswald added
ominously. “He’ll not want to be giving his only child in marriage
to just any man.”
“Especially one with a
reputation as a ladies’ man,” Dardinel piled on.
“True.” Talon eyed
Phillipe sternly. “Fathers can be overly protective of their
daughters.”
“And the miller carries a
really big axe,” Willem, who’d accepted an invitation to supper,
said with a laugh as Wyatt sat grinning beside him, happy to be
included in the men’s company.
“Thanks.” Phillipe winced.
“You’ve all been so…helpful.”
“We do what we can.”
Anglbert chuckled.
Phillipe cleared his throat and
straightened his shoulders. “I guess I’ll be buying that piece of
land from you sooner rather than later,” he told Talon.
Talon offered his hand and Phillipe
shook on it. “We’ll talk price tomorrow.”
“There goes that fine
broodmare you’ve been bragging on,” Anglbert said.
“And your first ten
foals,” Talon teased as Phillipe swallowed hard and tried even
harder to act as if the cost would be nothing to him, while all
around the table his friends spouted more and more ridiculous
terms.
Dardinel was up to three broodmares,
twenty foals, a hundred gold solidi, and Phillipe’s firstborn child
when Denys burst into the hall, panting, his face ashen.
“They’ve been taken.” He
gasped as he laid an arrow down on the table before Talon. “Lara
and Isabeau, Patience and Wilric, Berta, Enid, Doralice. They’ve
all been taken.”
“Basques,” Anglbert
growled down at the arrow as Talon stood and gripped the table’s
edge, the room spinning around him.
“Damned slavers.” Phillipe
stood with his hand on his knife’s hilt. “They will get no gold or
silver for our women and children, only blood.”
The scraping of chairs and angry
voices barely matched the roaring of Talon’s blood in his ears. He
glanced around the table. The men stood there watching him, waiting
for him to give them their orders, to tell them how to bring their
women and children home, how to save his wife and child from a band
of ruthless slavers.
“Did anyone see anything?”
he asked Denys.
“Marta did.” Concern laced
his eyes at how he must have hated leaving his wife after this.
“Lara convinced the leader she was too pregnant to survive a
journey of any distance. They left her gagged and bound in a chair
under the old oak.”
“Tree?”
“Had three arrows sticking
out of him, which he wouldn’t let me remove before I came to you.
Wolf has an arrow in his leg too.”
Talon nodded, grateful no one had
died. Yet. “Did either of them say how many men there
were?”
“Tree counted
six.”
“Did they put them on
horses or march them out on foot?”
“Tied them to a line and
marched them.”
Talon looked to Anglbert. “They’d want
to be moving fast.”
“Which means there were
men nearby with horses,” Anglbert said. “Maybe more waiting at a
camp.”
“Twenty should give us an
edge in numbers,” Phillipe said.
Talon addressed the room. “I need
twenty men who can ride hard and fight harder.”
Every man there stepped forward,
including Willem, who was no soldier used to days in the saddle, no
warrior used to wielding a sword. But he was a man who loved his
wife and child, and he had the right to fight for them.
“We meet at black of
dawn,” Talon told them. Night had already fallen, and by the time
Talon gathered enough men and supplies, it would be midnight.
“We’ll leave from Denys and Marta’s place; their tracks will be
freshest from there. I want every man to carry three days’ supplies
and a second saddle horse. They’ve got almost a day’s ride ahead of
us, fresh horses may give us an edge there.”
“Aye, that and trying to
keep Berta astride a horse.” The lightness of Anglbert’s words
belied the hard glint of his eyes. “That should slow them down a
bit.”
“The Basques take women to
sell.” Phillipe spoke what every man there feared. “They’ve got to
know we’ll be coming hard and fast on their tail. They won’t have
time to—”
“Phillipe’s right,” Oswald
seconded. “They’re slavers: they won’t want to be dealing with
women who are injured in any way. They’ll want their coin from
them, not their blood, or other things.”
Talon grunted. They were right. The
women would be worth more unharmed. And if they were wrong, he
hoped Lara would submit to her captors, that she wouldn’t fight or
give them a reason to hurt her or Isabeau, knowing full well she’d
fight them tooth and nail.