Chapter 5 Three Wounded Men
Three Wounded Men
Ayla sat in the solar at the top of the keep, staring out the window at the snow-covered slopes and the pale, thin flakes drifting slowly down. She’d been home from her ride only a few hours, the day edging to late afternoon. The mountain’s cold still sat deep in her bones.
If she took grain from the castle stores, would Ditmar notice? A week ago, she wouldn’t have worried about the servants telling him. Now, still uncertain how he’d found her contraceptive tea, she wasn’t sure.
But she didn’t like the thought of a unicorn starving in the mountain winter. She couldn’t get the image of its stark ribs out of her head.
With a sigh she pressed a hand to her own bruised side, then looked down at the embroidery hoop in her blanketed lap.
Ayla frowned and slowly pierced the needle through the beak of the griffon she was stitching, adding another speck of burnt orange.
She pulled at the thread, watching its length vanish through the fabric.
Halfway through it got caught. She tugged harder, then turned the hoop over and looked at the mess of knots on the backside. Ayla sighed.
After three years with few other amusements permitted, she ought to have been better at thread craft by now.
The trouble was, she didn’t enjoy it. It was hard to get good at something solely because Ditmar wanted her to be a proper lady.
The enjoyments of her old life, reading and glassblowing, were strictly off-limits.
She stared dully back out the window. Boredom was better than terror, but hardly enjoyable.
There, at the base of the slopes, where the trees thinned. Far past the reach of the walled town that hugged the castle’s left.
Movement. Three men staggered out of the woods.
She couldn’t make out details. Likely they were villagers, gone out hunting.
Blackfell was too remote for the men to be from anywhere else.
She watched them make their way across the distant snowy fields, like ants on white tile, then bent down to the embroidery hoop.
With slow coaxing, Ayla negotiated the thread through the tangle of knots and pulled the stitch tight. She was only halfway done with her griffon. The back of the embroidery was only going to get messier. Ought she just give up now and start over? She could pitch it into the fire.
She pierced the fabric with another stitch, and another, fighting to get each tight and neat. Then curiosity lifted her head back to the window.
The men were closer now. Distance still made them small, but she could see some detail now, and it was odd.
They walked with difficulty, as if injury pained them.
And they dressed as warriors, in armor. Not villagers.
Ayla leaned towards the window, her embroidery momentarily forgotten as she studied the newcomers making their way across the field.
The closer they grew, the more certain she was that they were wounded.
But what were they doing in Blackfell? They weren’t Ditmar’s men, she would swear on that; the armor and clothes did not match.
And the war wasn’t at Blackfell, it was far west and far east, at the corners of the country.
Besides, during the stormfall a week past Ditmar had predicted there would be no more fighting before the spring.
He knew more about such things than she did.
She glanced down at her embroidery hoop, then back out the window, and decided the unknown men were more interesting than a craft she wasn’t good at.
Perhaps they were hunters, not of game, but of monsters, whose body parts fetched high prices for the magic they bore.
Nixie hair, for instance, was worth a pretty sum; her father had once made quite a trade in it.
She wouldn’t be the least bit sad if they’d dragged the nix from the river.
Ayla planted her chin on her fist, leaning further forward, then winced and straightened.
It would be days before her ribs were free of pain again.
She pulled the blanket around her shoulders tighter.
A few minutes later the men passed out of view beneath the tall walls surrounding the castle yard.
They weren’t angled towards the town gates, but towards the keep itself.
It was safest to stay on the upper floors of the castle.
The more she kept out of Ditmar’s line of sight, the less likely she was to anger him.
But curiosity was a strong lure in a life defined by long stretches of caged boredom.
She wanted to know what had injured the men, and whether they’d seen the unicorn too.
She stood from her chair, leaving behind the warm cocoon of blankets for the cold hallways, and made her way slowly towards the castle’s winding inner stair.
She heard the voices by the time she reached the great hall. She’d only passed servants on the way, wondering as each face smiled at her whether they had betrayed her to Ditmar, or whether they were truly friend.
Ayla slipped inside the hall. She kept to the edge near the side door she’d come through, where it would be easy to flee and she wasn’t likely to be spotted.
The hall was a large, dark room. Its rows of carved pillars were made from the wide trunks of their region’s trees, the wood near-black and whorled with gold.
Long tables and benches filled the middle.
The empty dais to her right held a throne for Ditmar, and a smaller chair for her two steps down from his.
“We chased the traitors into the mountains,” Ayla heard a deep, rumbling voice say. She couldn’t see the man who spoke. “We had them when the troll came. It was a narrow thing.”
Traitors? Ayla’s breath caught. She’d just been in those woods, not hours past. The nix had been bad enough.
Had she almost become the captive of an enemy war band, too?
No doubt those men, who did not even have loyalty to their country, would have been even worse captors than Ditmar.
At least he kept her fed and warm. At least there was only one of him.
“I can’t risk my guards. The danger…” Ditmar started to answer.
“My men are injured,” the deep voice answered angrily. “They need to be carried out before the snow buries them.”
Ayla inched to the side of the column she stood behind, trying to move without making a sound.
Now she could see the speaker's face. The huge man—she could tell he was big, even seated on one of the hall’s benches—was half collapsed there as if too injured to stand.
From his plate armor and longsword, he was a knight.
He wore a collection of knives and a battleaxe strapped over his back, as though he was prepared for such heavy combat he might need a dozen weapons.
Blood smeared along one edge of bearded face and blackened his clothes where they emerged from beneath his dark gray plate cuirass.
His armor didn’t look dented; he must have taken a bad wound through one of the few openings.
His companions stood deferentially behind him, as if this seated man were their leader.
Where was the healer? The knight was bleeding out in the hall. Weren’t they even going to take his armor off and bandage the wound? It was just like Ditmar to do nothing.
“I sent men to the border,” Ditmar argued. “Those who remain are needed here.”
“Duty is not paid in half-measures.” She couldn’t help but notice the knight’s face was well-shaped, beneath the injuries.
He was very young, perhaps twenty to her twenty-four.
His long near-black straight hair was tied loosely back, strands falling free around a short, full beard, his eyes dark and fiercely focused on Ditmar from beneath a sharp brow.
He wasn’t pretty so much as handsome, a man who exuded rough and masculine power.
At least, if he weren’t bleeding out on the hall’s bench…
“Sir Corin,” Ditmar answered, his voice harsh. “Surely the Queen does not demand I leave my home unprotected.”
Corin. She knew that name, didn’t she, from sitting in silence during supper with Ditmar? Ayla raised a hand to her neck, staring even harder than before.
The house of Mount Eyron was one of the great ruling families of Enar. The Duke of Mount Eyron had turned traitor against his own sister, the Queen of Enar. The Duke’s eldest son, Corin, had renounced his family ties to Mount Eyron and sided with the Queen against his own father.
But the Duke’s younger son, Niel, had joined his father’s treason.
She inched another step away from the pillar to peer at Corin. She hadn't expected the hero to look so young. He was a man who’d protect his beloved country at any cost. Couldn’t Ditmar see that?
The knight’s fierce eyes flicked over to hers.
For a moment that seemed to last forever, he stared at her with a frown.
She froze, terrified Ditmar would notice the direction of his powerful gaze but unable to break her own away.
Finally the knight’s eyes flicked away from her.
She quickly pulled back around the pillar.
“I have given you an order,” the knight growled to Ditmar. “You court my displeasure—and treason.”
There was a long pause.
“Ten guards…” Ditmar started.
A loud thump rattled through wood, like a fist had smashed down onto one of the tables. Ayla flinched and clenched her jaw tight.
“Damn it,” the knight snapped. “Get yourself and your fucking men up into that mountain, now. The Queen requires your service.”
Ayla pressed tight to the pillar, heart beating fast. She was going to pay for the knight’s tone, later; Ditmar didn’t like feeling small. Her legs shook horribly. A long silence stretched. She prayed for peace and good feeling between the men.
“Kerr will lead you to them,” the knight said, by which she could only imagine Ditmar had at last nodded his consent. “Hurry.”
“Show him to the infirmary,” Ditmar answered, his voice prickling with displeasure.
Ayla took a step back from the pillar, intent on leaving the hall before Ditmar could realize she was there.
But then Ditmar brushed past the pillar, headed towards the door Ayla had meant to take, moving faster than she’d expected him to.
His eyes flashed as they found her. Ayla bowed her head and took a small step back, waiting for him to reach out and grab her.
Either he was too fixed on his task, or he didn’t dare break his wife in front of the Queen’s venerated general.
Ditmar left the room. Nobody else headed towards her door; the infirmary, where the knight was headed, was fastest reached out the other side of the hall.
Hands shaking, she slipped out after Ditmar and fled up the stairs, back to her embroidery.
Damn her curiosity. When would she learn that good enough was good enough? She should never have come downstairs.
Ayla took the embroidery back in her hands, then bowed over it, shaking.
Would a time ever come that she didn’t feel so abhorrently weak, so afraid of the man she’d married?
Just knowing she’d gotten his attention was enough to make her feel like she might lose her lunch.
Dragging deep breaths and trying to calm herself, Ayla lifted her head and peered out the window.
She had things to be grateful for, she reminded herself.
The nix hadn’t gotten her, nor the enemy soldiers.
She wasn’t a captive; she was just an unhappy wife.
She was the lady of a castle. She was fed good meals every day.
She had thick blankets, roaring fires, fine clothes. Her family was safe back in Carinth.
She would survive. Even if she would have traded every speck of luxury away in a heartbeat to be a hundred miles from Ditmar.
Through the window, she watched as his men rode towards the slopes: a pack of horses and warriors, her husband visible at the lead.
They vanished into the treeline. Then Ayla bent her head back to the embroidery, her ridiculous and ill-formed griffon, and wondered again if she ought to just burn it. It wasn’t going to come out right.
Sighing, she set it aside and looked back out the window.
How long would Ditmar be gone? Ought she to make use of the castle while he was out?
If she wanted anything from the lower floors, this was the time to do it.
Perhaps she ought to ask Sarella, one of the kinder kitchen maids, if she knew how Ditmar had found out about the contraceptive.
There. Movement again. Men spilled out of the woods a hundred feet to the left of where her husband had ridden into them.
Two, five, a dozen, two dozen... Ayla blinked.
For a moment she wondered if Ditmar had met trouble—monsters, or an army—and turned and fled immediately.
But the men hurrying across the fields weren’t on horseback.
And they wore different colors than Ditmar and his men-at-arms had. And there were too many of them.
Were those the traitors Sir Corin had chased into the mountains? No, of course not. How would they even know the castle’s warriors had ridden out? Two of them carried a wounded man on a stretcher. Surely they were just Corin’s men, the ones Ditmar had gone to save.
But her husband and his guards were not riding back with them. It was almost as if the men now charging the castle had waited for her husband to leave.
Her brain tried to supply explanations and logic. But a chill shivered down her spine as Ayla’s intuition screamed that something had gone wrong.