Chapter Six
Protection
Lara
“Three hundred gold
solidi,” Lara cried as soon as she was inside the captain’s tent
staked out in the courtyard of Oloron Manor. “It will take a
lifetime to earn that amount.”
“As Nithard well knows.”
Sophie closed the tent flap behind her. “As he knows that Fulrad
will never take the field for Charles again. He has done what he
could and made a slave of you.”
“He has tried.” Lara
slipped into Latin as she heard the captain speaking to one of his
men outside the tent.
“What do you intend to
do?” Sophie spoke in Latin as well.
“I intend to make my way
to the Hollow. To stay there until this garrison has left
Oloron.”
“Then what? You’ll never
be able to return to Oloron as long as Nithard is count and Ranulf
his successor.”
Lara gnashed her teeth.
Sophie was right about Nithard and Ranulf. They’d been given their
shot at her and taken it. They’d made her lidi and would never willingly give
her back her free status. “What do you suggest I do?” she asked
Sophie, who could see farther ahead than most.
Sophie laid her hand on
Lara’s shoulder and looked her straight in the eyes. “I suggest you
stay and be lidi to the captain. Serve out your sentence, for now.”
Lara shook Sophie’s hand off. “What?
No.”
“Just hear me out,” Sophie
insisted. “Captain Guiscard has proven himself an honorable man,
has he not?” Sophie arched her brows at Lara, who stood untouched
and intact despite her time living in the captain’s quarters,
surrounded by a troop of soldiers. Sophie indicated Wolf, still
alive and standing at Lara’s side despite Nithard’s ruling that he
be put to death. “Has he not?”
“Aye,” Lara admitted
grudgingly. “He has.”
“A lidi has her master’s
protection.”
“A lidi has a master.”
“True enough. Yet I see
certain advantages for you with the captain’s
protection.”
“Protection? If I stay here, he will
be the one I need protecting from.”
Sophie’s wizened gaze narrowed on
Lara’s. “How so, child?”
Lara opened her mouth to say, what?
That her reaction to seeing the captain in his breechcloth every
night was anything but childlike? That she dreamed of his low,
resonant voice and piercing eyes when she did sleep? That she found
herself dwelling on his masculine good looks and raw maleness when
she was pacing the chamber they shared because she couldn’t sleep?
She clamped her mouth shut.
“For me then,” Sophie
said. “Do this for me.”
“But Tante.” Lara was
suddenly, ridiculously, close to tears. “Lidi? I cannot. Not to
him.”
“Better to him than
others.”
Lara shook her head. Adamant. She may
have been an orphan and likely a bastard, but she was freeborn.
“Better to none.”
“I can’t argue that,”
Sophie admitted, making sense at last. “Yet you’ve given Nithard
his chance at you, and he won’t let it go. I can only protect you
so much from him in this.” She laid her gnarled hand on Lara’s arm.
The hand that had raised, comforted, and chastised her but had
never pointed her wrong. “What I propose is this. Stay. Stay and
be lidi to the
captain, a good, hardworking lidi
who does not trouble her master.”
Lara chuffed. “Your plan has already
failed. He thinks me troublesome to the core.”
“Tell him to talk with me,
then,” Sophie said. “He’s only had fourteen days of you, I’ve had
nigh on twenty-three years of your troublesome ways.”
A man went into a coughing fit outside
the tent, and Sophie’s grip on Lara’s arm tightened.
“God and nature did not
make you so strong-limbed and hardheaded for naught. Work hard, be
obedient, earn your master’s respect, and I will be making love
potions galore to sell to the valley’s women intent on catching
themselves a strapping soldier.”
“Love potions?” Their love
potion was the only false tincture they knowingly sold. “A summer’s
worth of good coin, to be sure, but three hundred solidi
worth?”
“We’ll figure it out as we
go. Until the captain proves other than right and honorable, I want
you to swear you will stay under his protection. He dislikes these
Midereds and makes little effort to hide it. As long as you don’t
anger him too much, he’ll stand between you and them as he did
today.”
The instinctive sense of
safety Lara had felt when he’d done so couldn’t be forgotten. How
he’d stopped Ranulf from showing her legs. How he’d gone against
the count and saved Wolf’s life. “You’re right enough about the
captain not liking those lying snake Midereds.” She took a deep,
slow breath in and let it out. If Sophie wanted her to do this,
there was a reason. This much she’d learned living with Sophie the
Sixth. “All right. I’ll stay and be lidi to Captain Guiscard and try not
to anger him too much.”
“Good.” Sophie patted her
arm. “’Tis good. Much depends on this, you know. On
you.”
“No, I don’t know.” Lara
rubbed her temples, which had begun to throb. “Always you tell me
much, but never what. You speak in your seer’s riddles, and my head
is near to splitting so that I can’t think straight.”
“There will come a time
when you’ll know what.” Sophie took Lara by the hand and sat her
down on a bedroll. “Until then, you need to rest. The captain will
be supping with the count, and you should try to get some
sleep.”
“You’ll stay with me?”
Lara was bone tired and weary.
Sophie sat down beside her. “I’ll stay
with you, child.”
Laying her head on Sophie’s lap, Lara
closed her eyes with a sigh, content to be Sophie’s child for a
while longer.
***
Talon
Talon gave Lara as much time to rest
and himself to think as he could without offending Count Nithard by
arriving late to sup with his household. He considered not having
her attend with him, but the day’s events and her conversation with
Sophie in the tent, of which he’d heard every word, had raised more
questions than they’d answered. Talon didn’t like unanswered
questions, especially ones he found himself in the middle
of.
It’d been obvious almost as soon as
the count and his son had taken their seats at Mallus that Nithard
had it out for Lara. And almost as obvious that he feared Sophie
the Sixth, whose calm stares and half smiles had visibly unnerved
him. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Sophie and Talon standing
beside Lara, he’d have wagered coin on Nithard sentencing her to
death along with Wolf. He didn’t know the cause of the enmity
between the healers and the count, but he was determined to find it
out. Lara had been right when she’d called Ranulf a snake, and his
father was as clever and sneaky as a weasel. The best way Talon
knew how to draw either out of their holes was with bait, and Lara
was the best bait he had.
He entered his tent, where she lay
with her head on Sophie’s lap, awake and watching him with her wary
cat eyes, Wolf curled up beside her.
“You will sup with me and
my men at the count’s table, Lara,” he told her. “Ready yourself.”
He looked to Sophie. “You’re welcome to join us.”
“No.” The old healer shook
her head. “I would be anything but welcome at the count’s table.
I’ll return home and take Wolf with me.”
Talon nodded. “That’d probably be
best.”
He waited outside the tent as Lara
made her preparations, then as she stepped out with her hair
freshly combed and braided, her gown of dusty blue skimming the
womanly curves of her body, she caught him off guard. He tried not
to envision her strong, sleekly muscled and tanned legs, legs
Ranulf had apparently seen as well, the knowledge of which left a
bitter taste in his mouth. He clenched his scarred hand, all too
aware of the similarities between Ranulf’s story of meeting her in
the river and his own. Even so, Talon was man enough to admit he’d
deserved his slice, and he’d wager coin Ranulf had deserved his as
well. “Come on,” he said brusquely. “We don’t want to insult Count
Nithard by arriving late.”
They entered the dining
hall as the company was being called to table, and Talon accepted
the seat offered him beside the count’s daughter, a pretty, petite,
dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman who sat to her father’s left and
Ranulf to his father’s right. Talon indicated that Lara should take
the seat to his left, and Tree to hers. Phillipe and Dardinel mixed
in with the stewards and their families, whose daughters were
instantly batting lashes and flashing quick, flirty smiles at them.
Talon recalled Sophie’s plans for her love potions and smiled to
himself. Perhaps his purse would be filled with three hundred gold
solidi after all, and his tight-lipped, stone-faced
lidi would be free of
him, and him of her, a thought that turned his smile
dour.
“Where is the witch’s
hound, Guiscard?”
By the insolent tone of voice and the
fact that no one else here dared call him Guiscard without the
proper address of Captain, he knew it was Ranulf who spoke. “Wolf
is safely tucked away, Midered.” Talon leaned forward so that he
could meet Ranulf’s sneering gaze. “Do not fear.”
“I fear no man,” Ranulf
insisted.
Talon smiled. “No. Only women and
dogs.”
Ranulf fumed as a dark troll of a man
standing guard at Nithard’s back bristled. The other three
men-at-arms looked to him for their lead, and it was to him that
the count looked and slowly shook his head. The troll stepped back
half a step, though he still huffed and bristled. At a look from
his father, Ranulf slouched back in his seat.
Talon glanced at Lara, who
sat still and silent beside him as the servants carried out
platters of roast meat, summer vegetables, and freshly baked loaves
of rye. Despite what the count had declared and everything that had
happened, he’d been considering how to overturn her sentence when
he’d overheard her and Sophie speaking inside the tent. It was true
what Sophie had told Lara. The count had done what he could to ruin
her, making her lidi to him, whore to a troop of soldiers in the eyes of the
valley’s people, whether true in fact or not. He’d half expected
Sophie to agree to help her escape to this Hollow they’d mentioned
twice now and had been as surprised as Lara when Sophie told her to
stay instead. To stay and be lidi
to him, under his protection.
Sophie had been right about another