Chapter Seven
Lidi
Lara
As lidi, Lara woke each morning at dawn
and helped Berta, Enid, and Marta prepare and serve breakfast to
the company of soldiers. After breakfast, she would tend to various
soldiers’ aches and ailments, then she would tend to Fulrad. Though
he couldn’t speak yet, he managed to say plenty with his sneers and
leers and rude, guttural grunts as she cleansed and bandaged his
neck wounds and rubbed a healing balm of comfrey, chamomile, and
yarrow on his knee. Every morning, she would have to cajole and
threaten him anew to drink the tisane of white willow bark for his
pain and swelling, his grimace each time he swallowed a mouthful of
the bitter brew small recompence for dealing with him.
Once Fulrad was dealt with, she was
free to spend her days as she always had, tending to her animals
and gardens, drying herbs and flowers, mixing tisanes and
tinctures, and riding into the villages and toths to tend the
people and animals of the valley. She saw little of the captain
during the day, and then only in passing as he rode his black steed
patrolling the valley’s borders, having left the daily running of
the keep to Anglbert, though he was always back at the keep when
she returned in the late afternoon to help cook and serve the
evening meal. Then she would tend to Fulrad again, repeating the
morning’s ritual with the addition of a glass of wine, the one
thing he took from her without complaint.
Several days into this new life, Lara
picked wild blackberries from the vines bordering her property and
strawberries from her garden and baked three pies with them in the
keep’s ovens, which the company made short work of after having
eaten their fill of roast goat, summer squash, and oat
bread.
“My compliments on the
pies, Berta.” The captain leaned back in his seat as Lara helped
clear the empty platters from the table. “I can’t remember when
I’ve tasted one so delicious.”
“Why thank you, Captain,
but they weren’t made by me.” Berta beamed at Lara.
“So, you can cook,” he
said with a teasing grin that Lara was learning to recognize. “Or
at least bake.”
Lara dipped her head. “As I told you,
m’lord.”
He furrowed his brows at the title he
hated, which was why she used it. “I tell you what, Lara the pie
baker. I’ll pay you a copper for a pie all my own.”
“How many pies can you eat
in a day?” Lara quickly calculated how many coppers equaled a gold
solidus.
He laughed, low, deep, and more
pleasing to her ear than she cared to admit. “One at a time will
suffice. My favorite is berry, any kind.”
“Mine is peach.” Phillipe
jangled his purse.
“And mine is plum,” Tree
added.
Before she finished clearing the
table, she had orders for five pies from five soldiers, making five
coppers toward her wergeld, which she pocketed before heading up to
the captain’s chamber that she still shared each night. Shutting
the door behind her, she glanced around. One of her new duties was
to keep the captain’s chamber orderly, but there was nothing for
her to tidy up. The captain was as neat and careful of his
belongings as he was of his person, bathing each afternoon before
supper in the tub in the antechamber.
“You’re welcome to bathe
before I do,” he’d offered the first night she’d returned to the
keep as lidi. “Or after. No sense in wasting a tub of hot
water.”
She’d thanked him and told him she
bathed at her house, and then he’d ordered three bars of sandalwood
soap and one of rose from her, grinning sheepishly as he’d asked
for the bar of rose soap.
“A gift for a woman?”
she’d asked, pocketing his coin.
He’d shrugged for an answer, and the
image of Ravenna, who’d sent a servant to buy a vial of love potion
from Sophie that afternoon, had come to Lara unbidden. She’d
imagined him grinning at Ravenna the way he sometimes grinned at
her, slow and sure and teasing, and she’d almost told him she was
out of the rose soap and would have if not for the coin.
He still came up to the chamber late,
spending the evenings in the common hall with his men, and now that
he wasn't guarding the door against Lara, he slept in the big,
four-poster bed while she slept in the cot, Wolf on his pelts
beside her. They were seven nights into this new dance when the
door to their chamber pushed open shortly after Lara had retired,
and the captain walked in carrying the strawberry pie he’d bought
from her that afternoon. Phillipe followed him in, carrying a
pitcher of wine and three cups. Lara was sitting on her cot,
counting her growing hoard of coin, a copper between her fingers as
the captain set the pie on the table and Phillipe set the pitcher
and cups down alongside it.
“How much?” The captain
nodded at the ornately carved wooden box that Lara kept her coin
in. It was the first time he’d asked about her earnings.
She dropped the copper into the box
and shut the lid. “Fifteen coppers, three silver pieces, and one
gold solidus.”
“How much of it is from
Sophie’s love potions?” He elbowed Phillipe in the gut. “Amelia,
the steward Braun’s daughter, gave Phillipe a sweet libation this
very noon.”
Phillipe made a show of feeling his
head, his chest, his gut. “Is there anything in particular I should
be noticing?” he asked Lara, his blue eyes laughing.
“Aye,” she told him. “A
brunette named Amelia.”
“She is rather pleasant in
a rather bland fashion.” He winked.
“She pays with good coin,”
Lara told him. “As have half the women in this valley.” Phillipe
grinned, and the captain snorted. “Be careful who you take a sweet
drink from, Captain,” she warned him. “Half of those women intend
their potion for you.”
“It will do them no good,”
Phillipe said, shaking his blond curls.
Lara gave the captain a sly smile.
“Over two score of marriages in the province have been initiated
with a vial of Sophie’s love potion.”
“If it’s marriage they
seek, they’re poisoning the wrong men,” the captain vowed with a
savage certainty that gave Lara pause.
“But if it’s a night of
pleasure only.” Phillipe wagged his blond brows. “Then I’m their
man.”
Lara laughed, the captain scowled, and
Phillipe poured the wine into the three cups as the captain set up
the figurines on the game board, all black on one side, all white
on the other. He motioned for Lara to sit at the table with
them.
“The game is called Shah,
or King,” the captain told her as Phillipe moved one of the domed
white pieces a square forward. “It was a gift from the Emperor of
Byzantium, who taught me how to play my second time there as
courier to Charles.”
“How many times have you
been to Byzantium?” Lara asked, impressed. A courier was someone
educated, someone the king trusted with secretive information, but
then the captain did read, write, and speak Latin, and was lieged
directly to Charles.
The captain moved a black piece
forward. “Three. I traveled my second with Phillipe as my guard,
which was how we met.”
“Ten years ago this past
spring.” Phillipe moved another white piece.
Lara took a sip of her wine. “How long
have you been soldiers?”
“Eight years,” Phillipe
said as the captain studied the board. “When Charles realized what
a strategist Talon was, not to mention good on a horse and handy
with a sword, he talked him into becoming captain of a company of
horsemen, a special troop that could ride hard and fast when
needed. Then they talked me into joining, promising me travel and
adventure, women and glory.”
He was grinning at Lara as he said it,
his blue eyes twinkling, and she found herself grinning back at his
easy charm. Charm and good looks that had no doubt gotten him many
of those promised women. Taking another sip of wine, she glanced at
the captain, whose gray gaze had turned somber and brooding.
Phillipe chuckled, and the captain flashed him a withering glare
before picking up another black piece and moving it.
“What are the figurines
made of?” she asked.
“The black are onyx,” the
captain said. “The white are ivory.”
“Ivory?”
“The tusk of an
elephant.”
“Elephant?”
“A massive creature the
size of three oxen with legs as thick as an oak trunk,” the captain
told her. “And a head as big as a boulder with big, floppy ears the
size of trenchers and a long, rope-like nose called a trunk that
can wrap around a full-grown man and pick him up and carry
him.”
“Truly?” Lara was amazed
at the captain’s description of such a fantastical
creature.
“Truly.” First one side of
the captain’s mouth crooked up and then the other, giving the hard
planes of his features a boyish cast, and Lara understood all too
well why half the valley’s women wanted him to drink their love
potions.
“Talon.” Phillipe was
grinning as he looked from Lara to the captain. “You should carve
an elephant for Lara.” He turned back to Lara. “He carved one for
the emperor of Byzantium that sits on the mantel at his summer
palace.”
“Did you carve the
figurine of the woman in your chest?” Lara could have bitten her
tongue as soon as she asked it. She’d just admitted to going
through his belongings. “I’m sorry, Captain. I didn’t mean to pry.
Well, I mean, I meant to when I saw her, but it was my first night
in my ca— your chamber.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he
told her with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “I would have done
the same.”
“Who is she? The woman you
carved?”
Phillipe coughed and sputtered on his
wine as the captain’s smiling gaze grew somber once more. He stared
hard at Lara for a long moment, and she tilted her head and stared
right back, trying to figure out what had happened. To figure him
out.
He stood. “Don’t touch my bloody pie,”
he growled at Phillipe, who sat grinning as the captain strode out
the door and slammed it shut.
“What was that about?” she
asked Phillipe, who chuckled. “What did I say? I apologized for
going through his things and he accepted. Was it the woman I found
in his chest?”
“Aye,” Phillipe said,
sobering. “It’s the woman.”
He said is, not was, and he watched
Lara as he said it.
“Who is she?” she asked
again.
“Who is she?” Phillipe
pulled at the short curly blond whiskers of his beard as if
weighing his words. “She is a dream.”
***