Chapter Twenty-four #2
middle age who rode a gray as sturdy as he, with his cart horse as
a second, who wore a jerkin of lacquered leather with a silver
hilted longsword slung across his back.
“I haven’t always been a
silversmith,” Rilke told Talon as they looked over the campsite. “I
rode under Carloman’s banner until his death.”
“And now?” Talon asked. It
was well known there’d been bad blood between Charles and his
brother, and the rumor that Charles had poisoned Carloman to gain
sole control of the kingdom had run rife.
“Now I ride for the Count
and Countess of Oloron. For a chance at a fair life in a fair
province.”
“It’s a good thing I ruled
in your favor, then.” Talon clapped Rilke on the shoulder. “An
experienced sword arm is always good to have on your
side.”
“It is yours, my liege,”
Rilke vowed. “Yours and your fair lady’s.”
Talon ground his teeth and kicked at
the cold embers of the fire the Basques had made no attempt to
bury, just as they’d made no attempt to hide their
trail.
“They mean to outrun us,”
he said to no one in particular.
“Aye.” Anglbert pulled on
his beard as he came over from making his own rounds. “Which is
good for us, bad for them. Nobody’s ever outrun us before, and
that’s without women and children slowing them down.”
“True.” Talon’s gut
knotted at the sight of women’s and children’s footprints ringing
the fire pit.
“They had a tent over
here,” Phillipe called out from the opposite edge of the small
clearing.
“Why would raiders set up
a tent?” Talon ran a hand through his sweaty hair. “Unless someone
of importance travels with them, a Suleiman perhaps, bent on
revenge for Pamplona?”
“Was not Roncesvalles
vengeance enough?” Anglbert grumbled.
“Against our soldiers,
surely,” Talon thought aloud. “But what of their women and
children? Why else would they have taken ours and nobody else’s?
Why didn’t they take anything else? No horses, no food stores. Why
raid a small place like Denys’s and not the keep? They obviously
knew we were away for the day.”
“How did they know where
our women and children would be and when?” Anglbert frowned.
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
“A spy?” Talon rubbed his
jaw. “It would be easy enough to hide out in Tent Town.”
“Captain.” Oswald stood by
a hedge of bushes along the clearing’s edge. “Over
here.”
Talon walked over and stopped at a
bush Oswald pointed down at. A bush that had a scrap of blue cloth
tied to a low branch.
Scratched into the dirt beneath it
were the words Nithard, trap, R and L, written in Latin.
***
Lara
Lara sat cross-legged on the ground
beside Patience, whose head bobbed and nodded as she fought the
sleep the other women and children had long given in to. At last,
the scout rode in and reported to Inigo and Ortzi, who woke
Nithard, Ranulf, and Lothair.
Trying to act more interested in the
fire than their conversation, Lara shifted closer and held her
hands out to it.
“They’re half a day’s ride
behind us,” Inigo translated what the scout said for Nithard.
“Twenty at least, maybe two, three more.”
“Twenty fighting men,
knowing Guiscard,” Nithard said.
Inigo said something to the scout, who
nodded and answered. “All armed, two horses each,” Inigo
translated.
“That’s just like the
bastard,” Ranulf spat. “How do we keep ahead of them, dragging
along women and children who can barely hang on to their
mounts?”
“We ride early, ride long,
don’t stop,” Inigo told him. “We need keep ahead one day more, then
we let catch up.”
“And spring our trap.”
Nithard looked as smug and pleased as a weasel that’d just spied a
fat, lazy vole.
Ranulf kicked at the dirt. “There are
only six men waiting at the pass. That doesn’t give us any
advantage in numbers.”
Lara recalled Phillipe’s warning about
numbers not counting for everything to Ranulf when he’d demanded to
beat her after Hamm’s unveiling, and the corners of her lips
twitched up.
“Our advantage be position
and surprise,” Inigo said. “This Guiscard expect us keep running,
not be waiting to ambush.”
“I do like that
advantage,” Ranulf said with anticipation.
Lara ground her teeth so hard her jaw
clenched up. She rubbed it, working the ache out, and realized the
men had stopped talking and were watching her. Ortzi crossed
himself and even Inigo took a step back, his dark eyes watching her
keen as a hawk’s. Ranulf glared at her and a chill ran down her
spine at the possibility of ever being at his mercy. She glared
back. She’d die by her own hand before she succumbed to him.
Nithard was staring at her with something between hatred and
terror, and Lara saw exactly what it was Sophie had given her as a
weapon against him.
“You’ll need more than an
ill-conceived ambush to kill my husband or me, or our daughter,”
she said to Nithard, who startled when he realized she was speaking
to him. She smiled. “I’ve seen you die, Uncle, in my dreams. Would
you like me to tell you how?”
Ranulf spat, Lothair snarled and
muttered a curse, but Nithard remained silent as he stood staring
at her, his face pale in the fire’s light. Smiling as if she really
had seen him die in her dreams and liked what she’d seen, Lara
turned her back on them and lay down beside her
daughter.
***
Talon
“Captain.” Dardinel
pointed to the ground behind a hedge of bramble, a grin on his
face. “She’s left you another one.”
Talon squatted down and lifted an
upside-down bird’s nest. Beneath the nest sat two rocks, and
between the two rocks were two stems of yarrow with their white