Dragonswood (8 page)

Garth laughed. “So no fox hunts for you.”

“None for me no matter how well I’m saddled,” I said gruffly.

Garth said no word, but finished currying Seagull, shelved the brush, and left.

There was something of the wildwood in the man who came and went illusive as moonlight moving through the branches.

Chapter Thirteen

M
ORNING SUNLIGHT GLISTENED
on the frozen puddles. The wind smelled of pine and coming snow. I walked around behind the lodge. The pond in the open field was iced about the edges. Water trembled in the middle. Ducks flew down and skated across the ice, fluttering and skidding. It made me laugh. Some blackbirds sang on the icy edge. I could hear it only in my right ear, not my left. My hand went to my cauliflower ear. It did not hurt. Not anymore. But I’d have the reminder of my father’s punishments all my life. Garth appeared walking Horace and saw me rubbing my ear.

“I’ve been wondering who did that to you,” he said.

I wondered if he meant my thumbs, still misshapen, the nail still missing on one. But he was looking at my ear.

“My father. He used to beat me.”

“Men who beat the weaker sex are brutes.”

“We are not the weaker sex,” I snapped.

He put up his hands in mock surrender. “All right, Tess.”

He looked at me again. I glanced away, surprised by my own outburst. Turning, he led Horace out beyond the pond and disappeared in the oaks.

I’
D BEEN RUDE
to our host early in the morn when we were the only ones awake. Later at the breakfast table, I thought to catch his eye, and say a word or two, hoping he’d forgive my rudeness. Garth ignored me and watched Poppy as he spooned more jelly. Morning sun poured through the window, sweetening Poppy’s hair and face.

“Poppy,” I said, “did you tell Aisling how you helped us forage food in the wood?” She’d worked well with the leech. She might become Aisling’s apprentice if the woman needed the help.

Poppy blushed at my praise.

“It’s true,” I went on. “She senses where to find herbs, mushrooms, and berries. What food there is, she finds. And,” I said, looking at Aisling, “Poppy brought nettles here wanting to make the very tincture you have in your jar for Tom.”

Aisling wiped her mouth. “Where are the nettles?”

“I threw them out,” I confessed.

“A waste,” Aisling said sternly. She looked fondly at her helper. “Tess is right. You have a gift. And your hands are steady with wounds. Any eye can see it.”

Garth asked, “Tell us where you learned this, Poppy.”

“Sir, I can’t say as I know. It… comes to me.” She batted her eyes. The two would be wed within the month if she continued looking at him thus. I cleared the table and went outside for air.

That night I made a tasty stew from the dried peas and meat bone I found in the cupboard and turnips from the garden. There was food aplenty here compared to our kitchen back home, where Mother and I were always scraping meals from nothing. Each day we were anxious, fearing we’d not enough to satisfy Father, who’d pound us for the meager meals. It mattered little that Father drank most of our market money, that we took in sewing and scribed letters for pay so we could afford to buy more food.

Stirring the savory stew, I thought of Mother and wondered how she was doing back home without me. Steam wet my face, and tears. I said a little prayer for her safety.

When all was ready, I was glad to serve the hot dish. For the feast day of Saint Placid, who was saved from drowning and invoked against chills, hot stew was a proper meal.

“Mm,” Aisling said. “You’re a fine cook, Tess.”

Garth ate, but did not say a word. Aisling, Meg, and Poppy put their heads together, talking over Tom’s condition. Meg took him a steaming bowl of stew. I could not offer medicine, but I hoped the meal would strengthen him. Later, when I’d finished scouring the pot, I headed down the hall with a gift for Horace. Garth was in the library with his hound. I paused at the doorway, suddenly uncertain.

“Come in, Tess. What is it you want?” It was not a warm greeting.

Horace met me with wagging tail and snuffed the back of my hand. I produced the soup bone and his tail wacked the table legs.

“He’ll be your champion forever now,” Garth said. I smiled to hear a softer tone from him at last, and at the idea of the old bloodhound as my champion. By the fire Horace gnawed the bone. I edged to the desk and touched the feathered quill.

“Do you wish to write something?”

“Sir? No, I—”

“You don’t know how,” he said matter-of-factly.

Many people, even lords and ladies, did not know how to read or write, so I shouldn’t have taken offense; still, I barked, “Of course I know how! I can read and write and do mathematical sums. I used to keep my father’s accounts; the clodpole couldn’t do his own.”

“Pardon me, mistress.”

I blinked down at the floor.
Leave now before you embarrass yourself further.

“You’re welcome to take a few pages.” Garth met me at the desk. “You might like this.” He pulled a small ink block from the drawer with an elegant dragon carved along the top. “Just take a little black powder from the edge like this…” He demonstrated for me, using a penknife to scrape powder into a small dish. “Add water and you have ink.”

Give me a man who buys her ink that she might draw or write, books that she might read
…

“It’s wonderful,” I whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“A traveling man’s ink, no worries over spilling the ink bottle. What will you write?”

I looked up at him. He was tall and lean, though muscled in the right places and his shoulders were broad. His dark hair curled about his ears. My skin tingled strangely. A feeling I’d not had before and one I couldn’t name. I wanted to say I had no plan to write a letter, but to draw. “M-may I mix the ink now?” I stammered.

“You have a lover you wish to send a note to telling him you’re safe now?” Garth asked, arms crossed. My hand slipped, I spilled the ink dust from the dish onto the table. “Oh, sorry. So clumsy of me.” Garth smiled and swept the dust back into the dish, the side of his hand blackened.

“May I go?”

He turned back to the fire. I rushed from the room, took a little water from the kitchen bucket. Behind my door, I breathed hard. Why run from the library like a coward? Cramps came as I drew. My courses would be here tonight. I would have to gather rags to catch the blood, find a private place to wash them out. I supposed this huntsman was not familiar with women’s troubles. The cramps strengthened as I filled the parchment page, but I was soon lost in the picture forming under my hand.

I was halfway into the first sketch before I saw I was drawing the great old dragon rescuing the burning girl. He winged over the sea, dipping her in the water to put out her burning gown. I showed her flailing in his claw, screaming, as I remembered her, though he meant to help her and not harm her. I added the dragon’s long tail and arched neck with its jagged scar, the moon above, the fishing boats to his left, the harbor. I did not sketch the fey man Poppy saw.

I still did not understand how Poppy spied a fey man on dragonback when I did not. I was the one who’d slipped into the sanctuary night after night, hoping to glimpse a fairy or a dragon.

When the page was full in every detail, I quickly hid the work behind the wardrobe. All the art I’d done back in Harrowton was in the witch hunter’s hands. Had she kept the dragon sketches, the drawing of the green man?

One page left. My hand knew what to do if my mind did not. A man sprawled comfortably before the fire with his faithful dog beside him. Garth’s face was less challenging in side view. I caught the way his brow tipped when he was deep in his own thoughts, the small ridge high on his nose, his strong chin and cheekbones, his mouth, which turned up a little. He could go very quiet, then of a sudden, rush into action.
He is like the deer that way.

My hand flew. But I found I could not capture the man’s mysterious nature, his readiness and ease. Some ink pooled near his boot as I drew his long legs crossed by the fire. I paused, not completely happy with my sketch.

You have a lover you wish to send a note to telling him you’re safe now?
Why presume that? What I did next confounded me. Did I mean to prove I was not writing a lover? Why else would I find myself again at the library door with the parchment in my hand. Garth was gazing out the window. I nearly ran off again, but he turned and crossed the room.

“It’s not finished,” I said, blushing.
Then why did you bring it here?

“You’re an artist, Tess,” he said. There was no jest in his tone. He took the drawing and set it up on the mantel above the hearth. “Look Horace, you’re in it too.” Horace lifted his head, tail thumping at the pleasant sound of his master’s voice. I leaned up against the wall by the window. Garth’s brown eyes questioned.
You didn’t want the quill to write to a lover?

Only to draw with
. “I’d write to my mother if I could, and tell her I am safe, but a letter from me would only endanger her. There’s no way to send her one anyway.”

He joined me at the window. “You’re right to protect her.”

Even if her worry over me is breaking her heart?

He was standing close enough for me to catch the scent coming off his skin and clothes, a mix of wood smoke, horses, and evergreens. A goodsome smell and not at all like my singed, ale-breathed father. New beard growth darkened his cheeks. I’d shadowed his face to show this in my drawing. He’d skipped his morning shave to ride out early after the leech.

“I’ve meant to thank you,” I said.

“For letting you use a little parchment?”

“For fetching Mistress Aisling.”

“A fine healer,” he said. “I hope we’re not too late.” We were quiet a moment, thinking of Tom. Garth pointed above the trees. “Look.” He opened the window. “There.”

Stars hung shining over the wood.

“Stars are jewels, my mother used to say. Heaven’s treasure free to anyone from prince to peasant if they have eyes to look.”

I liked his mother for saying that. They
were
free for anyone who cared to look. No one owned them, yet even as I gazed up I felt the need to capture the heavens on parchment as I drew other things I loved, to hold the vision and keep it with me always—a kind of ownership, I supposed. Perhaps I was not as generous as Garth’s mother.

“Free to all,” I agreed. “And these jewels can never be stolen.”

Garth frowned. No doubt he’d been asked to look for the king’s stolen treasure. All woodwards had to scour their sections of Dragonswood. He gripped something in his hand. Seeing my curious look, he spread his fingers. A thin gold chain coiled in his palm with a single pearl on the end.

A large pearl. “Does it belong to the king?” I whispered. Garth handed it to me. His fingers brushed my palm as he let go. I trembled near him, framed at the window, the fire behind him, darkness outside, and wind. I tried to give the necklace back. “I have never touched anything belonging to the king.”

His brows went up. “Haven’t you? The dishes here, Tess, the quill you used just now, the chairs by the fire.” He nodded at the chairs behind us with their finely patterned needlework. “The feather beds—”

“The king slept in our room?”

“His sons did.”

“The princes?” I stepped back. Well, that explained the rocking horse at least, though Prince Arden and Bion were grown men in their twenties now.

“The hunting lodge is not as big as a castle, Tess. Not many slept in these walls. Servants and men-at-arms stayed in the outbuildings beyond the barn.”

“Why didn’t you put us there?” I accused. “Won’t the king—” I checked myself. “Won’t the princes be angry?”

He shook his head, smiling a little. “I think not.”

“Do you know them that well?” I still had the pearl held out. He seemed reluctant to take it back.

“As well as any boy raised at Pendragon Castle. I am a nobleman’s son, not eldest but a second son, so I was a castle page before I became a knight, and served here as His Majesty’s huntsman.”

The pearl felt cool and silky. “How did you come by this?” Such a slender gold chain might have been lost under a bed and the huntsman would have opportunity to thieve it, I supposed.

“You’re quite inquisitive, aren’t you, Tess?”

He laid his hand across mine, the pearl shelled between our palms. I looked up at his face quite close to mine, then glanced away, dizzy with lack of sleep or too long a journey in the woods or…

“You think I stole it?”

My mouth went dry.

“I didn’t, Tess. It was my mother’s pearl.” His throat sounded thick with emotion, and I guessed his mother was dead. Perhaps the black armband was for her and not for the king as I’d first supposed.

He took the pearl, closing his hand around it so even the chain was hidden. The night wind from the open window blew my hair against his arm where the sleeve was torn. If it tickled through the tear he did not move to draw his arm away. I could not think what to say to comfort him. I’d nearly lost my mother many times to the perils of childbirth, but each time she’d strengthened and recovered.

He broke the silence. “Why were you accused of witchcraft, Tess?”

I looked at the hunched willow by the garden wall. “Why do you want to know that? You’d have turned us in by now if you planned to collect the fee.”

“There, so now you trust me that far at least,” he said.

My small shiver made him shut the window. We moved to the fire. Garth pocketed the pearl. The room closed in the way a flower folds its petals at nightfall. We did not take the chairs but stood in the circle of the red glow.

“You were there in Harrowton that day. I saw you.”

He nodded.

“What were you doing so far south of here?”

“You evade my questions, Tess.”

“I have questions of my own.”

He smiled, looked away. “I’d come to see your woodward. We check in with each other time to time. I found him sleeping on the job. The man is too lax to notice intruders in his part of Dragonswood.”

I’d been one of the intruders he was too lax to notice.

Garth added a log to the fire and poked it into place with the tongs till it spat sparks. “I came to speak with your Sheriff Bollard about him, to ask that he be replaced with another man more watchful at his post.”