Ironheart

“Tudur?” Her voice was low and musical, with a distinctive husky tone. There was something about it that made him want to hear it again. What folly! He laughed out loud, and surprised himself for it was not a usual thing for him. The woman must have heard him because she swung around and stared at him so intently that he felt both rude and careless. Her eyes held him where he was.

Leon felt his heart skipping. He wished he had come with the clarion of trumpets, the rattle of armor and the gleam of sword instead of by the back door and in the company of beggars. He wanted to leap back onto Deso and race away. He laughed again. Why he thought such foolishness was beyond him.

A tall boy, almost as thin and angular as a spider, came clumping out of the postern with a wooden pail that sloshed with liquid. A flutter of murmurs rippled through the crowd. The woman watched while the boy set the pail on the table, then turned her gaze back to Leon, but her face was in shadow, her features hidden. A swirl of skirts and she withdrew.

The four ragged fellows inched their way toward the open doorway, their shadows following them like cringing dogs. There was a pause in voices. A murmur. A tensing of the air. A deep voice. A sudden exclamation.

A small shadow thrust forward. “Get away from there!”

“Says who?” asked a hoarse, harsh voice.

“Guards!” The sharp quick shout came from the boy Tudur. A hairy hand wrenched the boy’s head to one side.

Abruptly Leon became every inch the soldier. His heart sped up and his hand reached for his sword hilt. Fingers clenched and unclenched on empty air. He had let Deso carry his sword, which he had stowed behind the saddle, though he carried a dagger in his belt. Beneath his brown wool cloak and leather tunic, he wore no mail, not even a padded gambeson, naught but a linen shirt.

He’d been a fool to leave his shield and armor, even to his helmet, at Chirk with his squire this morning, and he was beginning to regret it. He might be strapped with ropy muscle, tough as an oak tree and as hard to kill, for he’d been to hell and beyond and survived. In all truth, most men would rather not face him with or without his sword. Even so, he regretted the sacrifice of his mail. Linen and wool were poor protection against edged steel.

He had, he thought, taken a great deal on himself. He’d seen that much in his squire’s eyes when they’d parted; a cool kind of reckoning he had gotten in the drill yard. Now it seemed mad to have done, and a light sweat lay on his limbs, for all that the wind was chill.

Wrenching himself free, Tudur dodged a fist, scurried past the ring of people gathered by the table, scampered across the road, and stopped, panting, in midsprint in front of Leon. The young face came up, the mouth opened and the eyes widened. The boy flinched visibly, caught himself, and drew back, the look on his face changing in an instant from surprise to confusion.

Leon sighed. His forehead ached. He realized he was scowling. He stretched his mouth into a smile.

“Are you a knight?” The boy looked afraid—not greatly so, but uneasy all the same.

Leon inclined his head to him.

A peculiar animation had come to the boy’s face, a keen anticipation. “The sort that saves maidens in distress?”

No, Leon began to say. But…

“So ’tis said,” were the words that tripped off his foolish tongue.

“Yes. Yes! I knew it! Some say I am daft, but I could tell straightway you were Brenna’s knight!”

“I’ve no notion what you mean.”

The boy’s eyes darted from Leon’s face to the postern opening, back again. “Of course. My mistake. Being daft, I get confused, so I don’t—” His eyes flicked back to the postern. “You are most needed here, sir.” There was tremulous expectation, as if Leon would act now, at once, in a breath.

Leon inwardly cursed. He was not usually a man given to rash acts of compassion, and, though the boy’s pluck touched him, he saw no obligation to have his throat cut. Or to die for nothing because some self-righteous slip of a girl was too cocksure stupid to take heed of the curfew. He stared down his nose at the boy, who went beet-red.

“If you would give aid, good sir!” Tudur said, blinking wildly. “There may be trouble—at the gate.”

Well, what the hell. Nobody else was going to play the hero, and Deso needed hay and a warm stable. Condemned now to simple workaday practicalities, Leon cast common sense to the winds. He handed the reins to Tudur, pointed silently to the open gate and stepped into the shadow of the wall, drawing his hood over his head. This action had the added benefit of concealing the greater part of his features.

He held still while Tudur led the destrier through the gate. Deso went with his ears laid flat and pricked up by turns, dancing and skipping through imagined obstacles, iron-shod hooves ringing on the gray cobbles. Ravens still circled aloft, dropped lower, as if urging him forward.

The girl came running out of the postern once more, her dark braids whipping loose from under the confining net, each with a mind of its own, her skirts aflurry, her slippered feet hardly touching the stones. This time she carried a large basket piled high with bread and meat.

“Hurry, Telyn, we are already past the hour!”

A smooth-faced youth clad in a vivid green tunic and bright yellow hose followed her, also bearing a basket. “This is foolishness. Curfew has rung. The gates should be locked!”

She gave a laugh, easy and merry. Leon caught his breath at the sweet, open sound. “Shall these poor folk go hungry because the hour grows late?” The laugh died. “Come, good people…here is some bread for you…and for you.”

A vague fluting of tones rose among the group, and a voice said, “It is unsafe, Brenna. The air is charged with danger!”

The woman lifted her face, and a sudden flash of lightning bathed her features in light. There was something about the expression on her face that struck a cord within Leon; and he found himself ensnared by her face, he who did not generally pay attention to women.

His throat went tight. She reminded him of the angel in his dreams. He had never seen such perfect milky skin or such large dark eyes. She could not be considered beautiful in the strictest sense of the word, for her mouth was too large, her chin too pointed, her cheekbones too wide. But the result was somehow magical. The notion dazed him. He lost his breath and his clarity of thought both at once and stood shaking like a leaf.

She showed a smile of pearly teeth, and held out her hand, palm up. “Come, sir, there is enough for all,” she said; and snared him twice over.

He hesitated. She waited.

“Come,” she reiterated. Her voice was music.

Leon was thrown into a turmoil of self-awareness, caught for a moment in two flashing, dark eyes. Eyes that sat far apart above a fine, straight nose. Eyes that understood, accepted. His face burned. He could feel the cords standing out along his neck. His body knotted from throat to thigh. He must look a fool, he thought, the greenest of country bumpkins, undone by a woman.

Every part of him was drawn to her. Never had his limbs seemed so beyond his control. Every step he took seemed fraught with the potential for calamity. What if his overlong legs betrayed him? What if he tripped and fell?

Unsettled by such strange thoughts, he drew his cloak close. His feet beat out a grim refrain.

Brenna. Brenna. Brenna.

Until, finally, he stood very still, towering over her, staring down at her, sharing a look with her. For a moment there seemed a confusion in her dark eyes. Gradually he began to comprehend what he saw there: it was a reflection of his own emotions. She was shocked and trying to hide it.

Then came the thunder, rumbling, the intervals shortening between claps. Brenna shook herself, as if awakening from a trance, and held out a cup filled with milk. The smile faded to gravity. The eyes stayed upon his, dark as river water.

Fingers touched fingers. Oh, very gladly would he have touched more. He longed for a thousand things, all of them dangerous.

“My good fellow, you have enough scars to stitch a tapestry. Stand aside and I’ll find some salve that lets the skin stretch—” a frown formed on her brow and she bent her head to an ailing urchin, while her cheeks suffused with color “—and that cough, child, needs an herbal tisane…that sore on your hand needs a poultice—”

Leon felt another flush heat his ears, as if he were a grass-green stripling undone by his first glimpse of a trim female ankle. He buried his nose in the offered cup, thanked her in a low voice, drank deeply, put the cup on the table and retreated a short distance.

The shadows above his head stirred, as if a gentle wind was blowing. He slitted his eyes and looked up at the sky. The ravens screamed, swirling, and vanished into the tower.

He picked up a movement out of the corner of his eye. Instantly alert, he did nothing out of the ordinary, simply allowed his eyes to track the beggars once more. One of the churls eased himself away from the wall and slid toward the postern, his hand resting lightly on his hip. But he turned back to his original position when he noticed Leon watching him.

There was trouble afoot. Deep inside Leon’s mind he could feel a subtle unease. It was as if he felt, not heard, the echoes of the alarm bell clamoring across the desert air from the furtherest outpost long before the enemy has reached the gate.

The girl gave a cry of protest, which brought his head jerking up. The beggars! It seemed she was refusing their demand for a bed for the night.

“No,” she said, stepping back.

The beggar scowled. “There is shelter for women and children, but not for men?”

The girl did not rise to the bait. A woman and her two children had been ushered through the postern gate into the bailey, but now the girl barred the door to the beggars with her own person. “They want herbs and potions. You have no such need. Be off with you and seek a bed at the inn in the village.”