“I’ve heard some interesting news about you,” Sigefrith said once the formalities were behind them.
He turned his chair around, making the legs shriek across the floorboards. Ethelwyn was wound up so tightly he winced all the way to his chair.
“Meggie, what are you doing?”
Margaret closed the cabinet doors and sighed. So much for secrecy.
“Here it is,” Addonwy said, looking smug. “This has to be it. On the Nones of May, back in seventy-one.” He read, “‘From the hill known as Holly Grove, southwest by a gill called Horse Tail, three hundred yards to an old wall, and thence west across Moss Beck, thirty yards to the stone which Wihtgar put in this place. And Moss Beck is the boundary for three hundred yards unto the gate of Whittle Fold, at a distance of thirty yards, except it be in flood.’”
Dust was the other thing Sadb would remember when she spoke to her son of this day: the men and the horses, brushed to blinding in the morning sun, returning mud-spattered, dirt-clotted, and ashen, treading up a cloud of dust that would cast a pall over her world.
Sadb stopped to watch the wind tumble a speckled chicken feather across the path. She felt weightless and wind-blown herself today, skimming in and out of conversations, skipping over whole parts of Mass, yet sticking at such grain-of-sand trivialities as a feather drifting across an empty court. Surely one good gust would simply blow her away.
“Saeward!”
Saeward stopped, his shoulders tightened, and for a moment he stood motionless as a rabbit caught in the open while scurrying from one burrow to another. The court, he must have been thinking, was not so very wide. It was rotten luck, he must have been thinking, that Ralf chanced to arrive at just that time.
Aileann took a backwards-running leap and flopped back onto her bed.
“I hate Lent!”
With a fingertip Estrid traced the dust out of curlicue carvings on the back of the door, stopping and starting as the vines led her through a maze full of nothing but dead ends.
Brede pulled up his horse before the gate and stared over the crossbar. The yellow lights twinkling through the pines had seemed stars at first, turning into torches as they climbed higher on the path up from the lake shore. But once around the last bend, the candlelit arches of open windows were plain.
“That doesn’t look good,” Brede said.
Aengus was trying to remember the last time he had waited up for his da. As with most last times, he hadn’t known it then, and if he had he probably would have thanked the Lord. It was funny what a man could grow to be nostalgic for.
She might die an old maid—she might end up an old woman with dozens of cats as Catan had predicted—but she would not marry that nose.
Chapters
Latest Comment