Ethelwyn escapes
“Oh my God!” Ethelwyn moaned. “Not you!”
“Oh my God, not you, sir,” Egelric corrected.
“What do you want?”
“What do you want, sir? Two things. First, I want to laugh at you. Second, I want to ask you what you’re doing.”
“Let’s skip the first,” Ethelwyn snapped. “To go directly to the second, I am packing up and going home.”
“Home! Did you forget something there?”
“I believe I may still have a few shreds of pride hanging about there.”
“Now, Wyn, that’s a long way to ride only to retrieve a few tattered shreds with which to hide your indecency.” Egelric reached out one of his big hands to tousle Ethelwyn’s damp curls. “Pride is like hair—no matter how closely it is shorn, it eventually grows back.”
“Don’t touch my hair!” Ethelwyn cringed. “I just combed it.”
Egelric laughed.
“I suppose they’re already talking about it all over the valley?” Ethelwyn grumbled.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been all over the valley. But I did meet the Old Man in the corridor, and he was practically in tears because he missed the fun.”
“The fun! I like that!”
“Wyn!” Egelric scolded. “You didn’t get hurt, did you?”
“No. But somebody wishes I would hurry up and die so she can dance around my grave!”
Egelric laughed. “What’s this?”
“Red Boots!”
“What?”
“That insufferable, impudent maid with the red boots!”
“She saw you?”
“Saw me?” Ethelwyn gasped. “She pushed me in!”
“Pushed you in! The Old Man said it was Heafoc who pushed you in.”
“The boy only smeared cake all over my cloak. It was Red Boots who pushed me in. Or—no, she didn’t push me exactly. She herded me in.”
“The devil she did! Now I am practically in tears for having missed that!”
“Laugh until you cry, why don’t you? And then she had the gall to say that she would wear red boots to my funeral and dance around my grave!”
“Never!” Egelric laughed. “Now that’s what I call saucy!”
Ethelwyn turned back to his packing. “You will all be laughing when I catch a chill and die,” he muttered.
“Oh, Wyn,” Egelric chortled. “What a big baby you are. Tell me you’re not truly going home. People will only laugh all the more if you run away.”
“They will laugh anyway, and at least this way I shan’t have to hear it.”
“But Ana is coming on Saturday…”
“As if I could face a lady after what happened to me today!”
“Are you certain you won’t stay? The King is coming home tomorrow, and with the Queen gone, we’re bound to have some fun, even if it is Advent.”
“Fun laughing at me, perhaps.”
“Now, Wyn, I do not think that your dunking is of such great importance that we shall be discussing nothing but for the next forty-eight hours. Though I admit the line about dancing around your grave is worth repeating at least a few times…”
Ethelwyn sighed.
“Well, suit yourself, young man,” Egelric chuckled. “I don’t know how you will explain your departure to Her Grace, but if you think you must…”
“Oh my God!” Ethelwyn groaned. “I can’t see her now.”
“Certainly, if you are a gentleman, you cannot permit yourself to quit this castle without taking your leave of the Duchess.”
“I can’t do it,” he said miserably.
“Then you must stay.”
“But I can’t face her at supper.”
“Then you may trade seats with me and sit with your back to her.”
“I shall tell her I must return home on business.”
“Business! Will you lie to Her Grace?”
“Can’t you send me home on some business?” Ethelwyn pleaded. “Then it won’t be a lie.”
Egelric snorted. “You have all the courage and cunning of an eight-year-old boy.”
“I beg you. I would do as much for you.”
“I would never ask such a thing! Even at twenty I didn’t take myself as seriously as you do, Wyn. If any flamboyantly shod maiden had offered to dance around my grave, I would have asked her wherefore the wait, and picked her up and danced her around myself.”
Ethelwyn shuddered. “You would have!”
“I recommend you do it the next time you see Misstress Red Boots. She’s not old and ugly, is she?”
“No.”
“Then I tell you, that’s the way to get the upper hand with such a girl. The only way to beat her is to outdo her in impudence.”
“That may work for you, but I prefer to ignore them into insignificance.”
“Is that why you are running away?”
“I am not running away from her.”
Egelric shrugged. “The best way to beat people who are laughing at you is to laugh with them. But you’re as stubborn as I am in your way. I shall send you home ‘on business’ because I owe you a number of favors, not the least because you often rode out here for me recently, and were first subjected to Red Boots therefore. I shall even indulge you by giving Her Grace your apologies myself, as the affair was so very urgent. But my condition is that you return on Saturday, weather permitting, for otherwise my own Lady Silk Slippers will make my life miserable for allowing you to get away.”
“I thank you, sir,” Ethelwyn said quietly.
Egelric shook his head. “Now he remembers that I am his superior! Impudent, impudent young man!”
