Egelric has a few moments alone

Egelric dropped his cloak on a chair and stopped to rub his eyes.

He had a little time before dinner, when he would have to go down and take his seat at the right of his lord’s empty chair. Young Dunstan would be seated across from him, and he would be reminded again, as he had been ever more frequently as the weeks passed, that he might in fact be seated across from his lord even then. They had had no word from the King or the Duke since they had ridden off towards the coast in late July.

The Duchess was far from being worried yet, but Egelric missed him sorely. He realized now, in the first time in five years that he had to work for weeks without speaking to him, how much he actually relied on him. His first impulse upon being confronted with a problem – and he had plenty of them on his mind these days – was still to talk it over with his lord.

He saw now how many of the clever ideas he had thought were his own had actually been craftily placed in his head by Alred himself, even as he assured Egelric that he could never manage without his assistance. Egelric was both humbled and grateful. He hoped he would have the occasion to tell him so, and to try in the future to be more worthy of him. In any event, he thought that he was that much closer to understanding what a true leader was, even if he knew he would never be one himself.

The bedchamber he shared with Iylaine was directly over the eastern end of the hall, and he could hear the servants’ faint chatter through the floorboards as they prepared for dinner. It would not be long. He would have to go down and lead the men in their prayer.

It was the time of day that he dreaded the most. As little as he liked Father Brandt, it was always a relief to see him there when he came into the hall, for it meant he would be spared that duty. He wasn’t shy – he had a voice that carried, and he had picked up the handsome accent his lord had with his Latin – but he had a nagging feeling of hypocrisy as he spoke. All was not right between him and God.

He could not bring himself to confess to Father Brandt, and so he could only clear his conscience on the rare occasions he could ride up to Thorhold in the hills and see one of the priests there. He always told himself that the easiest thing to do would be to simply stop sinning thereafter – then he could spare himself the trouble and the ride. Of course he realized the absurdity of the resolution. He was only a bad man, and at the work site he was a bad man surrounded by bad men and, more particularly, bad women.

Since he had returned to live at the castle, where the only women he frequented were good and honorable, he had begun to feel like a man again, and not the sort of beast he became at only an hour’s ride from here. But when he had to stand and ask for the blessing of the Lord on behalf of all of these people, he felt as if he were merely a beast dressed up as a man. It always surprised him when no one laughed at his presumption.

As had become his habit when he was alone and had thoughts that troubled him, his hand burrowed almost unconsciously into the pouch he wore on his belt. It quickly found the tiny purse Iylaine had made from a scrap of silk when she was learning to sew, and his finger wriggled past the drawstring and slipped inside, where it could caress the thin lock of hair curled at the bottom.

Out of all of the confusion, fear, and dread that the recent stroke of the elves had provoked among all of the people, there arose for him one other emotion: hope. He was sick at the thought of meeting Druze again, and the elf Midra terrified him in ways that even Druze did not, but they might be able to give him a clue to tell him where his son might be found. And there were other elves that had allowed themselves to be seen as well, and they too might know something.

Egelric had listened carefully to the descriptions the guards gave of the four elves that had attacked them, and he did not believe that Ears had been among them. Even given that elves apparently tended to be tall, which might fool a man into thinking the boy older than he was, it did not seem that any of them had looked young enough.

Despite the fact that the elves had not killed anyone they met at the castle that night – though they so obviously could have – the men had orders from the Earl to kill any one of the four on sight, and Egelric suspected that any other elf would likely qualify for the same treatment if he weren’t around to stop it. He was not even sure he would try to stop it – unless it were Ears.

He admitted that the elf had saved his life at least once – perhaps twice, although he still could scarcely believe that the boy could have happened to have been on the center of the lake when he fell in, nor have lifted him unaided out of the water, nor have carried him to the cave in the hills.

Even if he hadn’t, the elf had been kind to him in the short time they had been together, from what he could remember. Egelric did not want to see him hurt. If he knew so much about Finn – if he could have brought him a lock of Finn’s own hair – then he was probably more able than anyone to help him reclaim his son, if only Egelric could speak to him again. And if he would not help, Egelric meant to hold him hostage until his son was returned to him. But he did not wish to see the boy hurt.

The faint voices below his feet grew deeper now, and Egelric knew that it meant the guards and the other men were coming in for dinner.

He pushed the curl of hair back down against the bottom seam of the little purse, gave a tug at the drawstring as he withdrew his hand, and closed up his pouch again. He glanced in the mirror to be sure that the costume of the man hung gracefully over the contours of the beast, and then he went down to join them.