Egelric finds a spider with butterfly wings

Egelric’s bedroom had a single window through which the sun never shone. It faced east, but the sheer wall of rock behind the castle rose up only a few dozen yards beyond it. Thus Egelric had learned to measure the hour of the morning not by the brightness nor by the angle of the light, but by its color.

Now the light was a coral pink which he only ever saw on Sundays. He did not rise early on Sundays, for the chapel in his castle was of even less use to him than the window of his bedroom.

It was Sunday light, but it was not Sunday. This realization came to him when he tried to roll over and found his body aching in unaccustomed ways, and more definitely when he saw the quiet form of a girl beside him in the bed, as pink and lustrous in the Sunday light as the curving heart of a shell.

She did not seem the same girl in her sleep. Asleep she was only small and innocent, like an infant version of herself. Without her bold laughter, with her brazen eyes closed, she seemed a gentle lady, incapable of harm.

But he had not needed to see her sleeping to know that she was not the girl he had thought. He had been fooled, but not in the way men were usually fooled. He had found her either a virgin or an irrefutable simulacrum of virginity. He had found her either as innocent as a child or as artful as a serpent. He had found her either a virtuous lady or a scheming jade. One way or another, he had been fooled. What was certain was that she was not what she had seemed to him the evening before.

Now he had only the sweetly sleeping girl in his sight, and so he could begin to believe that her desire to be shown exactly what would please him might simply have been a desire to learn what a woman was supposed to do with a man. He thought now that this girl who was so eager to learn new dances, new songs, new languages might simply have wanted him to teach her something she supposed he knew better than Gaelic.

This explanation was one that he could believe and could almost understand. It made her seem human again, and not some strange, chimeric beast, like a spider with butterfly wings. He had found her a virgin, innocent and gentle, motherless and as curious as a child. His deepest regret had become merely that she had not chosen Alred as a teacher.

Now he could lie at ease beside her, merely bemused, and watch her sleep.

He did not generally care for blondes, for they seemed dull and washed-​​out beside the redheads and the tawny brunettes he favored, but this one was all of a warm and rare gold. Neither did he like small, delicate women, but Lili, despite her size, had a glowing vitality that reassured him that he would not be likely to accidentally break her.

She was indeed a remarkable young woman, he thought. She had fallen in with the wrong man last night, but the right man might yet forgive her that. He only hoped the right man would forgive him.

“Lili,” he murmured.

He began to stroke her cheek with the backs of his fingers, as he usually did to wake a woman, but it seemed to him that even the short hairs on the backs of his fingers were too coarse to touch the cheek of a lady. He had never lain with a lady. He had never had to wake a lady.

Now he didn’t dare touch her. He did not know how he had dared the night before – not once he had learned she was not what she had seemed. Now he only dared say her name, “Lili,” once again, more loudly.

This time she woke. She looked around in apparent confusion, but she had the prudence not to speak until she had remembered where she was and how she had come to be there.

“Your bedroom is not untidy,” she observed.

“I had it straightened while we ate supper.”

“You could have told them to light a fire also.”

“You told me you would be keeping me warm,” he smiled.

“But now I am cold.”

“You never told me I should be keeping you warm.”

“Oh, even so. It is my mistake. Also I am hungry.”

At that instant a loud knock came at the door.

“Oh! Is it breakfast?” she asked.

“Even I am not so untidy as to eat in my bed, Lili.”

She laughed the same merry laugh she had been able to laugh the night before. He had not accidentally broken her. Then he remembered how Alred loved to hear her laugh, and he was ashamed.

“Sir?” It was his steward at the door.

“Enter!” Egelric said and sighed. He supposed he had Ethelwyn to thank for being allowed to sleep late at all, but there was always business early in the morning, and it was not Sunday.

“Sir,” Ethelwyn opened the door slightly and bowed his head inside. “I apologize for disturbing you, but there are two gentlemen here to see you, and they said that if I didn’t wake you, they would do it for me.”

Lili blanched as if all the warm and rare gold had drained out of her. He had never seen her discomposed before that moment.

“Their names, Wyn?” Egelric asked wearily, though he supposed he knew them.

“Sir Raedwald and Sir Friedrich, sir.”