Across the road, Dryden stood and walked on wobbling legs. He ducked free of his cloak with stiff movements. Dizziness slid across his features. After taking a knee, he handed up the cloak.
Will looped the length of wool over the horse’s head. The enfolding darkness quickly eased its frenzied fight. Moments later, the animal calmed and stilled, but a peculiar sense of unease came over him. Unlike horses, humans found no solace in blindness. In fact, blindness created shadows and specters out of the most innocuous words, touches, and sounds. Horses implicitly trusted their handlers, resigning their fates to cooler heads, but humans fought giving up control and held memory enough to lament their loss.
Annoyed to find reason for thinking about Meg—worse yet, to sympathize with her situation—he led his new horse to a birch. He securely looped the reins to a trunk layered in scaly white bark and fetched the other horse, tying it near the first.
Dryden pulled to his feet and stood over the soldier Will had pinned in the eye. “Good work.”
“If I hadn’t lost that first arrow, I could’ve taken Carlisle too, maybe to question him. But until yesterday, I hadn’t held a bow in years.”
“I cannot imagine your aim if you’d time to practice.” Dryden pulled free of a leather gauntlet. “You have my thanks, Scarlet. You saved my life.”
Will shook the nobleman’s trembling hand.
A low groan startled them both. They turned to see Monthemer on the ground, clutching his mangled forehead. The young man groaned again and pulled his knees close, roiling in the dirt.
Dryden walked unsteadily to his cousin. “Have you decided to join us among the living, Stephen?”
They knelt next to the young baron. Mingled blood and sweat coated his face, tinting his pale blond hair an ugly, brassy orange. Will shed his cloak and used its tattered wool to scrape past the sticky mess. Dryden pried his cousin’s clenched hands from his forehead. A crescent-shaped expanse of skull refused to rest modestly beneath muscle and skin.
Monthemer grunted, doubled over, then vomited. More a moan than language, he asked, “How is it?”
“I’ve had worse, and likely you have too.” Will pulled his anlace from its sheath and carefully cut the man from his encumbering cloak. He wound strips of the wool around Monthemer’s wound, purposefully blinding a second living creature in a span of minutes. He exchanged a concerned look with Dryden but kept his voice calm. “Meg will set you to rights. You’ll smell of some curiosity, but you’ll live.”
Dryden wadded what was left of Monthemer’s cloak into a makeshift pillow and stuffed it beneath his cousin’s head. “Rest for a moment.”
Will again eyed the man’s trembling hands. “How did you fare? Injured?”
“That second horse of yours kicked me.”
“He wasn’t mine at the time. I take no responsibility for his disrespect.”
Dryden grinned half-heartedly, standing once again. “Let us see what manner of plunder we’ve acquired for our troubles.”
The pair found the patient, abandoned mule chewing a bit of scrubby foliage at the road’s edge. Around the back of the cart, Will nicked a tiny hole in one of the two bulging linen sacks and gingerly tasted its contents. “Everyone has a craving for sweets today. ’Tis sugar.”
Dryden passed him a frown. “What would they want with all that sugar?”
“Well,
we
want it. Carlisle thoughtfully saved us a second trip into Keyworth.”
“Would anyone else know Meg’s tricks? Maybe that sister of hers?”
Will bit back a laugh. “You think I understand the woman?”
“You’ve spent time with her, certainly,” Dryden said. “Is she prone to lies?”
His laugh escaped, harsh and exasperated. “She would argue day is night if she thought deception would suit her aim. But your question remains. Why would Carlisle want sugar, or Finch for that matter? Not to make smoke. That makes no sense, no matter Meg’s truth or lies.”
“I am not partial to the situation.”
“That much is obvious,” Will said. “I’m hardly partial to the two of you, but at least we work toward the same end.”
Dryden smiled, a look of such cold cunning that Will felt the urge to retract even the tentative trust he had mustered for the man. “I cannot claim to know your aims, Scarlet, but I wish Carlisle’s head on a plate and served to Finch. At knifepoint.”
“Well said,” he replied, suppressing a shudder. But the nobleman’s words sparked a sudden idea. “Wait, what day is this?”
Able to deliver only a blank stare and a shrug, Dryden tossed the question to his cousin. Monthemer moaned nothing useful.
“None of us knows the day of the week.” Will shook his head, disgusted. “The forest is barbaric. Spend too many nights in the trees and we abandon all hope of civilization.”
“Why do you ask?”
“When does the harvest feast begin in Nottingham?”
“This week, I believe. What are you thinking?”
Panic skimmed across his mind—panic and a distinct call to abandon the entire mess of the last few days. “You insist on looking to me for answers. Why?”
“Since you seemed apt to providing useful ones.”
“A subtlety,” Will said at last. “Perhaps they intend to make a subtlety for the feast.”
“That fares well.”
It did. The tradition of subtleties—sumptuous carved sugar statues presented for feast days—fit the timing of harvest. And such a boastful creation might suit Nottingham well if he intended to display his mounting influence.
He hoisted a sack onto his good shoulder and froze. Staring wide-eyed at what lay beneath the sacks of sugar, his questions piled high.
Puzzlement spread across Dryden’s face. “What is that?”
“More’s the question, what did Carlisle want with it?” Will passed quick eyes across the trees and the quiet thoroughfare. “I’ll pose that question to a certain young woman we know.”
After collecting a large container’s worth, she went back to the cabin where Jacob had placed the boiler to cool. She wiped hands on the lowest folds of her gown, searching for a scant inch of fabric left unsullied by the beds.
She held still, listening. Jacob’s dull thwack of metal against wood sounded in the middle distance to the south. Otherwise, the forest was as still as she was, holding its breath in unison. She was alone. And for the moment, she convinced herself that solitude was a blessing.
Instead of tending the remainder of the formula, she approached the bench running parallel to the long eating table. Meals, experiments, studies—the table had hosted the mellow routine of her former life.
Life with her father. Life with Ada. Lives that no longer existed.
Bracing her walking stick on the floor, gaining traction with the soles of her boots, she stood slowly. The bench did not wobble. She reached high, searching through the open air. Edging farther along the length of the bench, she lifted a hand toward the ceiling. Sweat tickled the back of her neck and beneath her lowest ribs, but she continued.
Scarlet had to be wrong.
But he was not.
She grazed a flutter of petals as crisp as the autumn leaves. The flowers she touched, the flowers she pulled from the rafters and woven thatching, had been carefully dried. In the span of a few feet, she gathered six petite bundles. Crinkling petals tickled her fingertips and sounded like the last, quietest sigh of a dying fire. She tucked her nose among the neatly tied bundles but could find no perfume to distinguish variety.
She sat heavily on the bench. Scarlet said three dozen bunches decorated the cabin. Three dozen times, Ada had worked to preserve a collection of wildflowers. Three dozen times, she had used the table to fasten them to the ceiling.
And three dozen times, Meg had been too distracted to notice.
A ruckus outside the cabin caught her attention. Unexplained guilt stung her cheeks. She stood and turned, thinking of where to hide the flowers. Hide them in her own cabin. Hide the shame of having lived like a stranger with her own sister.
She found her father’s fat, tattered book and opened its warped pages. Dozens of letters from his great-uncle Adelard of Bath, the famous tutor to King Richard’s late father, Henry II, stuck out in disarray. She knew the feel of each one. She could no longer see the ornate scrawls of the famous scholar’s handwriting, but she knew what they contained: observations, translations, theories about the natural world, and tales of Adelard’s far travels.
Fingering the pages, she imagined the wonder of that distant relative, his travels and his marvelous ideas. Her father had read the letters to her and Ada like a balladeer, sparking curiosities and questions. They added to the undertaking with their own observations, ever expanding the scope of their family heritage.
And to that heritage, Meg added the flowers. She carefully pressed the dried bunch against the cured leather of the back cover and touched the flaking petals.
“They’re pretty,” Scarlet said.
She slammed the book closed and whirled. Dried petals gave way with a dull crunch. He walked to her, filling the tight span of the cabin with the distinctive tingle of his presence. She shivered.
“You climbed up for them?”
“Go away.”
Hugo had stood next to her not three hours before, piercing repellent remarks through her defenses. But Scarlet set her senses alight, intimidating her with a different sort of menace. Even at a respectful distance, the heat of his body called to her. He smelled of sweat and leather and warm metal—primal, dangerous. She turned and gripped the thick binding of her book, keeping her hands from him.
“What is that?”
“’Tis no matter for you.”
“And I suppose your sudden interest in dried flowers is none of my concern either.”
A sudden awareness of how she must look and smell threatened a blush. She should have been happy to have the filth of the niter beds at her ready defense, but Scarlet made her unforgivably self-conscious, especially after his disgusted reaction to the unfortunate smell of her home.
She scratched a thumbnail across her lower lip, remembering Hugo’s warning. By the Devil, she despised the idea of believing a man who lived to cause confusion and woe. But he was right. Will Scarlet was dangerous.
“Leave me be.”
“No,” he said. “We need your help with Monthemer. He’s been injured. Dryden is retrieving him from the horses.”
Pretending a quick inhale gave her courage, she nodded and pushed the smashed flowers from her mind.
Her
cabin.
Her
life. None of his concern.
“What happened?”
“Carlisle planted a boot heel in his forehead.”
“Carlisle was in Keyworth?”
Scarlet sighed heavily, his weariness like a solid wall. “Yes, and the apothecary was none too happy to have his patronage.”
Dryden and Scarlet dragged Monthemer to the pallet and recounted their trip and the ensuing skirmish.
Jacob returned from the woods. “Of course, I stay behind to boil rocks while your lot faces the sheriff’s men.”
Meg knelt beside the pallet next to Scarlet. He pulled her hands to Monthemer’s forehead, helping her assess the extent of his injury. Warm blood slicked her fingers.
Dryden shuffled behind them in an anxious clatter of mail. “How will he fare?”
“By the saints, I believe Carlisle must have worn a blade on his heel,” she said. “The laceration is deep. He’ll require stitches.”
“I can do them,” Dryden said. “Do you have anything for his pain?”
“I do, milord.”
Scarlet snuffed a bit of laughter but made no comment about the sedative. “Come with me, Jacob. You can help unload the sugar. No swordplay necessary, I’m afraid.”
For an hour, Meg worked with Dryden to staunch the fast flow of his cousin’s blood. She crushed wolfsbane flowers into a paste while the nobleman threaded a needle and laid the stitches. Their patient moaned on occasion, but he remained unconscious and still. She dabbed the completed stitches with a cleansing salve before wrapping his head in long strips of linen, leaving him to rest.
“You both do nice work,” Scarlet said upon returning to the cabin.
Dryden sighed heavily. “I only wish I could’ve saved him the injury.”
“Meg, you need to tell us: What purpose could Finch and Carlisle have for the sugar?”
She dipped her hands in a bucket of water and washed away the sticky blood. “With regard to alchemy?”
“Yes,” Scarlet said. “Could your sister have told them of your spells?”
“They’re not spells.”
“Fine.” His voice was like the tang of vinegar. “Could your sister have revealed any of your magic?”
She bit back a curse but considered his question. Yes, her sister helped note observations and read aloud portions of their father’s ancient book, but her interest in alchemy only extended to the point of obliging Meg. She had always been more intrigued by the exotic languages contained within their book, not the facts and formulas.
“I think not,” she said at last.
“Perhaps the sugar was intended for the harvest feast after all.”
Dryden cleared his throat. “Did you tell her about the copper?”
“What copper?”
“This way,” Scarlet said. Curiosity compelled her to obey. She followed him outdoors and toward the milling horses. A sharp clang spiked the air as something metallic tumbled heavily to the ground. “
That
copper.”
Kneeling, frowning, she touched three slabs of smooth metal as wide as a man’s body and half as long. Scarlet knelt beside her, the hard leather of his knee-guards creaking. “We found it in Carlisle’s cart, concealed beneath the bags of sugar. What purpose would they have for it?”
She stroked the copper, trying to find imperfections with her sensitive fingertips. The metal proved flawless, smooth, even at the corners and edges. “What is its color?”
“Shall I be poetic?”
“Merely descriptive,” she said, shaking her head. Excitement and fireflies of apprehension made her giddy. “Can you see any variations in its color? Any streaks or flaws? Jacob—come help him look, please.”
Jacob and Dryden joined the examination. Meg waited. Despite her concern, she amused herself by imagining their scrutiny, all three men hunched over the slabs. “Anything?”
“Flawless,” Dryden said.
She nodded. “Cyprian, then.”
“I would guess,” Jacob said. “Although I’ve only heard of copper this pure.”
“What does that mean?”
Scarlet’s audible confusion fused with her fear, a fear for her sister’s safety. Nausea lurched in her gut. She imagined an array of horrors, all in dazzling color.
“It means the sheriff has discovered a way to make Ada talk.”