blue basin below, part of the pool darkened by the shadow of the overhanging promontory, the rest sparkling warm and inviting in the early sunlight.
Obeying Sparrow’s pointed finger, Servanne carefully picked her way down the narrow trail that edged the embankment. At the bottom, it leveled out and she was able to walk onto a flat table of rock that leaned out over the water’s shallow end.
“You can have a bit of privacy here, if you want it,” Sparrow said. “I will go back and see where Old Shrew-Tongue has gotten herself. T’would be a pity to see her spill arse over heel into the pool.” He thought about the image a moment and added with a chuckle. “Aye, a dreadful pity.”
He was gone in a wink, vanished back into the undergrowth that swarmed the edge of the embankment. Servanne stared at the fronds until they had finished rustling, then gazed instinctively up at the sentry, who made no effort to pretend he was not staring directly back down at her.
Escape was the farthest thing from her mind as Servanne gingerly lowered herself onto her knees. She bowed her head and leaned forward to stretch the aching muscles in her neck. With a weary sigh, she unfastened the heavy samite surcoat and peeled it off her shoulders, then, on an afterthought, removed the jewelled broach that held the linen bands of her wimple pinned closed at her throat. Slowly, moving with the stiffness of a ninety-year-old woman, she unwound the starched collar bands and set the headpiece with its flowing caplet of cloth neatly on the blue crush of samite. She uncoiled the two thick braids of her hair and, using her fingers as combs, unplaited each glossy braid and shook the long, rippled mass free. When it was completely unfettered, she ran her splayed fingers across her scalp to massage it, nearly weeping with the pleasurable sensation of freedom.
As she was bending to dip her hands in the glassy surface of the pool, a loud splash farther along the shore caused her to jump and stare across the pond. A pale shape streaked below the water, erupting from the silver-black surface again several yards ahead of the spreading rings he had generated. Servanne recognized the chestnut mane of hair even as the Black Wolf shook it vigorously to scatter the clinging droplets of water. It was apparent he had not yet seen her, however, for as he began to walk into the shallower water, he was intent upon scrubbing his chest and arms with the handfuls of fine sand he had scooped from the bottom. A second dive brought him out of the shade and into the sunlight, and this time, when he stood, the water streamed in glistening sheets from his head to the tops of his powerful thighs.
A man’s naked body held no surprises for Servanne. Her husband had slept nude beside her for three years. Visiting knights and nobles had thought nothing of stripping naked and either being bathed by her or in front of her as was the custom in welcoming a guest to one’s castle. Some had been as virile and solidly thewed as this forest outlaw, although she could not, upon the instant, recall a chest quite so broad, or a belly so tautly ridged with bands of muscle. The hair on his chest glittered like a copper breastplate; a sleek line of it funneled down to a smaller thatch that swirled around his navel. Lower still and it grew into a tight, dark forest at his groin. What lay like a restless beast within that forest would have been more than enough to cause Servanne’s heart to leap over several erratic beats if it were not already stumbling headlong over another disturbing sight.
Furrowing down his right side was a swath of misshapen scar tissue fully as wide as her hand, as long as her arm, distorting the surface of his flesh from his armpit to his buttock. Circling the same shoulder was a shiny patch of skin, resistant to the sun’s tanning effects, and marking clearly where a chirurgeon’s crude efforts had attempted to compensate for skin and muscle pared away from the upper arm. The shoulder itself was as gnarled as bark. His left thigh bore similar evidence of horrendous wounding—injuries one sustained from a battlefield, not a cornfield.
Under different circumstances Servanne would have been amused by the look of complete surprised that jolted the stern, stoic features when he realized