the shining wetness of the tears that began to flow down her cheeks.
12
Servanne spent the next two days diligently avoiding all unnecessary contact with the Black Wolf. It was not a difficult goal to achieve since he had elected to stand guard throughout most of the first day, and had led a small party of men out to determine where the sheriff’s men were searching the forest. On the second day, he took Gil and two others out hunting and returned with a large buck, which was more than enough to replenish their food supplies. In the evenings she was forced to sit through the repeated mockery of a formal meal, but there again, she found him so preoccupied with other matters as to be generally uninterested in sparring with her.
Mutter and Stutter, the twin minstrels, were assigned as her personal guards and she went nowhere without the pair of them bickering good-naturedly a discreet few paces in her shadow. Not that there was anywhere to go outside of the ruined gardens and the Silent Pool—neither of which held any appeal for Servanne with their associated memories. And not that there was any pressing need to visit either place, for the weather had turned sullen and miserable, the sky an oppressive mass of unbroken cloud, which periodically spit torrents of water down upon the mouldy buildings in an earnest effort to make the unpleasantness of their surroundings even worse.
The walls dripped constantly. The birds who had made the refectory arches their homes for generations, screamed and quarreled incessantly, and made walking from one end of the hall to the other a hazardous roulette of bird droppings. The fires smoked blackly and could not hold a proper flame long enough to generate any real heat or relief from the damp. The chambers were cold and musty, and stank of animal excrement and decay.
On the fifth day of Servanne’s captivity, the sky was once again blue, albeit seen through the hazy, misty vapours of the forest steaming dry. She ventured gladly out into the courtyard after her morning prayers, thankful to feel the heat of the sun again on flesh that had grown wrinkled and clammy from dampness. The other members of the Wolf’s camp greeted the sunlight with the same enthusiasm and immediately went about setting up targets to practice their archery, quintains to sharpen the aim of lance and sword, and cordoned squares where men stripped to the waist and wrestled one another to stretch the lethargy out of cramped muscles. Even the huge war-horses were taken through their paces. The constant thunder of hooves and the trembling of the ground underfoot made one wonder if the crumbling masonry could withstand the abuse. But it held, apart from the odd startled stone, which was more than could be said for the field outside the main gates. It was left churned and pitted and trampled as if there had been a great battle fought on the common.
“It is just like being part of a tourney or a fair,” Biddy remarked with grudging admiration. “These scoundrels certainly do know what they are about.”
She was making a specific reference to Gil Golden, who had taken up a position at the far side of the courtyard, her back straight as a rod, her long legs braced apart, her bow prepared with such loving precision it could have been an extension of her own limbs.
“Now, my lady, you will see …” Mutter began.
“… a fine entertainment,” Stutter finished.
“For Gil Golden has no equal with a bow …” “… although Sparrow tries daily to prove the claim false.”
“Think you, brother, one day he might succeed?” Mutter asked, his frown suggesting the question was of the utmost importance.
Stutter’s brows mirrored the concern. “Oh, nay, brother. As clever as our Sparrow might be in some ways, his faerie powers hold no sway on Gil’s bow arm. Watch.”
In the courtyard, Gil nocked an arrow and let it fly, sending it straight to the heart of the target—a small canvas sack filled with kernels of corn. The sack hung from a branch that grew over the wall at the opposite end of the monastery grounds, a distance of perhaps two hundred yards.
“Paugh! Where’s the challenge?” Sparrow demanded, sighting the skewered target from under the visor of his hand. “I could hit it myself, blindfolded.”
Gil lowered the bow and glared at the little man. “Your best is not my worst, and well you know it, Puck.”