In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,87

to the fireside. A man born of a sorceress who had mated with a wolf and a dragon: this was the man her uncle had entrusted her safety to. A man who suffered black moods and nightmares.

It would be sheer luck if she did not have nightmares this night, for although she had promised Robin she would speak no more of it, it would be almost impossible not to think about it.

As quiet as the forest had been, with only the sound of the wind sifting through the trees, the abbey was like a tomb. Ariel lay in her straw-filled pallet with her eyes wide open, the very pores of her skin wide open as well, steeped in the silence of holy reverence. Sedrick had stoked the fire high before retiring to his own pallet, but the logs had been too damp to sustain a blaze for long and, apart from the odd crackle and hiss, it smouldered disconsolately in the grate.

Ariel had consumed rather a large quantity of wine after her confrontation with FitzRandwulf. Combined with the subsequent revelations by Robin, she filled her cup several times and eventually tottered to her bed with the room canting on a distinct angle downward.

Contrary to her earlier fears, she had been enjoying the best night’s sleep she’d had since leaving Chateau d’Amboise, when she was wakened—not by visions of demonic witches and ritual sacrifices, but by an uncomfortable fullness in her bladder. Twice before retiring she had ventured out into the night air and picked her way along the well-worn path to the lean-to that sheltered the privy holes. The fact that she needed to venture out a third time was threatening to keep her wide awake until something was done about it.

If I were a man, she thought miserably, I could simply piss in the corner pot and be done with it. But there was only one pot and it was a tall, long-necked thing she would probably knock over in her attempts to straddle it.

Apparently monks did not allow for pilgrims to have more pressing needs during the night.

Ariel lifted her head and searched the gloom, but there was not much to see. She pushed herself cautiously upright and swung her legs over the side of the cot. The dull red glow from the fire gave the bound staves at the ends of the pallets the slightest hint of shape and substance, and allowed her to steer her way across the chamber without tripping over packs, saddles, armour, and furniture.

Like most doors in a monastery, the hinges were well oiled to prevent the devil from knowing there were souls wandering about. Ariel slipped through the arched portal of the pilgrim’s hall and hurried along the stone corridor that divided the hall from the almonry. Exit through another silently swinging door let her out into the clammy dampness of the evening air. The rain had stopped but the mist was thick and pervasive, wetting her skin almost instantly and clinging in tiny droplets to the blanket she had draped around her shoulders.

Hemming in the fog, the pale walls of the abbey were her only link with reality. Here and there, the branches of a low bush plucked at the dragging ends of her blanket, and twice she managed to shrivel her own skin with lurid images of crouched, stalking grotesques with bony fingers and grasping claws.

At first she thought it must be nearer daylight than she had supposed, for the fact that she could see the walls at all suggested a general easing into daylight. But then she quickly realized there was a source of light somewhere up ahead, a concentrated source that bore the acrid tang of a pitch torch.

The stable where the horses were kept was directly behind the pilgrim’s hall, and it was from there the torchlight bloomed, yellowed and hazed by the mist. Ariel guessed it was a monk going early about his chores, and she remembered to pull the blanket up over her head to conceal the length and colour of her hair.

Her footsteps slowed, however, as the sound of voices came toward her. They were familiar voices, one of them as readily identifiable as her own.

“If you are worried about the state of the road between here and Rennes,” Henry was saying, “surely there is a way to bypass the town entirely.”

“There is,” Eduard agreed, “but one of us will still have to ride into the city to see if the lord marshal managed