he let it escape him.
Did the killer have her now? What if he tried to burn her? What if he…he wandered off into a dream of fighting a dragon. Of course, Uncle Torin was in this dream, sitting by a cave hearth telling him a story about a saint and a dragon. Tristan was no saint. He was more like the dragon. Then ye would be fightin’ against yerself, his uncle told him. Are ye?
Tristan woke from his slumber to a dark room. He sat up. Rose. He had to find her. He moved his arm, his torso. He felt a little stronger than when he’d been awake with Nel. Today? Yesterday? He looked at the window at the pre-dawn sky. Yesterday. Rose had been gone for almost two days now. His heart sank. Tracks would be more difficult to find. Where was Nel? Why had she let him sleep so long? He looked at the door to the room.
He needed to go.
He left the bed as quietly as possible and dressed in everything he’d arrived in. It wasn’t wise to walk around in clothes with a hole through them, so he donned his plaid and went to the door.
He paused before he left the room and took ten pounds out of his pouch. He returned to the bed and laid the money on the mattress. Nel and her husband had done much for him.
He left the room and tiptoed down the hall to the stairs in the dark. He tried to be as quiet as he could. He doubted Nel would agree to let him go if he woke her.
He stopped moving when a stair creaked and held his breath. No other sound came to him, so he continued down.
He opened the front door and stepped into the crisp air. He was thankful for his plaid. Still, his clothes felt heavy and they weighed him down. He realized he was still weak. Mayhap too weak to fight if he needed to but it didn’t matter. He was going. He had to find Rose and make certain she was unharmed.
His belly twisted. She’d been gone for several long days. If whoever took her intended her harm, it might be too late.
He reached the stable. Rose’s horse wasn’t in it.
“Greetings, Perceval,” he said softly, going to his horse. He hadn’t called his horse the name out loud in years. It was a name from his youth, from some of his uncle’s stories.
Had he dreamed of Uncle Torin last night? Tristan wiped his brow. What was happening to him? He was a cold-hearted savage. It was what he’d become in order to survive, both on the field and off. What was he doing thinking like a knight in a court he used to dream about as a boy? He remembered things about honor and intrigue, courtly love and God’s love and patience, the last from Father Timothy and Brother Simon. It brought a pang to his heart. He missed being home. He missed his kin. It surprised him. The one who barely felt, in truth, felt quite a lot.
Falling in love with Rose seemed to have opened the rusty gates of his heart. Settling in with a wife and bairns no longer seemed so terrible. He wanted her. No one else would ever do.
His heart raced and pumped waves of blood through his veins when he thought of her. She was his. Whoever took her from him was going to pay with his life.
He saddled his horse and thought about how easy it was to talk to Rose about his youth. He’d spent more continuous time with her than he had with any of his men in years. He woke with her and fell asleep with her—and he liked it. He liked her company.
He heard the sound of an approaching horse behind him and turned to see a man a few years older than him leaving the shadows. He carried himself like a soldier, reaching for a small blade hidden in his coat.
“Are you looking for a room?” he asked in his best English voice. The man was a soldier—probably an English one, or a Lowlander, which was close enough to English as one could get. Someone shot him three days ago. Unless the devil had been aiming for Rose and missed…no. The direction was off for that. If someone was trying to kill him then they knew who he was.
“Perhaps.”
Tristan eyed him. “Do you always ride up to an inn before