He carefully closed the book and handed it to his companion, who took it without demur as Hugh rose and came to stand before her. Already the knot in her gut and the aching in her head subsided, subsumed under a flood of new thoughts.
She had actually forgotten how beautiful he was—not a shallow beauty that bloomed quickly and withered with the next season, but something bone-deep, unfathomable because golden hair and a certain arrangement of features cannot by itself create a pleasing face. Why had God seen fit to shower him with that combination of lineaments and expressiveness, charm and intensity, whose sum is beauty?
“Liath! I—” He broke off, confused and flustered. “Where have you come from? Why are you here?” He glanced back at the elderly presbyter, who stood serenely by the bedside of the aged woman, watching the lamplight twist over her pallid face. “Nay, come, let’s go outside to talk. I can’t understand how it is you’ve come here.”
But they had barely crossed the threshold into the anteroom, and her lips parted to speak, she not even knowing what she meant to say, when a middle-aged presbyter with the stout girth of a person who’s eaten well since childhood hurried into view.
“Thank God, Your Honor. I hoped to find you here. How is the Holy Mother?”
“She has not changed, alas, Brother Petrus. May God have mercy. I’ve been reading to her.”
“Yes, yes.” The stout presbyter was clearly in a mounting frenzy, hands twitching, shifting his weight from one foot to the other like a child who has to pee. “You must come at once. The king—”
“Of course I’ll come.” Hugh looked at Liath, opening his hands as if to say, “what can I do?” “Will you wait?” he asked her in a low voice. “Or perhaps, I don’t know, I can’t believe— Nay, perhaps you’ll not wish to wait.”
Perhaps it was curiosity that goaded her, even as it occurred to her that there was nothing about him now at all threatening. “I’ll come with you, if I may,” her voice said.
His face lit. He smiled sweetly, then looked away as if embarrassed at his own reaction.
“I pray you, Your Honor, I fear there’ll be violence if you don’t come quickly—”
“Don’t fear, Brother Petrus. Let us go.”
One lavishly decorated corridor led to the next. She was lost in a maze of staircases and archways, colonnades and courtyards. At last they crossed out of one palace compound and into a second. Here, where the great hall abutted a long wing of princely chambers, they stepped outside into a small courtyard ringed by fig and citron trees. In the center, on a dusty oval of ground, soldiers took arms training. Yet under the rosy light of a cloudy day, so strangely bright that she realized she had no idea what season or hour it was, something in the ring wasn’t going right.
One man, wearing a grim iron helm and a heavily padded coat, was in the process of pounding some poor youth into the dirt.
Brother Petrus was so out of breath that he could barely wheeze out an explanation. “You know how it is… a woman down at prayers in the cathedral… he saw her… conceived a lust… had her brought to him… but then he was called out of his chambers… and returned to find her gone. He’s in a fury. You know how he hates to be crossed.”
Hugh’s mouth tightened. He lifted a hand to his face, laying the back of that hand to his cheek as though at a memory unlooked for and unwanted. The iron-helmed man had a blunted sword carved from wood, but by now he was simply laying into his victim as though he’d forgotten everything except that reflexive snap, over and over, of his sword arm. The young man was crying out loud, begging for mercy. Soldiers stood back, uneasily, but no one moved to stop them.
Hugh unbuckled his belt and stripped out of his presbyter’s robe to reveal a simple linen tunic and leggings beneath, the kind of thing worn by a noble lady’s younger son when he rides off in the retinue of his elder cousin. He was tall, lean, and strong. He gestured. A servant, running, brought him a padded sword.
“Nay, my lord king,” he said in a clear, carrying voice as he stepped out onto the oval, “this poor lad’s not much of a contest, is he? I’ll test you.”
The king hesitated between one blow and the next, lifting his head. Liath caught a glimpse of a cruel gaze behind the visor. He spoke with the voice of a man plagued by a surfeit of spleen.
“No doubt it was your doing the woman was taken out of the palace, my precious counselor.”
“She was a married woman praying for God to heal her sick child. She has both a father and a husband in the mason’s guild, my lord king. How does it benefit you to insult the men who build and repair the city walls?”