“Promises are easy, Milord, but don’t think you can turn me up sweet enough for me to be taking my eye off of my pantry when you’re around!”
After breakfast, Leeana and Bahzell left the tower and walked along the curtain wall towards the keep. The keep’s early morning shadow lay deep and cool across the battlements, and Bahzell gazed down into the courtyard with a pensive expression.
“Second thoughts?” a gently teasing voice asked, and he turned quickly to smile at Leeana.
“Now, that I don’t have,” he told her. “Mind, I’ve no doubt I should, but it’s a rare, determined wench you are, Leeana Hanathafressa! And”-his voice softened-“it’s never happier I’ve been.”
“Good. See to it you stay that way.” She tucked her hand into his elbow and laid her head against his upper arm. It felt odd not to tower over a man, but it felt…good, too. Of course, that might have something to do with the man in question, she reflected warmly, storing up the memory of the night just past like the treasure it was. A gentle and considerate man, her Bahzell, in more ways than one.
Sentries manned Hill Guard’s walls at all times, and she saw the armsman at the angle between the curtain wall and the keep jerk upright as he glanced in their direction. The sentry’s eyes widened, and then he snapped to attention. It would have taken a very tall human-even for a Sothoii-to fix his eyes above Bahzell Bahnakson’s head without straining his neck, and so the armsman locked his gaze on the center of the Horse Stealer’s massive chest.
“Good…morning, Milord Champion,” he said.
“And a good morning to you, as well,” Bahzell rumbled back. It couldn’t have been a more pleasant response, yet there was a little something in its timbre. Something that snapped the sentry’s eyes to Leeana, as well. He colored, then cleared his throat and bobbed his head.
“Give you good morning, Mistress Leeana.”
It came out in a commendably normal voice, only a bit more gruff than it might have been, and she smiled at him.
“Thank you,” she said, then looked up into the cool morning sky, her hair flying like red silk on the breeze that laughed its way across the castle and danced with the banners. “And the same to you. It is a beautiful morning, isn’t it?”
“Aye…Mistress.” The armsman returned her smile. “It is that. And”-he let his eyes meet hers, then Bahzell’s-“more beautiful for some than for others, I’m thinking.”
“Why, yes, it is,” she told him with a fleeting dimple.
He bent his head respectfully and stepped back out of their way, and Leeana laughed softly as they passed on into the keep proper.
“There!” she told her towering lover. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Now that it wasn’t,” he replied, looking down at her, “and it’s a fair start we’ve made, I suppose, in a manner of speaking. Your Da’s no more than another fifteen or twenty score armsmen here in Hill Guard and Balthar. Why, I’ve no doubt we’ll have dealt with all of them by lunch!”
“I’m sorry, Leeana.” Sharlassa looked back and forth between her and Bahzell, obviously afire with curiosity. “Baroness Hanatha isn’t here. She finished breakfast early and said she was going riding.” The younger woman grimaced. “She invited me to join her, but Master Tobis is expecting me this morning.”
“I see.” Leeana smiled at her resigned tone, remembering her own lessons with the dance master. “Do you think we could catch her at the stable, or is she already out and about?”
“I think you could probably catch her,” Sharlassa replied. “She hasn’t been gone long, and she said she had something to discuss with Master Greenslope before she left.”
“Well, love,” Leanna glanced up at Bahzell, “do we want to wait for her here, or go beard her in Doram’s den?”
“There’s a cowardly part of me says as how we ought best hide right here,” Bahzell admitted, “but I’ve not seen Walsharno at all, at all this morning, and I’m thinking Gayrfressa is after having a ‘told you so’ or three for me, as well.”
“My thinking, as well,” Leeana said, and chuckled at Sharlassa’s expression. It was obvious the younger woman was simply dying to ask the dozens of questions dancing through her mind, and Leeana shook her head at her.
“Wish me joy, Sharlassa,” she said. “Wish both of us joy.”
“Oh, I do. I do! ” Sharlassa clapped her hands in obvious delight. “I wondered if-that is, I mean-what I meant to say was-”
She paused, her expression flustered, and Leeana reached out to lay a hand briefly on her shoulder.
“I know what you meant to say. And thank you. Now I think we’d better go find Mother.”
“Oh. Oh! ” Sharlassa’s eyes widened suddenly. “Does she-I mean, had you-?”
“I believe I can safely say Mother is the one person in Hill Guard this news is least likely to surprise,” Leeana reassured her, and Sharlassa heaved a deep sigh of relief.
“Oh, good,” she said, and then blushed brightly as Leeana laughed and Bahzell rumbled a chuckle.
“I’m thinking we’d best be off to the stables before this poor lass is after catching fire and burns to the ground in front of us,” he said, and Sharlassa’s blush burned even hotter for a moment, before she shook her head and looked back up at him with a laugh of her own.
“Better,” he told her then, and extended his arm once again to Leeana.
“Milady?” he invited, and she snorted as she tucked her hand back into his elbow.
“Not anymore,” she reminded him.
“Ah, but there’s ladies, and then there’s ladies,” he told her, “and war maid or no, it’s my lady you are now, Leeana Hanathafressa.”
Her eyes softened. Then she nodded to Sharlassa, and the two of them were gone.
“-and after the farrier finishes with the two-year-olds, we’ll want him to see to Gayrfressa,” Baroness Hanatha said, her cane hanging by its lanyard from her wrist as she leaned back against the dark gray mare saddled and waiting for her. Despite her damaged right leg, she rode at least three times a week, and Mist Under the Moon (less formally known as “Misty”) was her favorite mount. Now Misty waited patiently while Hanatha and Doram Greenslope spoke.
“Aye, Milady,” Greenslope agreed. “Mistress Leeana pointed that out to me already, she did.”
“I’m sure she did.” Hanatha smiled warmly at the stablemaster. “And I’m sure you’d have seen to it without my saying a word. I do try to be a proper hostess, though, Doram!”
“Aye, so you do, Milady.” Greenslope smiled back at her, then stooped slightly, making a stirrup of his hands. She balanced on her weakened leg, lifting the toe of her left riding boot to his waiting hands. Her bad leg prevented her from getting her foot high enough for a regular stirrup, but the stablemaster’s strong boost as she straightened her good leg sent her more than high enough to settle into position on Misty’s back, and Greenslope shook his head as he gazed up at her.
“Always does my heart good to see you up there, Milady,” he said simply. “That it surely does!”
“I’m glad. It feels good, too,” she told him, and touched Misty with her heel, turning towards the stable yard’s gate and the pair of armsmen already mounted and waiting to escort her on her morning’s ride. But even as the mare moved forward, she saw the armsmen stiffen in their saddles, looking at something she couldn’t see yet. She drew rein, and then felt her eyebrows rise as Bahzell Bahnakson and her daughter stepped through the gate together.
Very together, she thought. She doubted she could have defined any single aspect of their body language-of the way they moved, their subtle awareness of one another in time and space-but it was more than enough,
