“Horse shite,” Padraig interjected. “Caris was still in the hall with the other guests. I know—I looked.”
“Well, I couldn’t very well push in on you and your guest, now could I?” she shot back.
Padraig frowned. “Guest? You mean Searrach?”
“Is a nude woman in your rooms so frequent an encounter for you that you’ve already forgotten which woman it was?”
Padraig felt his neck heat. “Ye’ve nae fashed to push in to me chamber with yer prissy lessons any other time.”
“What’s happened to your speech?”
“My speech is bloody fine.”
The trumpet sounded again, and the hounds were released with a cacophony of baying mixed in with the shouts of the hunters.
Beryl’s expression was no longer placid and cool as she tossed him a glare and turned her horse away from Padraig and into the trotting flow of riders.
“Hah,” Padraig shouted, kicking his mount forward after her.
The river of hunters flowed over the hill in a torrent, curving and winding up the next rise in unison, swirling to either side of an outcropping of rock as the tide recedes into the ocean. Her shining loops of hair bounced on the glistening cloak, the sunlight sparking copper and gold from its shining depths as Padraig followed her. Beryl made the awkward seat look graceful and effortless as she urged her small palfrey to pace just beyond Padraig’s larger mount.
Padraig leaned forward to gain on her through the next valley, as was at her side as the hunt circled the wood and then reined to a halt, milling impatiently at the edge of the dark, cold forest.
“I sent her away,” Padraig said to Beryl, who was again refusing to look at him.
“Who you choose to entertain is none of my concern, Master Boyd.”
“Jesus, Beryl. Lucan and yerself could be related, the way you both try to turn the point o’ the sword to suit ye.”
Her head whipped around now, and her eyes were full of outrage. “I’m not trying to turn the point of anything, and I resent your tone, Master Boyd.”
“Are you sleeping with him? Is that why neither of you can speak the whole of the truth of anything?” She continued to stare at him, increasing Padraig’s sense of overstep. But he would not back down now. “You can tell me. It’s nae as if the two of us are married. I doona care who you sleep with.”
A trumpet blared from the blackness of the wood and was answered with a matching tone from a horn in the party. The group sprang into the trees, heading south. Beryl kicked her mount forward without comment, disappearing into the shadows.
Padraig followed.
They swerved between trees deeper into the wood, the echoing barks from the dogs rebounding off the trunks and confusing the direction. The group began to splinter as smaller parties decided their strategy, and Padraig heard a faint yelping from his right.
He pulled his mount to the southwest. Hearing the answering hoof falls behind him, he glanced over his shoulder to see that Beryl and Lucan followed, along with Lord Hood and another pair of riders, one of whom Padraig was surprised to recognize as the obnoxious Lord Paget.
The faint sounds of barks seemed to be coming from ahead, and so Padraig leaned forward once more, eager to be proven right. He wanted this success, in front of Beryl, in front of Lord Paget and the others. He wanted to be the one to bring back the kill, proving to everyone that this land, this wood, these animals, were his, a part of him and in his blood, no matter that there were so many who were determined that he should fail.
Mayhap he wished to prove it to himself most of all.
Over the next crest into an even darker hollow their party flowed, along a tiny ribbon of a stream into a small clearing.
A strangled shout from behind him prompted him to glance back again, just in time to see Adolphus Paget sailing from the back of his horse. Lord Hood gave a cry of dismay, and the party drew up on their reins.
Padraig too slowed his mount with a curse. Leave it to one of the nobles to lose his seat. If the man cost Padraig this hunt—
A piercing heat burst forth in his shoulder, and Padraig swayed in the saddle with a cry. He struggled with the jerking reins of his startled horse to feel his arm, his palm coming away red.
“What the bloody—?”
“Padraig!” Beryl shouted.
Another slicing pain lit across his ribs on his left side, and Padraig saw the offending arrow hit solidly in the tree ahead of him.
“Get down!” he shouted, sliding from his saddle and staggering out of danger of the stomping hooves. He slapped the courser’s rear and sent it galloping into the wood and then pressed his hand to his side while he crouched low and ran toward Beryl, who had disengaged from her saddle and was sliding down from her horse. He caught her beneath her arms, gritting against the pain in his shoulder and ribs, and then grabbed her hand, pulling her down onto the dry leaves at the base of a wide oak.
Padraig saw Montague herding Lord Hood to safety behind another tree, but the other rider wheeled his horse and galloped hard to the east, and Adolphus Paget still lay in the open on the forest floor some distance away. The space between the trees was filled with only the rapidly dwindling rumbles of the escaping, panicked horses, and Paget’s anguished groans. The birds had fallen silent.
“They’re shooting at us!” Beryl cried in a horrified voice. “They must think us game—we have to tell them it is us! Padraig, you’re bleeding!”
“Shh,” he warned her, and then continued in a whisper. “’Tis nae accident, lass.” He met Lucan’s eyes and then nodded toward Paget. The knight answered with an understanding nod of his own.
“Stay here,” Padraig said in a low voice. “Doona move. And keep quiet.”
“Where are you—Padraig!”
