‘Enough to make me consider passing time in the company of any of the men round a fire,’ she snorted and he laughed.
‘Best not, love,’ he advised. ‘I would then spend the evening fighting them all, one by one.’
‘Ah, gallant knight,’ she replied in a strained falsetto. ‘Hold me not so tight, you are crushing the rose blossom of me.’
‘There will be a few round those fires who would desire to nip your rosy buds,’ Hal answered wryly. ‘Little they know of the thorns they risk.’
‘I need all my thorns for the Queen and her women, so it is hard to put them away easily at the end of day.’
‘You need them still?’
Isabel made a ‘tsschk’ of annoyance.
‘The Queen is stoic, as I say. Like some auld beldame faced with fire, flood and famine, for all she is a girl yet. She does not care for it much, but she will dutifully follow her man, to Hell if that is where he is headed. I am sure she believes it lies beyond the next hill.’
‘The King’s sister is not so bad – Lady Mary is of an age not to have her head turned by events. It is the others,’ she went on sourly. ‘Good dames o’ the court whom I have to remind that I am a countess, even if they sneer at the title these days. An’ Marjorie …’
She broke off to shake a sorrowful head.
‘She is a recent elevation to princess, yet still enough of a bairn to pout about the lack of ermine and pearls, or warm hall being feted by all the young men.’
‘Which she would be,’ Hal noted, knowing the attraction rank added to a woman, ‘for all her chin.’
They grinned at each other, sharing the sly spite on the chin of Bruce’s daughter, a heavy inheritance for such a flower. ‘You have an interest there?’ Isabel demanded archly. ‘If you can suffer the chin you will have a princely reward.’
‘And leave you to pine in some hawthorn arbour?’ he countered. ‘Alone and weeping?’
‘I am told that has attractions for some.’
‘Ach weel – pray for luck that kills me then. Men love to comfort a mourning lover.’
The game ended with her sudden, fierce clutch.
‘Weesht on that,’ she said, her eyes big and round. ‘I am not so stoic a matron that I can listen to that sort of talk.’
‘Swef, swef,’ he soothed. ‘Lamb. Shall I comfort you with the poetry of the Court of Love? Demand you turn the moon of your countenance on the misery of my night?’
‘God forbid,’ she answered and lay back, suddenly loose and lush. ‘I would concentrate on unlacing instead.’
He began, then paused.
‘The King will send his queen away in the morn, for safety,’ he said into the moonlit pools glowing in her face. ‘This may be the last time we see each other for some time.’
‘I know it,’ she said and buried her face in the curve of his neck and shoulder – then dropped back on to the bracken.
‘Are you having trouble with the knots?’ she demanded. ‘I have dirk if ye need to cut them.’
Afterwards, lying in the strewn bracken bed, he listened to the soft laughter and the sudden chords as Humfy Johnnie struck up a harp tune, his crooked back as bent as his gaping grin.
There was still the wild, strange feeling in Hal as he listened to her breathe softly beside him and, when he fell asleep, he dreamed that the blue sky and the brown earth were tilting him away from her altogether.
He woke in the dark, afraid.
Methven
Translation of the Relics of St Margaret, June, 1306
In the lush of morning, the summer lay on the ground, delicate and soft as a cat’s paw. The sun drifted lazily in a sky like deep water, soaking the spread of fields round Methven so that it seemed to Hal that the land lost the pinched skin of itself, softening and rolling under the hooves of the horses. Larks sang, hovering.
They were coming round in a wide sweep, out north and west from the raggle of poverty that was Methven vill, swinging round in a forage that had found nothing but horse fodder and beans.
Half the army, Hal knew, was trying to glean something from the empty basket of this place. He was glad that the household was to be packed up and sent north with two of the Bruce brothers, for it meant Isabel might get a decent meal. He would miss the music of her, all the same.
Sore Davey, scouting ahead, came back at a fast lick, flinging one hand back behind him as he gasped up.
‘Men,’ he said and, by the time Hal had established where, how many and whether they were on foot or horsed, the rest of the riders had tightened their straps and loosened their weapons.
A column of foot, three wide and deep enough to contain a good hundred, even allowing for Sore Davey’s poor tallying and seeing double, was moving at a steady pace up over the fields, having come out of a copse at one side.