Gaetan lifted his big shoulders, vaguely. “We shall soon know,” he said. “You and Denis flank them as they move. Stay to the trees, however, and stop when it is no longer safe to travel. Keep an eye on the pair for as long as you can.”
Luc nodded, moving through the other knights until he came to Denis. Young and excitable, Denis was more than agreeable to the orders and the two of them suddenly took off into the foliage, pushing through the heavy bramble and trying to remain silent as they moved. Gaetan watched them head off until he lost them in the shadow. Then, he moved up beside Téo and Aramis, standing between them as the men watched the Saxon warrior lady and the priest head towards the enemy encampment.
All they could do now was wait.
Ghislaine knew they were being watched as she and the priest headed into the Anglo-Saxon encampment and it was difficult to choose just who she was more afraid of at the moment – her brother or the Norman knight pointing an arrow at her back. None of this venture had gone as she had hoped but the problem was that she couldn’t stop the forward momentum now. She couldn’t simply walk away; she was becoming more and more entrenched in a situation of her own making and struggling not to lose control of it.
She was in it until the end.
As she and Jathan came to the edge of the encampment, several exhausted men around a weakly-smoking fire caught sight of her and began gravitating in her direction. Seeing that she was now noticed, she took action. She grabbed Jathan by the back of his tunic and shoved the tip of the dagger into his back.
“I am sorry if I hurt you,” she whispered to him. “But I must make this convincing.”
Jathan could see the enemy soldiers heading in their direction and he kept his eyes on them. “Understandable, my lady,” he murmured. “Good luck to us both.”
With that, the conversation died but Ghislaine’s apprehension was full-blown. The blade pressed into Jathan’s back was trembling so that she suddenly kicked his knees out and forced him on to the ground so her men would notice the prisoner and not her quivering hands. Besides… she didn’t want her shaking hands to jiggle that sharp blade right into the priest’s back.
“Look what I have found!” she said triumphantly. “Another Norman dog!”
Men were gathering around her, peering at the man on his belly, his face pressed into the cold, wet grass because Ghislaine had her foot on his head. She was beaming from ear to ear, as if genuinely happy with her captive, but it was all for show – she wanted her men to see how hateful she was towards the Normans and how gleeful she was in the capture of one. She had to be convincing.
And it worked.
Men began to congratulate her, peering down at Jathan only to spit on the man when they looked their fill of him. They had a Norman in their midst now and it seemed to rejuvenate whatever defeat had settled in their hearts and minds. A few of them even kicked Jathan as they circled him, like vultures going in for the kill.
“Another Norman bastard!”
“Kill him! Harold demands it!”
“Wait!” Ghislaine threw up a hand to stop the mob mentality before it truly started. “I will not kill him. I would put him with the other Norman prisoner, the one my brother took from me. Where is he?”
A man with dark dirty hair went to stand with her. He was one of her own soldiers, sworn to her, as were most of the men standing around her. In an age where men controlled the army and the country, it was extremely rare for a woman to command men but Ghislaine did. These men were gifted to her by her brother, Edwin, because he wanted her protected in battle. He knew he couldn’t keep her out of a fight so he had gifted her with about a hundred men and the means to support them.
Ghislaine’s men were extremely loyal to her, as evidenced by the fact that they’d remained in the encampment even when she’d turned up missing. A few had even gone out to look for her, but most of them were certain that Lady Ghislaine would return. She tended to be a loner at times, and a wanderer, but they knew she would not leave them. Even if she was a woman, she understood the heart of the warrior and the mentality. She would never leave her men if she could help it.
They had been correct.
Therefore, the man with the dirty hair was glad to see her and not surprised she’d brought back a prisoner. Lady Ghislaine was brave that way.
“Alary took his men and left just after dawn, my lady,” he told her. “That was a few hours ago.”
Ghislaine’s smile of triumph turned into something of a grimace and it was a struggle not to openly react to the news. “He left?” she asked, unable to keep the astonishment from her tone. “He… he is gone?”
“Aye.”
“And he took his army?”
“Those who could move, aye. At least two hundred men, mayhap a little less.”
“But… but what of my Norman prisoner? Did he take my knight, too?”
All of the men were nodding to varying degrees. “He was searching for you before he left, my lady,” another man said. “He would not wait for you to return.”
So Alary knew I was missing, Ghislaine thought. “So he took my prisoner and ran off?” she asked. “Did he not know I would return?”
The man with the dark hair shrugged hesitantly. “He did not say, my lady,” he said. “He looked for you. But when he could not find you, he took his men and his prisoner, and he left.”
It was unhappy news, indeed. It wasn’t as if Ghislaine could have stopped Alary had she been here, but to run off while she was away seemed underhanded somehow. Still, she was astute enough to realize that there was an unspoken question hanging in the air between her and her men at the moment – the fact that she had gone missing for quite some time. Yet, she was not troubled by it. The answer was on the ground at her feet.
“My brother is a fool,” she said, her disgust real. “Had he only waited, I would have had another Norman captive. Did he think I had run off? He knows me better than that.” She started to look around, realizing that there weren’t as many men around as there had been the night before. In fact, the area seemed rather empty and her disgust turned to puzzlement. “Where did everyone go? Has everyone fled for home?”
The men were looking around because she was. “Most,” the man with the dirty hair said. “Lord Leofwine’s men departed before the sun rose to return home to his wife in Kent. And everyone else… there is no reason to remain, my lady. It is best to return home and brace for what is to come.”
Ghislaine looked at the man. He was young and she could hear the fear in his voice. He’d suffered through the worst of the battle, just as they all had. It made the situation a bit more heady for her, a bit more sad. Beyond her scheming to have the Normans kill Alary lay the very real defeat of the Anglo-Saxon army and the destruction of her people.
And there was nothing any of them could do to stop it.
“It is the Normans that will come,” she said, feeling somewhat hollow and depressed even as she said it. “The Normans are already here.”
“Aye, my lady.”
“And my brother… he had fled them.”
“Aye, my lady.”