Remembrance

Meg could only shake her head and look on. It was as though she had entered one of Callie’s fairy stories. When Talis ran to the front of the horse and it reared back on its hind legs, Meg’s heart hardly fluttered. She knew that Talis knew what he was doing. She didn’t know how he knew, since she was sure he’d never seen a horse such as this one before, but she had almost as much confidence in his abilities as he seemed to have in himself.

Leaping to catch the bridle, Talis pulled the horse’s head down to his own. At first the animal gave him a wild-eyed look, but within seconds Talis managed to calm it with his hands and his voice, whispering secret things that the creature seemed to understand.

“Oh, you’ve tamed him,” Callie said, disappointment in her voice as she sat straight in the saddle. “I could have made him fly.”

“Fly! Ha! What do you know of flying horses or any horses, for that matter?”

“I know as much as you do. Let him loose and I shall gallop over the fields.”

“Not alone, you won’t,” Talis answered as he easily vaulted into the saddle in front of her. He seemed to have forgotten his injured foot that less than an hour ago he had declared was killing him. “Hold on to me,” he called to her before the great horse reared once more, then took off as though it had been hit with a whip.

Meg sat where she was, still not believing what she had seen.

What brought Meg to her senses was the yelp of the young lord as he came limping down the hill, just in time to see his horse with its two riders galloping away. For a moment Meg’s mind raced. Within the flash of an eye she envisioned Talis and Callie strung from a gibbet, hanged by the neck, their little bodies lifeless. Hanged for stealing this boy’s horse.

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Meg’s first thought was to kill the child. Better she should hang for murder than her precious children should be touched.

If Meg was dumbfounded, she was not more so than the boy. This morning he had stolen his father’s horse, trying his best to prove to his father that he was indeed a man and could ride the brute. But the horse had run away with him the moment his seat touched the saddle. It had run for so many miles and for so long that now Edward had no idea where he was. And what is worse, two peasant children had just stolen the horse. Under no circumstances was he going to admit that the children were riding the horse with more ease than he had ever managed.

With a glance at the fat old woman who was obviously nothing more than a farmer’s wife, Edward saw that she was looking at him with murder in her eyes. She might as well kill him, he thought, it would save his father the trouble.

But what put the steel back in his spine was that the children sitting atop his father’s horse came back into sight. God’s teeth but that boy could ride! Where could he have learned to ride like that? Who was his teacher? He could only be ten years old, twelve at the most, yet he rode as though his mother had been a mare.

Edward looked at the children, laughing, the girl with the extraordinary hair flying out behind them, sometimes wrapping about both her and the boy, and he was eaten with jealousy. If he could ride like that his father would take him everywhere. Edward doubted if this boy had ever fallen off a horse in his life.

One minute Edward was watching them, that malevolent woman glaring at him, advancing stealthily on him as though she meant to do him harm, and the next he was tearing down the hill.

“Get down!” he shouted. “How dare you steal my horse! I will see you hanged for this.”

Meg came running down the hill, her hands outstretched, going for the child’s throat.

“Stealing?” Talis said, laughing. “We kept him from running off. Had we not been here you would have lost your horse.” He cocked his head to one side, looking down at the boy from his lofty height from atop the horse. “Or is it your horse? If it was yours then you should have been able to ride him.”

Meg wanted to weep. She should have known Talis wouldn’t consider apologizing to this young lord. No doubt her whole family was now on its way to the gallows.

“I’ll have your ears for that,” the boy said, seething. How dare this lout of a peasant speak to him like that? His accents were of the coarsest nature, the talk of a boy meant for nothing but pulling a plow. He would be dead of overwork by the time he was twenty-five.

“Oh, will you?” Talis said easily and slid off the horse to stand before the boy. For all his great height, Meg knew that Talis wasn’t quite nine years old yet, while she suspected this boy was eleven or twelve.

Immediately, Meg stepped between the two boys, or as she was beginning to think of them, between the two young gentlemen. “There’s no harm done, sir. You have your horse back. The children were only bringing it back to you. No harm done at all.”

Neither of the boys seemed to notice she was there. With each passing moment, Edward was getting angrier. It was the arrogant stance of this dark-haired, dark-eyed boy, and it was the way that girl on the horse looked down at him. She was just a child, but with that hair swirling about her and with those eyes that looked so old, she bothered him. He didn’t like that she was looking at the peasant boy as though he were capable of anything, while he, Edward, was worth nothing. And how could that be possible? He was the one wearing the velvet and the jewels, not this coarse lad.

Edward struck the first blow—a blow that Talis easily parried, stepping aside to miss the boy’s fist coming at his face. But Edward’s next blow caught Talis on the shoulder, then, by accident, he stepped on Talis’s bee-stung foot and pain shot up his body. Talis leaped on the older boy and they fell to the ground, fists and feet flying.

Meg thought she might faint again. They were going to be hanged for sure.

“What’s this!”

Never in her life had Meg been so glad to see anyone as she was to see Will.

“I thought you were picking berries,” Will said, more annoyed than anything else. “Can I not trust any of you?”

Will was not concerned with matters of class and whether one of the boys in the tangle of arms and legs at his feet was a gentleman and the other not. All he saw were two boys fighting and so he broke them up. Grabbing the collar of each one, he pulled them apart, holding them at arm’s length while they fought to tear each other to bits.

“Behave yourselves!” he said, giving them each a curt shake.