Warrior's Song (Medieval Song 1)

He quickly lit a candle and came down beside her. “What is wrong, Chandra? Does your shoulder pain you?”

“My stomach, Jerval,” and she cried out, clasping her arms around herself, drawing up, and then she moaned deeply, jerking, finally lying back, panting hard.

“What’s wrong? My stomach feels like it’s ripping apart.”

“I don’t know,” he said and was gone in the next moment to fetch Agnes.

He heard her screaming even before they returned to the bedchamber. Agnes pushed him aside and came down over his wife. He saw her pull back the covers, saw her jerk up Chandra’s bedgown. Then he saw the blood, so much blood, and it was coming from her body. And he knew then, knew that she had lost a babe.

She was moaning quietly now, her eyes closed, her palms up at her sides as Agnes bathed her.

He turned and left the bedchamber.

It had happened so quickly. The child had existed for such a short time and now it was gone.

Simply gone.

Chandra lay quietly, bathed, wrapped in a clean bedrobe, and she felt empty.

She heard him come into the bedchamber. She said nothing until he was standing beside her and his palm was flat on her forehead.

“I’ve no fever,” she said.

“No.”

“I want to go home.”

“I told you. You cannot return to Croyland.”

“No, I meant Camberley.”

His eyes narrowed on her pale face. So much pain she’d endured, so much blood she’d lost. He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then he said, unable to keep the words back, “You lost my babe.”

She said nothing, just stared ahead toward the narrow window cut into the far wall. Both of them were staying in Mark and Mary’s bedchamber. It had been nearly seven days now.

He waited, and finally she said, “I did not even know that I carried a babe.”

“Why should you? You won’t accept that you’re even a woman. A woman conceives a child, a man doesn’t.”

“When Mary told me she was pregnant with Graelam’s child, I thought about it for the first time. You came to me always, every night, but then I just forgot about it, and then you no longer came to me.”

He paced to the far wall, then back again. He said, his voice flat and hard, “You will never change. I have to accept that. I failed. I will go to the Holy Land. As for you, when you’re well, I will take you back to Camberley. You may go fight the Scots, you may weed the gardens. I care not. You are free now, Chandra. Do what you will.”

She turned her head to look up at him. It brought her pain to look at him. He had given up on her, but why should that lance her with pain? She had lost the babe. She’d been so unthinking, so unwomanly, that it just hadn’t occurred to her. She still didn’t know how she felt about it—the pain was too recent.

She closed her eyes and turned her head away from him.

But he wasn’t through. There was just too much, all of it festering inside him. “You challenged the damned prince! You wanted to challenge him to archery. Do you have any idea what a fool you made me look?”

She said quietly, not looking at him, “I did not mean to make you look foolish, nor did I mean to make you angry, or to flout you.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Are you afraid that I could best the prince?”

He stared at her. “By all the saints’ name days, do you think it pleases me to have my wife bragging like a bloody man? Do you never think? Nay, don’t answer that. You don’t. You do only what you want to do. You don’t care about anyone else, just yourself.”

“I wasn’t bragging. What is wrong with my pitting my skills against the prince, or anyone else for that matter?”