“I—I. Y—you. But, th—they…”
She was babbling.
“Ye’re all right,” he murmured, keeping his speech low and calm, to bring her back from the fringes of panic. “We’re well. ’Tis over.”
Her gaze was locked on him, wide, staring. She still held the blade, shivering, near her ear. He reached out and slowly pushed it down.
“Ye didn’t have to use it,” he said quietly, calmly. “Ye’re a’right.”
“I would have,” she whispered, vehement. Her voice shook. “I would have used it. I just didn’t want to…strike you. By accident.”
“My thanks.” He looked down at the soldiers, scattered in a semicircle, bleeding in the sun. Rardove’s men. Soon, someone would find the bodies. They had a day now, maybe half again, until the baron knew they were not headed north, but south.
Would he figure out they were going to Hutton’s Leap? Had Turlough, his captured kinsman, finally broken and revealed their mission to retrieve the dye manual? No way to know. And it didn’t matter. Nothing would stop him.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They left the sacks of skins. Someone would be along. And whomever it was, Finian had no desire to meet them.
Chapter 24
“You saw them where?”
Rardove repeated the question slowly, as if the newly sworn-in soldier was stupid. Which, Pentony decided, he probably was. They usually were. Stupid enough to swear fealty to Rardove for a position or some land.
Some might say the same about him, of course. But then, Pentony was doing penance.
“By the river. He was Irish, for certain. But she was, too, my lord,” the young soldier added weakly. He looked at his equally shamefaced companion, then tugged on the belt around his waist. The belt came with the hauberk, their lord’s livery as their mark and first payment for service. It looked cracked around the edges, old. “She was Irish. I’d swear to it.”
“Would you?” Rardove snapped. “Was she comely?”
“Oh, as anything.”
“Red hair? Long?”
“Well, mores like yellowy-red, all curvy—”
“That’s my goddamned dye-witch!”
The soldier’s pimply face was not glowing red just from the sun he and his companion had endured all afternoon on their lark by the river, derelict in their duties at the keep. But what a gift, this truancy. Pentony was as certain as Rardove: these two sluggards had encountered O’Melaghlin and Senna.
“What were they doing?” Rardove demanded.
“Stealing a boat.”
Rardove stopped his furious circuit while behind the table. He leaned across its wooden width. “And you didn’t stop them? You let them just”—he flicked his fingers—“sail away, to go downstream and kill four Englishmen?”
“We thought they were delivering goods for the old man,” the other unhelpfully piped in. Rardove’s eyes snapped to him. “We thought she was his flaming doxy.”
The baron went still. A muscle ticked by his jaw. “What did you say?”
The soldier swallowed. “No offense, my lord. Now that we know…’Tis just she was, was…”
His voice trailed off.
“She was what?” The baron’s voice was thin and low pitched. Pentony felt the urge to cover his eyes.
“Aw, bollocks,” the soldier muttered. “She was sucking the Irishman’s cock, and they—”