Chapter 4
I grow weary of his complaints, Kari thought. She checked her latest snares, clapping her hands when Valentine toddled to the next and copied what she did. Neither snare had game in them that morning, which was of a piece with the rest of these miserable past few days.
You have changed, and not for the better.
“I would say the same,” she muttered, resetting the final trap with such force that the fragile mass of twigs and moss collapsed, leaving a ruined mess. Much like my marriage.
Just off the deer track, Valentine pulled up a pig nut and offered it to her.
“You have it, darling,” she said quickly, pleased at his generosity, furious afresh at those two, Constantine and Hadrian, for calling her son greedy. How dare they! “Wash it first,” she added, glad her voice did not reveal her anger.
While Valentine ran about, seeking a shallow pool, Kari followed in case he tumbled in. Her boy respected water, but he was still a babe—and no changeling.
Kari sighed. Did she, as Constantine claim, always leap to conclusions? The question had burned her all of yesterday, after she had fled from her husband. For a wild moment, recovering a clothes stash from its branch in a holly, she was glad she had no garments for Constantine in the simple cloth bag. Then she was sorry at her pettiness. Am I hasty in my judgments?
“You did not give him much chance to explain,” remarked her mother-in-memory, as Kari rummaged through the bag and felt her shoulders chafe at the ever-present pack on her back. “You may have run off before, in your marriage, to cool off, but never so far—nor so thoroughly—as this time.”
Three weeks and five days, Kari recounted sadly in her head, before she stiffened afresh. I dislike courts and gossip and sullen maids, the indoor work. I miss nothing of Sir Constantine’s manor.
Nothing but the man himself...
“Pride is good, but not when your nose is tipped up so high you do not see the track at your feet,” warned her father-in-memory.
“I want to know why,” Kari admitted aloud. Tying the clothes bag onto her back, she leaned over the puddle into which Valentine was carefully dipping his pig-nut and made faces in the water until her little boy laughed at her reflection. These shallow pools have not yet iced over. I still have time, before full winter, to stay out in my lands. “Why, he believed that Templar ahead of his own wife.”
“Bonds made in the heat of battle are hard-forged through danger, my daughter,” said her father-in-memory. “Your man clearly feels indebted to his brother, no doubt because Hadrian saved his skin while they crusaded in Outremer.”
“No more than Constantine would do for him and has done for him, I vow,” Kari shot back in her mind. “But I should ask Constantine and find out,” she added, while she lifted her son into her arms and checked that he was eating the pig-nut safely, without choking. Briefly she regretted that her husband was not beside her, to carry Valentine on his shoulders. We should be a family together.
“Then that is what you must strive for, daughter. Dismiss the rest,” said her parents in one voice.
Kari rubbed at her aching head, slapping aside a nodding brown fern. She knew she had to somehow distance herself from her indignation, or she and Constantine would never reconcile. I must find a way to trust him again; that, and quench my jealousy of Constantine’s miserable brother.
As my husband is jealous of Valentine.
The bitter revelation, a dark similarity between her and Constantine, gave her no pleasure. We are more alike than I want to admit.
Use it, then! Kari thought, lifting a hand in a noon prayer of thanks to the mother of the woodland. Use it and fight to be one with your lord before it is too late.
She swung Valentine up into her arms and turned about. It should not take her long to pick up her husband’s tracks and then—
What then? Her mind went blank. Like a heron crossing an empty sky, a thought slid through her, and the image of Constantine’s anxious face. “It will be Yule soon…”
He had said it in invitation, as an inducement for her to return.
And I shall take him up on it, though not in the way he might have thought.
First, she decided upon further thought, she would let him catch her. She knew how and where, too, by the low bushes where she had spread out their wet clothes to dry. As a warrior, he will recognize the spot as a place of ambush, for he will expect me to go back for clothes. After all, to make clothes takes time, and good wool, and effort—and you do not throw any away until they are rags.
She had to wait only for that thought to come to Constantine and for him to return. Weaving her way back to the little beck she had used for her washing, she settled Valentine on a nest of bracken and changed the moss and soft wool in his loin cloth. As her son patted her face while she dealt with him and kicked his legs when she kissed his fingers, she wished again that Constantine would only see.
Down to his good nature, the way he smiles, the shape of his ears, Valentine is fully his father’s son. Thrusting down the aching hurt in her spirits, Kari gave Val some wicker horses and acorn cups, a raggedy blanket, and some other toys, and resigned herself to a wait.
She heard her estranged husband close by only a few hours later, crashing through the forest, loud as a bell, reminding her anew of Yule and Christmas-time and the tiny bells in the bottom of her pack. Putting a finger to her lips to warn Valentine to be quiet, whispering to him, “A game to hide from daddy,” she slipped them both behind a stand of alders and pines.
A few moments after, she watched, torn between amusement and annoyance that Constantine again had not spotted her. No, he was busy spearing a scrap of parchment—and from where had he acquired that?—onto one of the holly thorns.
“A letter for me?” she asked, revealing herself and rolling a pine cone over the pine needles so Valentine would also scramble out from cover.
Her husband stiffened, then turned slowly to face her. “I wagered you would return here.”
“And you planned to snatch me?”
She had meant the question almost as a tease and was surprised when a slow red tide welled up into his face, seeping past his cheekbones. “Since when is a plea on parchment an ambush?”
He twisted back, to rip the note away, and she did not want that. “May I?”
With a bow that would have flattered a king, Constantine took several long strides back from the bush. At once, she changed her mind. Let him speak to me.
“Will you tell me what it says?” she asked. “We have spent so long a time apart, missing each other’s letters.”
“I sent them to you,” he said in a gruff voice, just on the verge of cracking like a youth’s. “While I was in Outremer, I wrote every day, though sending them out was always difficult.”
“And I wrote daily to you,” she admitted, glad to hear from his own lips that he had indeed written to her through their long months separated. “Wait,” she added.
He stared at her upraised hand as if it were a burning bush, something amazing, and she asked her question.
“Why did you venture in my lands without retainers?”
His look of amazement changed to one of indulgence. A warm-eyed glance I have not enjoyed from my man for many weeks. “I thought in your kingdom, I was best by myself. And we have not done so well with others between us…Hadrian, the maid…”
He was right, she thought, while his voice cracked anew with other, more revealing confessions.
“I knew I would do well, alone, in your lands. I wanted to be here, just as husband and father, for you and our son.”
“Valentine,” she prompted.
“Valentine,” he said, and conjured a heart-stopping smile at her boy, who, sensing he was being watched and admired, waved the pine cone and giggled, before gnawing on the cone.
“No, my lad.” Constantine crouched to stop Valentine choking, his reaching fingers colliding with her own. At once, her husband knelt back, clawing at something around his neck.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, while she extracted the cone from Valentine’s mouth. Before her little boy could cry a protest, her husband dangled a silver cross on a chain in front of their baby.
With a happy gurgle, Valentine snatched the cross and swung it furiously on the chain, almost striking his father in the eye. Serves him right, she thought, without heat.
“Letter?” she reminded him.
“Ah.” Constantine began to gather pebbles and leaves, making them into a circle for Valentine to scatter, with a grin of triumph. “Yes… God’s bones, this is hard with you looking on.”
Kari folded her arms and stared off into the blue sky, spotting, from the corner of her eye, two lowered heads as Constantine made another circle.
“My dear wife… I was wrong. I wish—”
He stopped, cleared his throat, and she gripped her elbows so hard she felt her lower arms going numb.
“Come home for Yule. Or stay here for Yule. But let us be one family. I was stupid and envious. You and Valentine made a whole between you, Madonna and child. I was excluded.”
Had I done that? Kari blinked away tears and listened even harder to Constantine’s lowering voice.
“I felt…useless. And you were different.”
“Changed and not for the better?” Kari said with lethal sweetness, before she could stop her hasty tongue.
Her husband gave a sharp nod before he shook his greying head. “You spoke more loudly and ordered people about. You were here and there and everywhere, always commanding. Some maids clearly feared and resented you.”
“I had a manor to keep safe and a new babe to protect,” Kari said quietly. “I had no choice but to be firm, among servants and men-at-arms who were strangers to me. The maids who disliked me…”
She knew which women and girls Constantine meant. They were the ones who would gladly hurry for a lord or a knight, but do scrimping service for a lady. Or worse still, undermine that lady, like sappers beneath a castle wall. Remembering how a maid had whispered of her unborn child to Constantine before she had chosen to speak to her husband, thus lessening the joy of her news and making another tear between them, Kari shivered. “Some were not kind.”
“I know that, now.”
Nor was the steward of your manor, she longed to say, but she considered her previous haste and said instead, “Battles are not all in the open, with swords.”
“Aye. ’Tis a lesson I was slow to understand until it was nearly too late.” Constantine tugged so fiercely at his hair she wondered if he might pull his own head off. Without conscious thought, she stepped closer to him, freezing as he spoke again. “I had left you, when you were expecting our first child, and vulnerable. We are the same, we two. Just as you had no alternative but to show your strength, I had no choice to follow the king’s command—but I realize now it was badly done.”
“Knights think only of war as a place of danger,” Kari remarked. She considered for an instant or so if she should add more. He already knows I am hasty, and still he followed me to be reunited. I have to force myself not to care so much whether he came for me and Valentine or for our unborn. I know that with two little ones I would struggle to survive if this winter grew harsher, so my anger and pride would condemn my babies to death, as well.
She considered her family’s winter keep of stone and turf, only to discard any idea of settling there for Yule. She remembered her aunt Melisande and how “civilization” had betrayed her in the end. Houses not only kept people safe, they also confined them.
She flinched at the hard, unyielding thoughts, colder than ice, her heart feeling to twist within her chest as she looked at Valentine, happy and intent as he stirred a patch of mud with a twig. If only my kindred had lived! I might then have stomached the old keep. Without anyone else, what choice do I have, in truth, but to return to my husband? His manor and place had done well enough for her in winter before, she grudgingly admitted—when Constantine was off crusading. She rammed down hard on the old fires of resentment at his abandonment of her.
Habit and our marriage vows will have to do for now, in place of deeper feelings, but some of this festering rupture between us must be cleansed. I will speak. “Since you left for Outremer, a laundress drowned in a stream and a ploughman lost his foot in an accident with oxen.”
And Constantine’s Manor Steward would have given their grieving families no help, had I not insisted and shamed him to action by sending for provisions and clothes for them from my own lands.
“Those and others, especially mothers-to-be, have no songs sung in their praise, celebrating their deeds. Only knights and damsels are worthy of verse, in the troubadours’ eyes.”
“Because only knights and ladies pay in gold,” said her husband.
“I agree,” she said. “It is the way of the world, but that does not make the way perfect.”
A silence eased between them, punctuated by the cries of a blackbird and their son’s baby chatter. She checked again that Valentine was content.
“What can I say?” Constantine raised both hands, spreading his fingers in a silent plea. “I am a warrior, and thick-headed, I admit it. When I returned and found you thriving, I was proud of how you had managed—and resentful, at the same time.”
“Because it seemed I no longer needed you?” How mistaken you are, husband!
Constantine frowned and pinched the base of his long nose, a habit that told her she had hit the mark. “I kept to the tilt yard and battle-training because I knew what to do there. Always, there were people between us, interruptions, demands, my brother, speaking what seemed to be good sense—”
He broke off, a strong shudder running through his kneeling body, warping his face. “Hadrian was more familiar to me by then. He is my older brother. I had followed him since we were small boys, when he had always led me truly and taken care of my scrapes and troubles. As a man, he carried me off the battlefield in Outremer, twice, he did, when he could have left me.”
She disliked the guilt that clouded his eyes. “Did you save him?”
“Of course, once in Normandy, while we were fording a river and Hadrian fell from his horse, and once in a skirmish outside Acre in Outremer.”
Skirmish sounded like battle to her, but Constantine dismissed both of his actions as if they were lesser, not important. Because he is the younger brother? Indeed, he said quietly, “My brother took a wound in his shoulder, recovering me the second time. His shield-arm will never be the same, and he is a Templar, a warrior for Christ.”
Kari flared up a little, not wanting to believe any good of Hadrian, remembering, too what this warrior for Christ had said of her. “Some wounds are delivered unseen,” she snapped, sharp enough that Valentine whimpered and stared at her.
“Yes, and they are often the worse. But that is no excuse.” Clearly unable to keep still, Constantine leapt to his feet and paced, stumbling, as she never would, on the damp stones and moss. “I listened to my brother when I should not have done. I heeded him, and others, and betrayed you, my own wife.”
He stopped abruptly and looked directly at her then, unashamedly speaking to her by now, not by means of any letter but with his heart, his feelings shining in his dark eyes. “I will do anything, anything, to have you and Valentine back.”
Before she could answer, a high scream had her sprinting down the slope, falling twice and skidding once in her desperation. In the few moments her attention had slipped from him, Valentine had wandered off. He is hurt!
A fur cloak slapped in her face as Constantine overtook her, racing like a lean wolf toward the soul-piercing cries. He dived straight into a murky pool, surfacing with Valentine clutched tightly in his arms.
“Give me,” Kari panted, and wrapped her crying son in her cloak. Beside her, Constantine spat out water and wiped his bleeding nose. He had flung himself straight onto rocks to save Valentine.
Because he is a warrior, trained for action, or because he cares?
Kari hated herself in that instant for even considering such questions. She rocked Valentine, starting as Constantine came behind her and rocked her in turn.
“Your cloak is sodden,” she said after a while.
“It will dry,” came the laconic reply. “Is he all right? Are you?”
She tilted her head back to look up at him. My emperor has never looked more absurd and at the same time more heroic, wiping blood from his rock-cut nose, draping an end of his dripping cloak over my shoulder so he does not bleed on me. Her rage against him fell away and a new warmth seeped into her body. “Let me make a fire for us.” She felt Constantine’s strong arms tighten about her and Valentine, and then slide away, brushing one of her hands, and one of Valentine’s tiny feet.
“He needs more toys, do you not, my lad? I will carve a wooden camel for you. I saw a camel in Outremer, bigger than a horse and with a hump on its back…”
Kari closed her eyes and waited for her beating heart to slow as she listened to her husband’s careful, painstaking words to their son and Valentine’s gurgles of delight in his daddy’s attention. See? He does care. He called Valentine my lad! They truly recognize each other now! Constantine makes Valentine toys! Perhaps all will be well.
She chose not to worry about the Manor Steward. She could but hope.