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A Knight of Her Own
by Oberon Wonch

Copyright © 2017 by Oberon Wonch. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Chapter One

England at the Scottish border

Winter, 1072 A.D.

Lady Isabel of Wulflandt took a deep breath and pressed her seal into the wax on the missive Prior Wygood had composed. She had no choice. She was out of options.

In the wan light of predawn, she saw the scroll handed up to the friar mounted upon his mule in the abbey courtyard.

Her fingers twitched. She yearned to grab the treasonous document back. If it landed in the hands of the usurper Norman king or his agents, her head would surely be forfeit.

But such qualms had to be put aside. Her destitute people still counted on her, even after all her years of hiding, and she had to do something. What was more, the drive to avenge her father’s bloody, needless death grew stronger with each passing day.

Thus, she allowed portly Brother Marcus to tuck the scroll into the folds of his robes for secret transport to her distant kinsman, Malcolm, King of Scotia.

“I pray thee Godspeed,” she said to the friar, who sat amidst the many baskets strapped to his beast of burden.

He nodded solemnly. “My lady.” With a heel to the mule, the brave soul was off, through the dilapidated gate and out into the snowy countryside.

Trying to quell the trembling in her hands, Isabel concealed her signet ring within a tiny pocket sewn into her bodice, then stood in a frozen, terrible silence, watching the friar depart.

“Let us pray this one earns reply,” said her friend, the wizened, wiry Prior Wygood, who stood beside her.

“Aye,” she whispered, too knotted with worry to say more. This wasn’t her first letter to King Malcolm. Her earlier pleas that the Scots king take her and her retainers in, and her offer of her own hand in marriage to the Scotsman of Malcolm’s choosing, had gone unanswered.

Not the least of her concerns was the gentle monk’s safety on his long journey north. These were terrible times in England, and it was possible the other messengers had never reached their destination with her missives. Even if a traveler evaded wolf and tempest, he might be accosted by brigands, crazed indigents, or worse—Norman soldiers.

Such villains slaughtered barbarously and without reservation.

Yet Brother Marcus was not without protection. The flagons of mead and ale he carried—some laced with deadly belladonna—might serve as means to his safe passage, either as bribes, payment, or weaponry.

Besides, no one would expect an innocent-looking monastic to lie about his doings, which Isabel fully trusted Brother Marcus to do. All the monks at St. Swithun’s had been lying for years.

“You’d best be getting back, then,” the prior said at length. “Sunrise draws apace.”

“Indeed. Thank you, Prior Wygood.”

She turned toward the main building of the venerable but tumbledown abbey just as her sister exited the doorway.

“Quickly, Phoebe,” Isabel said. “We must get back before daybreak.”

Travel by darkness had become habit these many years they’d been in hiding. Isabel knew the woods and hidden trails as well as she knew how to make the morning porridge, and her bold little mare, Mercy, could trek by rote. “Did you bid farewell to Jamie for me?”

Her sister nodded, tears glittering on her eyelashes. “He tries to be a big boy, but I know he weeps. Oh, Izzie, he’s our baby brother. He should be with us.”

Isabel put a comforting arm around her sister. “You know he’s safer here with the monks.” Phoebe was a good head taller than she and her senior by four years, but Isabel was older in ability and sense. It had always been thus. Phoebe was good-hearted and kind but naive as a child. “We’ll return in a fortnight. You’ll see him then.”

Phoebe sniffled, wiping her nose with the back of her tattered mitten.

Isabel reached up to her sister’s face and brushed back a straggled lock of hair. “Let’s go home.”

Only for her sister’s sake did Isabel call the hermit’s cave where they dwelled home. The dark, damp place barely served as shelter, but it had passed as such for much of the five years since the Normans had butchered her father, Earl Bodewin, and taken over his fortress and their family estates at Wulflandt.

A league from the abbey grounds, their quiet mount picked her way through the woods, following an ancient deer trail that folk in the area had used since before the Romans came. So far, it had been a safe route. But it was only a matter of time before these latest invaders, the Normans from across the sea, learned of the track and all the others like it woven through the heaths.

“You’re holding me too tightly,” Isabel told her sister. Not only did Phoebe ride behind with her arms wrapped immovably about Isabel’s waist, but the bigger girl had laid her head on the back of Isabel’s shoulders, too, making a heavy burden that doubled the difficulty of the journey.

Phoebe made no effort to alter her position, and Isabel glanced heavenward with a groan.

A male voice nearby broke the silence of the frosty air, chilling her blood. She drew Mercy to a halt beside a dense bramble thicket. In the gray light, the puffs of steam from the horse’s nostrils swirled like a ghostly veil.

Isabel listened intently, her heart pounding in her ears. There it was again. It had to be coming from the old stone road, which ran parallel to the path she’d been following, but a few yards off through the trees.

“Lady, are ye out there?” the voice queried. “I’ve fresh meat for yer blade, I do.”

The language was her own, but the accent was strange. Neither Norman, Danish, nor Scots.

“A true prize,” the person proclaimed. He sounded youthful, like a boy, even. “A Norman pig, no less.”

A thud and a scuffle followed, accompanied by what sounded like a moan of pain.

Isabel nudged her sister with an elbow. “Get down,” she whispered.

“What is it?” Phoebe asked groggily. She’d been asleep. No wonder she’d felt so weighty.

“Keep quiet and slide down. I must see what is up ahead.”

They were both accustomed to furtive travel, so Phoebe did as she was told in utter silence. Isabel often had to stop, let Phoebe down, and go on ahead to ensure the path was safe.

“Stay here and don’t allow anyone to see you. I’ll be gone for just a bit. We might have to bide here until this churl moves on.”

She urged Mercy forward until a break in the shrubbery allowed her a peek at the road.

The rising sun was a mere glow between the trees to the east, and in its weak light she could make out a small lad on horseback, in the road and facing away from her. A few feet in front of him, a man was on his knees, hanging his head. His arms were pulled behind him, bound at the wrists and wrenched upward by a rope attached to the saddle horn, amplifying the bulk in his beefy shoulders.

Isabel winced in empathy at the man’s obvious discomfort. The boy had taken this man prisoner? But how? The man’s size alone would have made such a thing impossible. Despite the humble position in which he knelt, his immensity could not be mistaken.

Neither could the power in his form. Amongst her father’s housecarls and all the Norman warriors who had overrun the land, she’d never seen a man as fit as this. Not even the local English hero, Leofric, who still waged a covert war against the invaders, could match him in that regard.

The prisoner’s sinewy forearms were exposed by the rolled-up sleeves of his iron-colored tunic, and his powerful thighs looked as if honed by the constant command of a restless stallion.

Isabel’s grip on Mercy’s reins slackened as a tremble slithered through her limbs. For a brief moment, assessing the stranger’s strength rendered her weak with fear.

Then she tightened her fists.

Weak? Never!

Ruthlessly, she pushed away the feelings of powerlessness. No one would ever know her to be soft again, least of all herself. She ran away the night her father had lost his life defending their home, but as God was her witness, she would never run away again.

Still, caution was warranted. The smaller fellow had said he had a Norman in tow. Indeed, the captive wore his dark hair shorn close at the back and sides and thicker on top—in the fashion of Norman knights. He also wore spurs, a sure sign of a knight.

She stifled the urge to spit into the snow. She hated the Normans—especially the new lord of her father’s lands, Wace de Belleterre. Hated them and what they’d done to her father, her folk, and her way of life. They were dangerous and bellicose, every one of them, and this warrior likely served de Belleterre himself.

But the man’s clothing appeared spattered with mud—or was it blood? It was difficult to tell at this distance, and him with his back to her. He was constrained, possibly injured. What harm could he do her?

And the other person was only a boy. Little to be concerned about.

Neither fellow had detected her presence yet, concealed as she was behind an overgrown brier, but the lad called out to the landscape around him. “This one’s ballocks’ll outweigh ’em all, fer certain. They’ll make a nice pair o’ baubles to hang on a gilt chain ’round yer neck. Or weights fer yer loom, if ye got one.”

Ah, so that was what the lad was about. He was seeking the mysterious Blue Lady of the Woods, Isabel’s carefully constructed alter ego.

She nudged Mercy forward, out of the brush.