Grave Goods by Ariana Franklin Read Free Book Online

batterin’
you
,” Gyltha told him, making him smile.
    Finished, Adelia stood back. “There. How does that feel?”
    “Six months, truly?”
    “I’m afraid so.”
    “But I walk again?”
    “Yes,” she told him, hoping to God she was right, “you will.”
    Leaving the patient as he was while the plaster dried in the sun, she and Gyltha repaired to the horse trough to wash the stuff off their hands. Emma, who’d been watching, came up to them. “How long is this going to take?”
    Adelia began explaining that there was more to do, but Emma, exclaiming, walked away.
    “Temper, temper,” Gyltha said. “What’s up with her?”
    “I don’t know.”
    There was a
lot
more to be done. Adelia, the groom, and Mansur worked all morning weaving a cage of withies they’d devised for the leg. It had a base of wood that Mansur had whittled into a bowl that should, if Roetger accidentally put his foot to the ground, keep most of the pressure off his heel.
    Occasionally, Emma came to the window of her room to watch them and huff with impatience, but Adelia took no notice—this was an injury new to her, and she was determined to mend it.
    It was after noon by the time the comfrey plaster had dried rock-hard and the cage could be strung around it. Even then, Adelia delayed the start of the journey until she had attached the front of the cage by string to a hook in the edge of the cart’s roof so that the champion’s foot was gimballed and any jolt in traveling would merely sway it in the air.
    “He looks ridiculous,” Emma said.
    For the first time, Roetger complained. “I am like trussed chicken.”
    But Adelia was adamant. “You stay trussed,” she said. After Aylesbury, they would be turning southwest onto minor roads that were unlikely to have been kept in good repair.
    Nor were they. During the early spring rains, the wheels of farmvehicles had scored ruts as deep as ditches into surfaces that nobody had subsequently filled in, leaving them to dry as hard as cement.
    Time and again, the company had to pause while the grooms saw to a wheel in danger of coming off the cart, though Adelia preened herself on the fact that Roetger’s leg had merely been swung from side to side in its cage and taken no harm. At each overnight stop, Emma summoned the local reeve and berated him for his village’s lack of duty in repairing the section of road for which it was responsible, though whether her lecture did any good was doubtful—highway upkeep was expensive and time-consuming.
    Apart from rough traveling, it was a lovely journey. The air was filled with the call of the cuckoo and the scent of the bluebells that paved every wood as far as the eye could see into the trees.
    The risk of robbery was lessened by the amount of innocent traffic on the roads or crisscrossing them, brought out by the good weather: falconers, market people, bird nesters, families paying visits, groups of vengeful gamekeepers after foxes and pine martens. The cavalcade exchanged greetings and news with all of them. True, Master Roetger suffered as they passed through villages where rude boys mistook his chained and recumbent position for that of a felon being taken to prison and threw stones at him, but the going through increasingly lush countryside was good, and Adelia would have enjoyed it if it hadn’t been for Emma’s behavior and, surprisingly, that of her own daughter.
    A strong character, Allie, despite her lack of years. At first her mother had thought the child was following her own footsteps in being fascinated by anatomy. Which, in a sense, she was—but only in that of animals. If it didn’t have scales, four legs, fur, or fins, Allie wasn’t interested in it. All living fauna delighted her, and should the subject be dead, she wanted to know why it had delighted her, why it flew, crawled, swam, or galloped. By the age ofthree, she had wept over the death of the jackdaw trained to perch on her shoulder—and then dissected it. By four,