Sing Me Home by Lisa Ann Verge Read Free Book Online Page A

your antics.”
    “Even the most skittish creatures always come around.” He had the audacity to grin at her.
    “Does everything you say have a double meaning?”
    “Not everything. Sometimes I speak the truth.”
    “Stop, just stop,” she said. “I went to church this morning, Colin. I met a cleric. Do you know what he did?”
    “He turned you away.”
    She flattened her hand on a wall, cut down at the knees by his knowledge.
    Colin shrugged. “A church is the one place our kind isn’t always greeted with open arms.”
    “I’m not a minstrel.”
    He raised a brow. “In that square, you played the part as if you were born to it.”
    “I played the part,” she argued, “because I foolishly wanted to give back to you the teasing you forced upon me. Vengeance is a sin, too. Another I won’t be able to confess until I find a pardoner willing to hear me.” She crossed her arms. “It’s sure you have no concern for the state of your soul.”
    “Ah, Maura.” His laugh was gentle. “I lost my soul a long time ago.”
    She opened her mouth but no sound came out, because she didn’t know how to respond to such a blasphemy. Her entire existence had been focused on the protection of her immortal soul—filling her days with prayers, confession, absolution, grace, especially to avoid the kind of sin that had crept into her dreams last night.
    “Here.” Colin tugged the tippet of his hood over his shoulder and reached into its length. “I followed you to give you this.”
    He pulled out a battered leather pouch, crisscrossed with patches. He reached out, uncurled her hand, and settled the pouch in it. A few coins spilled out. English coins, stamped with the visage of King Edward I. They gleamed dirty in the midday sun.
    “Your first earnings as a minstrel.” Colin raised one strong brow. “Like it or not, you’re one of us now.”

Chapter Five
    “ E very last penny!” Arnaud gripped the donkey’s bit and yanked the beast around the mud. “Gone, every last gleaming coin—flung to the breeze by our little Abbess. As if English farthings come so cheaply and so easily!”
    I’ll ignore him. I’ll ignore him, Maura told herself, in rhythm with her walk. Since they’d left the town, and she’d announced what she’d done with her earnings, the heat of Arnaud’s black gaze had bored a hole into her back. Well, she felt no shame in what she’d done with the money Colin had given her, though her stomach gurgled on nothing more than last night’s sour ale—all the breakfast the troupe could afford.
    She glanced at Colin to gauge his opinion, but that minstrel was concentrating on keeping the second donkey out of the mud.
    “Stop tugging so hard, Arnaud.” Colin gently gripped the frayed harness as he coaxed the second beast clear. “If you yank him, he’ll buck, or stop altogether.”
    “Let him buck—or stop—what does it matter?” Arnaud swung his free arm to the road stretched before them. “We’ll earn as much playing to the birds and the squirrels as we did playing to those tight-fisted Englishmen. No—” Arnaud interjected as Colin opened his mouth to speak “—you know the rules. We are to share all earnings equally. You had no authority to give all those coins to her so she could piss them away.”
    She flinched. “I didn’t piss them away.”
    “She gave it all to a pardoner, no less. Did you hear that, Colin? She gave our hard-earned pay to a pardoner!”
    “That money,” she said, “was better spent than any you ever earned.”
    Arnaud raised his face to the skies. “She thinks those coins actually went to the church.”
    “That pardoner,” she argued, “came from the hospital of Roncesvalles, in Spain—”
    “A Spanish hospital, of course!” Arnaud’s gaze searched the heavens. “Surely, a Spanish hospital would send a pardoner all the way to this godforsaken island to raise funds.”
    The comment struck hard but she ignored it. A holy man was a holy man. “That