The Cup of the World by John Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page B

away.
    Suddenly the ridge was milling with horsemen: the whole party twenty-strong including the wagon, holding their mounts in check and looking to the Warden. He waved an arm. A rider came up, with the big Sun and Oak Leaf banner beginning to lift and blow in the lake-wind. Under the brave device curled the Warden's motto: WATCH FOR WHO COMES. The herald sounded the long flourish of Trant, and the party poured forward from the ridge. Horns, fragmented by distance, sounded from the castle on the far hill.
    So Phaedra came home for the last time, under the banner of her father.

III
Suitors and Chessmen
    rant wallowed in the harvest.
    In the mornings and evenings, when it was cool enough to work, the hillsides swarmed with people among their strips and vines. The grapes were still picking. The grain was in. From every barn came the steady
whack, whack
of flails upon the threshing floor. The thin months were over. The food was here to be gathered, and every day counted. Every man hurried to bring his own crop in before he did his work for the manor, and every manor knight wanted all that was due to him before he thought of what might be owed to Trant. Ambrose was everywhere, riding from one manor to the next to bully the people into giving what they owed to him and to each other. One day he flew into a rage in the middle of a hearing and had three men from the same village put into stocks over their failure to do the labour due. For five days, three women and their children, down to a six-year-old, worked on without the help of their men at the most vital time of the year.
    That was at Manor Sevel. Ambrose held court there more often than any of his other manors, because a knightin the service of Tower Bay had once tried to claim the place, and it was still important to be sure that both Bay and Sevel understood who Sevel's lord was.
    Phaedra had ridden over with Baron Lackmere for the hearings, but was not present when Father had his temper fit because her guest had wandered away with his guards to the grape presses to sniff at the stew of juice and pulp and twigs (and flies), and to carp at her about the way things were done. Half an hour listening to the Warden's justice had been enough for Lackmere. It was not manor cases that interested him, but the distant possibility of a clash with Bay. Perhaps he imagined that the Warden might give him a sword and let him ride as a knight against Trant's enemies – if only for an hour.
    He was often in her company. He was not easy to entertain. For although he was treated with respect and held in comfort, and permitted to go where he would on Trant's lands under escort, he had little to do but brood and wait for orders of release that did not come. She did what she could. She rode with him all over the castle manors, and walked with him on the walls. She tried to read to him, although he had little use for
The Lamentations of Tuchred
, or any of the half-dozen other holy meditations that made up Trant's library. She wrote, at his dictation, a letter to his lady, in which his words and greetings were so stiff that they betrayed his guilt that his family was now protected and his lands held by those he had chosen as enemy.
    She wanted him to see Trant as she saw it – a homely place, even to an exile. She wanted him to see beyond the little signs of wealth that he noted, such as the silver platefrom which he was served, the numbers of woven hangings or the smooth craftsmanship of the joined tables and benches. She wanted him to show that he understood how lucky he was to have been sent here rather to any other house in the Kingdom: how he might laugh with James the housemaster or Joliper the merryman; or call Sappo the huntsman to take him fowling along the lakeside. She was annoyed when he spoke grudgingly about the dishes the kitchen produced, or complained about some detail. He spoke little with Brother David, the gnarled, greying castle priest, and attended holy service only when