The Winter King by Alys Clare Read Free Book Online Page A

Jehan, for it was the place where they had met.
    Stop thinking about him
, she told herself firmly. She was busy digging, turning the soil, pulling out a summer’s worth of weeds (nobody had tended the hut’s herb patch for months) and preparing the ground for the spring.
I must fetch a few sacks of chalk
, she thought. She did not know why, but the soil of the forest, consisting as it did almost entirely of leaf mould, did not nourish good growth in her herbs unless she dug in a good quantity of chalk. It had been one of the forest people who told her that, and, on the morning that he offered the advice, Meggie had experienced a sudden, vivid memory from early childhood: her own small, pudgy hands playing with a lump of chalk while Joanna dug. Exactly where Meggie was digging now.
    Her back and shoulders were beginning to ache, and the faint hope that she’d had of subduing her body’s longing for Jehan by making it work like a slave seemed not to be working. She paused in her digging, wiping a hand across her sweaty brow. Those summer weeks in Brittany, deep within the secret forest of Brocéliande, just the two of them living out there alone, had been magical, and getting to know each other’s bodies, naked under the trees, had been like—
    ‘Meggie! Are you there?’
    Hastily she dragged her thoughts away from making love on the soft green grass, pushed back her hair, straightened her robe and, with a smile of welcome, turned to greet her father.
    He jumped down from his horse and came hurrying across the fresh-turned earth to put his arms round her and wrap her in a rib-creaking hug. Laughing, she hugged him back.
    ‘It’s lovely to be greeted so warmly, Father,’ she said, still grinning, as he released her, ‘but we saw each other only four days ago. Anybody would think it had been months!’
    ‘You were off carousing in Brittany for months,’ he pointed out reasonably.
    ‘Yes, I know, and
you
know I wasn’t carousing,’ she replied. ‘Jehan has agreed to come to England for my sake, because I don’t really want to go and live in his country, and I felt the least I could do was to accompany him while he went about severing his ties over there.’
    ‘Aye, my love, you explained your reasons to me before you went.’
    She hesitated. There was something she wanted to tell him, but she feared it would open old wounds. She stared up into his eyes.
    And, as he quite often did, he read what was at the forefront of her mind. Very softly, he said, ‘You went to the Brocéliande. I think you must have done,’ he added in a rush, ‘because I know that’s where Jehan comes from.’
    ‘I did,’ she agreed.
    ‘You know you’d been there before?’ He had turned away and she could not see his face. ‘With … with your mother and me?’
    ‘Yes, I know.’ She paused, thinking how to reply so as to give him a moment of remembered happiness, rather than the sudden sharp pain of lost love. ‘I’m not sure I really recognized any of the places Jehan and I went to,’ she said slowly, ‘but I had the strongest sense that it wasn’t the first time I walked under those huge, ancient trees, or lay snug on the leaves of centuries, inside the bend of a stream with the sound of the rushing water to lull me to sleep.’ She thought she heard him give a sort of gasp. ‘I felt there was something there that recognized me and welcomed me back,’ she whispered. ‘It was love, I believe; yours and my mother’s.’
    She gave him a few moments. When he turned to face her again, his eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘It was a good time,’ he said gruffly, ‘although not without considerable peril.’ Then, beginning to smile: ‘Your mother fought like a cornered bear.’
    One day
, she vowed to herself,
one day when it doesn’t hurt him so much, I’ll ask him to tell me about it.
    It was time for a change of subject. Slipping her arm through his, she walked him round the small clearing beside the hut, showing