Until the Knight Comes by Sue-Ellen Welfonder Read Free Book Online Page B

grief, had used its lure to bedazzle them long enough for her to free and abscond with their leader’s murderess.
    Extinguishing the life of an innocent guardsman in the sordid process!
    “A fox—bah!” Ewan fumed again, his eyes blazing.
    “Aye, a fox, I’m a-telling you,” Wee Finlay shot back, his own glare equally hot. “And a cheeky creature he was, bold as the morrow.” He paused to wag a finger. “No one else set foot in this hall while the rest of you were away to Dunach looking for the Lady Mariota—for naught, I might add!”
    “Hell’s afire!” Ewan roared at the top of his lung power, his face purpling. “You’d have us believe a fox stole in here and secreted the lute from yon iron-bound coffer? Spirited the treasure out from beneath your sniveling nose when you’d vowed to guard it with your life?”
    Finlay thrust out his jaw and shrugged. “Foxes are cunning—would any amongst you deny it?”
    “Mayhap ’twas a fine, sweet thatch of some
other
kind of reddish fur that caught Finlay’s eye?” another called out, sounding well pleased with his suggestion. “We all ken he has a soft spot for the lasses. . . .”
    “I wouldn’t exactly say
soft,
” a barrel-chested man flung into the fray, his bawdy jest quickly followed by a burst of hoots, ayes and noddings.
    Only Ewan the Witty didn’t share in their mirth.
    His ill humor still rolled off him in great, angry waves.
    “A drooling dotard would have proved a sounder safeguard for our treasure,” he owned, beginning to pace before the high table. “With Hugh the Bastard dead, we had sore need of that lute!”
    Halting, he stared round the smoky gloom, his fierce gaze raking each man present.
    “Myself, I think
she
came back to fetch the thing.” Going toe-to-toe with Finlay, he jabbed a meaty finger in the smaller man’s chest. “Like as not, she and her friend hid in the wood, knowing we’d ride straight to her father at Dunach, looking for her. Then, so soon as they saw us do just that, they crept in here, found you snoring on your pallet, and helped themselves to the lute!”
    “I ne’er snored a day in my life,” Finlay objected. “And the sun won’t rise again if I slept at all while you were off on a fool’s mission.”
    “A fool’s mission?” Ewan jerked his brows. “Aye, mayhap it was since the lady’s father insists he hasn’t seen her. And if she can’t be found, mayhap we ought just leave her be and sacrifice
you
to the Each Uisge?”
    Wee Finlay glared at him. “You’ll ne’er see your precious lute again if you do!”
    “Och, say you?” Ewan took a step closer. “How so? By all the powers of heaven, I am burning to know.”
    “Because,” Finlay began, seeming to grow in stature as he spoke, “only I can recognize the fox that stole the lute.”
    “‘Recognize the fox’?” someone scoffed from the shadows. “By his scent or by that red pelt that so bewitched you?”
    “By his eyes,” Finlay returned, undaunted. “The creature had queer eyes.
Magic eyes.
”
    A hush fell over the hall then, all bluster and chortles silenced.
    Ewan caught himself first. “Here is odd talk,” he said, glowering at the little man. “God’s mercy on you if you are lying.”
    “I ne’er spoke more true words,” Finlay insisted. “Find the fox that looked at me as if he could see to the back of my soul and you’ll have your lute.”
    “The lute, and those two scheming women,” Ewan asserted, looking and sounding becalmed at last. “I can feel it in my bones.”
    Later still, closer to the smallest hours of the night, Nessa slipped along Cuidrach’s stone-slabbed parapet, taking shelter in a tiny cap house at the far end of the deserted and silent wall walk.
    Corbelled out over the crenellated walling and lit by the cold light of the moon, the turret-like room proved the perfect retreat for one such as she, a warm-blooded woman possessed of a wise head and a stout heart . . . at times weakened by