Chapter 49: Leaving Codswallow

“When might we expect you to return, my lord sheriff?” Aedwig dithered at Stefan’s elbow while Wilham fastened the hooks on the sheriff’s hauberk.

“When I do!” Stefan gave the steward a look that would have made fully armed warriors back away and make hasty excuses to leave the room.

Aedwig continued to dither.

“I only ask, my lord sheriff, so that I can be sure the manor is in readiness for your arrival.”

“It is Sir Stefan’s expectation that his manor will be ready for his arrival at all times!” Matthew snapped as he strode into the room with Stefan’s travel cloak in one hand and his shield in the other, adding, “Tell the cook that Sir Stefan wants breakfast provisions added to the meal sacks and that his slave will be coming to get them as soon as the lord sheriff has finished dressing!”

“Of course, good sir, of course! I will do so at once and with no delay and will see that she has everything in readiness as you command!” Aedwig gave his always flowery bow and backed out of Stefan’s bedroom, not quite closing the door behind him.

Stefan and Matthew exchanged a glance.

“Well, any luck tracking down the bastards?” Stefan spoke loudly enough to be sure his words carried.

Matthew answered in an even louder voice, “None, my lord! The innkeeper refuses to say anything! Like you, I do not trust him or his servants or the wench he calls his niece! They are all in league with the bandits, I am sure of it, so I have left the inn guarded. Their every move will be watched! Sooner or later, the brigands will try to contact them, and then we will drop the net over them all!”

“And you sent for reinforcements as I ordered?”

“I did, my lord, they will be here any day!”

“Good. I have it on the shire master’s authority that the outlaws have their hideout in the upper hills to the east, and we will need more men to hunt them down when the time comes.”

“Are you sure that the shire master can be trusted, my lord?”

“I am. It’s the innkeeper who’s in league with the bandits, and he’s the one I want watched!”

“But otherwise the inn is to be left to run as usual?”

“Yes, just as usual. I don’t want him to suspect that we know it’s him who’s been passing information on to the bandits!”

Matthew, who could be remarkably light on his feet for a man of his size, tiptoed across the room and laid his ear against the door while Stefan continued speaking to the space where his lieutenant had been. “There is nothing more to say, then, so give me my cloak and—”

Matthew straightened up and nodded, indicating that Aedwig had run off, and Stefan didn’t bother to finish his sentence.

The two waited until the man they both assumed to be a spy for the shire master was well out of earshot before Stefan looked at Matthew for his actual report.

“The men and horses are ready, Stefie. I’ve made sure the stablemen overheard me telling Udolf that we’d be back in a week or less.”

The first streaks of dawn were just beginning to show above the valley’s western ridge as Stefan, with his troop in close formation behind him, rode through the sleeping village and onto the main road. By the time they crossed the second of the bridges over the valley’s meandering river, the shafts of the rising sun were turning the sky a radiant mix of pink and orange, and what had seemed to be scattered lumps of stone in the fields on either side of the road began to move as sheep got to their feet, the rams and wethers starting to graze, the ewes nudging their newborn lambs to nurse.

With enough light to see the road ahead, Chessa was eager to break into a run, but Stefan held her back. He was oddly reluctant to leave the shire, especially in view of how bitterly he had resented being sent there in the first place. Suddenly aware that he might, in spite of himself, have started to feel at home there, he gave Chessa a free rein and led his troop the rest of the way out of the valley at a gallop, scattering the occasional clusters of sheep that wandered onto the road ahead of them.

The sprint cleared Stefan’s mind, and by the time they reached the first of the ridges that separated Codswallow from Derthwald, his attention was fully on the task ahead of him.

While he’d never before been charged with finding a missing princess, it seemed no more daunting than other challenges he’d had to face, and this time, at least, he wasn’t heading off to unfamiliar territory to take on who-knew-how-many enemy legions. Besides having spent the first twelve years of his life in Derthwald and knowing the lay of its lands from his boyhood explorations, Stefan had been inside the fortress from which he assumed the princess had been abducted. Picturing Gothroc’s massive stone walls and heavily guarded gates took him back to the first time he rode alongside his father up the steep road to the stronghold perched on the crest of the granite outcrop above their village.

Trusting his mare to pick her way along the rocky mountain road, Stefan let her reins go slack as he recalled his father going over the ledgers at the kitchen table on the night before that annual accounting—and remembered sitting in a nearby chair with a dishrag tied around his neck while his mother cut his hair.

He’d been six years old. He knew that for certain, because he’d been protesting that he’d already had his hair cut for his birthday, and his mother had said, “So now you are six and old enough to sit still,” even though he’d been sitting as still as anyone could who was getting hair in his eyes and down the back of his neck.

The next morning, after Stefan and his father did their chores, Ealswan had insisted that they take turns getting into the copper tub filled with hot soapy water. Harold had grumbled that she would douse them both with perfume and have them smelling like violets if he allowed it.

When she answered, “I just want His Lordship to see my handsome husband and son looking their best,” Harold snorted, “Well, handsome son, maybe,” but in a pleased sort of way, and he’d agreed that Stefan should stay inside and keep clean instead of going along to hitch the horses to the wagon that was loaded with the apportionment of their family’s personal stores.

Stefan’s objections to being treated like a baby were assuaged by his mother giving him an extra slice of warm bread while he was waiting, and while he’d felt self-conscious when he walked out the door, once he’d gotten up on the wagon seat next to his father, he’d been excited to be at the head of the caravan of the field workers’ wagons—loaded with sacks of wheat and bales of carded wool and casks of salted meat—as they passed through the town and were joined by other wagons on their way up the road to the lord’s manor and through its main gates into the stronghold’s central courtyard.

Even at six, Stefan had sensed his father’s pride that while the rest of the villagers and townsmen delivered their goods to the manor’s storage barn and made their accounting to the manor’s reckoner, Harold went into the main manor house and gave his report in person directly to “the lord himself.”

Now, two decades later, Stefan recalled being awed by the arches of the manor’s hallways high overhead as he’d walked at his father’s side to reach the doors that his father whispered to him were the doors to the lord’s chamber.

This was before Stefan had fully made the differentiation between his father’s lord and the Lord talked about in church—and when the chamber’s guards opened the doors to let them in, what he saw was no less breathtaking to him than what he imagined the heavenly halls would be.

The room was big enough to hold Stefan’s entire house. It was lit with blazing torches. Its walls were hung with tapestries of hunting scenes with riders on galloping horses pursuing herds of leaping deer. There was an immense hearth with massive oak logs burning in it, and in front of the hearth there was a table set with the biggest platter of sweetmeats Stefan had ever seen, and standing in front of the table was Lord Theobold.

Even after Stefan came to understand the difference between the title of “lord” and God in heaven, the image of the actual deity he carried in his mind would always be much the same as Theobold had appeared that day—tall and thin, stern-faced, with close-cropped white hair, wearing an ermine cloak.

Knowing how long it had taken his father to go through his lists the night before, Stefan had been sure that he was going to have to stand there for hours, so the relief he felt at Theobold’s reply to Harold’s offer to explain each item on the ledgers as he handed them over—“There is no need; I know I can trust you”—equaled that which Isaac must have felt when God decided Abraham didn’t have to sacrifice him after all.

Appearing to notice Stefan for the first time, Theobold asked, “And who is this little man?”

Harold put his hand on Stefan’s shoulder and pressed him forward. “My son, Stefan, my lord; I have brought him here to present him to you.”

As an adult, Stefan knew this was a figure of speech, but at six he had thought that Harold meant it literally and was actually giving him to the lord, so when Theobold nodded solemnly and asked, “Will you do your duty, serving me as faithfully as your father has done?” he’d been able to do no more than whisper, “Yes, my lord.”

Smiling, Theobold had patted Stefan on the head and given him a sweetmeat from the platter on the table before continuing his conversation with Harold. Whether that conversation had been about Theobold’s recent victories or matters to do with the next year’s planting, Stefan could not recall; he remembered only his sense of relief when his father bowed his farewell, nudged him to bow as well, took his hand, and—rather than leaving him behind, as he’d feared—led him back out of the room.

Stefan knew he had seen Theobold’s nephew—then the little lord Gilberth—at some time during that visit, and remembered him vaguely as a boyish version of his uncle. While he wasn’t able to dredge up any other recollections of the current king, the mission to rescue the princess Aleswina—who, in addition to being Gilberth’s betrothed bride, was Theobold’s daughter—now took on a personal dimension, and he urged Chessa on, caught up in the feeling that by finding her, he was fulfilling the boyhood oath he’d made to Lord Theobold.