“Aye…Mistress.” The armsman returned her smile. “It is that. And”-he let his eyes meet hers, then Bahzell’s-“more beautiful for some than for others, I’m thinking.”
“Why, yes, it is,” she told him with a fleeting dimple.
He bent his head respectfully and stepped back out of their way, and Leeana laughed softly as they passed on into the keep proper.
“There!” she told her towering lover. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Now that it wasn’t,” he replied, looking down at her, “and it’s a fair start we’ve made, I suppose, in a manner of speaking. Your Da’s no more than another fifteen or twenty score armsmen here in Hill Guard and Balthar. Why, I’ve no doubt we’ll have dealt with all of them by lunch!”
“I’m sorry, Leeana.” Sharlassa looked back and forth between her and Bahzell, obviously afire with curiosity. “Baroness Hanatha isn’t here. She finished breakfast early and said she was going riding.” The younger woman grimaced. “She invited me to join her, but Master Tobis is expecting me this morning.”
“I see.” Leeana smiled at her resigned tone, remembering her own lessons with the dance master. “Do you think we could catch her at the stable, or is she already out and about?”
“I think you could probably catch her,” Sharlassa replied. “She hasn’t been gone long, and she said she had something to discuss with Master Greenslope before she left.”
“Well, love,” Leanna glanced up at Bahzell, “do we want to wait for her here, or go beard her in Doram’s den?”
“There’s a cowardly part of me says as how we ought best hide right here,” Bahzell admitted, “but I’ve not seen Walsharno at all, at all this morning, and I’m thinking Gayrfressa is after having a ‘told you so’ or three for me, as well.”
“My thinking, as well,” Leeana said, and chuckled at Sharlassa’s expression. It was obvious the younger woman was simply dying to ask the dozens of questions dancing through her mind, and Leeana shook her head at her.
“Wish me joy, Sharlassa,” she said. “Wish both of us joy.”
“Oh, I do. I do! ” Sharlassa clapped her hands in obvious delight. “I wondered if-that is, I mean-what I meant to say was-”
She paused, her expression flustered, and Leeana reached out to lay a hand briefly on her shoulder.
“I know what you meant to say. And thank you. Now I think we’d better go find Mother.”
“Oh. Oh! ” Sharlassa’s eyes widened suddenly. “Does she-I mean, had you-?”
“I believe I can safely say Mother is the one person in Hill Guard this news is least likely to surprise,” Leeana reassured her, and Sharlassa heaved a deep sigh of relief.
“Oh, good,” she said, and then blushed brightly as Leeana laughed and Bahzell rumbled a chuckle.
“I’m thinking we’d best be off to the stables before this poor lass is after catching fire and burns to the ground in front of us,” he said, and Sharlassa’s blush burned even hotter for a moment, before she shook her head and looked back up at him with a laugh of her own.
“Better,” he told her then, and extended his arm once again to Leeana.
“Milady?” he invited, and she snorted as she tucked her hand back into his elbow.
“Not anymore,” she reminded him.
“Ah, but there’s ladies, and then there’s ladies,” he told her, “and war maid or no, it’s my lady you are now, Leeana Hanathafressa.”
Her eyes softened. Then she nodded to Sharlassa, and the two of them were gone.
“-and after the farrier finishes with the two-year-olds, we’ll want him to see to Gayrfressa,” Baroness Hanatha said, her cane hanging by its lanyard from her wrist as she leaned back against the dark gray mare saddled and waiting for her. Despite her damaged right leg, she rode at least three times a week, and Mist Under the Moon (less formally known as “Misty”) was her favorite mount. Now Misty waited patiently while Hanatha and Doram Greenslope spoke.
“Aye, Milady,” Greenslope agreed. “Mistress Leeana pointed that out to me already, she did.”
“I’m sure she did.” Hanatha smiled warmly at the stablemaster. “And I’m sure you’d have seen to it without my saying a word. I do try to be a proper hostess, though, Doram!”
“Aye, so you do, Milady.” Greenslope smiled back at her, then stooped slightly, making a stirrup of his hands. She balanced on her weakened leg, lifting the toe of her left riding boot to his waiting hands. Her bad leg prevented her from getting her foot high enough for a regular stirrup, but the stablemaster’s strong boost as she straightened her good leg sent her more than high enough to settle into position on Misty’s back, and Greenslope shook his head as he gazed up at her.
“Always does my heart good to see you up there, Milady,” he said simply. “That it surely does!”
“I’m glad. It feels good, too,” she told him, and touched Misty with her heel, turning towards the stable yard’s gate and the pair of armsmen already mounted and waiting to escort her on her morning’s ride. But even as the mare moved forward, she saw the armsmen stiffen in their saddles, looking at something she couldn’t see yet. She drew rein, and then felt her eyebrows rise as Bahzell Bahnakson and her daughter stepped through the gate together.
Very together, she thought. She doubted she could have defined any single aspect of their body language-of the way they moved, their subtle awareness of one another in time and space-but it was more than enough, especially to a mother’s eye, and she felt her lips twitch as Bahzell caught sight of her and his shoulders straightened ever so slightly.
The two of them crossed the stable yard to her, Leeana looking up and Bahzell looking more or less across at her, and she shook her head.
“Why do I have the feeling the two of you have something to tell me?” she demanded, frowning ferociously.
“Well, as to that-” Bahzell began, but Leeana poked him none too gently in the ribs.
“Perhaps because of a certain discussion you and I had a few days ago, Mother,” she observed sweetly, and Hanatha laughed.
“If I get down from the saddle,” she told her daughter, “then this vast lummox of yours is going to have to help me get back into it. You do understand that, don’t you? I’m not as young and…nimble as you are, my love!”
“I feel confident he’d be happy to assist you,” Leeana assured her, and took Misty’s bridle as Bahzell stepped forward to help Hanatha down from the saddle she’d so recently climbed into. It was rather like what Hanatha imagined one of the dwarves’ “elevators” must feel like. Those huge hands lifted her effortlessly down from the saddle, and despite her weakened leg, she knew she was no featherweight.
Bahzell set her smoothly on her feet, and she clasped both hands on her cane, leaning on it as she considered the two of them. She couldn’t see them, but she felt certain at least a dozen pair of eyes must have been peeking out of the stable’s shadows behind her, watching her. And she knew her waiting armsmen were soaking up every detail from behind those disciplined faces of theirs. She hadn’t contemplated “discovering” what Leeana had been up to quite this publicly, but Hanatha Whitesaddle had never been a coward, and Hanatha Bowmaster hadn’t changed in that respect.
“Knowing you, Bahzell,” she said after a moment, aware of all those watching eyes and deliberately pitching her voice just loudly enough to be certain they could hear without being obvious about it, “I feel confident you’ve come to apologize to me for abusing Tellian’s and my hospitality.”
The hradani started to say something, but she raised her left hand and waved it in a shushing motion.
“Give me leave to finish, Milord Champion,” she said sternly, and waited until he’d subsided. “Good,” she said then. “As I say, I feel sure you’ve come to apologize. And before you do, I forbid it. Leeana is a war maid, and war maids make their own decisions and live their own lives. And even if that weren’t true, I know where her heart lies, and I have no qualms whatsoever about the man to whom she’s given it.” She looked directly into his eyes. “There may be some among the Sothoii-and possibly among your own people, as well-who will have qualms over this. None of them will be named ‘Bowmaster,’ however.”