Page 190 of Disillusioned
Loïg snorted, braying as he shook his head back and forth, his regal onyx mane rippling in the wind.
“I wonder…” mused Myrddin as they trotted along in the zig-zag path Lilac drove them into. But he remained quiet, not bothering to tell them what it was he wondered.
“Anyone can ride a horse. It doesn’t mean a thing if we don’t know where we’re going,” said Yanna impatiently.
Myrddin began shuffling inside his pockets. “I could whip up a tracking spell if he just slowed down.”
There was a tug at her navel again—and not an unpleasant one this time. It was subtle, like a tap on the shoulder. Instinct settling her gut. Lilac leaned toward Loïg’s twitching ears. “Bring us to Garin,” she whispered, straightening when the wind picked up.
Leaves began to skitter along, dancing forward from the treeline. Some of them were splattered in blood.
Loïg whinnied. Then, they were off.
She screamed and scrambled for the saddle, Yanna and Myrddin cursing and holding on for dear life.
This was the way, back toward Paimpont and the High Forest. She could feel it. Garin hadjustbeen there. He was alive and near.
Loïg’s quick canter turned into a gallop, and all they could do was brace themselves as he took off down the grassy knoll, away from the embers of sun and toward the trees beyond.
32
GARIN
Garin ran west as fast as his feet would carry him in the dying light. He paid no mind to staying hidden—not so much as a single tree shrouded his path. The summer evening air ghosted his palate as he panted through his strides. With each sharp breath, he tried to catch the scents of the butcher or fromagerie, any aroma pointing him toward Paimpont.
The bloodied rapier he’d snatched from one of the bodies and the baldric it hung from jostled at his back. It was nothing like the mildly irritating rattle that came with riding horseback; on foot, each step bounced the blade high enough to deliver bruising smacks against his shoulder. It was an awkward, cumbersome affair, especially with the unconscious armored man he carried on the other.
He’d fled the castle grounds after hastily shoving Agnes’s corpse head-first into one of the rain-filled troughs at the rear of the bailey. No one seemed to patrol the northern gate; it was surrounded too closely by Brocéliande. They’d find the baroness, eventually. Hopefully before she began to decompose.
It hadn’t taken much to subdue or entrance her, just a few compliments on her skin-tight bodice and the way her deep auburn curls framed her face in his crooning tone, and she was out like a light. Garin had intended to gointo it with pleasant conversation about the weather, but her being unconscious worked well, too. He’d also intended on letting Agnes live, but without the distraction of small talk, thoughts quickly arose of the most hateful way the woman spoke to Lilac.
And so, he just kept drinking. There was a certain thrill that came with doing it in public, tucked away just out of sight while basking in sunlight. He’d even tilted his head back and imagined being at the shore.
He’d then rinsed out the tankard he’d repeatedly bled her into and placed it into her hand. An unfortunate case of too much cider—and, ironically, too little water—in the blazing sun would do that to anyone.
At the front of the bailey, he’d asked one of the passing guards to bring Giles some food; they hadn’t had one of their late night sit downs in a couple weeks, but one effect of the prolonged entrancement, Garin had noticed, was that the old priest often forgot to feed himself.
This morning, though, Giles looked surprisingly well. His cheeks were plump, eyes filled with vigor in a way Garin had never seen as the priest lounged in his seat with Bisousig curled his lap. The cat had stretched and pushed herself against Garin’s outstretched hand before leaping down and scenting his calves with her little rotund body.
What an insufferably cute creature of misfortune, he’d thought, just as Lilac’s anxious scribe burst out of the keep, scroll in-hand. When Garin approached, John muttered about being on his way to the lofts, after which he lamented his critical doubt in the queen’s insistence on sending an urgent letter to the King of England by bird.
Garin had held out his hand, pointedly nodding at the parchment John was holding. John passed it to him without question.
His throat had tightened as he’d read the letter, his widening eyes and the fury behind them the only meaningful response he could muster as words failed him.How had he not known Lilac would attempt to fight the battle on her own?He’d briefly considered intercepting the note himself, but that consideration was cut short by the clomping of hooves in the distance.
Frustrated,Garin had instructed John to carry on with what Lilac had had thenerveto request, then climbed the only manned lookout at the gate, took one look at the rider trotting down the path on anunmarked Arabian horse, and then entranced the alarmed guard next to him to fire three clean arrows into the newcomer.
After unseating the rider from his mount, Garin had leaped down and snatched the nondescript horseman’s satchel. It hadn’t been the Trécessions’ usual courier; he could at least tell that much.
Garin had stopped Ivon nearly every day since Lilac had ascended the throne. Some days, there were no letters for her at all, but he’d made it a consistent point to check. On the occasions there were messages for her, few, if any, were ever of any importance. Congratulations on her ascension, a sympathy note or two wishing for Sinclair’s swift recovery, all manner of the innocuous drivel favored by the upper echelons.
With those, he’d unentranced the messenger, then sent him on his merry way.
In the week after her ceremony, Garin had fielded several offers for Lilac’s hand, and one non-marital business alliance that didnotplease him. None of them did, in hindsight.At all.They displeased him so greatly, in fact, that he’d shoved them into his pocket and burned them at his hearth over a bottle of scotch and blood when he got home. He’d told himself it was the right thing to do. And, at the time, it was.
It had only taken him a moment to skim the letter before he was off, bounding through Brocéliande in a northeasterly direction and fighting every firing nerve that told him to turn around, march up those stairs, andstay.
But he had to go. To see for himself that France was making a real play for the Breton crown. Why else would Maximilian send the letter he did? Earlier kings had toyed with the idea but never tested it; they might’ve overtaken the duchies earlier if it weren’t for the war that had spanned a century.
