Page 157 of Feathers in the Wind
Deliverance woke to someone shaking her shoulder. She buried her face deeper into the bolster. “Go away,” she mumbled.
A finger lightly traced a line down the back of her neck. Lips brushed the nape of her neck, sending shivers down her spine.
“Wake up,” Luke's voice whispered in her ear. “I think you might want to see this.”
Deliverance rolled over and blinked Luke's smiling face into focus. A soft golden glow of evening light wove its way into the room around the roughly nailed boards across the windows. She had been asleep for hours.
“See what?”
He gave a low-throated growl. “You look lovely when you are only half-awake.”
“So do you,” she murmured, remembering the words spoken aloud while he was under the influence of Lovedie's sleeping draught.
He leaned over her, pinning her to the bed. His lips curled and his eyes gleamed with mischief.
“Why did you wake me?”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “Get dressed. I want to show you something.”
She pulled herself up on one elbow, running the other hand through her hair. She must look a fright. After the drama of the morning, she had barely made it to her bed, falling asleep in her clothes. Someone, probably Penitence, had taken off her boots and loosened her bodice.
“What time is it?”
“About five in the afternoon,” he said. “I've been asleep for hours.”
“You needed the rest. Now up, my lady, and come with me.”
He pulled her toward him and kissed her first on the forehead, then the nose and finally the mouth. When they stopped to draw breath, he spoke in a hoarse tone. “You are a terrible distraction.”
He waited outside the room while Meg helped her dress.
“I would love to have a wash,” she grumbled as she joined him.
“Plenty of time for that.” He took her hand, pulling her toward the stairs. “Hurry.”
For a moment she had to stop and think what was different. Light from the lowering sun flooded through the open gates into the courtyard and the garrison and household were streaming out across the bridge.
She squeezed the hand that held hers and he answered her unspoken question. “They've gone, but they left us a present.”
“Not a wooden horse, I hope,” Deliverance said.
They followed the crowd across the churned fields that separated the the castle and the village. As they reached the abandoned fortifications, Deliverance stopped in her tracks and gasped.
“They left the Thunderer!”
“Evidently decided it was too cumbersome to move in a hurry. Sir Richard will rue the loss of this beast even more than his sons,” Luke said.
As they neared the great gun. Sergeant Hale, bared to the waist, jumped up on the steps behind the gun that enabled the gun crew to light the fuse. He carried a massive mallet, and he held this aloft to the cheers of the crowd. In his other hand he raised a long, iron spike. With deliberate theatricality he placed the spike over the firing hole in the gun and crowd began to chant.
“Spike! Spike!”
He raised the mallet and brought it down with a mighty crash against the head of the spike, driving it into the hole. He repeated this only two more times before the spike went home and the Thunderer would fire no more.
A mighty cheer went up to see the great gun that had brought them so much misery over the last few weeks reduced to an impotent lump of iron.
* * *
The sisters squabbledabout who would wear the red dress to the celebration dinner planned for the Great Hall.
