Dream of Me/Believe in Me
pleasing her so everyone has given up trying. If you do something exactly the way she said she wanted it done so it's perfect, she'll turn around and claim she wanted it done differently.”
“How tiresome of her,” Krysta said, even as she wondered at how the high-handed woman had managed to avoid outright rebellion among the servants. No doubt it was their respect for Hawk and their gratitude for the safety he provided that kept them at work.
“Perhaps things will change now,” Edythe said with a sidelong glance.
“Perhaps they will,” Krysta said but made no promises. She was not eager to tangle with Daria despite Hawk's assurances that she could bring any problems to him. But beyond that, she could not even begin to assert herself as Hawkforte's mistress before she was wed to its master.
The apple gathering resumed a short time later. By dusk, the children were done. Krysta led them back to the fields where torches were being set up, as Hawk had ordered, but they might not be so needed now for the sky was clearing, the rising wind pushing the clouds away. An almost full moon cast a brilliant ribbon of silver over the land.
Food was brought out to the fields. The people ate quickly, making do with chunks of bread and cheese and mugs of cider. Everyone looked bedraggled and tired, but determined. Krysta left the children with their mothers and went off to find Hawk. He was working with a group of men bundling sheaves of oat and throwing the bundles into wagons for transport. For a few moments, she stood off to one side watching him. He was taller than the peasants and townspeople, and much more heavily muscled, but beyond that there was nothing to set him apart from the others, no visible sign of his rank or authority. Yet was there no mistaking that he was the leader even as he worked right alongside the others, doing as they did. He spared himself no task and nothing missed his eye. If a man needed help hefting bundles into the wagon, Hawk was there to offer a quick, encouraging word and lend his own strength. When water was passed around, and offered to Hawk first, he shook his head and let it go by until all the rest had drunk. Only then did he ease his own thirst. Even as he told the other men to rest for a few minutes, he continued to work, pausing only once to glance up at the sky.
He paused again when Krysta joined him. He tossedanother bundle of sheaves into the wagon, wiped his arm across his forehead, and nodded to her. “Are you finished in the orchards?”
“We are. I've sent the children to their mothers. They'll sleep beside the field while the grown-ups work.” On her walk from the orchards, she had seen how much had been accomplished in only a few short hours. Yet there was much more still to be done. “Are you still convinced there will be a storm?”
Hawk shrugged broad, bare shoulders begrimed by hours of hard labor. Bits of oat stuck to his hair and skin. Krysta had to resist the urge to remove them one by one. “If we are fortunate, it will skip to one side of us or the other. If it comes at us directly, it will be a storm such as I have seen only once before.”
“Where was that?”
“At Winchester. I was there with the king. It was five summers ago. The day before had been very still, as this one began, then the wind picked up slowly, bringing with it the smell of lands far distant from here. By morning, when Alfred and I went out sailing, the wind was heavy but we thought little of it for the sky remained clear. We were out only a few hours when the storm came up over the horizon. A wall of clouds charged at us, thunderheads grayer than any I have ever seen. Ahead of them, the sky turned yellow. Within minutes, the water churned so fiercely that we almost capsized. As it was, we barely made it into a sheltered bay before howling winds and sea battered our boat to pieces. We had to swim the last few hundred yards and it took all our strength to do so. To our great good fortune, we were able to wait out the storm inside a cave, but when we emerged the world looked transformed. Trees were knocked down, the beach had vanished, the grass was flattened, and all the peasants' huts were destroyed with many killed. Even the timber roof of the church was ripped off.”
Krysta's eyes had widened during this telling. She had known bad storms before, snow that fell so thickly no one could stir from indoors for weeks, lashes of ice that bent full-grown trees to the ground. But
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher