Medieval 03 - Enchanted

aside the comb. Ariane
hadn’t so much as glanced at her reflection in the brass
mirror.
    “If I had your face and form,” Blanche
said, “I’d not hide away up in my room like a nun in
her cloister.”
    “Then would that we could trade forms,”
Ariane muttered, “as Lord Erik and his wolfhound are reputed
to do upon a full moon.”
    Blanche shuddered and crossed herself
hurriedly.
    “Don’t be such a goose,” Ariane
said. “Lord Erik has been very kind to us.”
    “They say Satan is charming, too.”
    “Satan doesn’t wear the cross of a true
believer.”
    “Lord Erik does?”
    “Yes.”
    Blanche’s expression showed her
disbelief.
    “Ask the chaplain of Stone Ring Keep if you
don’t believe me,” Ariane said.
    Her voice was as curt as the staccato notes she
plucked from the harp.
    “Will you breakfast in your bedchamber
again?” Blanche asked carefully.
    Ariane was on the point of agreeing when
restlessness overcame her. She realized that she was tired of her
self-imposed exile from the keep’s life. Abruptly she stood
up, harp in hand.
    “Nay,” Ariane said. “I will
breakfast in the great hall.”
    Blanche’s pale eyes widened, but she said
only, “As you wish.”
    Ariane started for the door, then stopped. She set
aside her harp and began impatiently unlacing the dress she had
chosen to wear this morning. The cloth’s mauve folds and pink
trimming at cuff and hem no longer pleased her.
    “Bring me the dress I was married in,”

Ariane said.
    “That one? Why?”
    “It pleases me more than my other
clothes.”
    With a sideways glance at her unpredictable lady,
Blanche went to the wardrobe that held the few dresses Ariane had
brought with her from Blackthorne Keep.
    “A vexed odd fabric,” Blanche
muttered.
    She held the strange cloth no more closely than she
had to in order to bring the dress to her mistress.
    “Odd? How so?” Ariane asked.
    “The weaving looks soft as a cloud and feels
rough as thistle leaves. I don’t see how you can bear to have
it against your skin, even to please the Learned.”
    Startled, Ariane gave her handmaiden a long
look.
    “Rough?” Ariane said in disbelief.
“Why, the dress is softer than the finest
goosedown.”
    “Vexed odd goosedown,” Blanche muttered
beneath her breath.
    Gingerly she held out the violet cloth with its
lush silver threads woven through in disconcerting patterns, like
leashed lightning playing through an amethyst storm. With scant
patience, she waited for Ariane to take the dress.
    For once, Blanche didn’t insist on helping
her mistress with the laces. Nor was any help needed. The dress all
but laced itself, needing little help from Ariane’s quick
fingers.
    That was one of the things that appealed to Ariane
about the Learned gift; she didn’t have to endure unwanted
hands on her body in order to get dressed. The fabric also turned
aside stains with the ease of a duck shedding water.
    “I wonder how the weaving was
accomplished,” Ariane said, running the backs of her fingers
over the cloth. “The threads are so fine I can barely
distinguish them.”
    “’Tis said the most expensive silk is
like that.”
    “Nay. My father bought many bolts of silk
from knights who had fought the Saracen. None of the cloth was this
soft. None was as cleverly woven.”
    Yet even as Ariane stroked the fabric, she was
careful not to look into its depths where light and shadow
intertwined. The memory of Simon’s kiss was unsettling
enough. She didn’t need the vision of a woman arched in
passion beneath a warrior’s caresses to further disturb her
peace of mind.
    Harp in hand, silver-trimmed dress seething gently
around her ankles, Ariane set off for the great hall. The keep was
alive with the sounds of servants. As she made her way toward the
hall, Ariane heard them calling back and forth, talking of the fine
day after the wild storm and of the canny swine that had once again
escaped Ethelrod’s pen.
    The fire in the great hall’s hearth leaped
high and golden. Simon and Dominic were lounging nearby. The cat
known as His Laziness was draped around Simon’s neck like a
leftover storm cloud. Leather hawking gauntlets lay on the table.
From the swooping motions of the men’s hands, it appeared
that they were discussing the merits of hunting waterfowl with
falcons of various sizes.
    Other than a polite nod when Ariane entered the
room, Simon made no move to join her.
    Ariane was both relieved and…vexed. Only then
did she