Louvaen grinned, her heart pounding joyously under her breastbone. “I wasn’t planning to. I intended to tell you that you were going to marry me, but I thought I should at least be courteous considering your delicate state.”
Ballard gaped at her for a moment before chuckling. He tucked her against his side. When the laughter stopped, he bent his head to steal another kiss from her. “Kiss me, you bloodthirsty scold. And don’t bite my lip.”
She was gentle as a lamb.
EPILOGUE
From the highest window in the keep, Ballard gazed upon the forests and fields of his expanding demesne and waited for his wife to summon him. A westerly breeze blew in the green scent of clover, along with the peppery musk of pine and ash that heralded the coming summer.
Summer was Louvaen’s favorite season. She blissfully ignored the heat, the swarms of midges and the pungent scent of rotting flax that sometimes wafted across Ketach Tor from the nearby sodden fields.
“It’s the earth’s gift to a spinner,” she once told him. “I’ll take the perfume of wet flax over the stench of roses any day.”
The air hadn’t smelled of roses in almost four years. Those in the bailey had died with the curse. None had bloomed again once he and Gavin brought Isabeau’s shrouded bones out of the family crypt and buried her on her old dower lands in a field of pasque flowers. They had stood over her newly covered grave, wished her spirit a long overdue peace and walked away. Neither he nor Gavin visited the grave, though he’d heard his softhearted daughter-in-law sometimes traveled from de Lovet lands to his and laid white roses over her resting place.
The creak of an opening door behind him marked the arrival of his sorcerer and brought him out of his musings. Ambrose’s robes whispered dusty spells as they brushed against the floorboards. He paused before he reached the window. “Dominus.”
Ballard’s pulsed raced. “Is it finished?”
“More or less.” Ambrose’s voice took on a worried note. “She’s asking for you.”
He abandoned his view of the land and faced his magician. The man wore a look of dread. “She’s still raging then?”
Ambrose shook his head. “No. Quite calm—for a viper. Be careful.”
A pointless warning. Three years of marriage and he’d learned to be wary of his wife. He gestured to the nurse in one corner of the room. “Give him to me.”
She rose at his command, carefully cradling a swaddled bundle that twitched and snuffled. He lifted the baby from her arms and gently unwound the blankets to reveal a pink-skinned creature with curled fists, a cap of fine black hair and bright infant blue eyes which would soon change to gray or darkest brown. Ballard’s hands, dark and battle-scarred, spread over the boy’s small body as he turned him enough to view his back.
For countless generations, children of Ketach blood bore a sickle-shaped mark above their buttocks. Ballard had it, as had his father and grandfather before him. Smooth but not unblemished, this child’s back revealed the truth of his paternal heritage. The rosy mark stretched between the two tiny indentations on his lower back. Most definitely his son—not that he’d reiterate it to the boy’s mother. Ballard valued his head.
“You can give him to Gavin to foster when he’s older. I don’t like these new traditions of the boys staying with their parents. Spoils them. Gavin was fostered until the curse struck. He can foster his brother and do a good job of it.”
Ballard disregarded Ambrose’s suggestion, bewitched by the infant’s fine features and the tiny hand that clenched one of his fingers and held tight. Unlike Ambrose, he didn’t miss the old fostering tradition. Gavin would make an excellent mentor, but he and Cinnia had children of their own now. He doubted Cinnia would be any more willing to send them to Ketach Tor fostering than he was to send this child away from home. Louvaen’s flat refusal was a certainty.
The baby’s eyes blinked and slowly focused, catching Ballard’s gaze and holding it for one eternal moment, stripping him down to the bare essence of his spirit. For the second time in his memory something extraordinary moved within him, awakened and stirred—that ferocious instinct to claim and protect. The instinct went far beyond the powerful compulsion to guard Louvaen from harm.
He bent and brushed his lips across the baby’s forehead. This child was his by blood and spirit; not the heir of Ketach Tor and its lands but still part of its legacy. He would thank Louvaen on his knees for giving him so gracious a gift.
He looked to Ambrose who watched him with an inscrutable gaze and then to the nurse who smiled. “This is Thomas de Sauveterre,” he proclaimed in a soft voice. “Son of Ballard; son of Dwennon; son of Udolf; brother of Gavin de Lovet; child of Ketach Tor.”
“Proclaimed and recognized.” Ambrose bowed. The nurse curtsied.
Ballard swaddled his son once more and tucked him into the crook of his arm. He was eager to leave this chamber and carry the boy to the woman who had labored to bring him into the world.
The bower where Gavin had been born and where Cinnia once slept smelled of soap and newly laundered sheets sprinkled with dried lavender and pennyroyal. During her pregnancy, Louvaen had been in the bloom of health, even in the early weeks when she woke him each morning to the serenade of retching in a basin.
As the nausea passed and her belly swelled, he’d been like a man possessed—lusting after her until Magda threatened to drown him in the fish pond if he didn’t quit interrupting Louvaen at her work and dragging her off to their bed.
He’d been grim and sick with fear when her pains struck, and he carried her to the bower. She’d panted and stiffened, digging her fingers into his clothes with each cramp. He’d kissed the top of her head. “What can I do, Louvaen?”
Her gravid belly had tightened before his eyes, and she bared her teeth in a white-lipped smile. “Bring me my spinning wheel. I’ll spin you a mail hauberk.”
He stood sentry in the corridor after Magda chased him out of the chamber with her abrupt “Woman’s work. Get out.” Ambrose had managed to lure him to the solar where Ballard proceeded to worry himself into a sweat from the litany of agonized groans echoing down the hall and memories of Isabeau’s fatal blood loss.
When the groans changed to screams, he raced for the bower. Ambrose and two retainers barely stopped him from kicking the door down. Louvaen’s screeching oaths to deal him several forms of excruciating death made him blanch. He shook off his captors and cracked the door open enough to peek inside. Something slammed into the wood, sending shards of broken pottery through the opening. He shut the door and spun to face the other men. Ambrose stood before him, arms akimbo, an “I-warned-you” expression on his face. The two retainers grinned.
One offered a bit of sage advice that lessened some of Ballard’s terror. “It’s a good sign when they’re threatening to rip your entrails out and feed them to the hounds. You worry when they’re praying or quiet.”
Now, wan and tired, Louvaen reclined in the bed, propped up by pillows and swathed in a gown big enough to swallow her whole. Dark circles ringed her eyes, and damp tendrils of hair stuck to her temples and neck. Ballard thought her the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
Her eyes, a cool slate instead of the hot ash he’d glimpsed earlier in the day, glittered with excitement. She wore a wide smile as Ballard limped to her beside, little Thomas cradled against his chest.
“Your son, Louvaen.” He eased the baby into her waiting arms.
She peeled back the swaddling and glided her fingers over his round belly and limbs. She counted his toes and laughed when he pursed his lips and blew spit bubbles. “You sire lovely children, Ballard.”
He chuckled. “We’ll see. He’ll sport an impressive nose no doubt.”
Louvaen sniffed. “A face with character, my lord. The most interesting kind.” She pressed the tip of her finger to the baby’s lips. “Magda said he’d want to eat soon. I haven’t the first idea how to go about nursing him.”
Ballard floundered. Unless his son could gum a
chicken leg or a slice of mutton, he had no idea what to do either. “Should I get Magda?”
Louvaen shook her head. “Not yet. She says we’ll know when he’s hungry and she’ll help me then. I’m guessing that means he’ll howl the roof down around our heads.” She patted the empty space beside her. Ballard sat gingerly, ready to dodge a blow. She gave him a puzzled look. “What’s wrong?”
He found it difficult to reconcile the peaceful woman beside him with the screaming, wailing, pitcher-hurling demon of a few hours ago. “Do you remember what you said earlier?”
She eyed him as if he were a touch dim-witted. “Ballard, all I remember was trying to shove a cannon ball out of my body while Magda pinned my ears back with the order to push.” Her brow furrowed at his relieved exhalation. “What did I say?”
He stroked Thomas’s crown, admiring the soft hair. “Nothing horrible. Only that you were going to castrate me, decapitate me, dismember me, drench me in boiling oil, douse me in hot pitch, and set me alight.”
Louvaen gaped at him. “I didn’t say those things.”
The door opened and Magda strode in, a stack of blankets in her arms. She set them on a nearby table. “No, you bellowed them. Everyone three provinces south of here heard you.” She approached the bed and gazed at the baby. “Much handsomer now that he doesn’t look like someone tried to squash him in a haystack.” She reached for him and grinned when Louvaen instinctively clutched him closer. “Hand him over, Louvaen. He needs a sponging. I’ll take him to the kitchen. The fire is built high; he won’t get cold. I’ll bring him right back. You can use the time to extract gifts, promises, and apologies from his father.”
Louvaen held Thomas out to her. “I think he’s beautiful.”
Magda set the baby against her shoulder and patted his back. “He’ll be even more so when I return him to you. I’ll send Clarimond up with bread and broth. You need to eat and get your strength up.” She left the bower with a frowning Louvaen staring after her.
“Why is it I do all the work, and everyone else gets to hold him?” She turned her scowl on Ballard and promptly ruined its forbidding cast with a wide yawn. He was willing to wager half his treasury she’d be asleep before Clarimond returned with the food or Magda with the baby. She blinked sleepily at him. “What did you name him?”
The week prior to her taking to childbed, they had agreed he would choose the name if she bore a boy, and she would choose it if she bore a girl.
“I don’t trust you not to call her something silly like Aurora or Buttercup or Snowdrop,” she told him. “And if you named her Briar Rose, I’d have to kill you.”
When Magda came to tell him Louvaen had birthed a son, he’d already chosen a name. He carried no jealousy for Louvaen’s first husband. She’d spoken fondly of him and with great respect. He trusted his wife’s judge of character, and by all accounts Thomas Duenda had been an exceptional man. After all, he’d chosen Louvaen for his wife. Ballard could think of no better name for her son.
“Thomas,” he said. “His name is Thomas.”
The silence grew as she stared at him for long moments, the gray of her eyes deepening to charcoal. She finally spoke. ‘You must live another four centuries, Ballard, as must I. Any less and I’ll feel cheated of loving the finest man I’ve ever known.”
Ballard dragged her into his arms and buried his face in her hair. “My beauty,” he whispered in her ear. “If we lived a thousand years I’d still feel cheated.”
Louvaen pulled back far enough to cup his jaw. One slender black eyebrow arched. ‘I will be a shrew until the day I die.”
“Just promise me you won’t curse me once you expire.”
She swatted him on the arm. “Of course not. My ghost will just nag you into eternity.”
He’d happily accept that fate. He ran a thumb over her soft lips, watching as her eyelids drooped lower and lower. “Kiss me, shrew, before you close your eyes and dream of a handsome prince.”
They exchanged several drugging kisses before Louvaen slid down in the bed and laid her head on Ballard’s shoulder. “Ballard,” she said in a groggy voice.
“Hmm?”
“Princes are dull. I’d be bored to death traipsing off to royal balls and in a foul mood because I would be cinched into a scratchy gown and wearing the latest fashionable shoes—something ungodly painful and foolish like glass slippers. I’d rather dream of a Green Man with horns or a margrave with pretty scars and a lovely body.”
Ballard grinned and kissed the top of her head. “And if you wake up to find one in your bed? Will you run screaming for help?”
She gave an indelicate snort. “Hardly. I know a good thing when I see it. I’d swive him cross-eyed.”
His shoulders shook with silent laughter. He gathered her close as he could without crushing her. “I love you, Louvaen de Sauveterre.”
“I love you too, forest king.”
~END~
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Courting Bathsheba
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Grace Draven, Entreat Me
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