Free Wonderful by Jill Barnett Page B

We have trouble! You must hide from the Red Lion, for they say his anger is fierce. Those siphoning pipes you put in the castle well have—” The boy suddenly noticed Merrick and cut off his words so quickly there was almost an echo.
    Merrick did not say a word. He just looked from one pale face to another and another, then turned and stared out the window, searching for something. Patience. Wisdom. Divine intervention.
    What he got was the sight of a head covered with fuzzy white hair; it slowly rose up over the rim of the window-sill like a giant dandelion. A pair of wizened black eyes peered right at him. ’Twas the crazed old hag who kept burning bonfires on the nearby hillsides. The sky above that hill was beginning look like that of London, where the burning coal fires ate the freshness from air and turned it gray.
    As Merrick stood there, a rare sense of defeat swept over him; it was something he was not used to feeling. He crossed the room to one of the brewing pots, took down an ale horn, and filled it.
    Without another word he left the brewery. As he walked out, he could feel the surprised looks of Clio and those lads. He had no idea what they expected. Perhaps they thought he truly would flay the skin from her.
    What he truly wanted to do was start this day all over. Or perhaps start his life all over. No. He was lying to himself. What he wanted was to see Clio smile up at him again as if he had just given her the world.
    He drove a hand impatiently through his hair as he moved across the castle yard, going somewhere, anywhere. Confusion seemed to fill his head, and he crossed the bailey without stopping or speaking.
    When he reached a newly built section of the inner wall, he halted in the shade, moving aside as a caravan of lumber wagons passed by him. Still feeling confused and powerless, he lifted the ale horn to his lips and drank deeply, then wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.
    The ale was good, which surprised him. He stared at the horn, then took another swig. It had a flavor he’d never before tasted, even after being in the East, where drinks were spiked with spices and flavors that were exotic and rich and unlike any other.
    He rested his back against the wall and drank again, until the ale horn was empty and his thirst quenched. And as he stood in the shade, the cool air grew heavy and heated, as if the sun had come to find him.
    Merrick took in deep breaths of air that was dusty from the traffic in the castle yard. He was not feeling himself. Perhaps it was a fever that had entered his blood.
    A second later, he had the strangest sensation. As if birds were inside his stomach, a whole flock of them.
    He shook his head a few times to shake off an odd and uncharacteristic sense of light-headedness that had swiftly overwhelmed him.
    Not much time had passed, and he thankfully felt somewhat more like himself, so he moved over to where a group of his men were digging a new well. He stood there, watching, then opened his mouth to say something to one of his men.
    ’Twas then that the oddest thing happened.
    Merrick de Beaucourt, the Earl of Glamorgan and the famed warrior known as the Red Lion, did something he had never done in his battle-filled life.
    He giggled.
     

Chapter 9
    Mornings at the convent had begun with the pleasant chiming of a prayer bell at Prime. Each day dawned for the villeins and townspeople with the predictable crowing of a cock. But at Camrose, the new day started with the incessant pounding of a blacksmith’s hammer, the cracking split of a stonemason’s chisel, and the recent occurrence of giggles from Earl Merrick’s men-at-arms.
    Clio sat up in her straw bed and stretched, reaching her arms high in the air and yawning. Cyclops was wedged against her hip, sound asleep and wheezing the congested sound that was his usual snore. Pitt stood perched on the iron rung of a bedside candlelamp, one yellow foot bent up like a child getting ready to hop and his speckled head