Free A Glimmering Girl by L. K. Rigel

Sarumen said. He spat out a rueful laugh and fixed on the doomed White Lady , but he seemed to stare through the ship to another world. “What are they all going to do now?”
    Ross looked for the Vengeance and spotted her on the horizon, well away. Damn Captain Raymond for a coward. He turned the boat toward the shore.
    “On second thought, I won’t accept your offer.” Sarumen took up another set of oars and pitched in. Immediately they picked up more speed than one extra pair of hands should account for. The man was strong besides. “I’ll face Henry alone. If he won’t take my word, I doubt he’d take yours.”
    “You’re a brave man, my lord.”
    “I’m a practical man, Ross. I’ll call on your service another day, when it will be of better use. But for now you’ve earned your peace. Go home to your father and your girl.”

« Chapter 8 »
Tailor and King
    Traveling with Lord Sarumen, Ross couldn’t go home. Not directly. The two arrived at Windsor in the middle of the night, whereupon Sarumen hastened away to inform the king of the disaster of the White Lady and Ross was installed in one of the earl’s permanent rooms in the castle.
    The next day as Ross was finishing his breakfast, two odd fellows came to see him, sent by Sarumen.
    “You’re to have an audience with the king.” The taller of the little men, a tailor, picked at the fabric of Ross’s tunic. He rolled it between his thumb and finger and sniffed. “My art is definitely needed here.”
    “You’re in the best of hands,” the shorter one, the assistant, said. “We dress Brienne, you know.”
    “ Shush! ” The tailor grabbed his unfortunate helper’s hat and slapped him across the face with it.
    “Ow!”
    They were a rather strange pair, the master short and wiry and the helper shorter and wirier. Both had striking green eyes. They refused to take refreshment or to remove their slouch hats and worked speedily and obsessively.
    Within a few hours, they produced an exquisite tunic of light and dark blue brocade, fawn breeches, a white linen blouse, a fine hat, pair of black boots, and an embroidered dark blue cloak.
    “Honeysuckle and hazel?” Ross admired the embroidery work.
    “Lord Sarumen tells me you’re from Tintagos,” the tailor said.
    “And so I am.” Ross fingered the cloak’s red, white, and gold silk threads. A master touch: honeysuckle and hazel were symbols of Tintagos Castle—and of its doomed lovers, Tristos and Isolde, more famous to the outside world than Galen and Diantha. “I will treasure all these things.”
    “Of course you will,” the assistant said.
    “Shall I try them on?”
    The assistant gasped, then gave his master a wary look and stepped out of range.
    “If you feel you must.” Like a child, the tailor stuck out his lower lip. “In a thou… in all my years, no one has questioned my fit!”
    Ross suppressed a chuckle and shed his clothes, purchased only days ago in Normandum. Even without the dousing of seawater, they would have been shabby and coarse beside those made by the tailor who dressed Brienne—whoever she was.
    “Well.” He stared at a stranger in the full glass produced, from somewhere, by Short and Shorter. “I’m confounded.”
    A grown man looked back at Ross, his face roughened by years of sun and wind and dry heat. His hair had lost its bright orange tones and darkened to a tolerable chestnut color. His eyes were still dark brown. Perhaps darker. They’d lost their eager look, their optimism.
    “When did you become so sad?” He said to his image, tracing his scar with his thumb. The scar was taken now for a battle wound, a mark of glory, but he’d given it to himself when he was ten years old.
    He’d gone fishing with his father on a rare day together, just the two of them, away from the castle. They’d ridden northeast, beyond the Ring and the mist, through the Small Wood of ash and yew, until they came to what the baron called the sacred lake, fed by a