Free The Night Dance by Suzanne Weyn

explain to—”
    She grabbed his tunic and yanked him down behind the boulder beside her. They watched together as her father, the goose boy, and another man Rowena did not recognize headed toward the manor house. The third man’s appearance made Rowena think he must be some sort of artisan.
    “I’d better return home,” Rowena said. “He sometimes wishes to see my sisters and me after he returns from a trip away, even if he’s only been gone for a few hours. If he suspects that I am missing, he will question me until he learns that I have been out in the forest.”
    “And then I would have no chance of ever seeing you again,” Bedivere realized.
    “Not in the flesh, like this,” she answered as she began to rise cautiously. Her foot slid on a stone and she fell backward slightly. He reached out to steady her, wrapping his left arm around her shoulder. She noticed the odd immobility of his hand as it touched her shoulder and looked at him with a questioning expression.
    “A battle wound,” he explained succinctly, averting his eyes in shame.
    She observed the raised, twisted scar that ran across his palm. Filled with tender compassion for his injury, she reached across herself and pressed her hand into his crippled hand.
    He turned back to her suddenly and swept her up with his right arm and kissed her passionately. She returned his kiss with equal fire.
    From inside the courtyard, a door slammed forcefully.
    “Rowena!” her father bellowed.
    Rowena sprang away from Bedivere. “I have to go. He cannot find me out here!”
    “Meet me again tomorrow,” he pleaded. “Right here.”
    “I will,” she promised as she ran back toward the wall.
    When she got to the wall, she pressed her back against it, trying to get some sense of where in the courtyard her father stood. She didn’t hear anyone walking. Perhaps he’d gone back inside.
    Her mind was racing. If she was lucky and fast, she could bolt across the courtyard and through the kitchen door. From there she could take the back staircase up to the sewing room and say she’d been there the entire time.
    Kneeling first, she dropped flat to the ground and rolled to her side. She stuck her bare feet through the opening. Then, pulling the folds of her gown tightly around her body, she wiggled the rest of the way through.
    As her shoulders and head came into the courtyard, she instantly became aware of her father’s boots. Stiffening with anxiety, she slowly dared to look up only to see that her father was glowering down at her, his face red with fury.
    Gripping Rowena under her arm, Sir Ethan yanked her roughly to standing. “Now I see how you girls have been escaping,” he yelled. “Are all your sisters cavorting in the forest at this moment?”
    “They don’t know about the opening,” Rowena spoke with a quavering voice. “I’m the only one who has gone out this way.”
    Sir Ethan let her drop out of his grasp. “Do not lie to me. I saw your slippers this morning. All of you have been out.”
    “No, truly,” she insisted, “it’s just me.” Intimidated as she felt, she would not tell him about their adventure underground. She couldn’t presume to make that decision for all of them.
    “I have returned from town with a locksmith who will fit every door with a sturdy bolt,” he said. “Tomorrow I will hire a mason to repair this wall. This will put an end to these adventures.”
    He began to storm toward the manor and Rowena trailed after him, finding her nerve once again. “Father, why do you keep us locked up like this? Would it hurt if we went into town occasionally? Might we have a party sometime? If we could see the world and meet others we might not feel so desperate to go out.”
    “You have books, you have instruments, beautiful clothes, fine foods,” he replied. “The world holds nothing that you lack.”
    She stayed with him as he strode in the front door and headed toward the bedchamber the sistersshared. “We are not little