Free Chance by Nancy Springer

and wait there. When all is over, you will be ruler here, if you wish. You will wed me or not, as you wish. I hope you will not hate me.” His voice faltered for an instant, then grew firm and hard, the lines of his mouth very straight. “As for the lord your brother, I have a lifelong score to settle with him. The whipping boy has spurned the rod.”
    â€œYou—he—I do not understand,” Halimeda stammered. “After all, you hate him?”
    Chance shook his head. “I hated him for a while,” he said, “when he had you so in despair, when I remembered my own despair. But it is you who should hate him now, my lady.”
    Her eyes widened hugely, shadowed in the firelight, as she stared at him. Chance’s voice sharpened.
    â€œLady, your brother is no fitting lord. He craves to be killed. Do you think I should let the neighboring lord oblige him, then hunt you like a deer through Wirral? Or some lout hack him down, carry his head on a spear and take you to wife? You are the Lady of the Mark, Halimeda! If Roddarc is too cowardly to care for his own honor, he should yet care for what is rightfully yours.”
    Misfortune had made Halimeda tame, but his tone moved her. Listening to him, she felt her chin rise, her shoulders straighten.
    Chance said, “For the sake of my own hatred it would have been sufficient to look him in the face and kill him. But for your sake, my lady … these many months I have planned and labored and brought folk together, since before the little one was born. The outlaws of Wirral, I knew the ways to their lairs, though it was a subtle matter to speak to them without being killed. But after we had struck bargain all was easier, for they have no desire to skulk in the woods, and there are those in the village who want their comrades and brothers back. I made promises, and received the one I wanted in return: that you should not be harmed.”
    â€œI would rather you fought my brother for your own sake,” Halimeda said.
    Chance’s straight mouth quirked into a smile; there was yet some pride left in her! “Indeed, it is also for my own sake,” he said. “When I have made an end of him, I will deem myself a man again.”
    â€œHave you ever been less?”
    His face grew still and haunted. “Can you doubt it? I have always been lessened by Roddarc, and still am. Halimeda—have you not felt it, too? How he speaks you fair, and yet old Riol peeps around the corners of his deeds?”
    â€œI have come to an enemy encampment in the night,” she said, her voice hard, “offering my body to save my life. Yes, I feel it, how once more my brother has had no thought for me. This indifference is what he calls forgiveness.”
    â€œThere is food in the lodge,” Chance told her, for though Roddarc had taken no thought for her, Chance had. “Enough for you and the child for some days. Go there, bar the door and wait.”
    There were not enough men within the fortress, Chance deemed, to hold the shell, the circular outer wall of the stronghold. Though all the next day they did so, for Chance preferred to spare his followers and take Wirralmark by degrees. Not for him, the piling of bodies in the ditch outside the wall. He and his outlaw archers picked off defenders one by one until nightfall stopped them. During the night four more of Roddarc’s followers deserted to join the ranks of the challengers, and at daybreak Chance found the shell deserted. Roddarc’s force had fallen back to the keep, the square tower where the lord made his home, and they had knocked away the wooden steps that gave entry. The only door, heavily barred, stood well above the level of a man’s head.
    Chance and his rebels spent that day battering at the thick stone of the corner buttresses, hoping to knock a hole, stretching ox-hides over the laborers to fend off the many deadly things hurled from the parapets above.