“I’ve very well,” he said abstractedly. “And I must bear whatever discomfort there may be, if I’m to get on my way soon. It will knit well enough, I dare say.” His mind was not on his own ills, he was frowning thoughtfully over other matters. “Godric, I had no time to question, this morning, but — your Brother Cadfael said Nick’s buried, and in the abbey. Is that truth?” He was not so much doubting their word as marvelling how it had come about. “How did they ever find him?”
“That was Brother Cadfael’s own doing,” said Godith. She sat down beside him and told him. “There was one more than there should have been, and Brother Cadfael would not rest until he had found the one who was different, and since then he has not let anyone else rest. The king knows there was murder done, and has said it should be avenged. If anyone can get justice for your friend, Brother Cadfael is the man.”
“So whoever it was, there in the hut, it seems I did him little harm, only dimmed his wits for a matter of minutes. I was afraid of it. He was fit enough and cunning enough to get rid of his dead man before morning.”
“But not clever enough to deceive Brother Cadfael. Every individual soul must be accounted for. Now at least Nicholas has had all the rites of the church in his own clean name, and has a noble tomb.”
“I’m glad,” said Torold, “to know he was not left there to rot uncoloured, or put into the ground nameless among all the rest, though they were our comrades, too, and not deserving of such a death. If we had stayed, we should have suffered the same fate. If they caught me, I might suffer it yet. And yet King Stephen approves the hunt for the murderer who did his work for him! What a mad world!”
Godith thought so, too; but for all that, there was a difference, a sort of logic in it, that the king should accept the onus of the ninety-four whose deaths he had decreed, but utterly reject the guilt for the ninety-fifth, killed treacherously and without his sanction.
“He despised the manner of the killing, and he resented being made an accomplice in it. And no one is going to capture you,” she said firmly, and hoisted the plums out of the breast of her cotte, and tumbled them between them on the blanket. “Here’s a taste of something sweeter than bread. Try them!”
They sat companionably eating, and slipping the stones through a chink in the floorboards into the river below. “I still have a task laid on me,” said Torold at length, soberly, “and now I’m alone to see it done. And heaven knows, Godric, what I should have done without you and Brother Cadfael, and sad I shall be to set off and leave you behind, with small chance of seeing you again. Never shall I forget what you’ve done for me. But go I must, as soon as I’m fit and can get clear. It will be better for you when I’m gone, you’ll be safer so.”
“Who is safe? Where?” said Godith, biting into another ripe purple plum. “There is no safe place.”
“There are degrees in danger, at any rate. And I have work to do, and I’m fit to get on with it now.”
She turned and gave him a long, roused look. Never until that moment had she looked far enough ahead to confront the idea of his departure. He was something she had only newly discovered, and here he was, unless she was mistaking his meaning, threatening to take himself off, out of her hands and out of her life. Well, she had an ally in Brother Cadfael. With the authority of her master she said sternly:
“If you’re thinking you’re going to set off anywhere until you’re fully healed, then think again, and smartly, too. You’ll stay here until you’re given leave to go, and that won’t be today, or tomorrow, you can make up your mind to that!”
Torold gaped at her in startled and delighted amusement, laid his head back against the rough timber of the wall, and laughed aloud. “You sound like my mother, the time I had a bad fall at the quintain. And dearly I love you, but so I did her, and I still went my own way. I’m fit and strong and able, Godric, and I’m under order that came before your orders. I must go. In my place, you’d have been out of here before now, as fierce as you are.”
“I would not,” she said furiously, “I have more sense. What use would you be, on the run from here, without even a weapon, without a horse — you turned your horses loose, remember, to baffle the pursuit, you told us so! How far would you get? And how grateful would FitzAlan be for your folly? Not that we need go into it,” she said loftily, “seeing you’re not fit even to walk out of here as far as the river. You’d be carried back on Brother Cadfael’s shoulders, just as you came here the first time.”
“Oh, would I so, Godric, my little cousin?” Torold’s eyes were sparkling mischief. He had forgotten for the moment all his graver cares, amused and nettled by the impudence of this urchin, vehemently threatening him with humiliation and failure. “Do I look to you so feeble?”
“As a starving cat,” she said, and plunged a plum-stone between the boards with a vicious snap. “A ten-year-old could lay you on your back!”
“You think so, do you?” Torold rolled sideways and took her about the middle in his good arm. “I’ll show you, Master Godric, whether I’m fit or no!” He was laughing for pure pleasure, feeling his muscles stretch and exult again in a sudden, sweet bout of horseplay with a trusted familiar, who needed taking down a little for everyone’s good. He reached his wounded arm to pin the boy down by the shoulders. The arrogant imp had uttered only one muffled squeak as he was tipped on his back. “One hand of mine can more than deal with you, my lovely lad!” crowed Torold, withdrawing half his weight, and flattening his left palm firmly in the breast of the over-ample cotte, to demonstrate.
He recoiled, stricken and enlightened, just as Godith got breath enough to swear at him, and strike out furiously with her right hand, catching him a salutary box on the ear. They fell apart in a huge, ominous silence, and sat up among the rumpled sacks with a yard or more between them.
The silence and stillness lasted long. It was a full minute before they so much as tilted cautious heads and looked sidewise at each other. Her profile, warily emerging from anger into guilty sympathy, was delicate and pert and utterly feminine, he must have been weak and sick indeed, or he would surely have known. The soft, gruff voice was only an ambiguous charm, a natural deceit. Torold scrubbed thoughtfully at his stinging ear, and asked at last, very carefully: “Why didn’t you tell me? I never meant to offend you, but how was I to know?”
“There was no need for you to know,” snapped Godith, still ruffled, “if you’d had the sense to do as you’re bid, or the courtesy to treat your friends gently.”
“But you goaded me! Good God,” protested Torold, “it was only the rough play I’d have used on a younger brother of my own, and you asked for it.” He demanded suddenly:
“Does Brother Cadfael know?”
“Of course he does! Brother Cadfael at least can tell a hart from a hind.”
There fell a second and longer silence, full of resentment, curiosity and caution, while they continued to study each other through lowered lashes, she furtively eyeing the sleeve that covered his wound, in case a telltale smear of blood should break through, he surveying again the delicate curves of her face, the jut of lip and lowering of brows that warned him she was still offended.
Two small, wary voices uttered together, grudgingly:
“Did I hurt you?”
They began to laugh at the same instant, suddenly aware of their own absurdity. The illusion of estrangement vanished utterly; they fell into each other’s arms helpless with laughter, and nothing was left to complicate their relationship but the slightly exaggerated gentleness with which they touched each other.
“But you shouldn’t have used that arm so,” she reproached at last, as they disentangled themselves and sat back, eased and content. “You could have started it open again, it’s a bad gash.”
“Oh, no, there’s no damage. But you — I wouldn’t for the world have vexed you.” And he asked, quite simply, and certain of his right to be told: “Who are you? And how did you ever come into such a coil as this?”