Summers at Castle Auburn (9 page)

I did come across Roderick one day, finishing up sword practice in the yard with the rest of the young guardsmen. I was not enough of a judge to determine whether he did well or poorly, but he was still standing at the end of the final bout, while some of the men were not. I had joined about a dozen other spectators sitting or leaning on the broad wood fence that circled the weapons yard. Most of the others were kitchen maids, who were making eyes at the young men, or old soldiers, who had come to watch with a critical eye. There were no others of noble blood, or even half noble blood, anywhere in the vicinity.

I was surprised when Roderick came over afterward to greet me, pulling off his helmet to reveal his matted sandy hair. I had not thought he would notice me among the others, dressed in my plain daytime gown.

“Well, you've learned the trick of hunting aliora,” he remarked, leaning his elbow on the top railing of the fence. I had perched precariously on top, and was swinging my legs rhythmically despite the very real possibility of overbalancing and falling off. “Are you next going to take up swordplay?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Ugh,” I said. “So I can learn to kill people? I don't think so.”

He gave me that lazy smile, and his whole freckled face looked amused. “Well, you wouldn't have to kill them all. Just disable them. Discourage them a little.”

“Are you any good?” I asked directly. “I can't tell.”

He shrugged. “I'm improving,” he said in a laconic voice. Which told me nothing, since Roderick did not seem the type to boast of his prowess. I would have to ask Kent. “Yesterday I got a cut in the shoulder because I was careless.” He flexed his arm
experimentally and frowned briefly in pain. “Hurts more than I thought it would.”

Now I was interested, in a professional way. “Have you bound it? Put salve on it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “It didn't bleed so much as all that. It'll heal in a day or so.”

Most of the onlookers had dispersed by now, and the guardsmen still in the yard were talking amongst themselves. No one appeared to be paying us any attention at all. “Let me see it,” I said.

Again that smile crossed his face, but without any protestations of modesty, he unlaced his leather vest and unbuttoned the cotton shirt beneath. The wound on his shoulder had started to bleed again with the afternoon's activity, and it did not look to me quite as minor as he had made it out to be. Nothing that would kill him—unless it got infected—but it was a cut that would cause him great discomfort.

“I have something I can give you for that,” I said, swinging my legs to the outer edge of the fence and hopping to the ground. “Come up to my room and I'll give you a salve.”

He did not move. “Come up to your room?” he repeated. “I don't think so.”

I stopped with one foot already on the path back to the castle. Of course, stupid girl. Even Kent, who was close friends with my sister, rarely came to the suite of rooms reserved for Greta, Elisandra, and their attendants. Bachelor men and their valets resided in rooms on the other side of the castle, while the royal apartments were in the central portion. And guardsmen of Roderick's status were almost never in any of these wings; they lived in barracks situated nearer to the stables than the ballrooms.

“Lady Greta is right,” I said with a smile, pivoting back to him. “I'll never understand the etiquette of the royal household.”

Roderick was relacing his vest. “I'll be fine as I am.”

“No, I'll get you something. Meet me in the stables in twenty minutes.”

He still seemed reluctant, and his next words explained why.
“Are you really sure you can concoct some ointment to soothe this? You're a very nice girl, I'm sure, but—”

I laughed out loud. “My grandmother is a wise woman, and I'm her apprentice,” I said. “Didn't anybody tell you that? I know a lot about herbs and medicines—and other potions, too, when it comes to that.”

“What other potions?” he asked immediately.

I smiled, already sorry I'd mentioned it. “Nothing you need right now. But a healing salve—that I've got up in my room. I know you don't think I can help you, but I can.”

He shrugged. “I'll be in the stables. Twenty minutes.”

I scurried up to my room, careful once I was near my quarters because I didn't want to encounter Greta, and ran back down to the stables as quickly as I could. Roderick was waiting for me and, to my surprise, Kent was with him.

“You didn't believe me!” I exclaimed to Roderick. “You had to go off and find Kent to ask him if I could be trusted!”

“No, I was just coming in from my afternoon ride,” Kent said. “I wanted to know why he was loitering here, looking so worried.”

Roderick was grinning. “I said, ‘Yon Halsing wench, eh, is she be studying the blacker arts?'” He croaked this out in a perfect north-county accent. We all dissolved into laughter. “ ‘Be she about to poison me, eh lad, were I to give over me blood into her hands?' ”

“I could, too,” I informed him. “A few dayig seeds ground up into powder—”

“If you had any,” Kent said.

“I kept them all. Any good witch would.”

“Well, and we've only your uncle's word that they're poison,” Roderick said with a shrug. “I'm not so all convinced that he wasn't making a game of us.”

“And are you the one who's going to test his story?” I demanded. “Not today, anyway. Now, unbutton your shirt again.”

While Roderick was so engaged, I glanced over at Kent. “I really won't kill him,” I said somewhat tartly. “You don't have to stand guard.”

The young lord looked sheepish. “No, I thought perhaps—I
myself stand in need of a little doctoring. I thought you might be willing to give me some ointment as well.”

I opened my eyes wide. “You? You got hurt? Doing what?”

“Much the same thing Roderick was doing,” he admitted.

Roderick was now stripped to the waist. His long, lean torso sported a few old scars, trophies of similar encounters in the past, and he smelled faintly of leather and sweat. I was suddenly aware of him as a seminude man standing not two feet away from me, but he seemed completely unself-conscious. I opened the satchel I had carried down with me and busied myself poking among the bottles and vials.

“You were practicing swordplay?” I said, my voice a little gruff.

“With Roderick here, no less,” Kent said. “I thought my lofty status would protect me from actual blows, but I miscalculated the brutality of the career swordsman.”

“You told me not to spare you,” Roderick said. “Had I known you wanted to be treated as a baby after all—”

“Spell ‘Auburn'!” Kent challenged him, cuffing Roderick on his uninjured arm. “Spell out Corie's name!”

As Roderick recited the correct letters, I suddenly remembered their bargain on our trip. Roderick would teach Kent the crossbow, and the lord would teach the guardsman how to read. Apparently they had decided to expand into swordfighting as well. I was glad, somehow, to learn that they were adhering to their promises.

By this time, I had composed myself and pulled out a vial of antiseptic and a medium-size jar of dark red salve. “This will not feel entirely pleasant,” I said to Roderick, wetting a clean cloth with the antiseptic. As I touched the medicated cloth to his shoulder, I saw all the muscles of his chest tighten in response, holding their coiled protest while the cleanser worked away at the skin. The sticky smell of sweat was even stronger.

“It was poison, after all,” he said somewhat faintly. “But I had hoped it would not be quite so painful.”

I wiped the rag once more across the cut, then laid it aside. “But the salve will feel very good,” I promised. “It even has a nice smell.”

With a businesslike air, I dipped my finger in the cream and
smeared it carefully across the wound. His flesh felt slightly hot to my touch—perhaps the beginnings of infection in the cut.

“You'll need to apply this twice a day for three or four days,” I said. “I've brought you a spare jar.”

Roderick flexed his arm muscles and looked surprised. “It does feel better,” he said. “How can it work so fast?”

“Something in there that numbs the skin,” I said. “It doesn't mean you're healed yet. It's just that you don't feel it.”

I turned to Kent, who had rolled up the sleeve of his left arm. His gash was even nastier, perhaps a day old, and rimmed with a crusty red inflammation. “Well, that must hurt,” I observed.

“Enough that I was considering going to Giselda in the morning,” he confessed. Giselda was the motherly old woman who resided in the castle and called herself an apothecary. She had trained in healing in Faelyn Market, but I had spent more than one morning with her, going through her medicines, and I knew that she was a witch woman at heart. There was almost nothing on her shelves that my grandmother did not have at home.

“Well, she would probably do what I'll do, but since I'm here, let me get you started healing,” I said, treating him just as I had Roderick. First I cleaned the wound—which he took much less stoically than the guardsman, yelping and jerking away from me so that I had to grab his arm to keep him still. Then I smeared it with salve and bid him to let it go to work.

“How exactly did this happen?” I wanted to know. “Fencing?”

“It's not fencing when you're using a broadsword,” Kent said. “But I didn't move quickly enough.”

“I was thinking today. Might be time to go back to practice swords,” Roderick said.

“It is not!” Kent said indignantly. “I haven't fought with a wooden sword since I was—well, since before I was Corie's age.”

This was all very interesting. I said to Kent, “I thought you were such a brilliant swordsman. Jaxon said so.”

“He did? I doubt it,” Kent said dryly.

“He did. Right here in these stables. He said you were better than Bryan.”

“Oh. Well. I suppose I am.”

“You're not bad,” Roderick interposed. “A good man to have in a fight. It's just I've carried a sword almost since I could walk. Trained for it since childhood. I'm bound to be better than a man who's only played at it.”

“I've done more than
play
—” Kent began.

“And you've other skills,” Roderick said swiftly, smiling a little. “It takes all manner of men to run the kingdom.”

Kent looked a little ruffled at that patronizing comment, and I had to hide my smile. “You can roll your sleeve down now,” I told him in as serious a voice as I could muster. “I'll get you an extra jar of salve, too. You'll need it more than Roderick.”

Wiping the exasperation from his face, Kent adjusted his sleeve then rotated his wrist back and forth. “It does feel better!” he exclaimed. “Who made this? Your grandmother?”

“
I
made it,” I said. “Hasn't anybody been paying attention? I live with a wise woman. I'm her apprentice. I'll be a wise woman myself in another ten years.”

“She says she knows other magics,” Roderick said. “Potions, she said, but she wouldn't say what.”

“Potions, is it?” Kent said. Suddenly, who knew how it happened, I was no longer the professional healer with a calm demeanor, but the silly young girl being teased by the neighbor boys. “Can she give a man something to make him sleep?”

“Make him strong?”

“Make him fall in love?”

“All those things,” I said curtly, repacking my satchel and hating both of them. “I can cure his headache and help him remember his dreams. I know how to make the babies come—and I know how to keep the babies from coming, too.”

I stopped abruptly, because all at once talk of babies and falling in love seemed dreadfully embarrassing as I stood unchaperoned in a stable talking to two attractive men. Certainly this would not be on Greta's short list of acceptable behavior. Kent looked embarrassed, too, but Roderick was laughing.

“Well, I'll know who to go to about those pesky babies,” he
said. “What other helpful medicines do you have in that little bag?”

“Things you'd best not be asking about,” I said darkly, and baldly turned the subject. “You should both make whatever effort you can to keep your wounds rested in the next few days.”

“That I will,” Roderick said, grinning. “I'll just tell Kritlin, ‘No sword practice for me, old man, I've a little gash on my shoulder.' He'll pat my head and set me on the sidelines for sure.”

Kent grimaced. “Not much chance here, either. There's the ball tonight, and my father expects me to do my part dancing.” He looked over at me with a smile. “You're only fourteen this year, aren't you, Corie? Still too young for the balls, I expect. Elisandra didn't start going until she was fifteen.”

Too young for the ball and too much a hoyden for the dinners,
I thought but did not say. “Well, do what you can, both of you, to avoid more injury,” I said. “I'll check on you two later.” And before there could be any more talk of balls, behavior, or babies, I slipped out of the stables and headed back up to my room.