Velvet Song Read online

  Wincing once at his calling her, a freewoman, a serf, she nodded and ran deeper into the forest.

  Noon took a very long time in coming, and while she waited in the dark, cold forest in a torn dress without her cloak, she became fully aware of her terror at what could have happened at the hands of the nobles. Perhaps it was her training by the priest and the monk that made her believe the nobles had no right to use her people as they wished. She had a right to peace and happiness, had a right to sit under a tree and play her music, and God gave no one the power to take such a thing away from another person.

  After only an hour her anger kept her warm. Of course, she knew her anger came partly from a happening last summer. The priest had arranged for the boys’ chorus and Alyx to sing in the earl’s—Pagnell’s father’s—private chapel. For weeks they’d worked, Alyx always trying to perfect the music, driving herself to exhaustion rehearsing. When at last they had performed, the earl, a fat man ridden with gout, had said loudly he liked his women with more meat on them and for the priest to bring her back when she could entertain him somewhere besides church. He left before the service was finished.

  When the sun was directly overhead, Alyx crept to the edge of the forest and spent a long time studying the countryside, seeing if she saw anyone who resembled a nobleman. Tentatively, she slowly made her way back to her apple tree—hers no longer, as now it would carry too many ugly memories.

  There Alyx suffered her greatest shock, for broken into shreds and splinters lay her cittern, obviously trampled and retrampled by horses’ hoofs. Quick, hot tears of anger, hate, frustration, helplessness welled up through her body, spilling down her cheeks unheeded. How could they? she raged, kneeling, picking up a piece of wood. When her lap was full of splinters she saw the uselessness of what she was doing and with all her might began to fling the pieces against the tree.

  Dry eyed, shoulders back, she started for the safety of her town, her anger capped for the moment but still very close to the surface.

  Chapter Two

  THE BIG ROOM of the manor house was hung with brilliant tapestries, the empty spaces covered with weapons of every kind. The heavy, massive furniture was scarred, gouged from ax blades and sword cuts. At the big table sat three young men, their eyes heavily circled from a short life of little sleep and much wine.

  “She bested you, Pagnell,” laughed one of the men, filling his wine cup, sloshing it on his dirty sleeve. “She beat you, then disappeared like the witch she is. You heard her sing. That wasn’t a human voice but one meant to entice you to her and when you went—” He stopped, slammed his fist into his palm and laughed loudly.

  Pagnell put his foot on the man’s chair and pushed, sending man and chair sprawling. “She’s human,” he growled, “and not worth my time.”

  “Pretty eyes,” one of the other men said. “And that voice. You think when you stuck it in her, she’d cry out in some note that’d curl the hairs on your legs?”

  The first man laughed, righting his chair. “Romantic! I’d make her sing me a song about what she’d like me to do to her.”

  “Quiet, both of you,” Pagnell growled, draining his wine. “I tell you she was human, nothing more.”

  The other men said nothing and sat silently for a moment, but when a servant girl passed through the room, Pagnell grabbed her. “In the village, there’s a girl who can sing. Who is she?”

  The servant girl tried to twist away from his painful grip. “That’s Alyx,” she whispered.

  “Stop twisting or I’ll break it,” Pagnell commanded. “Now tell me exactly where this Alyx lives inside your beastly little town.”

  An hour later, in the dark night, Pagnell and his three cohorts were outside the walled village of Moreton, tossing pronged, steel hooks to the top of the wall. After three tries, two hooks held, their attached ropes hanging down the wall to the ground. With much less expertise than if they’d been sober, the three men pulled themselves up the ropes to the top of the wall, pausing for a moment before retrieving the hooks and ropes and lowering themselves down to the ground in the narrow alleyway behind the closely packed houses.

  Pagnell raised his arm, motioning for the men to follow him as he quietly went to the front of the houses, his eyes searching the street signs hanging over the silent houses. “A witch!” he muttered angrily. “I’ll show them how mortal she is. The daughter of a lawyer, the scum of the earth.”

  At Alyx’s house he paused, slipping quickly to the side of it and a latched shutter. One strong blow, one quick sound and the shutter was open and he was inside.

  Upstairs, Alyx’s father lay quietly, his hands clutching at his breast, at the pains starting there once again. At the sound of the shutter giving, he gasped, not at first believing what he heard. There had been no robberies in town for years.

  Quickly striking flint and tinder, he lit a candle and started down the stairs. “What do you ruffians think you’re doing?” he demanded loudly as Pagnell helped his friend through the window.

  They were the last words he uttered for in a second, Pagnell was across the room, his hand on the old man’s hair, a dagger digging deeply as he slashed the man’s throat. Without even a second glance to the body as it thudded lifelessly to the floor, he went back to his friends at the window. When they were through, he started up the stairs.

  Alyx had not been able to sleep after the day’s ordeal. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Pagnell, smelled his horrible breath, felt his tongue in her mouth. She’d somehow been able to keep what had happened from her father, not wanting to worry him, but for the first time in her life something besides music occupied her thoughts.

  So upset was she that at first she did not hear the sounds below stairs, only becoming aware of her surroundings when she heard her father’s angry voice and the odd thud that followed.

  “Robbers!” she gasped, flinging back the woolen covers to stand nude in the room. Quickly, she grabbed her dress, pulling it over her head. Why would anyone want to rob them? They were too poor to be worth robbing. The Lyon belt! she thought, perhaps they’ve heard of that. Opening a small wall cupboard, she expertly lifted the false bottom and removed the only thing of value she owned, a gold belt, and fastened it about her waist.

  A noise in her father’s room startled her as footsteps came toward her room. Grabbing a stool and a heavy iron candlestick, she positioned herself behind the door, waiting breathlessly.

  The door on its leather hinges opened very slowly, and when Alyx had a good clear shot at the foreign head, she brought down the candlestick with all her might.

  Crumpling at her feet was Pagnell, his eyes open for just an instant, seeing her before falling unconscious.

  The sight of him, this nobleman, in her little house, renewed her terror of the afternoon. This was no ordinary robbery, and where was her father? More footsteps, heavy ones, pounding up the stairs, brought her to her senses. After one desperate glance, she knew the window was her only means of escape. Running to it, she didn’t give a thought to how high she was when she lowered herself and jumped.

  The fall slammed her into the ground, where she rolled back against the wall, stunned, breathless for a full terrifying minute. There was no time to lie in the dirt and try to collect herself. Limping, a pain in her side and left leg, she hobbled toward the side of her house where a shutter gaped open.

  The moonlight was not a good source of light, but lying beside her father in a tilted candlestick holder was a glowing candle—all she needed to see clearly the great gaping hole in her father’s throat, his head lying in a pool of his own blood.

  Dazed, Alyx left the window and began to walk away from her house. She didn’t notice the cold air on her arms, the chill piercing through her crudely woven wool gown. No longer did she care about Pagnell or what he intended to do to her, what he took from her house, because he had already taken all he could. Her father, the one person who had loved her not because she was a musician but just because he liked her, was de