Medieval 01 - Untamed Read Free Page B

sadly.
    â€œYou are your mother’s daughter, always wanting to be outside stone walls. Like a falcon she was, crying to be free.”
    â€œShe is free, now.”
    â€œI pray you’re right, mistress. God rest her poor soul.”
    Meg looked away from Harry’s wise, faded blue eyes. The pity he felt for her was all too clear inhis expression. She was Glendruid, daughter of a Glendruid woman; and like her mother, she wouldn’t be free short of death.
    Just beyond the fish pond a kingfisher waited hopefully for a meal to disturb the still surface of the water. In the reeds at the edge of the pond, motionless as a statue, a heron gleamed ghostly gray. Ravens called hoarsely from the battlements at the top of the keep. As though answering, one of the gardeners berated his helper for stepping on a tender new plant.
    For a moment it was as though nothing had changed, as though Meg was still a child and her mother was singing softly of love lost while Old Gwyn embroidered runes on Meg’s undertunic, where they could be felt but not seen; as though no arrogant Norman knight had ridden up to the keep, demanding a wife, an estate, and heirs to stretch into a future no one could see.
    Meg breathed in deeply, drawing the clean air into her body, savoring its chill spring scents. Her skirts swirled in a gust of wind. The cold bite of the air on her legs warned of an uncertain spring, riven by the death throes of the hard winter past.
    The cry of a wild hawk keened over the meadow where green shoots pushed through the last year’s hay stubble. Nearby a sparrow hawk fluttered above the meadow, seeking the first meal of the day. A few days past, the priest’s falcon had hovered just like that, then stooped to the kill. But the kill had been contested by an untamed falcon thrice her size. Before the priest could intervene, the gallant little bird had been sorely wounded.
    Abruptly Meg turned and went back to the gatehouse. Her seedlings could wait. The falcon could not.
    As though expecting her, Harry opened the doorbefore she had taken three steps, allowing her to hurry back through into the bailey. When she set Black Tom down on the damp cobbles, he gave her a look of green-eyed disbelief.
    â€œYou can’t come with me just yet. I’m going to the mews first,” she explained.
    The cat blinked, then calmly began grooming himself as if he had never expected to be taken for a romp through the catnip in Meg’s herb garden.
    As soon as Meg came in sight of the wooden buildings that housed Blackthorne Keep’s array of hunting birds, the falconer came forward, relief clear on his face.
    â€œThank you, mistress,” William said, touching his forehead. “I was afraid you would be too busy with the wedding preparations to see the wee falcon.”
    â€œNever,” Meg said softly. “Life would be so much poorer without the fierce little creatures. Have you my gauntlet?”
    William handed over a leather gauntlet that he had made years ago for Meg’s mother. It fit the daughter as well. Scarred and scored with long use, the leather was silent testimony to the razor talons of the hunting birds.
    Meg went to the mews that housed the wounded bird. She had to bend slightly to enter, but once inside she could stand freely. After a moment her eyes adjusted to the semidarkness. She spotted the sparrow hawk on a perch in the darkest part of the mews.
    When Meg went over and offered her forearm as a new perch, the bird refused. Meg whistled softly. The sparrow hawk stood on first one foot and then the other. Finally, with stiff, slow movements and a dragging wing, the bird was coaxed onto her forearm.
    Meg walked to the door of the mews and heldthe little hawk in the wash of daylight. Eyes that should have been clear were cloudy. Plumage that should have been luminous with subtle shifts of color from gray-blue to buff looked chalky. The grip of the bird’s talons was uncertain on