Grave Goods by Ariana Franklin Page A

galloping hooves alerted it to riders coming up fast from the rear.
    Master Roetger felt for the sword that he kept always by his side, though what, pinioned as he was, he could have done with it was uncertain.
    There were three of them, all with the Plantagenet blazon on their tunics, each one leading a remount. Like their horses, theywere lathered with sweat from hard traveling. Their officer addressed Emma. “Are you Mistress Adelia, lady?”
    Adelia said, “I am.”
    “An’ is he the lord Mansur?”
    “He is.”
    The officer said, “We’ve been chasing you all the way from Cambridge, mistress. You’re to come along of us.”
    “Where? What for?”
    “To Wales, mistress. By order of Henry the King.”

 
     
     
F OUR
     
     
     
    L OOK ,” A LLIE SAID , pointing upward as they approached the castle. “Poppies. Lots of poppies. Big ones.”
    Against the setting sun, the severed heads decorating Caerleon’s crenellations bore a resemblance to wildly petaled flowers.
    “That damned savage,” Adelia said under her breath, and urged her horse forward up the incline so that they would reach the barbican more quickly and her daughter could be sheltered by its walls from the knowledge of what the “poppies” on the battlements were. “Barbarian. Pig. Just wait til I see the brute.”
    She was so tired that anger with Henry Plantagenet was the only thing keeping her in the saddle. All of them except Allie, who could sleep in the pannier attached to a horse, were exhausted—and by a journey Adelia had been loath to make.
    She’d refused to accompany the soldiers at first. “I am not going.” Twice now she had served the Plantagenet in her capacity of investigator into unexplained deaths, and each time had nearly lost her own life doing it.
    Emma, bless her, their contretemps forgotten, had joined the protest.
    “I cannot spare this lady, she is—” Emma remembered in time that the title of doctor should not be applied to her friend. “She is attendant to my physician, the lord Mansur here.”
    “He comes, too.” The officer’s hand moved to his sword hilt as he said it, and Adelia knew he’d enforce his king’s order if he had to.
    Adelia had panicked. “Not without my child. I am not leaving my child.” They’d have to drag her to Wales, she’d throw herself off her horse, she’d fight and scream at every step, she’d…
    On that matter, however, the officer had been prepared to give way. “The king said as how you wouldn’t.”
    “And I’m coming, too,” Gyltha said.
    The officer had nodded wearily. “King said that an’ all.”
    They’d barely been given time to say good-bye. Concerned, Emma said, “If you can get away, I shall be at our manor with my mother-in-law. Ask for the dowager Wolvercote.”
    Adelia waved as one of the soldiers led her horse into a trot.
    “Halfway between Wells and Glastonbury,” Emma shouted.
    Adelia would have waved again, but she was now at a gallop and had to hold on with both hands.
    The galloping proceeded, it seemed, for days. There was no planning for overnight stops such as Emma had made. When it was too dark to go on, they put up at whatever hostelry was available.
    Their first night had been spent at a miserable tavern on the way to the Severn Estuary. It was little more than a shack where everyone slept together on one raised platform covered in straw. The next morning they were infested with fleas and Adelia found that, in their haste, the pack with her clean clothes in it had been left behind with Emma. The officer—his name was Bolt, which, Gyltha pointed out, “suits the bastard”—refused to divert to thelocal market where she could have purchased some sort of raiment. “Sorry, mistress. You’ll have to grin and bear it.”
    “King’s orders, I suppose,” she said viciously. It was a phrase she was already sick of, and she knew she’d hear it a great deal more.
    “ ’S right.” It wasn’t that the man was unkind, but his