Knights by Linda Lael Miller Page B

Elaina, though of course he knew that, in her madness, she could not lend himcomfort as of old. Stories would not help him now, nor songs and harps.
    He encountered Edward, who had no doubt been lying in wait, at the bottom of the courtyard stairs. The boy was peeling a pear with a thin-bladed knife, and Dane wondered, forcing back a smile, if the stripling fancied himself a fearsome figure.
    “Hello, Edward,” Dane said. “I go to pay respects to the lady Elaina. Will you join me?”
    Edward looked surprised, though whether it was the invitation that had caught him off guard or Dane’s patent refusal to explain his encounter with Gloriana in the solar, Dane could not guess. Nor, in point of fact, did he care.
    “Elaina?” Edward echoed, as though he had yet to hear the name. “But she’s mad.”
    Dane was already striding in the direction of the second bailey and the stables therein when he replied. “Perhaps,” he allowed. “Or perhaps our sister-bymarriage is merely wiser than all the rest of us.”
    “But she sees things that aren’t there,” Edward scrambled to point out, taking two strides for every one of Dane’s, “and they say she hears voices.”
    Dane shrugged and kept walking. “Mayhap it is we who are blind, and deaf,” he said. He spoke thoughtfully this time, wondering if those terms did not apply to him in some ways, at least where Gloriana was concerned. “In any event,” Dane went on, shaking off a sense of mild dismay, “I have no fear of the gentle Elaina.”
    Within the stables, Dane found Peleus and saddled the great stallion himself, as he generally did. The beast was headstrong and had trampled more than one hapless groom in the brief time Dane had owned him. Edward, who had apparently elected to make theshort ride to the abbey along with him, led a respectable gelding out into the sunlit yard. Dane recognized the worn saddle and smiled slightly.
    “I would speak of Gloriana,” Edward said, as they rode slowly through the outer bailey toward the gates, which stood open despite Gareth’s alleged problems with Merrymont.
    “And I would not,” Dane answered, as the hooves of their horses clattered over the ancient timbers of the drawbridge. “Soon you shall be made a knight, Edward. Let us talk of that instead.”
    The road that curved beyond the empty moat was lined with oak trees, and their leaves made pleasant, moving patterns of light and shadow. Despite his dilemma, a quiet joy burned within Dane’s bosom, the knowledge that he was home.
    “I will be a mercenary,” Edward said. “Like you. Perhaps I will go and fight the Turk.”
    Horrific images rose before Dane’s eyes, like specters, things he had seen done by and to the muchfabled Turk, but he forced them back behind the mental walls he had erected to contain them. He’d had much practice, since he’d gone soldiering, at putting such memories aside. “It is your life,” he said simply, “to do with as you will.” He saw Gloriana’s face in his mind, wearing an ironic expression that said the same was true of her.
    “Would you do it again?” Edward asked. “Leave Kenbrook Hall, I mean, and England to fight for gold?”
    Leather creaked as Dane turned in the saddle to assess his young brother anew. “When I have worked out the answer to that question for myself,” he said, “I will share it with you. War is not a sport, Edward, like the scraps you have with other boys who fancythemselves knights, nor is it a game, like chess. No, it is a grim and ugly business, the making of war, and I am weary of it.”
    “You are old,” Edward said, as though that fact dispensed with all else.
    Dane laughed, then recalled that he had thought the same thing about Gloriana, that she would be a crone, with withered skin and bad teeth, if she had teeth at all. What a naive fool he’d been, for all his traveling and fighting, no wiser, in some ways, than Edward. “Yes,” he replied, knowing no argument would serve, in