The Last Knight by Hilari Bell Page B

well the use of both handkerchief and napkin. His personal habits are cleanly, and his manners very good—even when his attention is clearly on something else. This may be something a con artist would cultivate, but still…
    Fisk seldom speaks of his past and he eludes my questions, so I’ve stopped asking. He’ll talk when he trusts me, and not before.
    Having risen early, we were more than ready for sleep once we’d eaten. Fisk laid out the bedrolls on piles of leaves, and I complimented him on the softness of the bed.
    “It’s all right.” He yawned. “As long as nothing crawls in and joins us during the night. Unless of course it’s human, female, and preferably good-looking.”
    I smiled at his jest, but replied, “I don’t know. If such a thing happened to me, I fear I’d be too startled to enjoy it.”
    “You’d get over that,” Fisk said dryly. “Trust me.”
    “Would you?” The darkness beneath the overhang lent itself to intimate questions. “Not get over being startled, I know that would pass. But would you lie with a stranger, if she offered herself?”
    “I guess it depends on the stranger,” said Fisk. “If she was clean and willing, and there wasn’t so much in my purse that I’d mind when she stole it, why not? Not,” he added, “that the situation is likely to arise. Especially in the middle of the howling wilderness.”
    The howling wilderness is seldom covered with cultivated fields and traversed by good roads. But I didn’t tell him this, for with moonlight silvering the uplifted branches, and night birds crying warnings to the small creatures that rustled through the leaves, the night did have a wild sort of beauty.
    “But what about love?” I asked instead. “Or at least, affection. Bedding a woman without friendship would be…I wouldn’t care for it! All folk seek love with their beddings. Surely you must too.”
    I thrust the painful thought of Rosamund aside, for I knew she didn’t think of me that way. But someday, if my quest succeeded. If—
    “Oh, I’d like to be loved—who wouldn’t?” Fisk’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “But I’d settle for lust. Not that I get that, either. Well, not often.”
    I laughed at his exaggerated gloom and heard him chuckle too, but something in his voice made me add, “If that’s true, then you’re settling for too little.”
    The leaves rustled as he turned his back on me. His voice was muffled when he replied, “Sometimes, Noble Sir, you have to settle for what you can get.”
     
     
    Despite the craven slowness with which we traveled, we reached Baron Mallory’s keep by midmorning.
    ’Twas of the old style: four square towers, with high walls between them. A stone bridge spanned an old moat, dry now, with grass overgrowing its banks and a cow grazing in the bottom.
    We rode across the bridge, one behind the other, as its narrowness dictated. This would have been an excellent defense in olden times, but now it must prove a fearful inconvenience whenever someone delivered a cartload of supplies. Baron Mallory could have replaced it with a wider one, but there was an air of shabbiness about the old walls that made me wonder about the baron’s finances. Though when we clattered under the portcullis (rusted into place, thank goodness) the grooms who came out to take our horses were well clothed and well ordered.
    A manservant escorted us to the baron. The windows were paned in diamonds of clear, modern glass instead of the old thick circles, and the tapestries that covered the walls could have sold for much, so perhaps Sir Bertram was tradition-minded, not impoverished.
    Whichever it was, the old man had a strong sense of the dramatic. The manservant opened great double doors, revealing a long, empty hall, its rafters hung with banners. Baron Mallory sat in a carved chair on a dais at the far end.
    Walking down the length of the floor toward him, my footfalls ringing in the silence, I felt smaller with each