Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6)(129)

And that was the moment—with the pound of his blood in his temples and the rush of terror he could not suppress roiling in his gut—the moment he knew the impossible had happened. He loved Foxbrush. He loved his cousin, and he would die for him. Foolish Foxbrush. Weak Foxbrush. Chosen heir of the Eldest, baffled fool.

But none of that mattered, not now. Lionheart would die for him, and it would be a good death.

So Childe Lionheart stood straighter, throwing his head back and unbowing his shoulders. The guards restraining him shifted their grips and watched him uneasily, but he took no notice of them. He looked at Felix, and his eye was bright and his voice did not tremble when he said, “All will be well. Wait. Just wait . . .”

At that moment, the voice of the baroness was heard ringing across the courtyard. “I do not see why you should handle me so roughly! I can walk quite well on my own— Darling! ”

The baroness wafted across the courtyard in a flutter of butterfly frills. She flew to her husband, her face full of smiles, exclaiming, “Darling, how glad I am to see you well and whole! Have you quite changed your mind, then?”

Her guards caught her; otherwise she might have thrown her arms around the baron’s neck. He looked as though he had swallowed snake spit, his eyes bugging out from his face. But he spoke as quietly as ever, more quietly perhaps.

“How dare you speak to me thusly, woman?”

“But, darling,” said the baroness, as yet unaware of her peril, looking perplexed at the shackles on her wrists and the hands clamped like more shackles on her arms, “what do you mean?”

“You betrayed me,” said he. The gray of dawn streaking the sky fell upon the baron’s face and made him look so very old. Beneath the shielding cloak, he was a withered, wrinkled, gray man. And his voice was so low that only the baroness and those two who held her heard what he said (and those two turned their faces away and hoped to forget, as they valued their lives!).

“You betrayed me. The one person in all this world whom I have trusted completely.”


At those words, the baroness lost all trace of the silliness that so regularly painted her face more thickly than cosmetics. With deep sincerity she gazed up at her husband and tried to put out a hand to him, forgetting that she was restrained.

“My love,” she said, “I could never betray you. You betray yourself, but I will only ever bring you back.”

But the baron could not bear her words or her face. He turned away, and those standing nearest caught a glimpse of agony such as they had never seen in the eyes of any lord of Middlecrescent. When he spoke again, however, his voice was firm enough to say:

“Hang the traitors.”

Dovetree tried to scream, nearly choking on the rags in her mouth. The baroness turned and saw her lady-in-waiting being carried up the scaffold steps. “Oh!” she cried, struggling against her guards. “Let poor Dovetree go! She’s done nothing to merit this!”

“She betrayed you, my dear,” said the baron with deep bitterness. “Let traitors hang with traitors.”

Sir Palinurus shouted, and all the men of Parumvir raised an angry, threatening cry. The guards holding Prince Felix dared not move, for they saw the promise of war on those northern faces, a war they knew Southlands could not hope to win. But the dread of their master was great, and they stood frozen, unwilling to free the prince without the baron’s word, unwilling to drag him up that rickety stair and, with every step, drag their nation closer to destruction.

Felix watched Lionheart being pulled away, behind the collapsing Dovetree and before the confused baroness, who kept saying, “My dear girl, it will be all right! Lumé, child, don’t carry on so! You’ll be all out of breath!”

The baroness had strength in her. Just when one might most expect her to give way to hysterics, she seemed calm and motherly, smiling even at Lionheart as they were arranged beneath the nooses. Perhaps this was but the form of her hysterics.

Lionheart closed his eyes. As his hands were bound before him and he breathed the stench of the guardsman’s breath upon his face and heard the creaking of the scaffold floorboards, he pictured in his mind, as he had promised himself he would, a face. A sweet face with enormous silver eyes, otherworldly, strange, and lovely, crowned in roses.

“Beyond the Final Water falling,” he whispered as the noose was placed around his neck.

And Felix, standing below, watching all, wished desperately that he could look away. But he couldn’t. He stood staring, and he found himself saying, though he couldn’t hear his own voice in the din of the crowd, “Aethelbald, please . . .”

A wolfish snarl exploded over the heads of all those gathered.

An immediate hush fell upon the courtyard as everyone gasped and whirled in place, seeking the source of that horrible sound.

Another snarl, and now Felix saw the crowd parting, men and women falling back upon one another, dropping torches that sputtered out on the stones. This did not matter, for daylight grew keener by the moment. Indeed, it seemed as though the sun burst over the edge of the world quite suddenly, striking the eyes of all those present so that they believed they saw an enormous red wolf in their midst.

Then Daylily’s voice rang out against the stone.

“Unhand my mother at once, you dogs!”

No one moved to stop the wild, red-haired maid who sprang across the courtyard, past the guards, and up the scaffold stairs. She took a knife from the hand of the guard standing beside her mother, and in a single stroke (though the fibers were thick and tough with age), she cut through the rope. It fell like a dead snake upon the floor.