My Lady Jane(76)

Gracie was deftly shaping the wood with her knife, her gaze fixed on her work so she didn’t have to look at him as she talked. “That night I woke to our cottage burning. We were all inside, my ma and da and brothers—I had two brothers—and they’d blocked the door from the outside, boarded the windows, too.”

“The English,” he said, and she didn’t answer, but if it’d been anyone else, he knew she would have corrected him.

“My family was all E?ians, as I told you. My da was a beautiful red stag, and my mum a doe, which is why they got on so well. My brother Fergus was a black horse with a white star on his forehead.” She laughed softly. “My brother Daniel was a big, lumbering hound. Myself, I’d never changed before. That night was the first time.”

She fell silent. Edward shifted uncomfortably.

“The rest of my family were too big to get out of the cottage,” she continued after a moment. “Only I could squeeze out. My da told me I had to go. He said I should make my way south, to a convent in France where I had an aunt. He even drew me a kind of map, as the house was filling with smoke, and tied it to my neck with my mum’s handkerchief.”

She closed her eyes.

“Why?” Edward asked softly. “The English soldiers just . . . burned houses with people inside them?”

“They burned any place that housed E?ians.” With her knife she stabbed at the piece of wood fiercely, chips littering the ground near her feet. The carving was taking on a shape now, but Edward couldn’t tell what. “And they burned the homes of those who would protect them.”

He wasn’t so naive as to deny that such things had happened. Under his father’s orders, undoubtedly. Edward wanted to believe that, as king, he wouldn’t have authorized this kind of abuse. But even in that, he wasn’t entirely sure. He’d been awfully hands-off in the running of the country. He’d signed the papers his advisors had thrust at him. He’d trusted them to do what was best for the kingdom.

The world felt different to him now. He felt different.

“Did you ever make it to France?” he asked.

She gave a bitter laugh. “I tried. I lost the map after the first week, so after that I just ran south until my paws bled. I nearly starved, because I hadn’t yet learned to hunt or steal. I would have died if . . .”

She stopped whittling momentarily and swallowed hard, like this next part pained her to speak of even more than losing her family.

“If . . . ?” Edward prompted gently, when she didn’t finish her thought.

She looked up and met his eyes. “If the Pack hadn’t found me.”

Edward sucked in a breath. “Oh,” he said, trying to sound like this was no big deal. “The Pack.”

“They weren’t always so bad as they are now,” Gracie explained. “In the beginning, the Pack was about securing safety for the E?ian people. Yes, we stole and we plundered and occasionally we got into unfortunate scrapes with certain soldiers, but for the most part we kept to the shadows. We survived. We helped one another.”

She brushed an errant curl from her face. “The leader was like a father to me. He took me in when I had no one else. He taught me everything I know, and not just how to get by. He taught me to read and write. Mend a shirt. Figure numbers. Handle a bow, a sword, a knife. Carve and whittle. And he also taught me history and philosophy and the like.”

“What happened to him?” he asked, because he knew from her clouded expression that something had. Not long ago, he thought.

“He got old.” Gracie resumed her whittling. “Another man—Thomas Archer is his name—challenged him for the leadership, and won. After that things were different. Archer believes that E?ians should do more than simply survive. He believes that we are one with nature, and therefore we should dominate it. Take what we want. Punish anyone who would challenge or harm E?ians. Archer gathered up a group of men who become wolves, and they started to go about making trouble.”

“So you left,” Edward assumed.

“Yes.” She frowned in concentration as she began working on the finer details of her carving. “I went off one night and didn’t return. Which didn’t sit well with Archer. I was useful to him.”

“So that’s why you were so keen to avoid them.”

She coughed lightly. “Er, yes. Archer put a price on my head.”

“How much?” Edward asked.

She glanced at him. “Why do you want to know?”

“We’re short of money, of course. Every little bit helps.”

She caught on that he was joking. Her dimples appeared. “Ten sovereigns.”

His eyes widened. “Ten sovereigns! How fast can we get to this Archer fellow?”

“The Pack uses a tavern as their headquarters,” she said matter-of-factly, as if turning her in was a real possibility. “The Shaggy Dog. It’s about half a day’s ride from here, I’d say.”

She was finished with her carving. She wiped her knife and slid it gently back into her boot. Edward leaned forward to look at the figure. It was fox, which actually bore a remarkable resemblance to Gracie in her E?ian form, gracefully suspended in the act of running.

“Is there anything you can’t do?” he asked.

“Needlepoint,” she said, smiling. She put the fox into his hand. “I can only carve foxes. Everything else I try ends up looking like a lumpy dog.”