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remaining hounds howled and cowered into the undergrowth,
slinking away, bellies low as Gilles charged them.
    “Are you injured?” Gilles asked the woman, the stick held in
one hand, his bloody knife in the other.
    In answer, she crumpled in a heap at his feet, her head
striking a ring of stones surrounding a banked fire.
    “ Jesu !” He bent over the woman. A strange, hiccuping
sound made him draw back her mantle’s edge, which concealed her face and form.
    Roland dropped at his side.
    “ Jesu ,” Gilles repeated, for a tiny head, covered in
a nimbus of flaxen curls, poked out of the folds of cloth. The child opened its
mouth, issuing forth a protest loud enough to bring King Richard’s army from
the Holy Land.

Chapter Two
     
    Gilles glanced up at Roland, who backed away in
consternation, hands palm up. “Look naught to me, Gilles, I know little of babes.”
    “Then you will learn.” He picked up the wailing infant. Its
tiny legs churned and beat the air. A female. Too young to be off the breast.
Despite Roland’s sputtered protests, Gilles handed him the child.
    Going down on one knee, he placed a hand to the swollen
breast of the fallen woman. “Emma…the weaver,” he said softly to himself, his
memories of the manorial court where he had met her as sharp in his mind as if
it had been yesterday and not two years before. He nodded once as he felt her
heart’s beat, strong and well beneath his palm.
    “You know the wench?” Roland held the screaming babe at
arm’s length.
    “Aye.” Gently, Gilles grasped Emma’s chin in his hand and
turned her head. “Blood.” It ran down her neck and stained the earth beneath
her. “Go back to camp and summon aid.”
    “The child?” Roland danced from one foot to the other.
    “Put her down, for surely she will land there one way or the
other.”
    “Aye, my lord!” Roland placed the child on the ground as
gingerly as he might a venomous snake. The two men watched the tot scramble in
the dust to hide by her mother’s body. Gilles lifted the edge of woman’s mantle
and covered the two females.
    As he waited for the return of help, Gilles watched
anxiously over Emma. He lifted her pack, a simple leather satchel, and looked
for some cloth to cushion her head. He found only plants and seeds and barks.
If they had medicinal purposes, he did not know them. Lacking a more suitable
cushion, he closed the pack and slipped it under her head. Roland returned with
alacrity, bringing Hubert to see to the woman.
    “Her head injury is grave, my lord. These bites need
stitching,” the squire said, drawing up Emma’s gown to display her wound and at
the same time a slim leg clad in a worn and bloody woolen stocking.
    “Do it whilst she is unaware, then we will take her to
Hawkwatch.” Gilles stripped the bloody hose from Emma’s leg, then hovered like
an anxious mother hen. Hubert used wine to douse a long tear along Emma’s ankle
where the bone showed white against her skin. He carefully stitched the wound
closed.
    Gilles recognized the blue mantle. He remembered the woman,
remembered her name and face. After her humiliation at the manorial court, he
had not quite forgotten her. For several weeks he had expected her obnoxious
uncle to drag her before him, declaring her with child. When the pair did not
appear, Gilles assumed that the young woman had been lucky. He saw now that she
had not. Her child appeared to be the right age for conception at the time of
his first manorial court.
    Ignoring propriety and flinging up Emma’s mantle and
threadbare gown, Gilles inspected the slash of teeth marks down the young
woman’s leg. He turned back to the child who continued to scream her head off
and paw at her mother. He felt for the child, felt her anguish in an unusually
tangible way.
    Gently, he examined the raw edges of Emma’s wound now neatly
stitched. He knew a hound’s teeth could leave suppurating sores. He slipped his
hand along the inside of her leg to her knee,