The Rose of Blacksword Read Online Free PDF Page B

to be thankful for their survival, for the protection of the ruined castle and the blessed remains of the old well in the rubble-littered bailey, Rosalynde was nonetheless besieged by both fear and fury.
    It was not fair, she silently raged as she pressed a damp rag against Cleve’s burning brow. Nothing was fair at all! Giles should not have died. Nelda and Lord Ogden’s men should never have been so cruelly slaughtered. She should not be thrust into this terrible mess. And poor Cleve …
    He groaned and tried to roll over. Then he flailed one arm wildly about before she was able to grab it and still his feverish thrashing.
    “Look out!” He moaned as one tear escaped his tightly clenched eyes and trickled down his cheek. “Look out, milady.”
    Then his eyelids flew open and he stared up at her as if she were one of the very ghosts he had feared.
    “Be still now,” she crooned in a soft voice. She dipped the cloth she’d torn from her kirtle into a broken jug she had found and filled with water from a well. Then she wiped the sweat from his face. Despite the chill spring night, he was damp with the heat of his own body. She knew, however, that it was only a matter of time before the fever would give way to chills. Why hadn’t she searched the woods for some vervain before the night had descended? She could have prepared a tea for his fever. Then she could have made a wash of common woundwort or a poultice of lady’s mantle for his festering wound. Together the tea and the wash would have helped dispel the fever that tortured him now.
    But she had not thought about it in her haste to find them a hiding place safe from the clutches of those murderoushighwaymen. As soon as the sky grew light, however, she would venture forth. As soon as dawn broke the oppressive black of this night, she would do something—anything!—to help him.
    It seemed forever before the faintest glow of gray-mauve light touched the eastern sky. She was cold and weary. Her muscles ached from the crouched position she had maintained at the injured boy’s side all night. Her eyes stung and her vision was blurry, yet as soon as she was able to discern her surroundings, she knew she must move. Cleve had fallen into an exhausted slumber broken only occasionally by incoherent mutterings as he sought a more comfortable position. As she rose from his side she spread her cloak over his slight form and tucked it warmly about him. Then with teeth chattering from the cold, she picked her way warily from the lean-to shelter and out into the bailey.
    The ruined castle had clearly not been very grand, yet Rosalynde could easily determine where the keep had stood as well as the main walls and the chapel. As she made her way to the collapsed gatetower, she wished, as she had all night, that the new King Henry II had not been so adamant in his orders to dismantle all unlicensed castles. If Lord Medwyn and his wife had not been summarily dismissed, those bandits would not have felt so free to roam the countryside, attacking at will.
    She was brooding as she skirted a charred pile of timbers, thinking of the home it must have been, when a sudden idea struck her and she halted in her tracks. Any good chatelaine would have maintained an herb garden of both medicinal and cooking herbs. Surely some of those plants must still survive.
    It did not take her long to locate the forgotten garden. Amid new green shoots of loosestrife and hedge mustard,conkerwort and nettle, a sturdy group of the herbs necessary to any castle still thrived. There was no woundwort, but shepherd’s knot would do as well. And the inner bark of the linden tree, once stripped and beaten, would make an even better poultice than the dried everlasting leaves she had carried in the cart.
    Despite the cold and the hungry ache growing in her stomach, as she hurried back to the sleeping youth, Rosalynde felt infinitely better. Cleve would be all right now. She would make sure of it. Then somehow they