What the Heart Sees Read Online Free PDF Page A

like a lady, shoulders back, chin up, titties out, an’ no stompin’ about like a woodcutter’s oaf. Speak only when yer spoke to. Don’t pick yer nose or fart or scratch anything, an’ for pity’s sake, don’t swill more’n a mouthful of the wine or ye’ll end up on yer back with yer legs in the air before ye can blink.”
    Cassie repeated her orders and nodded. Her belly was full of butterflies and her hands were shaking as she followed Rosie into the keep. Despite having lived most of her life in the village, she had been inside the great hall but three times. On those occasions she had been conscripted along with every other girl above the age of ten to carry and serve food to a throng of guests. There had been no cause for great feasts held at Belfontaine these past few years, so her memories were more of running hither and thither with platters of meat and fowl, staring in awe at knights and their ladies, their colorful garments, while avoiding their huge snapping wolfhounds who attempted to snatch whole chickens off her tray.
    Now she stood at the arched portal at the rear of the hall and felt her knees quake anew. It was a large, imposing chamber with tall stone walls that stretched three storeys up to a maze of arched beams that criss-crossed the vaulted ceiling. Lacking windows below the level of the second storey, light was provided by a score of tall iron stands that seated a dozen or more fat wax candles. Fires blazed at either end of the hall, in hearths large enough to hold half a tree trunk. There were chutes built above the fires to carry the smoke up through the roof, but a good deal of it escaped and formed a hazy layer under the ceiling beams. Rushes crackled underfoot. Pennons, banners, crests, and shields decorated the spaces along the walls that were not covered by massive woven tapestries.
    At one end was a raised dais where the lord and his special guests sat to dine. Below were trestle tables stretched down either side of the hall where knights, priests, verderers, and squires would sit, their rank of importance readily identified by how far they sat above or below the square salt cellars. Pilgrims and priests were usually well below the salt, and lowest of all were common villeins and villagers who ate the scraps and gnawed the bones left by their betters.
    It was there, at the lower end of the table that Cassie thought she would be seated, but Rosie nudged her shoulder and pointed to the dais. Sir Thomas was seated there, slouched to one side in his chair, his head propped in his hand—a hand that occasionally rubbed his temple indicating he was not dozing, as she had first assumed, but that he was deep in troublesome thought. To his far left was Sir Hubert and another knight locked in quiet conversation. To his right was an empty X-chair and beside that, another pair of knights.
    “Surely not,” Cassie whispered over a fresh surge of panic. It was one thing to dream about being regarded as an equal, to long for something and someone she could never have, and to hoard such longings inside like a wretched secret never to be shared.
    It was quite another to walk boldly up to the dais and take a seat beside the lord of the castle and his vaunted knights.
    She turned and tried to dash back toward the bath house. Rosie’s bulk blocked her path on one side, then the other until finally she grabbed her by the shoulders, spun her around, and pushed her back inside the great hall. By then the commotion had been noticed by the handful of weary defenders taking their meal between watches on the walls. And, horror of horrors, by Lord Thomas Purefoy himself, whose voice echoed angrily along the empty hall to demand an explanation.
    “Now ye’ve done it,” Rosie sighed. “Get on up there, girl, and mind everythin’ I’ve told ye.”

CHAPTER THREE
     
    Thomas was frowning. He was short on fighting men but heavily burdened with villagers. They had come inside the walls carrying only what they