She couldn’t stop herself from wondering if she’d wandered somewhere untoward and quite possibly perilous. She wanted to believe that she was looking at the man written about so capably in the pages of her book, but his garb indicated he might have sprung from a far different realm. It pained her to suspect she had misjudged him so thoroughly, but she hardly knew what else to think.
She considered her possible alternatives—run and hide or stride forth and conquer—and decided upon the latter. If she were going to be carried off to Hell, she would not go quietly.
She took her courage in hand and strode forward boldly, stopping a few paces away from him. “Are you a demon?” she demanded.
He looked at her blankly. “A what?”
She pointed her finger at him, just so he wouldn’t think that he would escape her scrutiny so easily. “A demon,” she repeated firmly.
He opened and closed his mouth several times without speaking. That could have been because he was choosing a charm to lay over her—if demons did such a thing, which she sincerely hoped wasn’t the case. He looked a little baffled though, so perhaps she would manage to escape before he cast any sort of unholy bit of business over her like a net.
“Do I look like a demon?” he asked carefully.
She declined to answer, instead folding her arms over her chest and affecting her father’s favorite expression of skepticism. At least that might give her time to decide just what sort of man she was looking at.
He was holding a book, true, which was a mark in his favor given that she was almost certain demons couldn’t read. She’d seen several paintings of them leaning over monks diligently scribbling—the monks, not the demons—which had left her suspecting that only the lads manning the quills could read their own scratches. Indeed, from what she’d seen in those manuscripts, demons simply poked friars with their pointed tails, no doubt swearing quite lustily as they were about their terrible labors.
“You don’t have a tail, do you?” she asked sharply.
He looked behind himself, then back at her and shook his head.
“And youarereading,” she conceded, “which does you credit. I’m not sure if you’ve vexed any friars recently, but that might be something we can discuss in a moment. Your clothing, however, leaves a great deal to be desired not only in modesty but the inspiring of confidence that you aren’t going to carry me off to Hell.” She paused and looked at him sternly. “You aren’t going to carry me off to Hell, are you?”
At the moment, he looked as if he might be asking her to carry him off somewhere so he might sit down. He was also holding up his hand in the same way she tended to when Ambrose and his wee siblings were bouncing around her skirts like a litter of pups, as if he strove to stop the madness long enough to make sense of it.
“Would you speak a bit more slowly?” he asked. “My Gaelic is poor.”
She thought he spoke it very well, especially since she knew it wasn’t his first language. If he was who she thought he was, of course.
“I think it is good enough,” she said as casually as possible in his English.
He dropped his book, then gaped at her. She stepped forward and bent over to pick it up at the same time he did which left her running her forehead directly into the hilt of his sword. She straightened, holding her hand to her face and finding herself grateful she hadn’t put her eye out.
“I’m so sorry,” he said in Gaelic. “Here, come sit and I’ll fetch you some water.”
She had help sitting down upon a large stump that she was fairly certain had been a sapling the day before. It was such a ridiculous thought to entertain, she suspected she might do well to simply not think at all for a moment or two. She closed her eyes and put her hand against her forehead, though the pain wasn’t terrible. It cleared her head a bit from her chaotically swirling thoughts, most having to do with what the Duke of Birmingham was doing half an hour’s walk from her home, wearing clothing she wasn’t entirely certain she also hadn’t seen in some rendering of a hellish creature tormenting yet another poor monk.
She heard the door open and close and managed to squint at him as he squatted down in front of her. She took the cup, considered it, then looked at him. “Poisoned?”
He frowned. “Poisoned?”
“Poison,” she said in his tongue. In his history, the Duke had been particularly vexed by enemies attempting the same in order to have his fine goods, so that word she was at least familiar with.
He shook his head slightly. “Nay, ‘tisn’t.”
She drank and found it to be just water, as he claimed. She looked at the small wooden cup, which seemed comfortingly familiar somehow, then at him. He was only watching her carefully, as if he expectedherto draw his sword and use it on him herself.
“You changed your clothing from your demon garb,” she noted.
“I’m not a demon.” He knelt next to her and sat back on his heels, looking somehow both perilous and innocent at the same time. “Why don’t we begin anew?”
“Aye, with where you left your demon garb,” she muttered.
He smiled. “Perhaps not that far.”
“What language?” she asked loftily. “Mine or your marginally passable French?”
“My very French mother would be insulted,” he said with a faint smile, “but I’ll claim all the flaws there. Gaelic, then, and French when needed?”
