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Warmth enveloped her as Elise hastily set a red riding cloak across her shoulders. Smoothing down the wool, Elise’s hands fumbled and tripped over each other, absent of their usual grace. Next, she knelt, slid off Blanchette’s slippers, and replaced them with tall cattle-skin boots. Blanchette stood motionless, unable to tear her eyes away from the mayhem.
“Please, Princess, hurry and come with me,” Elise pleaded while she seized Blanchette’s arm and dragged her from the window. Blanchette fought to shake her off, but what her lady lacked in strength, she made up for in fear and the instinct to escape certain death. Her eyes grew impossibly larger, filling her pale face. “They are so close so soon. We must make haste! We?—”
“Stop it, Elise. Let me go! Now!” A slap across the girl’s face punctuated her words. Elise gaped at her and held her red cheek for a long silence. Blanchette stepped back, fastened her cloak’s tie, then whispered in a shaky voice she hardly recognized as her own, “I pray you stay safe, Elise. But no one shall keep me from my family. Not even the Black Wolf himself.”
The rebels were making headway into the outer bailey. The Black Wolf raised his longsword, and the men flanking him quickly tempered into an impressive pincer formation. This show of discipline unnerved Blanchette more than the actual bloodshed. Then she noticed a black figure darting through the commotion. An actual wolf was leaping at soldiers and tearing out their throats.
God, have mercy on us all. She touched the cross hanging from her neck and said a prayer.
Incoherent shouts took shape and became one voice, a fused battle cry that sent chills down her spine. “Death to the king! Death to King Bartholomew! Death to the king of Norland!”
Grasping her cross like a lifeline, she absorbed the scene with an unwavering intensity. She’d grown up to the twang of swordplay and quivering arrows and axes ringing against steel, yet she’d never witnessed war firsthand.
It was day and night. A different game entirely. A misstep meant death, and a missed parry cut far deeper than a man’s pride. The fight was desperate—castle-forged swords against crude bronze axes, soldiers and knights against townsfolk. Families pledged to the crown flew their banners, as well—House Baldwin’s gnarled elm tree, House Rutger’s prancing destrier—but those soldiers and lords stood on the wrong side of the battle line, and they’d crudely painted the Black Wolf over their own sigils.
More traitors.
Everything has changed in one night.
Or have I just been sleeping?
“Princess? Blanchette? I-I’m so frightened.”
Forcing her gaze from the swarmed bailey, she stumbled to Elise and held the girl’s body. They were both trembling. Hot tears soaked the front of Blanchette’s red cloak while they silently hugged and cried together.
“Shh… I am too.”
The unrest of the battle grew around them and penetrated the stone walls. Blanchette and Elise held and comforted each other for several moments—not as a princess and her lady-in-waiting but as two friends saying goodbye.
* * *
Our reinforcements shall hold.
The defenses will shield us and the knights and soldiers who man them.
Winslowe Castle shall not fall.
Not tonight, and not any other night to come...
Blanchette reassured herself, once, twice, thrice, as if her thoughts alone might will the sentiment into existence. Every few steps, a soldier raced by, adjusting his blood-soaked weapon, paying her the same care as the suits of armor that stood sentient on either side of her. Even so, she raised the red riding hood to conceal her identity. Most of the men held mere scythes and rusted axes, yet they wielded them with a knight’s bravado. She felt the passion of their war cries as they echoed off the castle walls and through her bones.
Her home had been fast asleep not long ago, and only a single wall torch lit the long, winding hall. Wavering light danced off stone, steel, and silk tapestry.
She continued to hold on to her hope even as the roar of the siege crescendoed, and one of her father’s guards bled out seven feet away.
God be good. He’d called for his mother with his last breath.
Nay, this was no siege. It was a sacking.
Winslowe Castle shall not fall, she repeatedly prayed as it indeed fell.
* * *
She slipped through the winding corridors—the same halls she and her beloved siblings had once fancied as a playground. Familiar ghosts manifested within those shadowed crevices. She saw them more clearly than the battle itself—her dear brother Willem hiding behind a tapestry, her seven-year-old self with her liripipes pulled over her head as she and Isadora raced through the hall playing come-into-my-castle… and her governess’s outraged cry at such naughty antics.
Each step took Blanchette farther from the light.
Each step snuffed out her hope and unleashed a cloud of doom.
