High above Ariella's head, a mere speck of
a lark soared and caroled in the azure sky, its song descending in a sweet
rain of silver notes. Beneath her bare feet, soft grass studded with
meadowsweet and tiny clover blossoms flowed cool and velvety. Ariella ran
mostly for the joy of release, but partly from guilt—if she got out of earshot
of the Manor quickly enough, she would be able to say in truth that she hadn't
heard Magda calling her.
And inevitably, her chaperone would call,
as soon as she realized that Ariella was not at the loom in the solar, at her
embroidery frame in her room, or her fine sewing in the garden. Magda was
supposed to be educating her—
Except that she doesn't teach me anything that hasn't
to do with a needle , Ariella thought with youthful scorn. Everything I've learned about
herbs and simples came from the monks at the Abbey. And everything I've learned
about the forest I learned by myself, with no one to teach me. So there! Magda had become more fretful, more insistent of late that her charge "behave as a proper lady." Perhaps it was
the advent of her sixteenth birthday that had brought all this nonsense
on—Magda seemed to place great significance on it, though as far as Ariella
could see, one more birthday made no difference at
all to her. Her Papa treated her the same, the serfs
and servants had not changed towards her. Only Magda acted as though sixteen
years meant something portentous.
So
Ariella ran through the meadow to escape her tormentor, the single-minded old
woman who tried to keep her pent up inside the dark, chill manor or confined to
the stiflingly manicured garden in the center courtyard. She ran, and she hoped
that today she could outrun that unwelcome call of, "Lady Ariella! This is
unseemly!"
"Behaving as a proper lady" did
not include discarding her hennin headdress and veil, heavily embroidered linen
gown, chemise, leather shoes and stockings, donning an old, threadbare,
homespun dress and kilting it up above her knees, then running off bare-legged,
bareheaded and barefooted to the forest. Proper behavior required too much of
one who had run free since she had been able to run at all.
And if a lady could not course through the
wild forest surrounding her home, then she did not want to be a lady.
Ariella reached the safety of the forest
and ducked beneath an overhanging bough, not even the least out of breath. She
paused for a moment among the shadows and peered through a screen of leaves
across the meadow to the Manor.
The stone-walled building slumbered behind
its moat, with a single sleepy guard standing watch on the wall and a pair of
swans gliding undisturbed on the waters. She breathed a shallow sigh. If luck be with me, Magda is safely
asleep, never knowing that I am not where she believes me to be. If
Magda had gone off to take her nap, she'd not awaken until her maidservant came
to summon her to the evening meal. By then, Ariella would be safely home, and
if there was nothing to show in the way of fine work for the passing of the
hours, Magda would only chide her for day-dreaming the time away.
Now that she was safely within the
invisible walls of her sylvan sanctuary, Ariella sat down on a drift of last
year's leaves and took the time to braid her hair. When she was done, she bound
up the end of the shining golden tail, as thick as her wrist and as long as her
arm, with a bit of leather thong she fished out of the left-side pocket tied
about her waist. Her two pockets bulged with her pilfered stores, and Magda
would have had a litter of kittens if she'd known that Ariella frequently
ransacked the stillroom to get her treasures.
In her mind she heard Magda's shrill voice,
cracking as it always did when the old woman grew agitated. "Those simples
are for humans, not the beasts of the field! God have mercy, that I should be
cursed with the task of civilizing such a fool of a girl!"
It was hard not to feel resentment towards
the old busybody, who grudged
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