Dream Lover

FOURTEEN

"You’re too late" she said her voice distant; "We've already died." Byron closed the distance between them cautiously.

"Sit down." He knew from experience that the mind played cruel tricks on people whose eyes looked as this woman’s did. She was far away now but she’d relive what was done and she’d fight against things that weren’t there and the people who tried to help her. "Rest" 

"I need another dress," the woman said looking down at herself. Her eyes were blank; Byron doubted she saw it at all.

"You’ll get one. Help is coming." Byron eased her down until she was reclining against a tree. He moved on quickly, following the trail until he heard a short shrill scream then a grunt. He came on the scene just in time to save a young girl, she'd gotten her hands on a crossbow and done her best to shoot the raider who'd found her hiding place. She'd pierced his side, but the wound wouldn't have kept him from slashing her to pieces. 

Byron closed the distance between them at a run. The raider was lifting his blade about to swing it down when Byron took his hand. The girl he'd been attacking was trying to load the crossbow. Her hands shook but she loaded quickly and managed to put an arrow in the man's back. He was already dying when he turned to see who’d taken his hand. 

Byron spared a second to tell the girl to find someplace else to hide until the soldiers came before he surged forward again. He came across two other trails and followed both to dead men. What he was seeing wasn’t like the any battle he’d ever seen. It looked as if each man had been taken by surprise and killed before they had a chance to react to the attack. 

The familiar sound of clinking armor sounded a few yards behind him. He shouted his presence to the approaching soldiers. Their orders were likely to kill all armed men on site. He heard the response and the echo of the information as it traveled down the line.

The commanding officer came through the trees first, surveyed the scene and grinned. Byron knew him well. They served as knights together. They had been friends since they were both teenagers and saved each other’s lives countless times.

"I didn't know you were so dedicated to your knighthood highness." Alton, or Lord Cedric of Stamford if titles came into it, was nearly Byron’s opposite. They were both tall nearly the same height, but Alton was light where Byron was dark. He had thick locks of blonde that hung to his shoulders and eyes as bright and blue as the sky in summer. He kept his angular face clean-shaven and his girlish features exposed. If not for his height and build, Alton’s long lashes and full mouth could have been feminine. His nose could stand some character to Byron’s way of thinking; the straight edge of it had never been broken, though not through lack of trying.

"Are they still letting you command?" Byron asked of his oldest friend as they embraced.

"The job is yours when you want it again." Alton had stepped into the role of commanding officer of the Mercian knights when Byron quit the throne, though not without a great deal of moaning. After the wars finally ended, he’d hoped to retire to his estate in the eastern plains. It was loyalty and friendship as much as a cool head and strategic thinking that kept him in the castle and the position.

"Did you do all this?" he asked nodding toward the man at Byron's feet he had an arrow in his side and he'd been stabbed in his chest.

"I just got here” 

"Then who did?" Alton asked quizzically 

"I'd say the women gave them some trouble." Alton looked skeptical. It was understandable. Raiders attacked for a number of reasons but more often than not it was done to provoke a fight from a peaceful area, to incite mayhem. More often than not, they attacked women and children because it was the fastest and easiest method.

"Why are you here?" Alton asked. 

"I'm looking for someone."

Alton's eyes went sharp and serious. Years ago, just before the war with North Umbria, raiders stormed the women's baths over the hot springs on the northern border. They killed them all. One of them had been Alton's lover who he had talked into traveling to the north of the kingdom with the army. Byron had had to be the one to tell him of her death. She had not died quickly, and Alton had wanted, needed, to hear all of it.

Alton admitted, once after getting very drunk that he would have given up his knighthood if she would have agreed to have him for her husband. Alton was the third son of a poor Earldom. To give up his knighthood was to give up any title he could ever hope to have. As it was he’d bought an earldom and made a success of the title and the land that came with it

"You think she's alive?" Byron hadn't once considered that she might not be. 

"She isn't your usual kind of woman," Byron said.

After giving the best description of Elle he could manage, Byron passed on a warning. "Mind the trees,"

"The trees"

"There’s no telling how she reacted to raiders." Byron said.

They began to search for survivors as was the knight’s duty, though the rarely ever found any. Alton began calling out. A while later they heard a faint reply. They froze. When it came again, they both heard it and had a good idea where it was coming from. 

They rounded a tree and encountered a gruesome sight. Someone had used a jagged tree branch to club one of the raiders to death. They'd taken most of his face in the process barely two feet away from the dead man a slight woman with a badly twisted ankle was hiding in the roots of a draped buttress tree. She had a short sword in her lap. Alton carefully lifted her out and away trying to shield her from the view. From where she was sitting, she could only see as high as the dead man's chest. His efforts were wasted. The moment she was free from her hiding place the woman asked to see the head. Alton complied hesitantly. She looked down at him for a long moment then turned her face into Alton’s shoulder.