Chapter One
Killeigh, Ireland, the Year of Our Lord 1307
When Maura finally found the man she was looking for, he was stretched across a woman’s lap, his fingers lost in her cleavage.
She stumbled to a full stop outside the campsite, still hidden in the trees, and tightened her grip on the basket slung across her shoulder. She felt as if she’d just come upon the sort of scene painted in the pages of the Abbess’s Bible, full of wild-eyed demons and half-dressed women and long-tongued satyrs dancing around a woodland fire.
Stop.
Summoning her convent-training, she muttered a quick Hail Mary and then an Our Father. When she finished, she took a breath so deep that she felt her surcoat tighten across her breasts. Certainly the great wide world and all the people in it couldn’t be as dangerous as the Abbess insisted.
She reminded herself that these people were simply performers, just traveling minstrels. The piper was playing the same reedy lilt that he’d played this morning. Another man was sucking on a bladder of ale, but in the village that same man had performed magic tricks that delighted the children. And the person she’d come looking for—the man now reclining on a woman’s lap—she’d last seen him laughing as he wrestled with the baker’s son while another minstrel took wagers.
She gave herself a good shake. It was too late to turn back. She hadn’t escaped the convent only to lose courage now.
She marched forward into the campsite. Swiping her skirt away from the flames, Maura rounded the campfire and stopped in front of the wrestler and his lover. As the man turned his head on its bed of fleshy breast, she tried not to notice that he looked like the very image of lustful sloth, sprawled out on the ground like that, his shirt untied so that the light gleamed on his chest.
He asked, “What have we here?”
The wrestler had a husky voice, as rough as she imagined his ill-shaven cheek would be. “My name is Maura,” she said, startled by the odd thought. “I have some business with you tonight.”
The piper’s music squealed to a stop. The juggler’s knives clattered to the ground. The wrestler stopped twiddling with his paramour’s hair.
“Do I know you, lass?”
“Oh, I’m sure he does know you,” someone interjected. “There isn’t many an Irish flower our Colin hasn’t plucked.”
“Aye,” another man shouted, “I’d say there isn’t a girl from here to Wexford that Colin hasn’t deflowered. Tell us, lass, should we be worried about a father or a husband waiting in the woods?”
“I have neither father nor husband,” she said, rattled by the sudden attention. “And I’ve never seen you all before you arrived today.”
“Leave the girl be.” The wrestler called Colin glowered at the gathering men. “Have you no eyes? This one’s coif is as white as snow.”
Maura’s hand drifted to the ties of her linen coif, still tight under her chin, which she wore to tame, somewhat, the wild curls of her pale brown hair.
“Ignore the ravings of these jesters,” Colin said, drawing her attention. “They make fools of good men for their living, and don’t know better when to hold their tongues.” He gazed at her through half-lidded eyes that held the flicker of flames. “Still, it must be a dangerous sort of business that would bring a young woman to our camp, alone, after dark.”
“Not dangerous,” she said, mustering every last drop of her courage. “I want to join your troupe.”
Amid the minstrels’ surprised muttering, the man called Colin raised his strong, black brows. Easing off his paramour’s lap, he found his feet and unfurled to his full height. She arched her neck to look up at him, which was a rare thing, for she stood a half-head taller than most of the men in the village and all the brothers in the nearby monastery. But it was more than his height that made her suddenly catch her breath. His pitch-black hair was tugged back by the ragged end of a bootlace. A single lock fell from his brow to brush his jaw. She had an odd, powerful urge to sweep it behind his ear.
The thought hit her. The angel Lucifer was said to be beautiful, too.
And for one bright, piercing moment, she wished herself back in her cold, empty pallet, the high strong walls of the convent around her...
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