Vampire Outlaw (The Immortal Knight Chronicles Book 2) by Davis Dan

Author:Davis, Dan [Davis, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2016-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

***

After Christmas was well over, I rode north and spent many days exploring the tracks and routes that I could use to bring a man back to my cabin unobserved.

There was a village a dozen miles away. French knights had been there, they told me, and forced rent from the villagers. Their English lord had run away and left them to their fate a year before and they had no one but Cassingham to protect them. But even he and his men could not be everywhere. The French were due to return to collect further payments in kind, the villagers told me, begging me for help. All I could do was advise them to pay what was demanded and then I rode away.

But not far. There was a wood nearby. A mixed wood of elm, hazel, ash, oak and elder throughout. Elms stood together in circular thickets where goldcrests and chaffinches sang.

There I hid and waited for the French to return. I lay shivering the bare branches of a wych elm, watching a family cutting back a portion of their ash trees. Wych elm trunks often branch near to the ground, which makes them perfect for easy climbing. When I was a boy, I used to try to get girls to climb up them with me so we could be secluded in the wide boughs.

That day, though the branches were bare I lay high up and well-hidden. I kept one eye on the family at work below me and one eye on the distant road, praying for a visit by a Frenchman full of warm French blood.

Coppicing must be done in winter, or at least before the sap rises in spring. I watched that family collecting every piece of the wood they cut down. The poles had a thousand uses. Thatched roofs required rods to secure the stacked bundles of thatch. Poles were used for making and setting eel and fish traps. Even the brushwood trimmed off the sides of the poles was gathered up by the children into tight bundles, bound together from twisted lengths of bark or from nettle twine. Those bundles would be used to get a young fire burning quick and hot. They piled fallen leaves over the cut stumps to protect the hazel shoots in spring from the browsing of deer. Moss showed everywhere, vividly green and shining around the stumps. The children chatted incessantly while they worked, recounting old scores and battles won by them against their enemies, the children of another family nearby.

Two days, I waited, shivering in the trees, hoping that the French would come raiding or raping so that I might prey upon them. My poor horse was miserable, though I covered her with a thick blanket and walked her about when it was quiet.

The French did not come. On the third morning, angry, hungry and eager for the taste of hot blood in my mouth I returned to my cabin.

On the way back, in the afternoon and almost at my oak wood, Eva found me.

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