The Red-Haired Knight Ch. 02 - Dreams...

The Red-Haired Knight 02

Dreams and Terrors of the Red-Haired Knight

For the back story, please see: "The Red-Haired Knight".

Malle.... Malle.... Malle...!!! Her name! Echoing...in her dream...her life? Awake, asleep? But...that was her mother calling...NO! Edward calling! No, a demon...!!

It was still dark...Malle, the witch warrior, the Lady, awoke. The room, her room. No, the tent, on campaign! The stench of the dead wafted in the night air. She shivered, in her long, linen shift, soaked in her fear sweat.

She stood. To prove she was awake...the dreams, the terror faded. She stood near the small fire Gwyneth had started early in the evening...She knelt to poke it...a good wife kept the fires, but she was no longer a wife...well, she was a wife forever to a dead husband...a ghost who still pleasured her...but not this night. This night, other visitors.

Malle shook away those thoughts. This day...the day after battle. This day was for preparation, for the battles to come. Yesterday's victory was dust...yet the dead still stank. Her dead. HER people. The sad, loyal peasants who fought for her, out of fear? Out of superstition; out of loyalty; out of hope? These people, the survivors of the battle and their families honored their dead. Through the tent flap, she saw the pyres, and heard the low keening. Her dead— those she led to the end— were honored.

No one to honor the dead of her enemies. Those lords and their minions. Those who also feared and despised her...the witch warrior, the devil's harlot. Their bones would mark this battlefield...Forever the field of bones of those who dared to oppose the Red-Haired Knight.

She went by many names, but loved the one her husband gave her...the Red-Haired Knight. She had stood beside him in armor, her long, red hair, and a banner; the sight had scandalized many, appalled more; even some of her own people. But the worst...were the neighbors. Those who lusted after the rich lands that were their valley. Forests full of great trees, good for timber; fields in the floodplain that had the richest soil and produced abundant crops; even the skies of the valley...the path of migrant birds, a fowler's paradise.

It served her greedy neighbors well, to whisper about her. How she had bewitched her husband; how he was not the true father of her sons, that the true father was a demon lover— Satan, himself.

The ambush that was to end her, failed; instead, her husband and two sons died defending her as all four fought off the dozen assassins that had been hired to end her and her Lord's line.

The ambush had been sprung too early, and her family was poised to defend itself. Without guards and unarmored, each of them had accounted for three assailants. But as the last of the assassins fell to Malle's sword...in the quiet, after mere minutes of a chaotic fight, she was the only one standing.

She went mad then. Some say she was possessed. The grief of a wife, a mother, the deaths of her Lord, and his heirs.

The folk from the farmstead arrived to see the aftermath of the slaughter. They could hear her grief. Under her direction, they took their Lord and the young heirs, just men now barely.

These bodies they would strip and wash and prepare, as all folk of the valley knew was proper. Malle saw that these were pious people and that they knew the rites. She left them to their holy duty. She also had a duty.

She needed to know who sent these men and searched the bodies for clues. She found gold; they all had a heavy purse of gold. But the coins were of varied denominations and origins. There seemed to be no one paymaster. Her plan...in her grief, her death madness she made a pact, a pact with the OTHER WORLD.

She stripped off her blood-stained garment, disgusted with the reek of assassins' blood on her body. Her husband Lord's body, and their sons, Liard and Liam, had been carried to the farmstead on their palfreys. She alone had ridden her charger. Since the Black Devil, as she named her gelding, was new to her, she rode him as often as possible. Always training for battle. She knew now for the first time that that war horse was the reason she survived.

The ambushers had been on foot and expected to overpower them by seizing the reins of the smaller riding horse and dismounting the riders. Her steed was too large and fierce for this plan to work. Even unhorsed her menfolk had almost proved too much for the assassins. Almost.

She had their purses...and she cut something else from each body and placed it in the gold purse of each one of the killers. Tonight. Under the moon of the Sky Father, on the soil of Mother Earth, with sacred fire, she would divine the truth.

(More about the Red-Haired Knight in another episode. Many thanks to kenjisato, my proofreader and editor.)

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