as full as it should be. What little nutrition the old mare had taken in had gone to keeping herself warm and not to making milk. Even if the mare survived, the foal might not.
Sybilla patted the mare on the rump and scooted round behind her. “God’s peace, Addy, why did you have to do this on the coldest night since Michaelmas?”
She slid her arm into the mare’s velvet warmth and probed to find a tiny hoof trapped behind protruding pelvic bones. Wrapping her fingers around a small fetlock, she looked at Etienne, his youthful face pinched with worry. “Don’t fret,” she whispered. “This will be easier than I thought.”
With one strong tug, she pulled as the mare pushed and grunted. The tiny limb straightened and the foal slithered out in a gush of shiny fluid, black hair, and legs.
Sybilla wiped the mucous from his mouth and nostrils. “Aren’t you a handsome one?” she said softly, as she traced the perfect white stripe that began between his soulful eyes and ended with a splash across his muzzle.
She raised her eyebrows and pointed to his feet. The hair there was solid white, right up to his fetlocks, on all four hooves. “Mother Mary. You look like you danced in chalk-paint, or you robbed the nuns at St. Bertone’s an’ stole their stockings. But you’re a beauty.”
She glanced at Etienne and her joy faded.
His mouth agape, he took a step back as he stared at the newborn. “Mistress, he’s marked like the magic horse from Hades! The one the seer told us would be born at Cornbury. You don’t want this one, mistress. He’ll bring you nothing but trouble.”
“Etienne, that’s tittle-tattle, a tale told by a seer to earn pennies at the fair. She’d say anything to earn coin to buy food.” She ran her hand along the foal’s graceful neck. “Marked as he is, he’s mine. I spent my last chink to buy his mother. He’s sired by the Duke of Marmount’s champion Spanish stallion. I shall call him my Regalo, God’s gift. Safely delivered, sent from heaven, not from hell.”
Sybilla’s words surprised her. She’d attended the births of hundreds of foals, but for this one, she felt an unprecedented sense of ownership.
Addy nickered and staggered to her feet. The remnants of the afterbirth clinging to her tail, she sniffed the foal and snorted her approval. Pray to the saints, her milk would come now that she’d seen and smelled her foal.
The foal, surprisingly alert for just a minute old, lifted his head and looked around. His bright eyes flickered with unusual acuity and with an eagerness that made Sybilla take a second look. He rolled himself upright, folded his legs beneath him, and boldly met her gaze. A whinny pealed from his throat, as if to say he would get up when he was damn near ready, but for now, he preferred to sit like the prince he knew he was.
Sybilla smiled. “Praise the saints, you’re healthy.” She splashed water on her freezing arm and mopped it dry with the hem of her chemise. “You are a fine colt, even marked as you are. I could not have hoped for better.”
She tossed her braid behind her shoulders, and nudged Etienne. “Go and fetch your mother. She’ll know what to do from here. I daren’t stay any longer.”
A pensive Etienne slipped out of the barn without bothering to close the doors fully. Through the crack, Sybilla watched him go, a boy on the verge of manhood. He raced across the snowy yard to the tiny mud-and-wattle house with a thatched roof and a crooked chimney. How his mother, the widow Margery, managed to feed all six children through the winter was a wonder, having not a penny or a man to help. They all might still starve to death. The April fields had not been planted, the ground still blanketed with a crusty mix of ice and mud. Even Sybilla was down to her last cabbage.
The foal floundered, struggling at his first attempt to stand. His muscles shook from the effort but, when at last he hoisted his gangly legs beneath him and stood squarely on all fours, he swung his head around and looked at Sybilla. His big round eyes filled with pride.
Sybilla grinned. She, too, had her pride. She was a free woman, cold and hungry, but free. Her parents, God rest their souls, had been freemen, too—her stepfather born that way, her mother blessedly released after years in servitude.
Sybilla took a deep breath, wondering how she would survive. If she could last another week or two, spring would be here. She’d planned to earn her keep by helping farmers with the foalings. But now what would she do? She’d been warned once already to cease practicing her trade.
“Mistress Corbuc,” the wiry Father Ambrose had yelled one sunny day last spring, when he’d found her with her arm inside a mare who struggled to deliver her twins. “The church bars women from the practice of surgery and ministrations on animals. It cultivates the keeping of familiars and cavorting with the devil. I forbid you to be a midwife to a horse. ’Tis indecent.”
Sybilla prickled. If she were caught tonight, they’d arrest her without witness or defense.
She put her hand to cheek, the place where they would hold the branding iron and burn the mark of a Separate into her skin…She’d seen it done to other women—heard their screams, and smelled the nauseating scent of burnt flesh. ’Twas even worse if they scorched to the bone.
Her stomach roiled at the recollection. God in heaven, she had to leave Cornbury––to go anywhere a woman with her skill was free to earn her keep.
A squeal erupted from the foal, jolting Sybilla from her dark thoughts. He pranced and nipped at the glittering snowflakes drifting through the roof hole. The sparkling white powder that dusted his finely sculpted head gave him a definite aura, a spirit-like quality not of this world.
He was different, though she couldn’t quite say why. But in that instant, she knew they shared a common bond. She would defend him with her life.
Heavy footsteps suddenly crunched across the frozen yard and headed toward the barn. Sybilla spun around and faced the door. Panic shook her heart. Those were not the feet of Etienne, or his mother!
Choking back a yelp, she shoved her arm through the sleeve of her chemise and dove beneath the feed trough. Shards of rotting wood snagged her scalp and cobwebs whisked across her mouth and lashes. She drew her knees to her chest and let the shadows fall across her face as she watched the scene unfold before her.
Men’s voices shouted. Hinges squealed and the barn doors swung fully open. A blast of wind blew powdery snow across the threshold and she watched as a knight, a stubby man with a rounded belly and an icy red beard, stumbled inside, his short mantle swinging like a bell. He surveyed his surroundings. “This will do,” he grumbled. He shoved his hood back, and brushed the snow off his shoulders and his red-topped head.
A second knight strode in past the first one, his cloak billowing around his powerful legs. The ice-glazed spurs at his heels glinted like crystal. His hood obscured the details of his features, but he was tall, towering, and the way he held his strong back, erect with assured purpose, suggested he was mayhap twenty five or thirty years of age—and the kind of man who could keep a woman safe—or destroy her.
He took a deep breath, expanding his hulking chest, his shoulders as wide as a church door. His presence filled the space around him like that of someone accustomed to taking and doing exactly what he wanted.
He rested his hand on the hilt of his sword as he turned his head slowly and scanned the barn. Stomping the snow from his booted feet, he strode toward the shadowy stall where Sybilla huddled.
She didn’t dare breathe.
