The sweetness of his words did not reach his eyes. They never did. He would recite them to any maid or widow unfortunate enough to cross his path, and all the time his gaze would traverse his victim, leaving stains worse than those made by his hands, and harder to wash off. She shook her arm free of his grasp and said, “I have work to attend to, as do you.”
“No work so important that it cannot spare our efforts for a time. Wouldn’t you care to share some of your charms?”
She actually tasted bile in the back of her throat, thinking of the petty troll Lukasz playing the role of the knight in her ballad. “Those are for my betrothed,” she snapped at him in a low whisper.
“A lucky man, indeed. You should grant me an introduction.” Lukasz laughed at her, and she felt a sick sense of despair that she was so plain and common at nineteen years that this brute was the only man to show such an interest in her.
In the dark parts of her soul, she thought that her desire for solitude at times led those more discriminating than Lukasz to question her chastity. She didn’t know, but she suspected what the other women in the kitchen chattered about when she left to serve the knights.
She blinked back her tears and started walking away from him, promising herself that she wouldn’t turn around.
“Someday, Maria, I will be a knight. You could be the betrothed of Rycerz Lukasz.”
Maria balled her hands into fists and spun around. “A knight?” she shouted back. “On that day I will be far too old and feeble to hold your interest, and you’ll be too senile to remember any favors I granted you!”
Her outburst was greeted by laughter from the other side of the stone fence. A trio of stable hands, all younger than Lukasz, were standing in the pasture and doing nothing to hide their amusement at Lukasz’s expense. Lukasz’s face lost all trace of the false humor he’d been showing her and his skin rapidly changed color, becoming a blotchy red. “You shall not make light of my service, woman!”
“We both have duties to attend to,” she said. It took a supreme effort of will not to add, “Don’t you have manure to shovel?”
She turned to walk to the gate.
“You will not walk away from me like—”
She tensed, waiting for him to grab for her, but he was interrupted by the sound of hoofbeats. She felt the approaching horses in the packed earth of the path beneath her feet before she saw them. First she looked back the way she had come, but her path just led back into the dark woods that stretched south of the fortress.
“Everyone, the river!” yelled one of the stable hands from the pasture.
North and west of the fortress, the river Narew flowed, separating the fortress from the last wooded frontiers of Masovia. Across the river were dense woodlands, and eventually Prussia—the Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights. Even after the Polish king Casimir had found peace with the Teutonic Order, very little had come from that direction except the occasional messenger headed south, toward Poland. Masovia itself was still an independent duchy. Even under the rule of Casimir’s brother, it had yet to rejoin the Polish union, leaving it an uneasy buffer between Poland and the Order.
The black cross standard of the Teutonic Order fluttered above a score of horsemen as they drove their mounts across a ford in the river. The sight sent a shiver of terror through Maria’s chest. She grabbed her cross through her chemise as she watched the invading knights: men and horses, moving as if the hand of God itself was whipping their backs.
Behind her, the alarm bells tolled within the fortress.
“We’re under attack,” Lukasz said, standing rooted on the path while his fellow stable hands ran off to retrieve the horses from the pasture.
Maria stared at the men as they crossed the river and said, “No, we’re not.” Then she vaulted the stone fence and began running across the pasture toward the river.
What she had realized, after the initial shock of seeing the Teutonic Knights in Masovia, was that their tabards were smeared with gore, half their men were draped across the backs of horses like so many sacks of grain, and even the horses showed wounds leaking blood down their flanks.
The carnage was worse the closer she came. Even the