Seraphim. Michele Hauf

A swing of your sword decapitating the enemy? Sera!”

      “I don’t want to hear it.” She pat Gryphon’s rear flank and picked up a curry comb that hung from an iron hook on the wall. The horse bristled his coat as she smoothed vigorously over it with the brush. “You may leave my service if you wish.”

      “I—your serv—” He struggled to place his tongue on the words.

      Sera knew the man had nowhere else to go. He was hopelessly lost when it came to religious pursuits. And toad-eaters were certainly out of vogue.

      With a curt straightening of his shoulders and a proud thrust of his chin, Baldwin replied, “I would never.”

      “Then silence your objections from this day forth. Do you understand?”

      Baldwin Ortolano, tall and slim, his hands and wrists jutting way beyond the hem of his borrowed shirtsleeves, merely nodded, defeated. “I fear my attempts to cease uttering oaths may have to be renewed should I remain by your side.”

      “It is not me you must answer to in your final days,” she said. The curry comb skimmed through Gryphon’s sleek hide, warming her fingertips with the brisk motion.

      “You would do well to remember the same,” he said.

      The fine wire brush stopped on a glossy patch of hide. When her final day did come Sera knew exactly who would ask of her mortal sins. And she did not fear Him. She could not. She was doing the right thing. So many lives would be spared with the swing of her sword.

      Though, she sensed there was a deeper reason she had taken on the quest. But that reason was not immediately to hand. Normal females did not take to the sword to sever heads. What was she doing? There was no doubt she had not a clue beyond that she was angry. On the other hand, ’twas very much…a compulsion to battle. She knew not why, only that the rage that boiled within pushed her. Enticed her forward. Someone had to put an end to the de Mortes’ reign of terror.

      And that someone would be her.

      “Creil is another two days’ journey,” the squire offered in the silence of torch flicker and horse chawing. “Might we bed down here tonight and start afresh in the morn?”

      “That is what I intended.”

      Baldwin’s sigh of relief could have been heard in the dark cacophony of yonder tavern. Sera smiled, but turned her face to Gryphon’s flank so the squire would not see such emotion.

      “Shall we get a room?”

      “Is there one available?”

      “I believe there is.”

      “You have my coin stashed safely?”

      “I do.” He patted his hip where a conglomeration of baldric, gauntlets, leather bone-bag, and wool cape made it impossible to determine just how slender the man really was. He kept her coin in his codpiece, Sera knew, from the rhythmic tink that accompanied his strides.

      “We’ve enough to see us through many months.” Though she prayed this quest would end much sooner. “Go ahead. One room. I shall sleep on the floor.”

      Already eagerly on his way to make arrangements, Baldwin stopped in the doorway. He turned with a pained moan and pinched grimace. “Sera, you know I will not sleep a single wink should you be lying on the floor while I have a straw pallet to cradle my weary bones.”

      “Are you propositioning me, squire?” Sera peeked under her arm to catch his reaction.

      “Why no!”

      He blushed a deep crimson. The two of them had never shared more than a brief nod in passing through her father’s castle, or whispered morning prayers in the chapel. But she had heard of his former profession, the very reason that pressed him to seek atonement by applying to the church. Baldwin Ortolano had done things to survive—cheating, lying, stealing—acts that branded him a criminal. Those same acts also fashioned him imperfectly human. And she certainly needed human right now, imperfections and all.

      “If the bed is wide, we can share. We shall lie so our heads are opposite one another’s feet. What say you?”

      Baldwin lifted a suede-booted foot and rubbed it along his opposite ankle. “I’m not sure…”

      Sera gestured through the air with the brush. “I’ve smelled worse than your feet in my lifetime. Now be gone with you. Run up and find us a room with a fire and have it blazing for me when I return.”

      “Yes, my lady—er, my lord.”

      A while later, Baldwin strode out of the Dragon’s Eye, pleased that his mistress’s coin had purchased them a fine room with a wide bed, fresh water (melted-down snow for washing), and clean straw.

      Sera hadn’t come in from the stables, and an odd twinge of foreboding had prompted him to seek her out. She was, after all, a woman. A young female of four and twenty who should not be left to defend herself against any danger that should approach.

      Oh, he knew Sera was not your average amiable, submissive female. He’d lived at the d’Ange castle for nine months, and in that time had learned Sera had taken over chatelaine duties when she was but twelve. Elsbeth d’Ange, Sera’s mother, had developed twisted joints that would not allow her to do anything with her hands, save brush aside the bed curtains to receive her maids.

      He now knew that affliction had come following the abduction of Elsbeth’s newborn daughter. Faeries, eh? Fine enough, the little winged creatures. But the idea of a changeling, mewling in a newborn’s crib…well, it just gave Baldwin the shivers.

      When Sera could not be found taking accounts in the larder, or purchasing food and fabric at market, or mending clothing, or shearing sheep, she stole a free moment here and there to practice in the lists with her father and brother. An unusual female, Seraphim d’Ange, in that she wanted to do it all. If her brother Antoine could do it, she could as well.

      And her father had encouraged her masculine pursuits. Marcil d’Ange, a stalwart lord possessed of a compassionate but fierce heart, had treated Sera as if a son, but not without the occasional gentle smile and knowing wink.

      Beyond such knowledge of her abilities, the fact that Sera had beheaded two of France’s most notorious villains still troubled Baldwin. When ensconced in the black armor and charging through the roar of battle cries with a steel-clashing sword, Sera rode a strange sorcery that tricked her mind into believing she would succeed.

      Baldwin prayed that sorcery would keep its hold on her until this quest was finished. For if and when she did fall, it would be a hard fall, indeed.

      Just as he had suspected! A strange man leaned over a figure lying on the freshly spiked straw at the end of the stable. Long, narrow legs and wide hands splayed over the nest—he stood over Sera!

      In a cacophony of tinking coins, jangling bones, and breathy huffs, Baldwin dashed through the stable door. He tripped up his feet on a block of wood, righted himself with the expert skill he’d developed since his teen years had seen to stretching his limbs to ridiculous lengths, then scrambled to the end stall where Gryphon was tied.

      Before Baldwin could blurt out an angry shout, the man turned and backed away from Sera, acknowledging the squire with a nod. ’Twas the dark-haired knight that had set Sera to a swoon.

      “That is my lord at rest, and I shall thank you to leave her—er, him at rest.”

      Baldwin knew his eyes bugged at that slip, a response to mistruths he had never been able to tame. Indeed, he’d played a blind toad-eater, wearing a scarf over his eyes to keep the innocents from reading his grift.

      He clutched the bag of bones tied at his waist. For strength. “Pray, tell what you think you are doing, sir?”

      “Forgive me.” The man raised his hands briefly to show he had no ill intentions, then stepped back. “I was just seeking my own resting place for the night. All the rooms are taken.”

      Baldwin