Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [143]
The cloth wrapped around her feet muffled her footsteps and allowed her to move in complete silence. She listened intently as she moved and kept a sharp watch for places she might be able to hide if anyone came along this corridor. But no doors gave onto it except the one at the end, and the only light came from slit windows high up under the ceiling.
The noise was all coming, so far as she could tell, from the opposite side of the villa. And to her delirious joy, the corridor she was in opened not onto a courtyard but onto a bit of graveled yard surrounded by a laid stone wall. And in the center of the yard was a pile of wood, a chopping block, and an ax, left stuck in the block, as if the user had been interrupted. This was the yard that supplied the hypocaust with wood!
With that in her hand it would take more than two or three men to make her a captive again. She ran out into the yard, seeing the mouth of the furnace in the wall to her right as she did so.
She shoved the knife in the bucket, grabbed the ax, and yanked it out; the wall had been built to keep people out, not in; there was a rough way up it by way of the wood stacked against it, and she took it, flinging herself flat on the top of it to avoid being seen.
The wall was built at the top of a steep slope, with woods at the bottom. It was a long way down to the ground. But this height was nothing she hadn’t managed before, so long as she remembered how to fall and tumble. The building she had just left loomed higher than the wall—there was no way to tell what all the ruckus was about. She just hoped it would continue.
Breathing a prayer to Epona, she tipped herself feet-first over the edge, ax in one hand, bucket in the other.
She hit hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to break or sprain her ankles, and she turned the fall into a barely controlled tumble and let the momentum hurtle her down the slope at a pace far faster than she could have run. This came at a cost, of course; stones hidden in the long, rank grasses bruised her ribs as she rolled over them, and she collided abruptly with a tree trunk at the bottom. But still—nothing broke, and she was able to scramble to her feet and duck into the woods.
She felt as if she was on fire with exultation. She was free!
Free, yes. But the trick is to stay free. She paused, panting, to take stock of her situation.
All right, I have no idea of where I am. Or . . . when . . . It could be early spring or autumn. The trees were leafless—
But buds on the branches of the bushes that screened her were greening.
Spring, then. She had been Medraut’s captive for most of the winter. She still didn’t know where she was, and there was no way to find out quickly. Or slowly, for that matter. Assuming she got away, far away, and encountered farmers or a village, she didn’t dare ask anyone, for as soon as it was known that she had escaped, Medraut would have his men out looking for her. Think, girl. East was dangerous. South was the Saxons. North was Lot’s.
All right. No matter where I am, if I go west, eventually I will come to our lands, or at least the lands of Father’s allies. All she had to do was figure out just which way was west.
But first she had to put as much distance between her and that villa as possible, and for that the best answer was to travel directly away from it, no matter which direction that was.
Bucket in one hand, ax in the other, she made herself think calmly and gathered all of her scouting skills together.
Then she slipped into the forest like a phantom.
Those scouting skills returned with every step she took, until she was slipping through the woods as silently as any deer and leaving less trace. Perversely, the fact that her feet were wrapped in rags meant that she left almost no footprints,