Authors: Carmella Jones
Agnes herself was a fine specimen as well. She had black hair with a wild curl, a sensuous and full body with skin as pale as milk. Her father had no shortage of marriage offers, but he declined them all to keep his little girl close at hand until the right opportunity presented itself, but now it never would. At least, not unless her father could see the error of his ways and beg the good people of Scotland to forgive him for his trespasses, though considering the hostility with which she was met, she wouldn't hold her breath that her father would ever be welcomed back into the homeland.
Even though Agnes could appreciate the finer features on this man, she was more than a little annoyed that he just unceremoniously stuck his hand down her corset. Maybe his hands were chaste and didn't do anything untoward, but she was still annoyed. Despite her frowns, he didn't seem too fazed, and he just continued to look down at the paper as Agnes stared unhappily at his visage.
Once he was done reading, which took about twenty minutes, the man stacked all the papers neatly on the corner of the table, then looked at Agnes, meeting her hard expression unblinkingly.
"Why is it exactly that you want to join our ranks?" he asked.
"I've already explained this once to you. But if you want an encore then luckily the reason is simple. I wish to help Scotland fight against oppression," Agnes replied, a tinge of annoyance audible in her voice.
"And why is that?" the man asked.
"Because my father failed to do the job himself. As his only child, I feel like I must pick up the pieces that my father left behind," Agnes replied confidently.
"And the best way you decided that you could pick up the pieces, as you say, is to waltz into the country dressed like some English duchess without the least attempt for a disguise? Do you realize how conspicuous that makes you seem?"
Agnes just looked at the man with a genuine sense of curiosity. "No. I am here to save my country and countrymen. Why would I have to hide my face or disguise myself? Only assassins and ne’er-do-wells attempt to keep their identity a secret," Agnes replied calmly. "Why do you think that my behavior is strange? That is the real question that should be asked, in my opinion."
"Have you never left your father's estate, woman? You are dense," the man said.
This made Agnes' temper flare. She had borne much from this man, but his insults were getting to be a bit more than she could suffer with a smile. "I'm not dense! I have left my father's estate before. Just because I may not be cultured in this air of mystery and mistrustfulness is no means by which you should feel this prejudice. I am not a person who has spent her life learning what it is to be of the common folk. Perhaps that is my greatest sin. But my ignorance is not stupidity!"
The man considered this for a moment. Agnes was not a pleasure to speak with, but he was starting to like her despite that. She was a passionate and fiery woman with the strength of her convictions. For good or for worse.
"Woman, what is your first name?" the man asked quietly.
"Agnes. And yours?"
"Faolan," he replied. He hesitated slightly to give away his name, as if debating if it were a good idea. Thankfully, he ultimately did decide in her favor.
"That's an unusual name," Agnes replied, though in all honesty she was not the most cultured woman. She certainly hadn't met a large enough sampling of people to say that she knew what a common name was versus an uncommon one.
"My father bore this name, as did his father before him," Faolan replied.
"Is the name popular in this area, outside of your family?" Agnes asked.
"I've never heard anyone go by the name. But that doesn't mean much," Faolan replied, then stood and eyed over Agnes for a moment. "If I untie you, and you try anything funny, I will take appropriate action against you," Faolan said. The only thing that Agnes heard from that, however, was that she was being untied.
"It's about time! I was starting to get sore, just staying in this position all day! It's terrible that you'd treat a lady like this, you know!" Agnes replied, and Faolan merely rolled his eyes as he stood and began undoing the knots.
Once she was free, Agnes stood up and just stretched her taut and abused muscles. In doing so, her loose corset fell to the ground, but Agnes didn't care too much about that at the moment. What did catch her attention, however, was the sound of papers fluttering after hitting the floor.
"What were those?" Faolan's voice was a bit tenser when he spoke this time, as if he were accusing Agnes of hiding something. If she were trying to hide, she would be doing a really bad job by first instructing Faolan to take those papers, and then dropping them on the floor while she stretched. But she didn't say that of course, and instead she just leaned over and picked them up.
"These are some of the documents I had thought you already picked up off of my person. They must have been deeper in my corset than the others. Let's see," Agnes mused, looking over the papers. As she did, her eyes widened.
"What?" Faolan demanded, and snatched the papers out of Agnes' hand effortlessly.
"An attack is being launched on this village tomorrow," Agnes said, but Faolan just focused his attention on the document wholly and read until he saw the orders that Agnes had read herself. This was not good news, not at all.
"I have to organize a search party. Agnes, stay here--" Faolan began.
"I didn't travel all these miles to be told to wait in a dingy basement, Faolan. I'm going to go to the frontlines and fight, if I am useful there. If not, I'm going to go wherever I can be useful and offer up my labor there. You can't just ignore me and tell me that I should be staying in the basement, when I'm the only reason that you're going to be able to prepare for this attack and fortify your town.”
"I would have appreciated it if you would have gotten here a week ago with this information," Faolan replied, his brow furrowing in an annoyed expression.
"Well, perhaps if I had known that this was going to happen, I would have been here sooner. But I haven't had the time to do anything but travel after I stole those documents, because I was trying to get here as fast as possible. Even if I had read them, I couldn't have gotten here any faster than I did. If I pushed myself further still, then I would have probably ridden my horse to death," Agnes replied indignantly.
"Fine, you did your best. But this situation is pretty terrible," Faolan said, and bit his lower lip as he mulled over what he should do.
"Do you have a decent number of men who are capable of a little hard work with some shovels?" Agnes asked. Faolan seemed to have momentarily frozen in his thought, but Agnes realized that they didn't have time for long preponderances over different courses of action. Therefore, she was going to take charge and help Faolan help himself, because he seemed in need of that sort of intervention.
"Yes. What does that have to do with anything?" Faolan asked, and if Agnes was hallucinating, she could have sworn that she heard a guttural growling noise emerging from Faolan's throat.
"Scotland will attack with cavalry. If you dig a shallow moat around town and put sharpened sticks facing outwards from the mote, then you'll be able to stop them from entering the town on horseback. Sure, that's not going to stop the raid, but it would be an invaluable advantage to have," Agnes replied. Though perhaps she wasn't as smart on the streets, or in her conduct as a refugee, she at least was very learned in books. She had learned this strategy from an old book on Norse battle tactics, and she never actually thought that it would be applicable in any way in her life, other than just a sort of metaphorical sense. Today, that was proven wrong.
Faolan was a bit in shock as he realized that Agnes had actually proposed a great idea, and so he just nodded. "By God, you may be onto something," he said, and ran upstairs. Agnes followed him, and entered the ground floor of the small cottage in which she had been locked up. The place was nice. Everything was tidy, there was the smell of food that had been prepared not too long ago, and the hearth was lit to boil some stew for supper.
Seeing all this, Agnes assumed that Faolan was a married man, which might have gone some way to explaining why he was so skittish when he reached his hand into Agnes' corset to pull out the documents. Agnes herself wasn't the biggest fan of his decision to do that. Having him invade her space like that was uncomfortable to say the least, but perhaps he was worried that his actions might have been thought of as a betrayal to his wife? That was a romantic notion, at least.
The woman was nowhere to be seen in the cottage at present, though. She was likely out getting water or milking the cow. Either way, she wasn't present, and so Agnes couldn't relax and ask a few questions about the state of the town or the country without scrutiny. Therefore, she went out in search of Faolan, who had run off in a hurry to recruit citizens to help dig the moat. Though she wasn't as strong of back as the younger boys in the village, Agnes could either help supervise or help dig.
Chapter Three
Once Agnes found Faolan in the streets, she saw he was doing quite an admirable job giving orders, delegating everyone their set tasks. For a moment, she hesitated to interrupt him, because in her mind she had assumed that she would easily be able to take charge in this situation and lead everyone to victory. It was embarrassing to be so consistently wrong about so many things. This was definitely a humbling experience on many levels for her.
Regardless, she did work up the courage to speak with Faolan. " I'm ready to take my orders, sir," she said. Though her fantasies revolved around her helping to lead this rebellion, she knew good and well that Faolan was the one who deserved the job when she saw everyone in town respond to his orders by jumping on the command.
"You're ready? You should be in my basement," Faolan growled. "What are you doing running around in this confusion?" She was still dressed in a European fashion, and her clothes were suspiciously fine to be a woman of this poor town. Someone would think she was a British woman who had managed to slip in and was preparing to stir up trouble. The possibility was certainly there for that to happen.
"I told you I wouldn't stay locked up. I want to help," Agnes replied stubbornly.
"You want to help? Fine. Stay out of the way," Faolan responded, and Agnes just gritted her teeth and dug her heels into the dirt.
"I'm not going to be ordered into the house, Faolan. I'm going to help you. Honestly, is this how you treat someone who brought you news of the war front that may save your entire town?" she asked.
Faolan just gritted his teeth. She noticed then that he had some unusually large canines, but made no comment on it. Still, they were unsettling. Her mind fancied that canines like those were things that only vampires could boast, yet here Faolan stood in the open sunlight, so he couldn't be any mythical monster of old. Those were only fairy tales, anyways.
"I will dig, if there's no other occupation for me. Or sharpen sticks. Whatever I can put my hands to doing," Agnes said proudly, but then softened her voice a little and added, "Please, Faolan. I didn't come all the way back to Scotland to sit on my rear. If that's all that I wanted to do, I wouldn't have left home."
Faolan let out a sigh at that and nodded. "Very well. Collect the sticks for the pit and sharpen them," he said.
With these orders given, Agnes went out of the town and set her mind to collecting sticks of two or three meters. She would get together a bundle of these sticks and bring them back into town and leave them with some women who were tasked with sharpening them.
Along with Agnes, only a few children were set on the task of getting the sticks, because this was the least labor intensive of the jobs. Still, after ten or more trips out into the woods, Agnes felt her arms and legs ache from the foreign experience of putting in an honest day's work. But she was not done that easily.
Once enough sticks were collected, the women sharpening had still not finished getting all of the branches to a fine point, but Agnes and the children began planting them in the parts of the ditch that had been dug out so far. She and the children made at least twenty trips carefully transporting the sticks, making sure that they did not break off any of the well-chiseled tips in transit.
No sooner did the other workers finish in their labors than did Agnes and the children manage to make their last trip, and they carefully planted these spikes just like they had the hundreds before. Though their limbs were exhausted and screaming to be left alone, and though they just wanted to rest, they finished planting the spikes before they returned inside the walls of the town.
At least at this point, Faolan no longer had to worry about Agnes making the townspeople suspicious with her appearance. Perhaps she was a lot curvier because of the better diet she could afford to consume, so she was still an anomaly in that regard. However, no one's head would be turned because of her outfit after the day's work she put in going out into the woods.
She shuffled back to the old inn that was close to the entrance and asked if she could still have her room. The inn keeper, the old network of wrinkles and creases that she was, still managed to smile at the question.
"Go ahead. You have earned it," she replied. The amount of work that Agnes did for the town did not go unnoted in the eyes of the townsfolk. She worked as hard as anyone to protect a town that she had just come to, despite being actively discouraged by Faolan.
Given that permission, Agnes went upstairs to lay down her head, and no sooner than that, she was asleep. The nerves for the upcoming battle the next day made her sleep a light and fitful one, however, and when the slightest amount of light entered her room, she got up and set off for the day.