At the Queen's Summons by Susan Wiggs Page B

soul of virtue and innocence, an angel in an idealized portrait with her sun-drenched face and halo of hair, the lean purity of her profile, the fullness of her lips as she pursed them in concentration.
    â€œSit down, Your Serenity,” she said softly, still not looking up. “I’ve decided to tell you more because…”
    â€œBecause why?” Willingly shoving aside the news from Ireland, he approached the table and lowered himself to the bench beside her.
    â€œBecause you care.”
    â€œI shouldn’t—”
    â€œYet you do,” she insisted. “You do in spite of yourself.”
    He did not deny it, but crossed his arms on the table and leaned forward. “What is all this?”
    â€œMy things.” She patted the limp, dusty bag she had worn tied to her waist the first day they had met. “It is uncanny how little one actually needs in order to survive. All I ever had fits in this bag. Each object has a special meaning to me, a special significance. If it does not, I get rid of it.”
    She rummaged with her hand in the bag and drew out a seashell, placing it on the table between them. It was shiny from much handling, bleached white on the outsidewhile the inner curve was tinted with pearly shades of pink in graduated intensity.
    â€œI don’t remember ever actually finding this. Mab always said I was a great one for discovering things washed up on shore, and from the time I was very small, I would bring her the most marvelous objects. Apples to juggle, a pessary of wild herbs. One time I found the skull of a deer.”
    She took out a twist of hair, sharply contrasting black and white secured with a bit of string.
    â€œI hope that’s not poor Mab,” Aidan commented.
    She laughed. “Ah, please, Your Magnificence. I am not so bloodthirsty as that.” She stroked the lock. “This is from the dog I was with when Mab found me. Mab swore the beast saved me from drowning. He was half drowned himself, but he revived and lived with us. She said I told her his name was Paul.”
    She propped her chin in her cupped hand and gazed at the whitewashed wall by the window, where the morning sun created colored ribbons of light on the plastered surface. “The dog died four years after Mab found us. I barely remember him, except—” She stopped and frowned.
    â€œExcept what?” asked Aidan.
    â€œDuring storms at night, I would creep over to his pallet and sleep.” She showed him a few more of her treasures—a page from a book she could not read. He saw that it was from an illegal pamphlet criticizing the queen’s plans to marry the Duke of Alençon. “I like the picture,” Pippa said simply, and showed him a few other objects: a ball of sealing wax and a tiny brass bell—“I nicked it from the Gypsy wagon”—flint and steel, a spoon.
    It was, Aidan realized with a twinge of pity, the flotsam and jetsam of a hard life lived on the run.
    And then, almost timidly, she displayed things recently collected: his horn-handled knife, which he hadn’t the heart to reclaim; an ale weight from Nag’s Head Tavern.
    She looked him straight in the eye with a devotion that bordered discomfitingly on worship. “I have saved a memento of each day with you,” she told him.
    A tightness banded across his chest. He cleared his throat. “Indeed. Have you naught else to show me?”
    She took her time putting all her treasures back in the bag. She worked so slowly and so deliberately that he felt an urge to help her, to speed her up.
    The message he had received still burned in his mind. He had a potential disaster awaiting him in Ireland, and here he sat, reminiscing with a confused, possibly deluded girl.
    The letter had come all the way from Kerry, first by horseman to Cork and then by ship. Revelin, the gentle scholar of Innisfallen, had sounded the alarm about a band of outlaws roving across Kerry,