My Man Godric by R. Cooper Page A

shivered at the cold evening air,
or perhaps at the thought of those left behind, though he couldn’t
let himself dwell on that, not now. Beyond the doorway lay safety,
rescue, and the love of his life. He knew that, but he stopped with
his hand out, letting the warmth that radiated out from inside the
tent reach his clumsy, half-frozen fingers. He shivered again. This
truly was not how he’d meant things to go.
    Godric’s captain, the blond-haired,
perpetually unhappy man-at-arms at Bertie’s side paused too, quite
obviously stopping himself from prodding Bertie forward, perhaps
recalling Bertie’s rank just in time.
    Bertie’s rank was a thing that Bertie had a
feeling many forgot, either due to his dress or his careless
manners, but Bertie had never much minded the slights. He was well
aware that he had no talent for governance or war craft as his
brother had. The opinions of others, of most others, had
long since ceased to matter much to him.
    Nonetheless, he opened his mouth to lick his
regrettably cracked and dry lips. Wiping a hand over his face and
feeling stubble at his jaw made him wince, as did the quick
finger-comb of his short hair. Even with his reputation, knowing
the world often thought him useless, the king’s illegitimate
half-brother, the princeling with a love of needlework and feminine
clothing, at this moment, he could not help but fret over his
appearance and wish himself someone else, someone braver and more
worthy.
    Then he heard the children behind him
suppress a tired complaint and an elderly steward shift against the
branch that had served as his crutch, and he raised his chin and
stopped his dithering. The captain next to him seemed to still and
Bertie glanced at him, narrowing his eyes in a fair approximation
of his brother’s manner.
    His tone however, was all his own.
    “You will see to my people, will you not,
Captain?” he inquired sweetly, imploringly, and yet well aware that
he would not be denied. He did not wait for the inevitable
agreement. There was only one answer any man could give to
Aethelbert of Clas Draigoch, and that was yes .
    Unless of course that man was Godric of the
South.
    Bertie put a hand to his stomach to quell
its excitement, though heat was rising in his cheeks and he was
trembling like the last remaining leaves in the trees around
them.
    Godric .
    He pushed inside the tent with sudden
impatience, forgetting about both his fears and his impossible
fantasies of collapsing into his beloved’s arm the moment he
realized he would actually get to see Godric if he moved
forward. Godric was here. Close and real and alive.
    Also probably irritated with Bertie as
usual. He would be polite, spare with his words, but distant.
    Bertie stumbled at the thought, worn to the
bone, but held up a hand to ward off attempts to help him so he
could look past the council of knights gathered around a table. He
ignored every startled look of recognition and surprised, hurried
bow until he found his target, his treasure, the straightening
figure at the other end of the room.
    Sir Godric of the South. The hero of Bohdon.
The Master of the Horse and Captain of the King’s Guard. Stable boy
turned soldier turned knight, honored and feared even in the lands
beyond the sea for his courage and wisdom, and, if rumor were true,
the one man the king turned to for honesty aside from his foolish,
bastard brother, and the one man the Green Men from the East were
said to want dead more than any other.
    He was, on his feet, about half a head
shorter than most of the other men in the room and mere inches
shorter than the Hereditary Count Vonridii, the lone woman present.
He had untamed pale hair, rich with silver, which thinned slightly
above the temples, and piercing eyes for all that their color was
an unremarkable brown.
    He wore plain, likely itchy, coarsely-made
breeches, and a shirt with sleeves so short his forearms were bare,
revealing soldier’s tattoos, the work of a tiny needle and