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“So I won’t marry.” Bria shrugged Mary’s arm from her shoulders and raced off through the clearing.
Mary followed her through the tall stalks of grass. “You have to marry! You’re a lady! That’s your place -- to produce heirs.”
“What if my place isn’t to produce heirs? What if my place is... to battle against tyranny?”
Mary giggled.
Bria stopped, striking a statuesque pose with her hands on her hips. “I am the Midnight Shadow!” she proclaimed in a deep voice.
“You sound like a woman.”
“How’s this?” Bria lowered her voice to a husky whisper. “I am the Midnight Shadow.”
“That’s pretty good,” Mary admitted, amazed and surprised. “I think you’ve been practicing.”
Bria smiled. Sometimes alone at night, she did. “Tyranny will not be tolerated!” she whispered. “All people will be treated fairly.”
Mary grunted, the humor leaving her. “Then you’d have to battle Lord Knowles.”
Bria broke her pose. “Now what has he done?”
“He increased our taxes again.”
“Not so!” Bria gasped. That was the second time in a month. Trying to come up with the extra food to pay the collectors had been hard enough, but now it would be next to impossible for Mary’s family to have a decent living.
“Mother and Father work so hard. They’re up before dawn and work well into the night. I help as much as I can...” Mary shook her head, her dark locks swaying over her face. “But it’s never enough. Lord Knowles always wants more, more, more.”
Bria had no words to console her friend. She wished Mary lived on her lands, under her father’s rule.
“Someone has to do something!”
Bria was shocked by the conviction in Mary’s voice, the passion.
“It’s not fair that we should have to work day and night! If Mother or Father get sick, we’ll starve!” Mary sighed. “If only the Midnight Shadow were real. He’d do something about this.”
Bria remembered a time when she’d wished for the Midnight Shadow, too -- when her father had gone off to war to fight the French and Randolph Kenric threw her into the bramble patch. She put an arm around Mary’s shoulders. “I wish I could do something to help –”
Suddenly the sound of a man’s laughter rang out through the forest. A second man’s voice spoke quietly.
Silence settled around them again and the two girls glanced at each other.
“Let’s go find out who it is,” Bria whispered, feeling brave in the darkness.
“No,” Mary gasped. “What if it’s robbers?”
“They won’t see us. Come on, Mary.” Bria tugged her friend toward the voices, pulling her into a group of thick bushes near a small dirt road.
An elderly woman’s voice drifted over to them from the road. “I don’t understand why you’re bringing me here this late at night.”
“It’s necessary,” a man replied.
Bria peered through the leaves. An old gray-haired woman stood near a man in the pale moonlight. She was dressed in a plain brown gown, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. The man had his back to her, so Bria could not see his face. His leggings were black, his tunic pale. But what captured Bria’s attention was the sword strapped to his waist. Bria swung her gaze down the road before them and saw another man not far away -- a soldier, she guessed, by the chainmail he was wearing -- but his tunic had no crest, no allegiance. He held the reins of two horses.
“Well, what is it you want?” the old woman demanded. “I’m sure it could have waited until morning.”
“It’s Widow Anderson,” Mary whispered. “The herbalist.”
Bria nodded.
