Excerpt: Sage in Winter

Brenna’s wedding dress was made of fine silk, with vines and roses embroidered throughout the entire pattern. It was lovely; perhaps the most beautiful dress she had ever seen. It was also completely useless when tied to bed sheets and tossed out the window to be used as an escape ladder. Naturally, she didn’t discover this until she was laying flat on her back on the ground below and staring dazedly above her for a few moments before letting out a rather pathetic groan of pain. After all, it wasn’t the sort of thing they covered when they were teaching embroidery and dance and the like. They didn’t say, “And, by the way, you won’t want to climb out a window using this material for a ladder. No, I would suggest you use something a little coarser. Perhaps a muslin.”
Once she had her wind back, Brenna determined that nothing was probably broken or damaged too badly. She might have some fine bruises in the morning, but that was no excuse to simply stop functioning. When one was running away, one couldn’t let little things, like falling down a storey, slow one down. She rolled onto her side, closing her eyes and pausing for a moment as she waited to adjust to the pain, and then pushed herself to her feet, dusting off the men’s breeches and doublet she’d slipped on. They weren’t entirely comfortable, and she felt a bit awkward in them, but she hadn’t imagined it would be the simplest task in the world to climb down bed sheets in one of the fancy dresses in her wardrobe. Anyway, it seemed to her that she might make it farther if she was dressed as a lad. Women, particularly ladies in fine garments, did not go gallivanting about alone on trips across the country.
She picked up her bag and pulled from it the hat she’d found to go with the outfit. It was floppy green velvet with a rather sad looking pheasant’s feather sticking out the top, and it certainly wasn’t the most fashionable thing she’d ever seen, but she wasn’t intending to sport all of the latest men’s fashions at court. Anyway, it served it’s most important purpose, which was to at least partially disguise her identity. She tucked her brown curls up into the hat and then hoisted the bag to one shoulder, slinking off as silently as possible toward the stables.
Stealth was one more of those things they didn’t teach when they told young ladies how to write a pretty letter or how to hold a cup of tea, but fortunately, it was the middle of the night, so most everyone was asleep, and the soft summer grass around the castle made very little noise to begin with.
When she reached the stables, she paused outside the door and closed her eyes, saying a silent prayer for stealth and luck. The stable lads slept up in the hayloft, and she would have to take extra care to be silent once she passed through the door. If she were to upset one of the horses, well, that would be the end of that. Though she did wonder, briefly, what they would have her married in if they caught her. She’d made rather a mess of that wedding dress, after all.
Taking a breath to steady herself, she crept through the door of the stables and walked slowly down the aisle until she came to her horse, a quiet, dowdy looking chestnut pony named Genny. She slipped her a lump of sugar as a sort of bribe and very carefully began to saddle her. Once that was done, she tied her bag to the saddle and then reached behind the trough and pulled out her lute. Perhaps being a lady didn’t endow one with the most useful of skills, but music, she thought, was one she could turn to her advantage. Not only could she pose as a traveling musician, but she could even play a pretty enough tune to make it convincing. The instrument had a bit of hay on it, but that was easily enough fixed. Anyway, she thought it was probably in much better condition than if she had dropped it from her window with her bag. She had a sudden image of falling onto the lute and the damage it would have done to it, and to her, and thought she had maybe been wise to hide it in the stables. Latching it to the saddle as well, she took Genny by the reigns and led her out of the stables. True to her nature, Genny was as quiet and mild mannered as ever. Once they cleared the doors and gained some distance from the castle toward the forest park that lay on one side, Brenna patted Genny’s neck and whispered, “There. That’s a fine horse. Just a few steps more and I’ll give you an apple for your troubles.”
Getting to the trees was the next crucial part of the plan. Then, at least, they would be out of plain sight. Brenna bit her lip as she thought of all the worries to come after that. She still had a great deal of ground to cover in very little time if she hoped to get a head start, and there were many disadvantages on her side. Her disguise was flimsy, at best, and Genny had no disguise at all. If her horse was recognized, she was as good as caught. And then, aside from all of the normal problems a runaway fiancé might face, there was the problem of Nikola. Nikola Von Hesson was no normal man. It was him she had to worry about.