“My lord! Please, you must wake up!” Garron opened his eyes and stared up into his squire’s white face hovering above him, seeming somehow detached, floating. “Thanks be to all God’s blessed angels, you are alive! Oh, considerate and generous Lord who occasionally hears his servants’ prayers, I will burn a hundred candles to your blessed Holy Mother for saving my sweet master. What happened, my lord?” He frowned up at Gilpin, whose head was once again sitting on his neck, and tried to make sense of what had happened. He said, “I was gone, where, I do not know. Somehow, she sent me away.” “She, my lord?” “The witch was within the tower. She said she was Merry’s mother, but she couldn’t be, Gilpin, she was young and beautiful, all golden and white, but her eyes were this cold ancient gray, like an old tombstone, or dirty ice. She drugged me, the bitch must have rubbed some poison into my skin when she stroked my face.” He remembered her fingers pressing into his flesh and shook his head.
