“Surely, Don Sancho, a bachelor like you cannot be so ungallant as to imprison a lady.”
“A lady! A woman! God’s mercy! what does this mean? Who has dared to deceive me?”
“I,” answered the Infanta. “Shower your wrath on me, your kinswoman. May I not be a deceiver when so many of my blood excel? The queen, for instance? Now look at me, Sancho, and let this folly end.”
And the king did look, and into a most towering passion he fell, using more bad language than I care to repeat.
“A curse upon you!” are his first intelligible words. “Where is that villain, your husband?”
“In Castile,” she answers, “or far on the way. Never fear, he will soon return to settle accounts with you.”
“False woman,” and the king, fuming with a sense of intolerable wrong at having been made such a fool of, lifts his hand as if to strike her, “learn to fear my vengeance!”
“Not I,” is her answer, laughing again. “You dare do nothing to me, and my loved lord is free, skimming like a fleet bird over the plains. I fear you not, you dastard king!”
Consigning the Infanta into the hands of the palace guards, Don Sancho rushed off to the apartments of the queen. For once that wicked woman was powerless. No one dared harm Doña Ava, especially as rapid news soon spread of the wild joy with which Fernan had been received in Burgos, and that, at the head of his army, he was marching on Leon.
On the other hand, the dark King of Navarre, hard pressed by the Moors, executing forays into the north, as the safety of his daughter was at stake, refused to use his troops for her capture; thus the King of Leon was left alone to bear the brunt of the attack, pillaging, demolishing, and burning in true mediæval style.