Desire Lines (Welsh Blades, #3)

by Elizabeth Kingston

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  DESIRE LINES

  First edition. March 21, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Elizabeth Kingston.

  Cover by The Killion Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  Character List & Other Notes

  Aderinyth

  Chapter One

  1277

  Chapter Two

  1277

  Chapter Three

  1280

  Chapter Four

  1281

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  1282

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  1283

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  For Taffy

  If they don’t give you a way, love, then make one.

  Character List & Other Notes

  WELSH BLADES CHARACTERS

  Lady Eluned - Lady of Darian, Gwenllian’s mother

  Lord Robert (de Lascaux) - Lord of Darian

  William (Will) - Lord of Ruardean, Eluned’s son

  Robin Manton - son of Lord Robert’s best friend

  Gwenllian - Lady of Morency

  Ranulf - Lord of Morency

  Sir Gerald - a knight of Morency

  HISTORICAL FIGURES

  Edward I, King of England

  Llewellyn, last Prince of Wales

  Dafydd, Llewellyn’s brother

  FICTIONAL PLACES

  Darian: Lord Robert’s lands in Wales

  Dinwen: Eluned’s childhood home, now part of Darian

  Morency: Ranulf’s lands in Suffolk

  Ruardean: Will’s lands in the Welsh Marches

  PRONUNCIATIONS (simplified)

  Eluned: Ell-in-id

  Gruffydd: Griffith

  Gwenllian: Gwen-lee-an

  Iorwerth: Yor-worth

  Rhodri: Rod-ree

  Rhys: Reese

  Desire lines (or desire paths): a planning term referring to the paths created by pedestrians or cyclists when a constructed route is unsatisfactory or nonexistent

  Aderinyth

  Philip Walch was his favorite, because he only cared about the birds. Not who was in command, or how high or low anyone’s birth, or if you were English or Welsh or Norman. All that mattered were the birds and how you treated them.

  “Do we have to sew his eyes shut?”

  “They are not like men,” answered Phillip. “A falcon is calmed by the dark. Her fears do not live in the night.”

  Her. Gryff looked down at the covered basket he’d insisted on carrying once they’d caught the falcon not far from its nest. He would have looked under the cloth to see it again, if Philip hadn’t warned him they must wait until they were back in the mews. Females were the fiercer hunters, everyone knew that.

  “Where do her fears live, then, if not in the dark?”

  This made Philip Walch smile, but he didn’t laugh at Gryff. He was never cruel. “She knows naught of fear, and never will. You have heard us speak of their fear when they are handled, if you move too fast or cause them harm. But it’s not fear such as we have. A bird will trust you, or it will not. Now she does not know or trust any man, and so we say she fears us. It is our arrogance, that we see our own fearful hearts in them so that we may say we conquer that fear.”

  Gryff knew already that there was no conquering. Not with any of the falcons, or the hawks. It was a partnership, always: the man took care of the bird and in return, the bird would hunt for the man.

  “Then why must her eyes be stitched closed?” he insisted. This was his chance to learn as much as he could and he intended not to waste it. His father gave each of his sons one spring and summer of their boyhood to catch and train a bird with the master falconer so that they could learn the art of it. But after that, Gryff must return to only hunting with a trained bird, instead of devoting every hour to their care and keeping.

  “I see no greater merit in the old way of seeling closed the eyes. It’s the hood she’ll wear, and a dark room she’ll stay in, so that we need do no stitching.” They had reached the mews, and Philip pushed the door open for Gryff to enter. “It is done because she sees more in one glance than you will ever see in your life. All of this is strange to her, and is best she become accustomed slowly. You will see.”

  They were careful in lifting her out, Philip’s hands gently closing over her wings and his voice soothing as he instructed Gryff to attach the jesses to her legs. It was hard to see in the gloom and Gryff sweated all the while, afraid of doing it wrong, worried she would bite him. She was only a little more than a baby, just beginning to venture from the nest when they caught her, but she looked at him with eyes that seemed ancient. It made him feel much younger than his seven years.

  “There she is,” said Philip approvingly, when Gryff had attached the leash and handed it over. At a glance, the falcon seemed perfectly calm. But anyone could feel she was ready to bate and scream, to bolt away from them for as far as the leash would let her. Only Philip’s practiced hands kept her still.

  Gryff found the hood and held it up.

  “I will train her, truly?” he asked, and Philip nodded. He could hardly believe he’d be allowed that much time at the task, for it took weeks. Every hour of the day must be spent in the mews with her. He had heard Philip tell his father already that Gryff was possessed of a falconer’s steady temperament, unusually patient and observant for such a young boy. It made him glow with pride when he heard it.

  “How long until she is tame?”

  “You will both be trained, but is only you who will be tamed, little fool.” It was affectionate, but serious. There were few who were permitted to call Gryff a fool, though he was only a boy. But Philip could. “You could raise her from the egg and still she would not think you her master. Never will she truly need you. She will stay with you so long as it suits her. But she will never be tame.”

  They began the long process of coaxing the falcon to accept the hood. All the while, Philip explained that the fiercer the creature, the more gentle must be the man, or they would never be in accord. This was why his father wanted him to learn this art, so that he would know what it was to be a servant to one who served you, to have dominance but never complete control.

  Gryff looked at the bright eyes of the young falcon, and was glad it could never be tame.

  Chapter One

  1288

  It began in beauty and in blood.

  He saw her face in an improbable moment, amid chaos and carnage – startling blue eyes and a soft mouth set in perfect, graceful lines – and then he saw the blood. Not a drop of it touched her. It was all around her, and all of her own doing. Ferocity and beauty, that’s how it began.

  At first he only saw men dropping on the road, an incomprehensible sight. Eight men, vicious criminals, who had lain in wait behind the trees and sprung themselves on the small party with whom she traveled. They had done everything as they always did, Baudry and his
men. Their habit was to fall on the armed knights first, while the women and children screamed in terrified confusion. It was always over quickly.

  But this time Baudry and his men only crumpled to the ground one after the other, though it was clearly not the armed knights who caused it. Gryff looked up to the trees for archers, but there were none. This was not a rain of arrows. The horses reared and the women screamed and the attackers merely fell down dead, as though from a plague.

  She was the plague.

  In the moment he realized it, she looked at him. Briefly, her eyes came to rest on Gryff where he stood beside the road and somehow she did not kill him too. He had raised his hands without thinking, arms extended and palms open, as though he could halt her with a gesture – or at least show he was unarmed. She saw it, just a blink down to his hands and back up to his face again before she was turning away. It was fast. She was so fast, in a way that made him think of a snake striking at its prey. Even before she had finished turning away from him, she drew a fresh blade from somewhere and threw it at Cuddy. Impossibly, it found the half inch gap in his hard leather collar and sank into his throat.

  Fitting, for Cuddy to die on his knees with naught but a look of surprise. Even more fitting, that it was the hand of a woman that did it. All that violent lust was ended at last with the almost leisurely flick of a woman’s wrist, and her barely looking at him as she did it.

  Gryff watched him die, trying and failing to relish it. It was all too sudden. One minute he had been bracing himself to watch as Baudry and his men slaughtered yet another group of innocent people, and the next minute – this.

  Cuddy was the last to fall. Now she stood with her back to Gryff as she looked over the scene, and he did the same. Baudry and all his men were in the road, lifeless. Among the travelers, one of the knights was injured and the other appeared dead. A woman clutched two children to her while one of the unarmed men of the traveling party stumbled over bodies to reach her. The last was a monk with a bloodied eye and a stunned look.

  The beautiful woman took it all in at a glance and turned back to Gryff. Now he saw she was a young maid. She wore no veil, and she was slim and straight, few womanly curves on her slight frame. There was no distress in her. No fear, no sign of what she’d just done. Months he’d spent with these murderous men, and he had learned something about this kind of unceremonious violence, and the kind of person capable of it. Her brows drew together, a look of concern or curiosity or both as she met his eyes again. It made her seem entirely human for the first time.

  He tried to tell her that he wasn’t one of the thieves, but it came out as a weak and wordless croak. She was coming toward him with a purpose. He was strangely calm about it, though he didn’t want to die. Not yet. Let him go home first, just once. He only wanted to see his home again in this life.

  If he died like this he couldn’t even be buried there. No one would know it was where he belonged. Even in death, he could not go home.

  The panic only came on him in the moment she stumbled. It was Baudry himself – not dead after all – reaching up from his place on the ground as she stepped over him. He grasped her leg and pulled her down and Gryff saw suddenly how small she was. Baudry was more than twice her size, and she disappeared completely beneath his bulk.

  “No!” Gryff shouted it over and over, as though that might do any good. He could not reach them, though he tried. The rope that attached his ankle to a tree barely allowed him up onto the road, but he strained against it anyway. He could be no help to her or to anyone, the state he was in, but he had seen her face as Baudry pulled her down. She had not expected it. She had had no weapon in her hand. She was so small. She would die and be left broken and lifeless in the road, and so he shouted, “No! No!”

  But somehow it was Baudry who died. Gryff only saw the broad back, muscles contracting, undoubtedly moving to snap her neck, and then he was motionless. Baudry became a lump of heavy flesh that she struggled to push off.

  In the end, she had to slide out from beneath his dead weight. Now there was blood on her. The shoulder of her very fine woolen gown was soaked in it. None of it was hers.

  “By what mischance are you tied to a tree?”

  The uninjured man of the traveling party had appeared beside him, completely unnoticed. He looked to be a merchant of some kind. The monk was tending to the wounded knight, the woman and children huddled near. This merchant disregarded all of it and greeted Gryff like it was a perfectly normal afternoon.

  He must think of some way to explain it.

  “They have held me as prisoner.” He felt on the verge of babbling. Too much relief, too much fear and uncertainty. The girl had turned back to the scattered bodies in the road, leaning down to each one in turn as a little dog scurried among them. “Since the Epiphany. Just before. Two days before.”

  “They sought your ransom?” The man looked doubtful, and with good reason: Gryff knew he looked even worse than the thieves. Dirty and ragged, more bones than flesh, clothes that were never more than rags, and wearing no cloak in this cold – only a fool would think anyone would pay money for his release.

  “Nay,” he said finally. “Not ransom. They kept me. As a servant, of sorts.”

  He found he could not say more. There was too much to explain and a kind of creeping fear was coming over him in the calm. He watched the girl as she went among the bodies. He kept expecting another one to rise up when her back was turned, and come for him this time. It seemed impossible that Baudry and his men and all their torment were finished, in only a few short minutes.

  But they were dead. She was pulling free the weapons that had killed them. They were strange short knives with no hilt, the blade a few inches long with only a flat circle of metal where the handle should be. Instead of a handle there was a small hole where she inserted something like a nail to pull the blade free. It was the only way to get enough grip, he saw, especially when the blade was slick red and buried deep.

  “I am Alfred Brant,” said the man at his side, and looked at him expectantly.

  Names. This was conversation. This was how people spoke to one another when they met. He remembered it. It shouldn’t be so hard to do.

  “Gruffydd,” he said without thinking, swallowing the ab Iorwerth in time. But it was too late. His name was enough.

  “You are Welsh?”

  It was no crime only to be Welsh. Not here, anyway. So he said, “Aye, born of a Welshman. I’m called Gryff. Just Gryff.”

  “Well met, Gryff, and God give you good morrow. There is a priory ahead, not two miles. They’ll bury our dead and care for Sir Gerald,” he said with a nod toward the injured knight. “And for you, do you come with us.”

  Alfred had a kindly face, as though that meant anything. Gryff looked at it for too long without speaking. He knew it was too long, but he could not help it. Words seemed almost as foreign as the idea that he might be able to move among decent people again, and have food to eat and not fear he would be killed in his sleep.

  “Better you share the road with us than journey alone,” Alfred advised with a patient look, and Gryff finally nodded. It was better. Safer. And he did not know where else to go. He did not even know where exactly he was.

  “First I must... There’s something,” he said, gesturing to the trees behind him. “It wants only a moment. Not far. If you will cut me free of this rope.”

  “There are more of your company?” asked Alfred, his kindly face turned hard. “They wait for you?”

  “Nay.” He said it with a shake of his head so vehement that it likely damned him. “On my soul, I swear it. There is only what few things were theirs, and the hawks. I must bring the hawks. I cannot leave them. Go ahead if you will, only free me and I will meet you on the road before you have gone even half a mile.”

  There was only suspicion in the man’s face. Gryff did not know what to do. He could not even contemplate leaving the birds behind, alone. He stared at this stranger who seemed to want him to choose
between his own freedom and the hawks. But there was no choice. He could not leave them.

  So they looked at each other, Alfred with suspicion and Gryff silently pleading, until suddenly the girl was there. She pulled a long and elegant knife from her boot, knelt down without a word, and cut the rope that Baudry had tied around his ankle not an hour ago. Her eyes swept over him when she stood, taking in the threadbare tunic he wore, the lack of cloak, the shoes that were hardly worthy of the name. She looked a long time at his face – silent, always silent. Was she a mute?

  In her, there was no suspicion. It was something else. Compassion, he thought. It had been so long since he had seen it that he almost did not recognize it.

  In the same moment he saw it, she turned her eyes to Alfred and some understanding passed between them. She had no words, it seemed, but she held sway among this party. Alfred nodded at her and walked to where the others were gathered around the injured knight. The girl went to the mule that had stood calm and imperturbable throughout the attack. She reached into a pack on its saddle and pulled out a round loaf of bread, stepped forward, and handed it to Gryff. With a snap of her fingers, the dog came to her side and she made some other quick gestures that ended in her pointing at Gryff. Then she walked away.

  The dog seemed to understand whatever she meant, and sat looking up at Gryff. Little thing, velvety brown fur and ears standing up on its head, friendly face watching him curiously. The man named Alfred was lifting the dead knight onto the mule while the girl and the monk helped the injured knight onto a horse.

  They were going ahead without him, leaving him with a loaf, a dog, and his life. He was free.

  Gryff stared down at the bread in his hands. The smell of it was breaking his heart.

  He was free.

  1277

  It was his brother Aiden who was supposed to go as hostage, not Gryff. Even their mother had said so. She’d left off her prayers for a whole afternoon to argue with Father about it. Their oldest brother Rhodri had already been sent to live with a great Norman lord years ago.