Desire Lines (Welsh Blades, #3)

by Elizabeth Kingston

  It struck him as an unwelcome truth that this woman knew more of Nan than he did. He had thought he knew her because he had heard her story and met her aunt and saw her reunion with her sister. He had watched her kill men and marvel at cathedrals. But he had known nothing of these people who were so dear to her – Robin and Lady Eluned and Lord Robert – and wondered now what else she carried hidden in her silent heart.

  “Will you tell me why it is that she speaks so rare?” he asked. Even now she sat wordlessly among the chatter of gathering diners.

  “Because it suits her?” Lady Eluned shrugged a little, looking out at Nan, then grew thoughtful. “But there is a greater truth behind it: that the words of a serving girl are seldom noted. And so she did find a way through silence to her voice. It was only when she stopped speaking that she was ever heard.”

  This made a kind of sense that he could not deny. Nan spoke so little that all around her attended closely whenever words escaped her. She was so many things – strong and intelligent and competent at whatever she put her hand to. It was not surprising that she would be so clever as to have turned silence to her advantage in this way.

  “She is no common woman,” he observed.

  “Is she not?” Lady Eluned picked up her wine and let her eyes drift thoughtfully over the other people in the hall. “In faith, that was my true discovery. Now I must wonder how many others there are under my very nose, whose worth is overlooked. Mark that lesson well, my lord,” she said with a wry twist to her mouth as she lifted the cup. “I would that I had learned it sooner.”

  The servants came with ewers of fragrant water then platters of food, and Gryff made himself remember courtly conversation. One of the ladies who attended Lady Eluned was seated next to him, the one who had seemed familiar. It was because he had known her sister, he realized, though he bit his tongue against saying it. He had stolen a kiss from her once under a snow-laden tree, during a hunt – but only one kiss, because she had blushed prettily and then turned painfully shy.

  It was a memory that made him smile fondly until he thought suddenly of how he had reached out that first time to touch Nan’s hair. How sure he had been that she wanted it, and how wrong he had been. Even as this world of the highborn comforted him with its familiarity, he seemed to see it anew through her eyes. Innocent pleasures were not so innocent, frivolity and cruelty like two sides of the same coin. And he had never seen it before. He had never needed to, so occupied with his own concerns, so happy to indulge in what pleasures and privileges had been afforded him.

  He could feel himself slipping back into it, if only a little, like it was the most natural thing in the world. The glib words, the excellent wine and rich foods, the attentiveness of servants, the coy attentions of the lady beside him who was daughter to a baron. It was an easier world, for all the dangers in it, and he could not help but welcome its embrace.

  When the meal was done there was music and dancing, and he watched a few men pluck up the courage to approach Nan, inviting her to dance. To his relief, she did not, nor did she speak or smile or join in the merriment in any way. Instead she drifted closer to the exit and slipped out, accompanied by one of the other ladies who had attended Lady Eluned in her solar.

  He followed within minutes, hoping he might at least learn which chamber was hers. In the morning, he could wait outside it and try to speak to her. He would be careful – they must be careful that none suspected what she meant to him lest it bring danger to her – but he must speak to her.

  As he crossed the courtyard in the deepening twilight, he caught sight of Fuss running to a shadowed corner. There was a faint gleam of blue silk, and his heart lifted to see she was alone. He called her name softly as he approached.

  She stepped out of the shadow and lowered herself into a courtesy, her eyes down, a perfect show of humility. Anyone would think she had been born and bred at court, the way it was executed. There was the old aura of untouchability to her, that sense that everything in her was perfectly contained and set apart from him. Worst of all was that she seemed to be waiting for him to tell her she might rise.

  No, worse than that was how he could sense this deference was meant sincerely, because she thought it was expected of her.

  “Stop this,” he said, too terse. She immediately rose and began to hurry away, past him, always keeping her head lowered. She kept moving even as he said, “Nan.”

  He reached out to catch her elbow, and felt her go still beneath his touch. There was rejection in her, a stiffness that did not soften and melt as he expected. He waited, too happy to be touching her to break the contact, trying to judge her silence, desperately searching for the right thing to say. But she began to pull away.

  He did not let go. He could not. He tugged at her arm to turn her to him and she spun, swift and sudden. She flung his hand off her in the same motion, a knife in her fist as she stepped within inches of him. It was the simple eating knife that hung from her belt, the only one she wore tonight – at least the only one that could be seen. She met his eyes, more threat in her look than he had ever seen directed at him.

  The air froze in his lungs, but he did not flinch. “You would not.” There was no doubt in his voice. “I know you would not.”

  Her look never wavered as she pressed the blade closer, the edge of it just under his ribs. Her words were cool, deliberate, spoken very clearly so that he would not mishear any one of them.

  “I suffer the touch of no man without I ask it, be he prince or no.”

  She turned and made her way toward the manor, leaving him with only the burning blue of her gaze, her perfect Welsh ringing in his ears.

  Nan retreated to the tower roof again the next day. She should be attending her lady, or bent over an embroidery frame – something, anything. But she needed a kind of peace that could not be found anywhere except in this high corner of the manor, open to the wind and sky. A place where she could see the world but the world could not see her.

  Word would come soon. The king held court barely a day’s ride from here, hunting at some manor she had never heard of. Close enough for a pigeon to have carried a return message already, and she did not know what it meant that there was none. Perhaps it was not safe, or perhaps there was no news yet. But if nothing else, Robin should come back tonight. It might be any minute. She stared at the horizon, trying not to watch for riders.

  At Morency she would have lost herself in sparring with Davydd and Robin, or listening to the unrelenting flow of Suzanna’s chatter as they stitched an altar cloth. Or hours spent next to Gwenllian in the herb-house, her occasional murmur about this or that cure, the quiet companionship as they sorted and steeped and distilled.

  Life had made sense there. She had made sense there, or felt she had.

  Lord Robert found her at midday, and looked out with her at the sky for a long minute before saying only that there was no message yet. Just the sound of his voice was a comfort. It was him who had been the first to soothe her when she came out of that awful place, before her lady arrived to barter for their release. He had even wiped the blood and tears from her face, gentle as her own father – or as a father should be, if he cared more about his daughter than his drink.

  So when, hours later, the Welshman appeared on the roof, she made herself stay still. She knew it was Lord Robert who had told him where to find her, and he would only do that if he thought she should hear what the Welshman had to say.

  He held himself differently now. It had been there in the hall and it was here too. It wasn’t just the fine new clothes they had given him. There was a sureness in his body, an absolute control of the space around him, the confidence like arrogance that was the birthright of highborn lords. It was so very far from the shrinking man she had found tied to a tree. When had it begun? Why had she not seen it for what it was?

  She looked out at the horizon, and felt him looking at her. It was a long time before he spoke. He soaked in her silence first, fit himself into it in that way he
had. For a moment it felt like it had only days ago, like she knew his every thought and feeling. Hiraeth, she thought – and knew it was not the distance from his lands that grieved him in this moment. It was the distance from her.

  “It means naught to me that they call me a prince,” he said quietly. “Is but a word. One that has damned me.”

  She tried to believe him. She tried not to remember how he had lain naked before her, all spread out like a banquet beneath her greedy hands, no shame in her as she compelled him to serve her hunger.

  If it were but a word, she would not feel this way. If it were but a word, he would have told her.

  “The Welsh have no kings, only princes with little wealth,” he continued, so determined to explain it. “My only worth has been as pawn, to my father and to Edward.”

  Nan had no worth to any kings, and her worth to her father had fit easily into the palm of his hand. A few coins, spent and forgotten. Her worth.

  “It is the Normans who rule, and it means little to them that I was called a prince. When I lived among them, they looked on me with contempt.” It was there in his voice, how it still stung him. “They sneered at me. Every day, for years.”

  He made it sound like she should be amazed. If she felt like talking, she might tell him how she and Oliver were treated like dogs when a Norman lord had held them. Worse than dogs. But she had told him that already, all of it. He had seen the scars. So she stayed silent and tried to care about some sneering in his youth.

  “I could not tell you for fear of my life. If Rhodri knew I lived, or the king... I could tell no one.” She could hear the urgency beneath his calm coaxing, hear how much her silence unsettled him. “I verily believed I could live a simple Welshman, with none to remember my birth. I tell you, it is what I wanted.” The yearning was in his voice, the same way he sounded when he spoke of his home. “I wanted that, and you.”

  She had imagined it. She had. No use in pretending otherwise. She had imagined a place in the green hills he had described, him flying falcons and Fuss hiding from the hawks. And now her imagination added a child – his child – in her arms, and she wanted it with a breathtaking ferocity. All of it: the place and the child and him.

  It made her dizzy with longing, and then sick with hate. Hate for him because he made her want it. Hate for his murderous brother, hate for the king. Hate for all of them because they stole her Welshman and replaced him with a prince.

  “It means naught to me, Nan,” he insisted. “It is but a name.”

  A name, just a name. Gruffydd son of Iorwerth and grandson of Cynan the Red, that was what he was called. The leader of Aderinyth, who probably had a bard to sing the history of his family for ten generations.

  She was Nan. Just Nan from nowhere, with a whore for a sister.

  Though he stood close enough that she heard his every breath, all she could feel was the distance that had come with this word he said had no meaning. Even if a lesser prince, he was still a lord, like those she had served, those who felt free to grab and take as their right. Those who commanded serving girls to their beds, who had looked at her and seen a sweet morsel to get their hands on, who were the reason she had made herself strong and deadly: so that they could never hurt her again.

  But one had found a way to hurt her in spite of it. Her heart seemed to bleed, a steady seeping as though from a skillful cut, no matter that he had not intended it. Any of it.

  “Say something,” he entreated.

  She could not. She could feel how much he wanted to touch her. Her eyes stayed fixed on the horizon. The riders would come soon.

  “Know you what has become of the other Welsh princes?” he asked suddenly.

  She did not. She remembered hearing that the prince of all Wales who had died, Llewellyn, had a tiny baby girl. Nan had been vaguely aware that there were other Welsh princes but they were just more lords, to her. It had never been a thing that mattered before.

  “Prince Llewellyn had no sons when he died. His daughter was taken from Wales and given to a convent as a babe in arms. She will never be allowed to leave it, for fear the Welsh will rally to her. They say she does not even know Welsh, and it will never be taught to her.”

  There was no anger in his tone but she heard it anyway, and understood why. They stole even her language from her, this orphaned Welsh princess, as though taking her land and her people were not enough.

  “Prince Dafydd was executed for treason.” He paused, and she nodded quickly to let him know he need not detail the execution to her. Everyone had heard of it, how the traitor Dafydd had been tortured. His skull still rotted on a spike in London. “He had two sons, both imprisoned at Bristol. The oldest was near my age. Last year he died in his prison. The younger prince...” His voice faded, and she glanced to see his face. His lips had gone white at the edges, and she looked away quickly. “He is there still. He is locked in a cage every night.”

  The sun seemed too bright, the air too cold. She did not know what to do with the images he put in her head. She pressed her tongue hard against her teeth and thought of her lady, wise and cunning, who said he would not be put to death. Nothing had been said about cages.

  “It is a curse. All the misfortunes of my life have befallen me because they call me a prince. Believe me that I would live happily as your Welshman. I have lived happily as that.” He stepped closer. Close enough to touch. “In all my wretched life, Nan, it is the only happiness I have known.”

  What was there to say – the truth, that it was the same for her? She stared out at the empty sky and remembered him saying simply, And then I wake, and you are there. He had said it like it was an answer to everything. And it had felt that way.

  But it was no answer to this. There was no answer to this at all.

  He turned from her to face the same sky, and they looked out in silence together. She could feel him giving up on her. Yet her tongue would not move.

  “Tell me anything of what is inside you.” He said it like a prayer, a supplication to her silence.

  What was inside her. She thought of Oliver dead on a dirty floor. She thought of her mother telling her to care for her brother and sister. She thought of her aunt marveling over simple embroidery, of Bea with a blade pinning her sleeve, of Robin whispering in the dark. She thought of princes and cages and far green hills.

  “Say something,” he whispered.

  But she did not, and he left her alone under the open sky.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The flame guttered, the wax dripped, the empty hours passed. His was a life spent in waiting. Waiting to learn when he would stop being a hostage, waiting until it was safe to come out of hiding, waiting for Baudry or one of his men to kill him. Waiting to go home.

  Another day had passed. Three full days, when the journey to Edward and back should not be more than two. No message had come, no word of reassurance. Nothing.

  It could only bode ill. Lord Robert was insistently optimistic, citing any number of harmless reasons for the delay – poor roads, an injured horse, the court moving to somewhere a little farther away for better hunting. He was sure it was nothing more than that. But Lady Eluned’s face was carefully neutral, and her noncommittal responses filled him with foreboding. She knew Will as he did, and they both knew Will would send word if the news was good.

  He would also send warning if it was bad – if he could. If it was safe to do so.

  Gryff stared at the candle by his bedside. Those first years in Lancaster’s household, when he was too young yet to fill the hours with welcoming women, he had spent his nights in this same way. He would watch the candle flame for hours, trying to burn the memory of home out of his eyes. Then at the abbey, he had spent every night for five years in the dark, wishing he could remember more.

  Somewhere in the night he became aware of her. Outside the glow of candlelight, just inside the door of this fine bedchamber with its thick tapestries and carved oak furniture, she had slipped silently in. She brought her own
peaceful variety of silence with her, somehow smoothing the jagged edges of the quiet that surrounded him.

  He did not look toward her. All day he had paced the grounds of the manor, sure that at any moment a message would arrive. By late afternoon he had given into the sinking sense of doom. He could not eat, but could not resist going to the hall to look at her from afar, sure now that it was the last he would ever see of her. Blue silk, blue eyes, golden hair, and a mouth made for sin. No flame would ever burn the memory of it out of him, but he had let his eyes drink their fill.

  “Do you come here to torment me with your silence?”

  He asked it to the candle, his eyes following the dripping wax. He almost asked why she did not leave him alone, but stopped himself in time. She would take it as a command from a prince, damn her, and he would be left without even her wordlessness to keep him company.

  Her step came closer, a soft footfall on the rushes behind him, but he did not turn from his place on the bed. There was a gathering glow, and he understood she must be holding a lamp. The light of it joined the light of his candle as she came closer behind him.

  “Nay, not that.” she said. “Far from that.”

  He held his breath through the rush of relief that flooded him. Her voice. It left him lightheaded, staring at his shadow on the wall while he prayed he would not say the wrong thing.

  “Then why?"

  Her slow steps carried her around the corner of the bed, just at the edge of his vision. He felt it again – that thin ribbon of her deepest self escaping its careful containment, flowing out toward him. He knew she was waiting for him to look at her. He thought he should fear whatever she had come to say. But he did not care, as long as he could look at her. As long as she spoke to him.

  He turned his head to where she stood in the glow of her lamp. She was back in her coarse brown dress, her weapons glinting in the dim light. All her beauty was still there, and all her lethal strength, no matter the outer trappings.