His words brought a peculiar dreadful ache to her stomach. She had heard some of the tale, but she had always suspected there was more to it, told only in whispers and never to an unmarried maiden. “He does not know who— or what—I am, Walter,” she said, keeping her voice calm and level with effort.
“But if he should guess and …” Walter broke off and swallowed the rest of his sentence, his eyes bulging out as if he were strangling on whatever it was he couldn't bring himself to say aloud to a gentlewoman.
“Walter, the man is a knight, not a common brigand.”
The groom's fist tightened over the edge of the rough monastic blanket, his normally congenial face hardening. “A knight he may be, yet I have heard it said he openly laughs at the codes of chivalry. You will not be able to rely upon his honor, should he learn the truth.”
Attica ignored the chill his words sent coursing through her. “He won't. I'll make certain of that.”
Walter's gaze drifted awkwardly away from her as he struggled with something he obviously felt he needed to say. “You will not reach Laval today. You realize that?”
Attica nodded. She knew it, but if she let herself dwell on the intimacy of all those hours she would be spending alone on the road with that man—if she thought about tonight—she would never find the courage to ride on. “If possible, I'll try to convince him to ride through the night without stopping anywhere. I'll—”
She broke off at the sound of footsteps coming toward them down the corridor. She barely had time to leap to her feet like some guilty conspirator before de Jarnac's strong hand swept the curtain to one side.
His big body filled the doorway, his gaze traveling from where Attica stood, her color probably betrayingly high, to Walter, who looked so much like a cornered wolf determined to guard its only cub that Attica might have laughed if she'd been in a different frame of mind.
Then the knight's cold green eyes swung back to Attica, and any thought of laughter fled. “If you still plan to come with me, it's time to leave.” He held her gaze for a long, tense moment, as if he were issuing some sort of challenge.
“I am ready,” she said, careful to keep the fear she felt out of her voice and face. “Only give me a moment to say farewell.”
Nodding, he spun on his heel and left the cell. She could hear the quick tread of his boots echoing down the corridor.
Walter reached out to grasp her hand, jerking her attention away from the empty doorway where the curtain still quivered. “You don't need to go with him. You could stay here, in the monastery, where you'll be safe. Surely there must be someone you could send in your place?”
Attica gently slipped her hand from his grasp. “You know I can't, Walter. How could I trust such a secret to some stranger?”
Walter's gray brows twitched together in a troubled frown. “Do you think Stephen would want you to do this thing you are so set upon?”
A wry smile twisted Attica's lips as she thought of what her big brother would say if he knew what she were about to do. “Probably not. But he would do it for me.”
“He is a man.”
Attica's chin came up in an unconscious gesture of pride. “He is a d'Alérion, and so am I. Just because I am a woman doesn't mean that loyalty and honor are nothing to me. Or that I can't be brave.”
Walter let his breath out in a long sigh. “I know how brave you are. That is why I am worried.”
CHAPTER
FOUR
They were being followed.
A thicket of tall beech trees grew beside the track, their slender leaves quivering and rustling in the late afternoon breeze that skimmed along the top of the rise. Damion drew aside into the sheltering shadows of trunks and overhanging branches before he wheeled the Arab to face the way they had come.
By squinting hard against the westering afternoon sun, he could count four mounted men, maybe five, in the distance. Armored men, riding fast. He could see the glint of sunlight on their helms, the cloud of dust raised by the thundering hooves of their horses. They were only half an hour behind, maybe less, and gaining fast.
He turned to survey the road ahead and swore softly to himself at the sight of gentle countryside lying open and vulnerable beneath a wide blue sky. Striped, rolling fields of golden-green grain and cleared pasture stretched on for miles, broken only here and there by a few scattered copses of mixed brush, a hamlet or two, and, not too far ahead, the strung-out line of a merchant caravan, its pack horses heavily laden with goods bound for the summer fair in Laval.
Damion pursed his lips and blew out a long, slow breath as he turned to stare again at that armed party of men. His mission for Henry had been cloaked in secrecy and known only to the king's most trusted inner circle of men. But Damion had learned young not to trust anyone, had learned well the dangerous lesson that things are often not what they seem.
His hand moved unconsciously to the hilt of his sword as he considered the hard-riding men behind him. It was always possible, of course, that they were simply headed, like the merchants, to Laval. Then again, he thought, setting his teeth in annoyance, they could very well be after his mysterious little lordling. Whoever they were, they obviously had orders to kill their horses, if necessary, to get where they were going.
“What is it?” asked Atticus, riding up to him.
Damion shifted his gaze to the slim, dark-haired youth reining in beside him. “Is there any reason to think someone might be following you?”
The youth's face went admirably blank as he blinked into the sinking sun. “No,” he said, drawing the syllable out. “Why? Is someone behind us?”
Staring down into that fine-boned, attractive face, Dam-ion felt a smile pull at his mouth. At some point, the lad had managed to pick up the courtly trick of making his features go completely smooth and expressionless, thus hiding whatever betraying thoughts and emotions might be boiling behind the public mask. With most people, it probably worked. Except that in Atticus's case, the studied lack of animation formed such a marked contrast to the lad's natural, open expression that its assumption was a betrayal in itself.
Damion felt his smile fade. In the three hours that had passed since they left the monastery, he had studied the youth closely and come to several confusing conclusions. Despite his fine seat on a horse and his undeniable skill with a dagger, the boy nevertheless had the pale face and soft hands of one dedicated to scholarship and the church from an early age. Which made him a peculiar choice, Damion would have said, to play a role in a treasonous plot. While there was obviously nothing wrong with the lad's courage or determination, anyone who knew the boy well enough to trust him must surely realize that he was too sensitive, too inexperienced, too compulsively honest and forthright to ever succeed at something as dirty and unprincipled as a conspiracy to depose a king.
But Damion didn't believe in coincidences, and for the natural brother of one of the English king's household knights to be on the road to La Ferté-Bernard, at this time, and not be involved in some way in the plot against Henry would be simply too much of a coincidence for anyone to swallow. True, Damion wouldn't have picked Stephen d'Alérion as one of the conspirators, but then, one never really knew what lay in another man's heart.
“I can't see anything,” said the lad, peering into the distance.
“It's a small party. Four, maybe five men. Riding hard and fast.”
And then the boy must have seen them, for he jerked suddenly, swinging the chestnut away abruptly before Damion could see his face.
Touching his heels to the Arab's sides, Damion followed the boy thoughtfully down the hill to where Sergei waited with the spare horses at the base of the slope. They had almost reached the squire when Atticus drew up sharply.
“Something wrong?” Damion asked, reining in beside him.
He found himself confronted with Atticus's courtly mask of a face. “It's Chantilly—my mount. He keeps favoring his right foreleg. I think he must have a stone caught in his shoe.”
D
amion watched the lad swing his leg over the cantle and drop to the ground. He moved stiffly and awkwardly, Damion noticed, as if he were unaccustomed to such long hours in the saddle and was sore as a result. “Sergei can look, if you like,” offered Damion.
“I can do it,” said the lad, running his hand down the gelding's right leg. He lifted the forehoof up on his thigh and bent to scrape at the caked mud with the point of his dagger. His movements were careful and slow, as if he hadn't done this too many times before. From just over the top of the hill, a flock of swallows took flight, twittering loudly. Damion's head fell back, his gaze following the birds as they wheeled away to the south, the golden sunlight gleaming on their outstretched wings. The riders must be gaining on them.
Atticus let the hoof drop and carefully wiped his blade in the grass before straightening. “I don't see anything. But I've pushed him hard today.” He looked up at Damion with wide, overbright eyes. “Perhaps I could ride your roan for a while?”
There could be no disguising the mingling hope and fear that sharpened the boy's features and quickened his breath. Curious, Damion studied the big chestnut. It was an unusually fine animal, with a distinctive white blaze and four white socks. A horse such as this, he thought, a man would notice—and recognize if he came upon it again. But not more readily, surely, than this finely dressed, patrician-boned youth?
Damion's gaze shifted back to the boy, to those thick black lashes and smooth, rose-touched cheeks. There was something ethereal, almost unnaturally beautiful about his face. Something that nagged at Damion, like an elusive thought or a memory half-forgotten.
As if uncomfortable with Damion's scrutiny, the boy swung his head away, showing Damion only his classic profile. Still watching him, Damion raised his voice. “Sergei. Bring up the roan for our lordling here. His chestnut seems to be favoring its right forefoot.”
“Oui, messire,” said the squire, slipping out of the saddle. “I didn't notice a limp,” he added, moving quickly to help Atticus transfer the saddle from the chestnut to the roan, “but that chestnut does have the look of a horse that's spent too many months doing little beyond eating its head off in the stables, I'd say.”
Damion stood in the stirrups to stretch his legs and glance around. “I can hear a stream running somewhere, probably at the base of that hill over there. Perhaps you should take the chestnut and bathe its legs in cool water for, say, an hour or so?”
Sergei glanced up from fastening the saddle girth. His black, knowing gaze met Damion's and held it. “I understand,” he said, and turned away to gather up the chest-nut's lead.
“If you're quick,” Damion said to Atticus, who hauled himself up onto the big roan's back, “we should have time to catch that merchants’ caravan and blend ourselves in with them before your friends overtake us.”
The boy's wide brown eyes flew to Damion's face. “They're not my friends.”
Damion reached out to close his gloved hand over the small, fragile fingers holding the roan's reins. He exerted just enough pressure to make the boy wince, and returned his frightened, breathless stare with a deliberately cold, mean look. “Friends or enemies, it matters not what you call them. But make no mistake about this, lordling. Once those men have passed us, you and I are going to have a reckoning.”
They overran the merchants on the far side of the nearest small hamlet.
The company was a large one, Spanish by the looks of it, preceded by a standard-bearer and flanked by crossbowmen and pikemen. An impressive display, Damion thought, as he spurred the Arab past the lumbering line of burdened pack animals and tired men—although one probably intended as much to advertise the value of the shipment as to guard it, since he could see only one knight, a fat, gray-whiskered cavalier dozing in his saddle with his double chin sunk against his hauberk. The man half strangled on a snore, his head jerking up as Damion drew in beside him.
“Good evening,” said Damion with a lazy smile. “You're late on the road.”
The knight sat up straight and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “As are you, my friend.”
Damion stared off into the distance, as if surveying the land. “I was hoping to find an abbey where we might stop. But I've seen no sign of one for hours now.”
The knight shook his head. “Nor will you, in this country. But there is an inn, at the crossroads outside the gates of a small town called Ravel, not too far from here.” A look of wondrous longing crept over the man's mottled face. “They serve the most wonderful, garlic-roasted milk-fed lamb there.”
The knight—who introduced himself as Sir Odo—had obviously traveled this road often. Damion listened, his expression politely interested, his attention on the road behind them, as the old knight discoursed at length on the quality of the inn's food and wine and then moved on, by natural extension, to the relative merits of the whores who frequented the establishment.
“But if you like your women with big tits,” said Sir Odo, “you'll want to ask for Rose. Now, her face isn't much to look at, I admit. But the things she does to a man with those—”
Out of the corner of his eye, Damion saw the fast-rising dust from the west gradually solidify into five horsemen— three knights and two servants, wearing the livery of the house of Salers.
“She takes them in her hands, see,” Sir Odo was saying, “and squeezes them together. Now remember, they're big. As big as the watermelons of Jerusalem—”
The riders passed the plodding pack horses as Damion had done, at a canter. Watching them come on, Damion caught a brief glimpse of Atticus's dark hair and pale, strained face near a cluster of mules loaded with what looked like bags of alum, but after that, Damion took care not to glance in the boy's direction again.
The unknown horsemen paused several times to speak to various merchants, then spurred on to where Damion and Sir Odo rode at the vanguard of the cavalcade. “I tell you,” Sir Odo was saying, “you've never felt anything like it—”
He broke off as the men approached. Two of the knights were young yet, fair-haired and fresh-faced. They hung back as the third, a dark-haired man with small, sharp eyes and a hawklike beak of a nose over a tight-lipped, hard mouth, drew rein beside Damion and said, “We're looking for a gentlewoman. Tall, slender. Brown-haired. Young. Have you seen her on this road?”
“A gentlewoman?” repeated Sir Odo, fingering his wiry gray face whiskers. “No. Don't think so.”
Damion didn't let the surprise he felt show on his face, although the man's words were hardly what he had been expecting. A gentlewoman, he thought. Now what the devil would a monastery-bound youth like Atticus have to do with a gentlewoman—a young gentlewoman—from the house of Salers?
He studied the closed, guarded face of the hawk-nosed knight. The man had obviously been ordered to keep his inquiries short and discreet. But there were ways around that.
“A gentlewoman from the house of Salers has gone missing?” Damion said with just enough surprised amusement in his voice to provoke a reaction.
He got one. “Not missing,” Hawk Face snapped. “The viscomtesse de Salers simply wishes her future daughter-in-law to travel with a larger escort.”
“Ah. Well, you'd best hurry, then,” said Damion, obligingly drawing the Arab closer to the grassy verge of the road. “Because the future viscomtesse is surely still ahead of us.”
He waited, one hand resting on the pommel of his sword until the knights and servants of the house of Salers were little more than specks on the eastern horizon. Then he said farewell to the talkative Sir Odo and cantered back to deal with Monsieur le Batard d'Alérion.
Whatever relief Attica felt at escaping detection by the men from Châteauhaut-sur-Vilaine vanished immediately at the sight of Damion de Jarnac thundering toward her.
She had no way of knowing what the knights from Châteauhaut had said to him, but it had obviously been enough to enable him to guess that she had deceived him in some way. And one did not lightly deceive a man such as Dam-ion de Jarnac.
Her stomach twisted with fear at the thought. She turned her head, the late-afternoon breeze fluttering the ragged ends of her cropped hair about her face as she stared at the distant hills. She knew an almost hysterical impulse to dig her knees into the roan's sides and gallop off across the fields, not caring where she went as long as she got away from him. She even collected her reins. But then she remembered that the roan she rode was his horse, not hers. And it occurred to her that even though she might have a head start and a fresher horse, she wouldn't put it past de Jarnac and that indefatigable Arab of his to ride her down anyway.
If he didn't simply borrow one of the archers’ crossbows and shoot her as she fled.
Abruptly abandoning all thoughts of wild flight, she considered instead the possibility of throwing herself on the mercy of the nearest merchant and asking for his protection. But when she glanced about at the disinterested, self-absorbed faces of the fat, overdressed Spanish burghers, she knew that no man here would dare to stand up against a knight such as Damion de Jarnac. Especially not for the sake of some unknown woman caught masquerading as a man.
He was almost upon her. Lifting her chin proudly, her heart pounding painfully in her chest, Attica drew the roan onto the grassy verge and waited as the dark knight rode right up to her.
His hand flashed out to grasp the roan's reins below the bit. “Get down,” he ordered, as if he knew how close to flight she'd come. “Now.”
Her gaze focused on the cruel, mean slant of his mouth. Wordlessly, she slid out of the saddle.
To her chagrin, her knees buckled as soon as her feet hit the ground. She couldn't have said whether it was from fear or exhaustion, but she simply no longer had the strength to stand. The grass rose up to greet her, cool and soft and familiar in a world suddenly gone strange and frightening. She made no attempt to stand up. She was aware of de Jarnac on his black horse, looming over her like some evil nightmare, but she kept her gaze fixed on the passing pack horses. He would do nothing as long as the Spanish traders were here.
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