Attica studied his averted face. She could see no sign of emotion, only a closed, cold kind of detachment. And yet … “You kept the boy?” she asked. “And trained him as your squire?” It was unusual. Knights typically took only the sons of other knights as their squires.
De Jarnac shrugged. “Sergei's good with horses. Although I'm beginning to think he'd be happier as a priest.”
Attica laughed softly. On the far side of the room, the inn-keeper's servants were already moving among the tables, clearing away trenchers and platters. One of the minstrels stood up and strummed his lute. Attica turned her head to see better and found herself staring into the massive cleavage of the red-haired young woman.
“Here you are, monsieur.” With deliberate, provocative slowness and an enticing smile, the serving woman leaned over, her breasts pressing almost into Attica's face as the woman placed a trencher overflowing with choice meat cuts on the table before Attica.
Attica didn't know where to look.
“My name is Rose, when you're ready for something more,” she said with a giggle, and whisked herself off before Attica had time to clamp shut her dropped jaw.
“Ha! You see,” said the man on de Jarnac's left, a thin, long-boned knight with a lined face and the blue eyes and fair hair of a Norman. “It's the soft, pretty boys that women like.” He waved one arm expressively through the air in a grand gesture that tottered the ewer of wine at his elbow. “Not mature, battle-tested men like us.”
The other men at the table all laughed while another knight with black hair and a bulbous nose said, “I'll drink to that,” and called for more wine.
De Jarnac quietly settled back until his shoulders touched the wall and he could cross his arms at his chest. “What do you think, lordling?” he asked teasingly, slanting a look up at Attica from beneath lazy lids.
Attica shifted uneasily on her bench. She never, ever should have come in here, she thought despairingly. “What do I think about what?”
His lips curled into a faintly malicious smile that told her he hadn't entirely forgotten their confrontation on the road, either. “What do you think women want?” he said.
She ducked her head and feigned a sudden, intense interest in her supper. “How would I know?”
“Ah, look at the lad blush, the sly thing,” said the long-faced Norman knight, displaying a mouthful of half-chewed pork. “He's had himself a few pieces of tail already, and that's a fact. Go on, lad. You tell us what makes the women happy.”
Attica flung up her head, her cheeks burning, her determination to keep silent forgotten. “I can tell you what women don't like,” she said, her voice rising higher than she'd intended. “They don't like being referred to as pieces of tail.”
To her chagrin, the other men at the table all looked at her and laughed, including the Norman, who washed his food down with a swig of wine and grinned. “All right then, lad. You tell us. What do women like?”
From the far side of the room came the drunken jong-leur's rough baritone, raised in song. “En cest sonet coind'e leri …” he sang.
“What's the matter, Roger?” someone said with a snicker. “Had so little luck lately, you're looking for pointers?” There were a few catcalls and lewd suggestions, but the general noise quieted down, and Attica realized they were all looking at her. Oh, God, she thought wildly. Why didn't I keep my mouth shut?
“Go on, lad,” said de Jarnac softly. “You've let yourself in for it now.”
“Fauc motz e capuig e doli …” sang the jongleur.
She glanced, panic-stricken, down the row of expectant and faintly hostile male faces staring back at her. “I should think,” she said, her voice sounding uncharacteristically prim and dangerously feminine, “that most gentlewomen wish for nothing more or less than a good Christian knight.” Her chin lifted as she felt de Jarnac's sardonic gaze upon her. “A man who is courageous and loyal and—and charitable toward the weak and unfortunate.”
“I thought we were talking about tavern wenches,” said Sir Roger, sloshing more wine into his cup. “Not gentlewomen. Gentlewomen listen to too many damned troubadours and expect us all to be damned Rolands.”
“Oh no, not Roland,” said Attica with a quick shake of her head. “For does Roland think of his lady, the Fair Aude, at the moment of his death? No, his last thoughts are of Durendal, his sword.” Some of the men laughed, but she pushed on, her gaze locked with de Jarnac's. “A woman dreams of a knight who is not only brave and honorable but also gallant and chivalrous.”
“Bah,” said the bulbous-nosed knight. “You've been listening to too many troubadours along with the ladies, lad.”
“Aye,” agreed Sir Roger, nodding his head sagely. “What a gentlewoman wants is a rich, powerful lord. It doesn't matter how he acts, or even what he looks like, as long as his estates are grand enough.”
“It's not that simple,” said Attica, her voice lost amid the general chorus of agreement.
“No?” said de Jarnac, sitting forward so that his words reached her alone. “Just ask your sister Elise.”
Attica felt her breath leave her body in a painful rush that brought her splayed hand up to her chest in an unconsciously feminine gesture. “You say that as if you fault her for her betrothal. Yet she only does what her father wishes.”
De Jarnac's eyebrows rose in a mockery of polite incredulity. “And if her father had wished to marry her to a poor man known as Fulk the Fat, would she have agreed so readily?”
“Women have no choice in such matters.”
But de Jarnac wasn't about to let her get away so easily. “Are you saying she would have agreed?”
A ridiculous and wholly incomprehensible threat of tears stung Attica's nose, taking her by surprise and filling her with terror, lest she give herself away utterly. “You speak as if a woman's interests in marriage are different from a man's,” she said, seizing on anger as a desperate antidote to this dangerous weakness. “Yet tell me, Monsieur le chevalier: What does a knight want?”
De Jarnac's lips curled away from his teeth in a quick smile. “An heiress, of course.”
His laughter seemed to break the strange, inexplicable seriousness of the moment. She folded her hands on the tabletop and looked down at them. “How did we come to speak of marriage, anyway? I thought we spoke of love.”
The jongleur's voice warbled in the background. “Qu’Amors marves plane daura …”
“Of love?” De Jarnac reached for the wine ewer. “Hardly. A knight can't afford love. At least not a knight-errant.”
She drew in a deep breath and pushed it out again before she could trust herself to speak. “I think you're wrong.”
He paused in the act of pouring his wine and looked at her from beneath quirked eyebrows. “Do you, indeed?”
“Yes, I do. I think a knight must learn to harmonize his knightly virtues with love—”
“Sweet Jesus. Not the knightly virtues again.”
“Laugh if you want.” She leaned forward, her weight on her elbows. “But it's true. Without love—without fin’amors—a knight will never truly achieve what he seeks.”
“Here, here,” said Sir Roger, startling Attica by lifting his cup high. “To the eternal quest.”
“To the eternal quest,” rang the chorus up and down the table.
“Which quest?” called someone from the far side of the room.
“The quest for love,” shouted Sir Roger, the wine sloshing over the edge of his cup. He looked down at it, startled; then his eyes rolled back in his head and he slowly sank beneath the table. The room rang with laughter while the minstrel, abandoning the sweeter rhymes of Arnaut, strummed a new chord and raised his voice gleefully.
“I quest for love
o'er hill and dale
Yet ne'er do I find
A willing female.
“Or if I find her
And she's generous
Her lord's a miser
And her cons gardatz.”
Attic
a felt her cheeks flame with embarrassment at the crudity, but the men in the room all let out a bawdy whoop that turned into a chorus of laughing boos as the jongleur staggered drunkedly and, clutching his lute to his breast, closed his eyes and began to howl like a hound baying at the moon.
“Here, give me that,” said the bulbous-nosed knight, rearing up to pluck the lute from the drunken minstrel's grasp. He turned. “You play for us, de Jarnac.”
Attica ducked as the lute sailed through the air. Standing, de Jarnac deftly caught the instrument around the neck and began almost absentmindedly to tune it. She found herself staring at him in astonishment, for he held the lute as easily and naturally as he held his sword.
“Sing us a song about a knight,” called someone.
“Oui,” said someone else.
“De Jarnac,” chanted a third, thumping the table in front of him.
Tilting his head, de Jarnac looked up from the lute and smiled, a smile so open, so boyish even, that it took At-tica's breath away. His fingers began to move, coaxing from that battered lute a sound so beautiful that the entire room fell silent. Then, as she watched, his smile broadened and became faintly rakish. “Ferai un vers, pos mi sonelh,” he sang in a clear, rich tenor.
A roar of appreciation rose from around the room, then quieted as he launched into the familiar, lighthearted tale about a knight who pretends to be a deaf-mute in order to enjoy the carnal favors of two obsessively discreet ladies.
At the end of the last verse, he started to put the lute down but paused amid shouts of “More!” and “Don't stop now.” His gaze met Attica's for one intense instant. Then he laughed and, clearing the table with an easy leap, landed lightly on the balls of his feet in the center of the room, his fingers already plucking the strings as he launched into a classic vers about a valiant knight and his beautiful, wise, and courteous lady.
A lithe shadow moved along the near wall. Turning, Attica felt a breath of cold night air and caught the faint echo of incense as Sergei slid onto the bench beside her. By now, de Jarnac had changed songs and moods, shifting gracefully into a hauntingly beautiful canso that she realized with a jolt of surprise was about love. Not lust, but the kind of tender, eternal, ennobling love this man claimed he had no use for.
“I die for you.
You are my hope
My life
My love.”
“I've never heard this before,” Attica whispered to Sergei, pushing the trencher of meat toward him. “It's beautiful.”
Sergei nodded, his gaze on de Jarnac. “It's one of his own.”
“In you alone
I see
I hear
I breathe.”
Attica swung her head around abruptly to stare again at Damion de Jarnac. His own. The torches in the wall brackets sputtered and flared, casting a rich reddish-gold glow over the roomful of upturned, enraptured faces. She felt the rough edge of the table pressing into her side, felt a strange, enveloping heat that spread over her as she looked at this man.
In the torchlight, his eyes seemed almost black— mysterious, unknowable. She let her gaze drift over the line of his jaw, the flaring elegance of his cheekbones. She watched the graceful, athletic movements of his body, the broad line of his shoulders beneath the rich dark cloth of his tunic, the lean length of hip and thigh as he strolled slowly about the room. She watched his long, tanned fingers move effortlessly over the lute's strings, watched him make sweet, beautiful music.
She thought what it would be like to take a man such as this to husband. Not a plump, weak, sulky boy but a man grown. A man who was big and strong and brave, a man who could be brutal with a sword yet was capable of composing such heartbreaking poetry and coaxing such magic from a battered old lute.
Her breath caught painfully in her throat as she realized the wayward direction of her disloyal thoughts. Not only disloyal but sinful, too, for she was a lady betrothed before God and man.
And yet … and yet she could not stop herself, for it was not so much a thought as a heartfelt yearning, a bittersweet ache that swelled her breast and made her want to reach out and stop this moment and make it last and last.
“Without you,
My sun dies
My prayer falters
My song ends.”
He swung around then and found her watching him. Their gazes met, and it was as if he sang to her, as if he knew what was in her heart and soul better perhaps even than she knew herself. As if he saw her secret sorrow and despair, and called to it.
“Give me yourself.
If not your body,
Then your heart.
Make me your soul.”
The song ended and the room erupted in cheering. And still he looked at her, his gaze sharpening with an unmistakable gleam of understanding, his jaw hardening with dangerous intent.
She stared into his dark, strong-boned face and felt a wave of panic that welled within her, stopping her breath and setting off a fine trembling from someplace deep inside her.He knows, she thought wildly, watching him hand the lute back to the drunken jongleur without dropping his probing, frightening gaze from her.
Mother Mary, help me, she prayed. He knows I am a woman. He knows.
CHAPTER
SIX
The wind had increased until it blustered against the inn's thick walls with an insistent howl that seemed to Attica to accentuate the unnatural silence between them as she followed de Jarnac's broad, dark-clad back up the stairs to their chamber.
She could hear the tossing branches of the big old chestnut that sheltered one corner of the courtyard and the flapping of a loose shutter somewhere in the unseen night. A draft eddied up from below, flaring the torch he carried and flinging huge, misshapen shadows across the narrow whitewashed walls of the stairwell. She watched him shove open the chamber door and thrust the torch into a wall bracket, and had to tense every muscle in her body to stay where she was rather than bolt back down the stairs.
He had scarcely spoken to her or even looked at her since handing the lute back to the jongleur along with an easy smile and shake of his head that quietly refused the crowd's roar for more. “We start early,” he'd told Sergei, resting a light hand on the boy's shoulder. “Don't linger too long over your supper.” Then he'd pinned Attica with a frighteningly intense gaze and said, “Come.”
It never occurred to her to refuse. If he had somehow guessed the truth about who she was, Attica decided she would far rather he confront her with it in the privacy of their chamber, rather than downstairs before a ragged assortment of half-drunken, unruly, and unpredictable men. Only now she wasn't so sure.
Pausing halfway across the room, he glanced back at her over his shoulder, his brows drawing together, his eyes lost in dark shadows. “Splendor of God, must you always hold the door open?”
She moved quickly, the latch catching with a snap as she leaned back against the heavy planks, her wary gaze following him as he crossed to the laver and reached to wash his hands. His dark, simple tunic had been made of fine cloth and cut to fit well, so that she could see plainly the intimidating bulge of evey toned muscle in his shoulders and back as he bent to splash his face.
Since she'd closed the door he had not looked at her again, and she felt the breath ease out of her in a long sigh. She told herself she must have imagined what she'd read in his face earlier, when their gazes met across the crowded common room below. No matter how hard she tried, she could think of nothing she had said or done in that moment that might have led him to guess the truth about her. She must have been mistaken.
In which case, she thought with a renewed upsurge of panic, she should not be arousing suspicion where none existed by standing with her arms splayed against the door, as mute and motionless as if she had been crucified against it.
“For a knight who does not believe in love,” she said, striving to keep her voice light and relaxed as she pushed away from the rough panels, “you sing of it very beautifully.”
&nbs
p; He swung away from the laver, his wet skin gleaming in the torchlight, his eyes dark above the white of the length of linen he used to dry his face. “All troubadours sing of love, just as all priests prate about the mercy of God.” He tossed the cloth aside. “How many believe in it is another matter.”
She looked up from setting her saddlebags on the bench beside the bed. “Don't you believe in the mercy of God?”
He unbuckled his sword belt as he walked toward her, and she tried not to tremble at the rattling scrape of the scabbard as it came to rest on the floor on the far side of the bed. He faced her across six or seven feet of plain coverlet. “Do you?”
The intensity of his gaze made her uncomfortable. She sat down on the bench and yanked at her boots, keeping her head bowed. “Of course I believe in God's mercy.”
“So you embrace your vocation willingly, do you?”
She paused, one boot still in her hand, conscious of a sense of edginess that had somehow crept into the conversation. She did not know how to answer him. In the course of this long and hideous day, she had uttered more falsehoods than she could remember, yet she could not bring herself to lay claim to a religious vocation she had not received. “I should make a poor knight,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “And the life of scholarship does appeal to me.”
“Indeed? I had thought it perhaps an obligation laid upon you by your father.”
Something stirred within Attica, something unacknowledged and unwanted and quickly suppressed. “I should be proud to serve my father in any way he deemed necessary,” she said, keeping her voice steady with effort.
De Jarnac grunted. “And does Elise d'Alérion go to her fat bridegroom as willingly as Atticus goes to his cloister?”
Attica swung her head to look at him. He had already removed his boots and mantle. As she watched, he tugged off his tunic and tossed it aside. He looked big and frightening and magnificently male, standing there in his shirt, hose, and braies. She felt a queer trembling start, someplace deep inside her, but she could not look away. “My sister knows that women of her station do not marry for love,” Attica said slowly. “She has never expected nor wished for anything different.”
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