The Last Knight

by Candice Proctor

  “Thank you,” she murmured, and rolled over onto her side, hugging the warm, dry cloth to her.

  Again she felt the touch of his fingers, on her cheek this time. Felt their gentleness and an odd, unexpected tremor as he smoothed her wet hair away from her face.

  “Go to sleep, lordling.”

  She awoke to the clear, melodious notes of birdsong and a luxurious sense of warmth she gradually realized came from the large male body cradling her.

  She lay on her side, her back snuggled against de Jar-nac's chest, his hand resting on her hip. All her life, Attica had slept alone. A luxury, she knew, for many slept five or six to a bed. And yet it was a fine thing, she thought, to wake up next to someone. To a man.

  To a man she loved.

  She kept her eyes closed a little longer, drawing out the moment, reveling in the warm intimacy of his hard man's body so close to hers. Still faintly smiling, she opened her eyes, then felt her heart lurch at the sight of the pale glow lighting the vaulted gloom. Dawn was breaking.

  She squeezed her eyes shut again. She didn't want morning to come. She knew a futile sense of wishing she could reach out and stop time, hold off the coming of the dangerous day and cling to this moment. This moment of peace and warmth and safety.

  He hadn't moved, yet she somehow sensed from the aura of coiled alertness about him that he was awake. “Is it time?” she asked quietly.

  “Not yet.”

  He drew back, as if he meant to put some distance between them now that she was awake. She caught his hand, stopping him. “Hold me. Please.”

  There followed a tense pause filled with the quiet exhalation of his breath and a strange, quivering tension. Then he said, as if to break it, “That's only false dawn you're seeing. Try to go back to sleep.”

  She shifted her shoulders until she lay flat on the hard stone beside him. Her body ached with scrapes and bruises and an intense physical weariness such as she'd never known. She closed her eyes. But sleep seemed to elude her.

  “De Jarnac?” she said softly, glancing toward him. He lay with his head resting on his upflung arm. His eyes were open, and he was looking at her.

  “Yes?”

  She let her gaze rove over him. She could see him now in the growing light, see the darkly brooding eyes, the fiercely beautiful line of cheek and jaw. His neck was bare, and his shoulders, and she realized suddenly that he was as naked as she beneath the covering of cloaks. The thought brought her a strange, forbidden thrill that sent heat surging into her cheeks, so that she found she couldn't look at him anymore.

  She stared at the stones of the vaulted ceiling above them.

  “Do you think it will work?” she asked. What she meant was, Do you really think we'll be able simply to walk through the city gates unchallenged, dressed as Pepe the Stiltwalker and his lute-playing companion?

  But she didn't need to say all of that, because he knew exactly what she was asking. “I don't know,” he said. “How good are you on the lute?”

  She let out a low, nervous laugh. “Good enough, I think. How are you on stilts?”

  “Well, I have used them before.”

  She swung her head to look at him in surprise. “You have?”

  “Mm-hmm. At Acre, in Outremer. When I was serving as squire to Sir Rauve. I think I was fifteen.”

  “Sir Rauve? Is he the knight with whom you took the cross?”

  “Yes. He had the devil's own temper when roused, but I stayed with him because he was one of the best men with a horse and a sword there ever was.” He shifted his weight so he could glance down at her. “I wanted to be the best myself, you see.”

  She imagined de Jarnac as a brash fifteen-year-old and smiled. “So what happened?”

  He lay on his back beside her, his elbow bent behind his head. “I had some free time one Sunday afternoon, so a couple of the other squires and I decided to go into the city. To the market. That's where we saw him.”

  “A stiltwalker?”

  De Jarnac nodded. “Ponce and Sigibert—that's the other squires with me—they knew I had a pretty high opinion of my athletic abilities—”

  “You mean, you were insufferably cocky?”

  “Something like that. At any rate, the other boys bet me that I couldn't walk the length of the leather souk on those stilts without coming to grief.”

  “So of course you took them up on it,” she said, unable to keep the laugh out of her voice.

  He frowned at her, but she saw the wicked gleam in his eyes. “Well, I couldn't hardly not, now, could I? I mean, I had a reputation of my own to keep up.”

  She rolled over onto her side so that she was facing him. “And you did it?”

  “Mais oui. I paid the stiltwalker a few coins for the use of his stilts and some quick pointers. It's not as hard as you'd think, if you know what you're doing and if your balance is good.”

  “If your balance is good.”

  “Mine is. I put on quite a show. Before I was halfway through the souk, I'd collected a considerable crowd around me, heavy on dogs and little boys. The boys were all laughing and yelling, and the dogs were all barking—which wouldn't have been a problem, except for this camel.”

  “A camel,” repeated Attica, not sure whether to believe him or not.

  “A camel. Right at the end of the leather makers’ alley. I came charging out of that leather souk on my stilts, with all those barking dogs and shrieking boys leaping around me, and that camel, she took one look at me and knew she wanted nothing to do with me. She threw back her braying head, showed me an ugly mouth full of yellow teeth, and bolted.”

  “She?”

  “Of course it was a she. She ran right into me.”

  “And?” Attica prompted, trying hard not to laugh.

  De Jarnac sighed. “It's a long fall from up on stilts. I went flying. And when I came down, I was on top of a pastry stall. Smashed the stall, of course—not to mention all of those sticky pastries, and the pastry seller's head, too. Oh, and I broke two of my own ribs. But not the stilts.”

  Attica let out an ungenteel sound, rather like a snort. “And Sir Rauve?”

  “I was his squire, so he was held responsible for all the damage and had to pay for it. Of course, he took every last sou of it out of my hide. But at least he waited until my ribs healed before he thrashed me.”

  At that, she couldn't help it: She laughed out loud. But as her laughter floated away into the dark columned recesses of the crypt, she sobered suddenly, her fingers clutching at his hand. “If this doesn't work,” she said, her voice low and earnest, “if something goes wrong and they take us at the gate, you must tell my uncle what he wants to know.”

  He sucked in a hard breath that lifted his bare chest. “I can't, Attica.”

  She sat up, hugging the cloak to her breasts as she turned toward him. “But—he'll torture you! Torture you to death if you don't.”

  “I know. He took some pains to outline the entire procedure for me in great detail, presumably on the assumption that knowledge of the particulars might increase my willingness to cooperate.”

  She searched his features and dark, shadowed eyes, looking for some sign of the fear he must surely—surely?— be feeling. But she saw nothing. Nothing except a wry, bitter kind of self-mockery. Her own fear for him trembled through her. “I don't understand. Why not tell him? Whatever reward Henry has promised you for your loyalty, it won't be of any use to you if you're dead.”

  He shoved himself up on his elbow, the cloak falling away from his broad, naked chest as he leaned into her. “Sweet Infant Jesus. Is that why you think I'm doing this? For some damned royal reward?”

  She stared at him. “Why else? Don't tell me it's out of loyalty to Henry, because I won't believe it. You're the one who is always saying you're loyal to yourself and no other. The documents in that book aren't worth you dying for.”

  He sat up completely, swinging his legs over the edge of the stone slab and taking one of the cloaks with him in a swirl
of dark cloth as he stood up. “It's not a matter of what's in the book.” He reached for his braies. “It's who has it.”

  “Sergei,” she whispered in sudden understanding. “You're protecting Sergei. You gave him the breviary when he met us in the square, and then you sent him ahead to warn Henry of Richard's plans for the conference.”

  De Jarnac paused to throw her a hard glance over his shoulder. “Do you really think I'd send your uncle's men after that boy, just to save my own hide?”

  She felt the blood drain out of her face, her gaze falling away from his to her own, clenched hands. “No. No, of course not.”

  She could feel him staring at her, even though she was no longer looking at him. Then he picked up one of the gaily colored tunics and tossed it to her, along with her own underwear. “You'd best get dressed. We need to get through that gate before Pepe and friend wake up and find their clothes and the articles of their profession gone.”

  Attica caught the bundle of clothes. “But we paid for them. Far more than they're worth.”

  De Jarnac grunted. “Making me go back to leave your gold necklace at Pepe's bedside might have eased your conscience, lordling, but somehow I doubt it'll stop him from setting up a howl when he finds he's nothing left but his underwear.”

  Wordlessly, she pulled on her shirt and braies, then suppressed an inward cringe when she reached for the lute player's red-and-yellow tunic. The wool cloth was old and coarse; it reeked foully of cooking fat and woodsmoke and stale sweat, and it was doubtless infested with lice and other vermin. Gritting her teeth against a wave of revulsion, she jerked the tunic over her head, pulled on the coarse hose, and stood up.

  The tunic had been made for a much broader man. It hung on her awkwardly, so that she had to pad it out with her own clothes and de Jarnac's, too, wrapped about her torso and tied in place with their hose. The effect was less than realistic.

  This is never going to work, she thought, fastening the lute player's worn leather belt with fingers that suddenly began to shake violently. It's not going to work.

  “De Jarnac?” she said quietly.

  “Mmm?”

  She swung to face him. “I'm scared.”

  He came to her, his gaze intensely serious as he searched her face. “I know,” he said softly, resting his hands on her shoulders. He took her mouth in a swift, sweet kiss. Then he smiled. “Look at it this way.”

  She cocked her head. “How's that?”

  His grin widened into a low laugh. “At least there are no camels in Laval.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  Pepe the Stiltwalker was in fine form that morning, unfazed, it seemed, by the light drizzle that fell incessantly from out of the low, dull sky.

  His long sticks flashing, his tall, athletic body unbelievably lithe and controlled, he charged down the hill from the church of Saint Sulpice, a circle of laughing, excited children darting around his stick-extended legs like ragged brown bumblebees about a giant yellow-and-red flower. Behind him came Benno the Lute Player, his white mask a frozen grin of black thread on coarse linen, his cold-numbed hands working hard to coax a tune from the battered old lute.

  “Look at that,” said the younger of the two guards at the River Gate. “Now, that's one way to stay out of the mud.” But the other guard, wet and chilled and foul-tempered after a long night spent chasing shadows across the rooftops of Laval, simply grunted and retreated farther beneath the sheltering archway of the gate.

  “Hey, Benno,” called the younger guard, bobbing up and down on his toes to keep warm.

  The lute player, looking dumpier than ever in his ill-fitting yellow-and-red tunic, spun about to face the guard and froze.

  The guard grinned. “Play something by Isabelle d'Anjou.”

  The masked head nodded, the sewn black starbursts around its eyeholes seeming to explode in a parody of alarm. He swung away, his fingers flying over the lute strings, while Pepe the Stiltwalker, not content simply to walk, began to dance, his long stick legs moving in a stately parody of a courtly promenade that brought shrieks of delight from the children.

  The young guard laughed. “Merci bien,” he called, and tossed the lute player a coin.

  Benno caught the coin neatly from the air and threw back his head to yap like a happy dog. The yapping could still be heard, growing fainter in the distance, as the two performers twirled their way through the gate to be lost in the tangle of tents that filled the open fields between the city walls and the wood beyond.

  “Mother of God, you—you cocky—” Attica sputtered, searching desperately for the right word.

  De Jarnac's eyes sparkled at her through the slits of his mask. “Méchant diable?” he suggested, then ducked as she snatched off her masked hood and used it to whack him across his shoulders.

  She felt almost breathless with lingering fear and a queer, trembling sense of triumph. “What in the name of God did you think you were doing?” she demanded as he pulled off his mask and backed away from her, his hands up as if to ward off more blows, a smile tugging at his lips. She wanted to reach out and trace the curve of that smile. She wanted to hit him hard enough to wipe that smile off his face. “There I was, so afraid you were going to come tumbling down on top of one of those guards that I could scarcely play the lute, and you start dancing?”

  Laughing, he feinted sideways as she threw her hood at him. “I told you I was good, didn't I?” He tugged off Pepe's parti-color tunic and tossed it aside, his hands settling on his lean hips as he paused a moment to stare at her. “Besides, I wanted to put on a good enough show that neither of those guards would get the bright idea that they ought to make us take off our masks.”

  “Huh.” She yanked off Benno's filthy tunic and reached for her own, her hands still shaking so badly, she found it difficult to do up the laces. They had paused to change in the shelter of a small grove of leafy green poplar trees some half a league from Laval. The rain still fell in a light drizzle, pattering softly on the overhead branches. But the mist was lifting from the low ground and the sky had lightened until the wet leaves and vivid green grass seemed to sparkle with jewels.

  She looked up from tying her laces to watch him bend over and pick up his own tunic. The great rents in his shirt showed her a back strapped with muscle and marked with purpling bruises. “Don't tell me you learned to dance like that after one pass through the leather souk?” she asked.

  He swung to face her as he pulled on his torn tunic. “Not exactly. You remember that stiltwalker in Acre I told you about? Well, after I came to grief with the camel, he set up a screech that I'd cracked his stilts. I hadn't, of course, but in the end, Sir Rauve bought the things, just to shut the man up.”

  “You mean, you used them more than just the once?”

  He looked up from tying the points of his chausses and grinned. “That's right. By the time we left Acre, all of Sir Rauve's squires could do a jig on stilts.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “Huh. Then what excuse would I have had if I had fallen off ?”

  She scooped up his boots and threw them at him. He caught them neatly. “Where is Sergei supposed to meet you, anyway?” she asked.

  Balancing against the trunk of a nearby tree, de Jarnac tugged on first one boot, then the other. “He's not. When I gave him the breviary, I told him to take his own mount and the Arab, and kill both horses if necessary, as long as he reaches La Ferté-Bernard in time to warn Henry about Richard and Philip's plans to attack after the conference.”

  She felt as if someone had just kicked all the wind out of her. “You mean, we have no horses?”

  “One, hopefully. Sergei was supposed to leave the roan at a cottage not far from here.” He finished lacing his boots and straightened. “Are you ready? We need to put as much distance as possible between us and Laval before your uncle realizes we've left the city and organizes his men to come after us.”

  She swung one of the purloined cloaks over her shoulders and tur
ned toward the road. “But we'll have only one horse between us.”

  “That's right,” he said, keeping to the grassy verge that flanked the muddy track.

  She stopped. “Then you must go on without me.”

  “Keep walking, Attica,” he said, not missing a step.

  “Listen to me.” She caught his arm to jerk him around.

  He swung to face her, his eyes hooded, his jaw set. “All right. I'm listening.”

  “If Renouf catches you, he'll kill you.”

  He flashed her his devil's grin. “If he catches me.”

  He would have turned away again, but she stopped him, her grip tightening on his sleeve. “He'll be far less likely to catch you if I'm not with you.”

  She watched the smile leave his face. “That's true.” He took a step that brought him right up to her. “But if you think he will be gentle with you, I wouldn't count on it, Attica. His life's on the line here, and by helping me to escape, you've shown yourself to be his enemy.”

  “He is my kinsman. He would be angry, and he might very well beat me. But I doubt he would kill me.”

  “That's not what you thought last night, when you fled the castle.”

  She brought her chin up. “It doesn't matter. I'm willing to take the chance.”

  “Well, I'm not.” Something flashed like quick lightning in the depths of his fiery green eyes before he hooded them with his drooping lids. “I might have to stand by and watch you sacrifice your happiness out of a sense of honor and duty to your family, but I'll be damned if I'll have you sacrificing your life for me.”

  She took a step back, her hand coming up to hold the edges of her cloak together at her neck. “Oh? And what makes you think I'm willing to let you risk your life for me?”