The Last Knight

by Candice Proctor

  He gave her a slow, unexpected smile that clutched at her heart. “I'm a knight, remember—even if I do seem to have temporarily misplaced my horse, armor, and sword. Rescuing damsels in distress is what I do.”

  Her breath caught on a startled laugh as he reached out to snag her around the neck with the hook of his elbow and draw her to him. “Ah, lordling,” he said, his breath wafting warm against her cheek. “I'm not abandoning you, so you'd best make up your mind to it.”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder, her gaze on his hard face outlined against the low gray clouds above her. Beneath her cheek, she felt his heart beat, felt him live. And she was suddenly so terribly afraid for him— afraid for them both. “At least we know that even if we don't make it, Sergei will have warned Henry.”

  He touched his sword-callused fingers to her lips, silencing her. “We'll make it.”

  Attica watched de Jarnac lead the saddled roan across the muddy farmyard toward her. The rain had settled in hard again, pounding on the broad leaves of the old oak overhead and splashing into the broad brown puddles that littered the yard.

  Through the gloom, she saw a jagged blaze of red that confused her until she realized it came from the lightning bolt of de Jarnac's shield, dangling from the saddle. She supposed it made sense for Sergei to leave the knight his shield. But how did one explain the simple sword now buckled to de Jarnac's hip?

  “Merci bien,” de Jarnac called to the peasant woman who shuffled back to her thatched-roof cottage, her hooded head bent against the rain, her fist clutched tight around the coins he had given her.

  The horse's hooves made little sucking noises in the mud as de Jarnac stopped before Attica. She caught hold of the cheekpiece of the roan's bridle. “Where did you get the sword?”

  “You'll have to ask Sergei that,” he said, vaulting into the saddle. “He left it.”

  “But how could he know you'd be needing it?”

  De Jarnac shrugged. “I stopped asking myself questions like that a long time ago.” He slung his shield by its strap across his back and reached down his hand to her. “Here.”

  She hung back, staring up at him through the driving rain. She thought she'd probably never wanted to do anything in her life as much as she wanted to take his hand now. “I still think you ought to ride on without me,” she said, her voice husky but calm.

  “Très bien.” He leaned his right forearm on the pommel as the horse moved restlessly beneath him. He was no longer smiling. “You've told me what you think, and I am impressed with your nobility even if I'm not particularly flattered by the implication that I am so lacking in honor that I'd even consider riding off and leaving you to face possible death. Now give me your hand and put your left foot on mine.”

  She held out her hand. His big fist tightened around her wrist, and she scrambled up into the saddle in front of him.

  “You are a fool,” she said, clutching the gelding with her legs as de Jarnac's arms came around her to hold her close against him. His body felt so warm and comforting around hers. She tilted her head back against his shoulder, felt his chest hard and strong against her spine.

  His breath tickled her ear as he pressed his lips once against her neck. “Don't worry,” he said, his voice deep with amusement. “When the horse gets tired, I'll make you walk.”

  She laughed softly as he spurred the reluctant roan out of the yard.

  The direct road to Le Mans and La Ferté-Bernard ran in an almost straight line to the east, down a slope to the broad valley beyond. They turned instead toward the grass-covered hills that would lead them to the higher, wilder country stretching northeast in a wide arc to Sille-le-Guillaume and Beaumont-sur-Sarthe before curving back toward No-gent and down to La Ferté-Bernard.

  Raising her hand to shield her face from the rain, Attica studied the distant hills. Even without the rain and with two good horses, the roundabout route was a journey of at least five or six days. But with only one horse between them and the need to stay away from the main roads …

  “Why are we stopping?” she asked when he drew up beside a copse of chestnut and beech, not long after they'd dropped over the rise from the farm.

  He jumped down to the wet, spongy ground and handed her the reins. “I'll walk from here.”

  She reached out to grab his shoulder when he would have strode ahead. “But you can't.”

  He swung to face her, the rain running in rivulets down his hard, tanned cheeks. “Attica, this horse will never last carrying us both.”

  She grabbed a handful of mane, ready to scramble down herself. “Then we'll take turns. I'll walk first.”

  His big hand closed over hers, stopping her. “Oh you will, will you? And can you walk eight leagues a day, day after day?”

  She paused. “I don't know,” she answered honestly. “I've never tried.”

  “Well, I have.” He let her go and started walking. “So you ride.”

  She nudged the gelding after him. She watched him striding through the grass, his long legs swinging into an effortless rhythm. There was so much she didn't know about this man, so much she wanted to know.

  “You never told me how long you've been with Henry,” she said at last, when she could no longer contain herself.

  “About six months,” he said, not looking at her. “Why do you ask?”

  Instead of answering, she said, “Why Henry?”

  He glanced up at her, a smile curling his lips as his head fell back. “Why not Henry? He's the greatest king in

  Christendom. And only a king can give me what I want.”

  “What do you want?” she asked quietly.

  The smile hardened, although his voice stayed light as he answered her. “Land. Titles. What every younger son turned knight-errant wants.”

  She kept her gaze on his face. “Your brother left a son and heir of his own, didn't he?”

  He swung his head away from her, so that she could see only the sharp line of his cheekbone. “He doesn't matter. I want nothing from the de Jarnacs,” he said, his tone suddenly harsh. “I will be the man I make myself.”

  The silence that followed was hard and brittle and unwelcoming of disturbance. She rode beside him, her hands clenched tight about the reins. She felt restless and unsettled, wanting to know more but reluctant to press on. In the end, he was the one who spoke next.

  “Why are you still unwed at the age of nineteen?” he asked suddenly, surprising her.

  The rain had eased up, and she pushed back the hood of her cloak before she answered. “I told you, I was betrothed as a child to Ivor of Chauvigny. He went on Crusade, while I was sent to his mother to be trained at the courts of Aquitaine and Poitou, and to await his return. Only, he wasn't particularly anxious to come back. He was gone for six years and finally died in Antioch.”

  “If I remember correctly, my dear Atticus,” de Jarnac said, the warmth of amusement returning to his voice, “you told me Elise had been betrothed to Ivor of Chauvigny.”

  Recalling her earlier deception, Attica felt her cheeks heat. “I spoke of myself.”

  “Hmph.” He kept his gaze on the distant hills. “So it was after the death of Chauvigny that your father betrothed you to Fulk of Salers?”

  “Yes.”

  Something in her voice brought his head around, his eyes narrowing as he stared up at her. “He must be a hard man, your father, to use his only daughter so.”

  Her throat felt suddenly thick and tight. “My family has many estates in eastern Brittany, but they are scattered and not easily defended, and the times are troubled. The d'Alérions need this alliance with Salers, and my person and the three castles I bring as my dowry are what secured it.” She paused, lifting her head to let the damp wind fan her cheeks as she drew the cold air deep into her lungs. “I have never doubted my father's love. But I have always known his first loyalty is to his house, and to his lord, Henry. He expects no less from me.”

  “And your mother?”

  Attica shook her h
ead. “It was my mother who first suggested the alliance.” A bitter smile tugged at her lips, then faded. “My betrothal is one of the few things Blanche Blissot and Robert d'Alérion ever did agree on. I told you they despise each other. Now that my father's age and illness have freed her from the constraints of childbearing, they are rarely together. She spends most of her time at the southern courts, while he travels between his various castles and hunting lodges in Normandy.”

  She was aware of de Jarnac's hard, intense gaze upon her. “Is your mother as loyal to Henry as old Robert d'Alérion?” he said.

  Her horse stumbled in the sodden grass, and she pulled it up sharply. “I don't know. Why do you ask?”

  But he only shrugged and squinted away into the distance.

  Attica let her fingertips trail down the fiery lightning bolt emblazoned across the front of de Jarnac's shield, hanging against the roan's side. “When did Sergei leave for La Ferté-Bernard?” she asked after a moment.

  “Yesterday afternoon.” He slanted a grin up at her. “Unlike me, Sergei guessed the truth about your sex from the very beginning. He simply didn't tell me.”

  “Why not?”

  He laughed out loud but didn't answer her.

  They were traveling now through thin woodland of oak and birch with an undergrowth of bracken and fern and wide stretches of soft green grass. At the base of the slope, to her right, she could see a small hamlet of crude huts huddled against the cold, the dense gray smoke of their hearth fires curling up from holes in the thatched roofs. Encircling the village, a thick, protective hedge of brambles showed a prickly face to the world.

  “Tell me more about him,” she said. “About Sergei, I mean.”

  She watched de Jarnac's brows draw together in a frown of concentration. “If you're asking me to explain him, I'm not sure I can. I'm beginning to think that sometimes, when something truly horrid happens to people—particularly if they're sensitive to begin with—it can alter their perception in some way. A way that enables them to see things the rest of us tend to miss. But explain it?” He shook his head. “I can't.”

  She stared down at the high, bold line of his cheekbone, at the wind-tossed wildness of his dark hair blowing against the tanned column of his throat. He was no longer looking at her but at the gorse-covered cliff above, hovering dark and silent in the gloom.

  “So what happened to Sergei?” she asked, remembering the squire's haunted eyes. “What happened to him that was so horrid?”

  De Jarnac's head swung around to look at her again. “His town was attacked by nomads from the east. Mongols, he told me his mother called them—and every man, woman, and child in Christendom should get down on their knees each night and pray to God that scourge never reaches our borders.”

  “Why?” she asked breathlessly. “What do they do?”

  She saw his nostrils flare. “They're herdsmen, Attica. From the steppes. They don't believe in cities, and so they … destroy them.” He tightened his jaw. “Destroy them with a savagery the world doesn't often endure.”

  Looking at him now, she could see no emotion in the hard planes of his face. But Attica found she could scarcely speak for the tightening of her chest. “And Sergei saw it all happen?”

  De Jarnac met her gaze steadily. “You wouldn't want to even imagine the things he saw. He and his mother were the only survivors out of a population of several thousand.”

  She lifted her head, listening to the wind blowing through the grass and scattered trees, and the tired clomp of the roan's mud-splattered hooves on the sodden earth. The things he spoke of, they had happened so far away and so long ago. Yet it seemed in that moment as if the horror of those dreadful events reached across the distance of time and space to touch her with a chill of fear and the sickness of despair. She wondered how anyone could endure such a thing and survive. A child. A woman.

  A woman, put up for sale at an Eastern slave auction.

  She dropped her gaze to the reins twisted through her fingers. This was one of the dark, secret things she wanted to know about this man; she wanted to know about the woman he had bought in the slave market of Aleppo. She wanted to know about Sergei's mother.

  But when she cast another look at the dark knight beside her, she saw that his attention had been caught by a line of horsemen that had suddenly appeared on the crest of the low ridge on the far side of the vale. He pulled the gelding into a copse of birches and waited, his hand over the roan's muzzle, until the riders disappeared over the rise.

  By then, the moment had been lost, and they pushed on.

  Early in the afternoon they came to a stream and paused beside its grassy banks to rest for a while. The rain had stopped by then. Attica swung off her wet cloak and tied it to the back of the saddle, while de Jarnac sat on a water-darkened log near the streambed and pulled off his boots with a quickly concealed wince.

  “We've only seen those few horsemen,” she said, coming to sit beside him. “And we don't know for certain they were Renouf 's men. Perhaps no one is following us.”

  He grunted and raised the wineskin they'd brought from the woman at the cottage. “They're out there. Renouf knows where we're going, so he'll have sent most of his men on the direct roads east to Le Mans. But he's bound to have small groups of knights out covering the country to the north and south, too.”

  Attica wrapped her arms around her bent legs, hugging them close. The rain might have stopped, but she was still wet and cold and already beginning to feel stiff from the hours she'd spent in the saddle. “Who is the Saintly Guido?” she asked, resting her chin on her knees.

  “What?”

  “The Saintly Guido. Olivier de Harcourt mentioned him, and when I told you of it on the road to Laval, it seemed to mean something to you.”

  De Jarnac rubbed his cramped toes. “He was the singing master of a Benedictine monastery in Italy. Guido of Arezzo. He came up with the system of notation for writing down music.”

  “Music?” She frowned, trying to remember. “But there is no seventh note.”

  He shrugged. “Guido's system used six notes. But if a seventh has been added …” He shook his head.

  “But what has any of this to do with Henry and Philip?” she asked, leaning forward.

  De Jarnac held her gaze for a long, intense moment, then turned away, reaching for his boots. “Philip has always had a fondness for codes. I suppose it goes with his fondness for treachery and intrigue.” He paused to ease his right foot into the wet leather of his boot. “At first, he used just simple ciphers, where the normal alphabet is replaced by another. But such ciphers are fairly easy to break, so now he's had someone develop a new code.” He slammed his heel down into the boot. “A musical code.”

  “A musical code?” She studied his strong-boned profile as he reached for his second boot. “But … how is that possible? Even with the addition of a seventh, there wouldn't be enough notes. Not in a useable range.”

  “No.” He stretched to his feet and swooped to pick up the wine skin. “Which is why I think they're using a code that relies on the length of the notes, not just on their pitch.”

  Her head fell back. “But there is no way to indicate the length of notes, is there?”

  He shrugged, turning away. “Not that I know.”

  She watched as he crouched down to refill the skin with water from the stream. The rain-cooled breeze gusted around them, bringing the scent of wet grass and earth, and the scolding churr of wrens in the copse of birches farther down the slope.

  She was suddenly intensely aware of their isolation here, in the wilds of Maine, and of the hours and days she would be spending alone with him. The hours, the days, and the nights. She found herself watching the way his tunic molded itself to the muscles of his broad back and the veins in his strong hands stood out against the hard sinew as he dunked the bag beneath the surface of the stream. She swung her gaze away to the distant mountains lost in the misty shroud of low-lying clouds.

  “When you were in
Brittany and Ireland,” she asked suddenly, “did the things you heard lead you to suspect John's loyalty to King Henry?”

  He glanced at her over his shoulder. “I know there have been messages sent back and forth between Paris and John's court. But no, I didn't discover any real proof that John has decided to join the rebellion.”

  “Yet the letters patent from the breviary would prove it, wouldn't they?”

  “To my way of thinking, yes.” He stood, his back to her, his attention still focused on the wineskin in his hands. “But I don't know about Henry. After all, he's not only a king; he's also a father. He'd probably argue that the letters only prove how much Philip is willing to offer. There's no real evidence that John intends to accept.”

  “I don't understand how a son could turn against his own father the way Henry's sons have turned on him,” she said softly. “What kind of men must they be, to rebel against the very man who gave them life? To conspire with his enemies?”

  She was startled by the abruptness with which de Jarnac spun about. She saw the taut set of his shoulders, saw the sudden flare of an old, old pain in the depths of his vivid green eyes. Pain, and something else, something she thought might have been guilt, although she couldn't be certain because in the next instant his lids drooped and his lips curled into a bitter line. “Perhaps you were more fortunate in your sire than some of us,” he said, and swung away to catch up the roan's reins.

  She stared after him, her heart aching in her chest, a rush of unshed tears stinging her nose as she wondered what long-ago wound had cut so deeply that it still festered raw and bleeding in the depths of this man's dark soul.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  They were plodding up a long, grassy slope, wet and slippery with rain, Attica on the roan, de Jarnac walking beside her, when she saw his head jerk up, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the horizon.

  She followed his gaze, her heart slamming up against her rib cage at the sight of two mailed knights, cresting the hill above them.