“You intend to pay his outrageous demands?”
“I cannot see where I have any other choice,” he mused, smiling tightly. “If I refuse to pay the ransom, he will take the greatest delight in sending the pieces of De Briscourt’s widow to me in a series of tiny bloody sacks. When he does, whether it is the widow he slices or not, the news will travel the length and breadth of England like wildfire. Lackland will hear of it and panic. He will think at once that his own stupid schemes are at risk, and there will be bodies thrown from the parapet walls before he can be calmed enough to see reason.”
“Calmed? Lackland? I was told he frothed for a week when he found out you were planning the wedding so soon. He should turn into a ravening madman when he hears about this. Can you not find this … this Black Wolf”— she hissed, unable to admit the spectre had another name— “and kill him before the threat goes any farther?”
“Find him? In these woods?” Wardieu scanned the dense fringe of tall pines and sweeping oaks that blackened the horizon. “You forget, he knows every footpath and deer track in this forest as if he were indeed a wolf and this his natural domain. My men could search for months and never come within bowshot. It was a game with him, almost since he was old enough to drag the weight of a sword behind him, to hide in the forest and defy Father’s best gamekeepers and woodsmen to find him. Few ever did.”
“A pity you did not indulge in his games,” Nicolaa said dryly. “Then you might have known one or two of his favourite lairs and spoiled whatever his gambit might be.”
“There is more than one way to trap a wolf,” Wardieu said evenly. “And more than one kind of bait to use against a man’s emotions.”
The second chill that trickled down Nicolaa’s spine caused her to turn slowly and follow the direction of Wardieu’s stony gaze. Silhouetted against the leaping orange flame of the main campfire were De Gournay’s two squires, their heads bent forward as they dexterously cleaned and polished weapons that were already burnished to a mirror brightness. Rolf, the eldest by three years, had been fostered into Wardieu’s care at the behest of a neighbouring baron who hoped his son could learn his skills at the feet of a master. Eduard, taller than his thirteen years would suggest and quicker to accept the increased responsibilities of his promotion from page to squire a year earlier, had also been a part of Wardieu’s household since the tender age of six. Both young men were trustworthy, courageous, and loyal. Both burned for the opportunity to earn their own spurs of gold through deed or battle, and until then, to serve their powerful and mighty liege lord in whatever capacity demanded of them.
Nicolaa had never paid one more heed than the other, treating both with the same indifference she allotted any menial who sat below the salt. Only in moments of great weakness—or drunkenness—did she allow herself to remember the pain of giving birth, of pushing the screaming infant away from her breast, of banishing it into the north country so that no one should know or suspect its origins.
“Eduard has grown into a fine young man,” Wardieu murmured in her ear. “A son any man would be proud of. A year or two more and he will no longer be content just to split Rolf out of a saddle, but will be turning his eye to me.”
“When he was born,” she said bitterly, “I wanted to take him out-of-doors and dash his brains out on the nearest rock.”
“Ah, compassion,” he retorted blithely, echoing her scorn of only moments ago. “It comes back to haunt us all, at one time or another. It will be interesting to see whose back Eduard will protect when he discovers the truth.”
“He need never know the truth. He believes he is yours, bastard-born, as does every other pair of eyes in the shire. There is no living soul who could gainsay him differently. Not even I could swear by my blood or yours whose seed it was took root and swelled within me.”
“Could you not? Can you not, Nicolaa? Look closer at the living flesh and tell me with all honesty—if you can—that you know not for certain where you have seen those eyes before, or warmed to that smile. Watch his hands, Nicolaa. Your servants did well in breaking him of the habit to favour the left, and I am sure he does not even remember a time when he did not grip a sword or a lance by the right. But the small things betray him. In the end, the small things betray us all.”
Nicolaa was watching Eduard, but in her mind’s eye, she saw only him. She saw him as clearly as if he stood before her now, his gray eyes almost colourless with resentment and disbelief. It was true, she had gone to him to beg forgiveness for her earthly sins and rampant appetite, but he could see nothing through those noble eyes but betrayal and impurity. In disgust she had torn the ring from her thumb and hurled it at him, and he had simply turned away and walked out of her life without so much as a glance back.
“Does it not rankle to see him every day?” Nicolaa asked, flinching from the robust sound of Eduard’s laughter as it drifted past her on the cool night air. “How could you even take him in if you suspected he was sprung from your brother’s seed?”
“The suspicion did not trouble me as much as it troubled you to know I had found him, despite all of your cunning attempts to keep him hidden.”
“I sought only to spare you pain,” she insisted darkly.
“What is pain if not too-perfect pleasure?”
“Was it your pleasure, then, to keep him by your side, flaunting him before my eyes at every turn?”
“It was my pleasure … and my wisdom … that bade me keep a small hold over you, my love.”
“He means nothing to me—nor to you if your treatment of him is any judge.”
“Nothing dead,” Wardieu agreed. “Alive, he serves as a reminder.”
“Reminder of what? That your brother was in my bed first?”
Wardieu laughed suddenly. “Why do you think I pursued you at all, if not because my brother was there first? The fact you betrayed him so eagerly and so … wholeheartedly, even knowing you carried his seed, well, it serves to remind me that things oft repeat themselves in life.”
“I would never betray you!” she insisted. “I …”
Nicolaa caught herself, a breath away from an admission. She could see the incandescent heat was gone from his eyes, replaced once again by the almost insufferable indifference that would have turned any kind of an admission into another weapon he would think nothing of using against her. And, even as she fought to regain her composure, another insufferable intrusion appeared on the crest of the knoll, running toward them with the beetling self-importance of a noisome gnat.
“Good my lord!” Onfroi de la Haye hailed them, an arm raised and flailing the air for attention. “A message from Sir Aubrey de Vere …”
Wardieu’s annoyed gaze flicked to the sheriff … then flicked again as he caught a brief glint of light where no light should have been. It took his superb reflexes only a split second to identify the metallic flash of an arrowhead streaking out of the woods, and he was able to shove Nicolaa out of its path as it hissed toward them, flying straight and true to the point where Nicolaa’s heart would have been.
Wardieu spun around, his sword already halfway out of his scabbard, his eyes searching the blackness for an enemy he could not see.
Behind him, Onfroi de la Haye felt something hot and sharp punch through the quilted velvet of his surcoat. Meeting with very little fleshy resistance, the arrow had enough force behind it to pierce through muscle, gizzard, and tissue, and to exit out the other side a full six inches before the stiff feather fletching snagged on cloth and torn sinew. Onfroi stared down at the protruding feathers and screamed. He gaped uncomprehendingly at his wife, at Lord Lucien, at the shaft of the arrow that had found him by sheer mischance, and he opened his mouth again, screaming until Nicolaa’s bunched fists struck him to the ground.
Less than fifty paces away, concealed by heavy shadow, Gil Golden cursed and swiftly drew another arrow out of his quiver. He nocked it and realigned his quarry, but before he could shoot, he was trammeled to one side by a pair of booted feet. The bow
and arrow were startled out of his grip as a solid weight crushed into his shoulders. An instinctive grab for the hilt of his sword was cut short by the familiarity of a high-pitched voice cursing at him from the clump of thicket.
“What do you think you are doing, Addle-Brain!” Sparrow shrieked in a strident whisper. “Christ’s blood, are you mad? Has the whole world gone mad this night!”
Gil’s fury gave him no chance to vent an intelligible answer. Beyond the fringe of trees, Onfroi de la Haye’s screams were causing a minor eruption of chaos in the Wardieu encampment. Torches were blazing to life. A flurry of shouted orders was bringing a small army of armoured feet running down the slope toward the hem of trees. In seconds, the woods would be swarming with knights and men-at-arms.
Sparrow extricated himself from the thickets and gave Gil a resounding thump in the ribs even as the taller outlaw was bending over to search for his fallen bow.
“Move, you ape! Run to deeper cover before they fetch the hounds and loose them on us!”
“I almost had her!” Gil spat, crashing through the tangle of saplings and gorse behind the fleeing Sparrow. “I would have had her too, by Christ, if you had not swooped down on me like the wrath of hell! Where did you come from? What the devil are you doing so far from camp?”
“What am I doing so far from camp? What are you doing so far from camp! And what do you mean you almost had her … had who?”
“Nicolaa de la Haye,” Gil snarled. “The sheriff’s godless wife.”
“Nicolaa de la Haye!” Sparrow exclaimed, tumbling to an abrupt halt. “But I thought—”
“You thought I was aiming elsewhere? You thought I would set out on this miserably dank night to risk the ire of the Black Wolf by piercing the one breast in all Christendom he chooses to reserve for himself? You think me that much of a fool?”
“Would that I thought so highly of you, you hulking bandysnatch!” Sparrow retorted. One ear was tuned to the camp and he heard the sudden howl of dogs, a sound that raised a cool prickle of sweat across his brow. He hated dogs. Loathed the mangy, fang-toothed demons as much as he had the capacity to loathe any of God’s creations. An early attraction in one of the fairs he had been sold into had been the pitting of a manacled dwarf against a salivating, red-eyed demon hound from Hades. Both his body and his mind were scarred from those horrific bouts, and he could barely tolerate the gentle, tamed beasts that had attached themselves to the Wolf’s camp.
“Do you realize the trouble you have caused me?” he demanded, running again. “Do you have half a head’s worth of notion how many different treasons I have condemned you of over the past few hours? Skewering the Dragon would have at least made the trip worthwhile, but you, you poxy snipe, you tell me now you had not even that much ambition! You tell me all you wanted was the skewered bosom of the Lincoln Bawd!”
“I almost had her too, damn my luck. A beat sooner … a blink sooner and she would have been as neatly spitted as a suckling pig.”
“A more deserving fate I could not envision for you, Gil of the Golden Eyes!”
“I did not ask you to follow me,” Gil countered. “Nor will I thank you for interfering, if that is what you expect.”
“Save your gratitude and your sweat for the hounds,” Sparrow snorted. “Perhaps your luck will fare better and they will tear you apart before the Dragon’s men have a chance to mould a copper mask to your face. And before milord hears of this folly and pins your ears to your heels!”
“He will only hear of it if you tell him.”
“Aha! Now the knave begs favours!”
They weaved and bobbed from one shadowy stand of trees to another, moving as swiftly as they dared in the darkness. The sound of their braying pursuers had veered to the west of them, but both knew it would not take long for the pointed noses to relocate their scent.
Gil, seeing how hard Sparrow was churning his legs to keep apace with his own longer, lither ones, felt as vulnerable as a newborn babe without the comforting weight of his longbow slung over his shoulder. Halting again, he grabbed Sparrow around the waist and, without delaying to ask, hoisted the squawking bundle onto a nearby branch.
“Up into the treetops you go,” he commanded. “You can move twice as fast through the branches, especially if you do not have me to hold you back.”
“What will you do?” Sparrow gasped.
“My legs are long enough to cover the same ground, only in a more earthbound fashion. Do not worry about me.”
“But the dogs—”
Gil wiped a hand across his brow and glanced back over his shoulder. “There is a wide stream up ahead. I will cut it down the middle until I have gone a ways to dilute the scent.”
“And you expect me to just leave you!” Sparrow sounded shocked—and hurt.
Because the little man was now on eye level with the taller forester, the latter could feel the clutch of fear in the gnarled, stubby hands as they grasped his shoulders.
“I will be all right, Puck,” he assured him. “We will meet up again at the fens in … an hour. In fact, a sovereign says I arrive there first, in plenty of time to cut and pare myself a new bow frame. Are you game?”
“’tis not a game, Gil,” Sparrow objected morosely.
“I know.” Golden reached out and ruffled Sparrow’s curly locks. “But I will best you just the same, so you had better put in a good effort, else have your coin waiting at the other end.”
With that and an extra tweak on Sparrow’s rump, Gil set off at an agile, loping gait that quickly carried him out of sight in the misty gloom. Sparrow sent an oath after him, and would have given chase except for a sudden, bowel-clenching burst of braying and howling that was far too close for lengthy debate.
Scrambling nimbly up to the highest branches, he swung from tree to tree, his heart pounding loudly and steadily within his chest. He kept his eyes trained on the ground as it rushed below, hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of Gil running safely through the forest. Not even his keen eyes could see anything, and once or twice, the hot sting of tears almost caused him to misjudge the distance and angle between branches.
“God give you speed, my friend,” he whispered to the night air. “God give you speed.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“God give me strength,” the Wolf snarled. “You did what?”
Gil and Sparrow, looking as if they had both been dredged through a thorn patch, fidgeted guiltily, shifting their weight from one foot to the other while the Wolf showered accolades upon their intelligence.
“You left the abbey without consulting anyone; you crept within a few hundred paces of the enemy camp, then, without a thought or consideration for the consequences, proceeded to single-handedly jeopardize all of our safety by throwing arrows at Nicolaa de la Haye?”
“She does not figure to be of any significance in your mission for the queen,” Gil said sullenly, then added in a hushed voice. “In truth … I only wanted to see her. When I heard Sigurd mention she had joined the Dragon’s camp, I …”
“Only wanted to see her,” the Wolf repeated belligerently. “And?”
“And …” The gleaming amber eyes lifted to meet his. “And I saw her. She was standing fifty yards away, a clear shot, bold as evil under the moonlight. I did not even realize I had fit an arrow to my bow, or raised the bow to my shoulder until the string was drawn and the arrow in flight.”
“You shot her.”
The crown of unruly red curls bowed again. “I shot at her. I missed.”
The Friar, perched quietly nearby as a casual witness to the proceedings, crooked an eyebrow. “You missed? A clear shot from fifty yards … and you missed!”
Gil reddened, for it was something that did not occur with any great frequency.
“She was not alone. Whoever was with her must have seen something and pushed her out of the way just as I loosed my arrow and … well … before I could notch and fire another, Sparrow flew down on me out of nowhere and—”
“Sav
ed your crusty hide, no doubt,” the Wolf cut in bluntly. “Did they not give chase?”
“They tried, but we lost them. There was no harm done.”
“No harm,” Friar snorted.
“Except to the sheriff,” Sparrow chirped brightly, his smile fading almost instantly on a slanting glare from Gil.
“What about the sheriff?” the Wolf asked guardedly.
Gil chewed a lip and looked as if he regretted not staking Sparrow out as a tidbit for the wolfhounds. “The sheriff just happened out of nowhere—”
“He was behind the Bawd when Gil’s arrow went sniffing,” Sparrow provided helpfully.
“… and when she was pushed out of the way—”
“The shaft found him a ready target!” the elf concluded happily.
Friar and the Wolf both stared.
“You shot Onfroi de la Haye?” Friar asked at length. “Is he dead?”
“He took the arrow in the belly,” Gil shrugged, indicating the worst could be assumed.
The Wolf continued to maintain an unbroken silence for a full minute before he released a short, sharp gust of air from his lungs and turned away.
The four were standing near the main gates. There, the early pastels of dawn and an alert sentry had conspired against the two culprits’ attempt to regain entry to the abbey grounds unnoticed. Sparrow’s face and hands were smudged with sap, his clothes torn from his journey through the tree-tops. Gil was not so leafy, nor so sticky, but a seam of his deerhide jerkin had parted at the shoulder and the flap hung down like a limp pennant on a windless day. Both recalcitrants were wary of their leader’s temper. Both squinted upward from time to time, curious to know how the sun could continue to shine so brightly up above while the gathering storm clouds bristled so ominously below.
Friar, debating whether or not he had ever seen a blacker expression on the Wolf’s face, shook his head sadly and looked down at his hands.
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