THE SLAYER'S REDEMPTION
Warriors of York series
Book One
by
MARLISS MELTON
Bestselling, Award-Winning Author
Williamsburg, VA
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2015 Marliss Melton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published by James-York Press in conjunction with Cat Whisker Studios.
ISBN: 9781938732164
This book was originally published in print under the title Danger's Promise by Marliss Moon as A Seduction Romance by The Berkley Publishing Group/A Jove Book. The current version has been extensively revised and expanded.
Cover: Covers by Ramona, coversbyramona.blogspot.com
Editor: Sydney Jane Baily, Cat Whisker Studios
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Warriors of York Series
About Marliss Melton
Dedication
This revised and expanded version of Danger's Promise is dedicated to readers who have read every one of my books, including my first published novel. Because you deserve my very best effort, here’s the story again, woven from finer yarn and written with fifteen years of experience behind me. I think you will love The Slayer’s Redemption. Thank you for your loyalty!
Acknowledgments
Where would I be without my best friend, senior editor, and author-in-her-own-right, Sydney Jane Baily? She is the driving force behind the historical accuracy and fine details in this updated story. If you love historical romance, be sure to read her Defiant Heart’s series, set in 19th-century Boston, the mid-west, and San Francisco.
Hats off to my team of Beta readers who came through in a pinch, offering helpful feedback, especially Penny, Kathy, Susan, Joyce, and Suzanne. Thank you for your hard work and keen eyes!
Prologue
In the Year of Our Lord, 1146
In battle, he fought like a man possessed. To the enemy, he gave no quarter. His nom de guerre sent shivers of horror down the spines of common folk. Yet, reflected in the gray depths of his newborn’s eyes, the Slayer of Helmsley looked like an ordinary man. A profoundly humbled man.
His baby had inherited his swarthy coloring and apparently, given that the infant was still alive, his father’s stubborn nature as well. Little more than a bundle of slippery limbs held in his father’s battle-hewn arms, the boy child’s chest swelled on a healthy breath. His fists resembled iron mallets. With a wail that bounded off the ceiling and magnified, Simon de la Croix heralded his own birth. Beyond the shutters, thunder boomed and lightning crackled with a midsummer storm.
A grim smile tugged at the Slayer’s lips. Simon would be the next Baron of Helmsley, not a bastard warrior like his father. Not a man forced to fight for all he had.
The portal burst open, startling the baby into silence. A draft beat up the torchlight and illumined the flapping sleeves of the midwife as she rushed into the chamber.
“Give me the babe!” screeched the wizened woman. She reached for him with her shriveled hands. “I must baptize it at once!”
Christian lifted his son above the woman’s reach. A pox on the midwife! Did she think Simon marked for the devil? “I told you to leave,” he said in his quietest voice.
The old woman stilled, her eyes moving beyond him to the lifeless form of the Slayer’s wife. “Mother of God, what have ye done?” she whispered.
Christian felt his horror bubble up, and he quickly squashed it down. “What have I done?” he snarled. “I’ve done naught but save my son from perishing with his mother. ’Twas you who let her die. Get you out before I think to imprison you for murder!”
The midwife blanched and scurried backward. Hastily she gathered her belongings: bottles of draughts and tisanes, knives and needles. They clanged together in the earthenware bowl as she scuttled from the room. With a furtive look, she darted away.
The door closed behind her. In the silence that followed, Christian heard the thudding of his own heart. His disbelieving gaze drifted about the room, touching on the mutilated body of his wife, the rosary beads lying useless in her palm, the half-embroidered altar cloth upon the chair. At last, he looked down at the baby in his arms. Simon returned his gaze intently.
“Your mother is dead,” Christian whispered. ’Tis my fault.
Until the midwife came, his wife’s labor had been unremarkable. Genrose had suffered the pangs of childbirth with the same saintly silence that she had suffered her husband. Then, oh, so subtly, she had faded with the dying light of day.
There is naught more I can do, the midwife had declared. These things are in God’s hands.
The words perturbed him even now. Christian had cast the woman from the room and dared to alter fate’s design. He had cut Simon free of his fleshy prison, and even cut the cord that tied the baby to his ill-fated mother. And the baby had lived!
Lowering his son into the cradle of waiting linens, he wrapped him carefully against the cold. Simon held still, accepting of his father’s ministrations. Yet his somber gaze demanded something of him—a mother, most likely.
With a deep breath, Christian called upon the ruthlessness that had given him his deadly reputation as the Slayer. Then he turned to the task of rolling his lady’s corpse in cloth. It took all the sheets on the bed, plus those folded on the chest, to staunch the blood still spilling from her body. His movements were deft with practice. Yet in all his experience of war, he had never felt so sickened by his actions, so keenly plagued by guilt.
Had he loved the woman who had died giving him a son? One thing he knew, if he hadn’t married her and begotten a babe on her, she would still
be alive. For that, he shouldered the blame for her untimely demise.
In the act of covering Genrose’s face, he hesitated. Her quiet features were hardly even known to him. She had been as pure as a novice when he’d wed her a year ago. Then, as now, he had been unworthy of her sacrifice. His only comfort was the certainty that she was happier with God than she had been with him.
The baby gave a whimper from within his small oaken bed resting on wide curved rockers. Christian hurried to the cradle, worried that the cruel, unpredictable hands of death might yet snatch his son away from him.
Who would nurture Simon? Who would feed him? The questions hit him like the broadside of a sword. At that moment, his babe should be snuggled against a doting mother’s breast and then later moved upstairs, cradle and all, to the tower nursery.
Wiping the blood from his hands on the edge of a sheet, he scooped up Simon one more time and paced the length of the chamber. The baby ceased to fret, his bright eyes watchful. The rain began to pelt the shutters. A knock sounded at the door.
“Enter.”
Roger de Saintonge edged into the torchlight. The droplets on the cloak of Christian’s master-at-arms gleamed like diamonds as he ran an eye over the nightmarish scene. “My lord, you are covered in blood!” the middle-aged knight exclaimed, shutting the heavy door behind him.
Sir Roger’s tilted smile was not in evidence that night. The scars that forked like veins upon his face paled as he approached. His gaze fell to the swaddled infant. “A boy, my lord?” he queried gently.
“His name is Simon. He will inherit his grandfather’s title,” Christian answered, though Roger already knew his motives for marrying the baron’s daughter.
The knight’s brown gaze flicked to the bed where there was nothing to see but a cloth-wrapped body, then back to the baby.
“I know not what to say,” he confessed.
“Say nothing.” Christian felt as if he wore a mask upon his face. Spots burst and swam before his eyes. “Tell me how the defense goes at Glenmyre.”
“The news isn’t good, my lord,” Sir Roger warned.
“Say it.” The struggle over Glenmyre was escalating into war. Between domestic matters and military preoccupations, Christian would have little time to spare for his son. “What has Ferguson done now?”
“He rode upon Glenmyre at dusk, when the peasants were returning from the fields. He slew them all.”
Christian swore viciously at the Scot’s perfidy. “How many dead?” he demanded.
“Nineteen men.”
A familiar queasiness turned Christian’s stomach. The Scotsman’s atrocities reminded him of his own past. Feeling his knees go weak, he thrust the baby at his vassal.
“Find a nurse for my son,” he commanded. “I will ride to Glenmyre to bolster our defense.”
He took several steps toward the door before turning to regard his wife’s dismal chamber. “See that my lady is buried alongside her parents,” he added gruffly.
Sir Roger looked older with an infant clutched to his hauberk. “As you will, sire,” he assured his lord.
Christian grasped the latch. “Send word to the Abbot of Revesby. Ethelred must bury her. Do not let news of her death reach Rievaulx.”
“I will not, my lord,” Sir Roger promised, and Christian took his leave.
Genrose’s chamber opened to a gallery, which overlooked the hall, as did the family solar and his chamber next to hers. Below, the servants gathered, awaiting news of the birth. The hush that greeted him made it apparent that they’d heard of their ladyship’s demise, no doubt from the hysterical midwife.
As Christian clutched the balustrade for balance, the light of the fire pit deepened the bloodstains on his tunic.
The servants looked up at him in one accord. Shock flared in their eyes. Hearing whispers ripple among them, he fell back into the shadows. Too late, he realized they were thinking of the abbot’s prophesy, cried out within the chapel just nine months earlier.
Mark me well, people of Helmsley. This virgin bride will be slain by her husband!
Nay, not he! Christian longed to defend his innocence, but his protests would fall on deaf ears. The servants wouldn’t take his word over that of a cleric. He would never win their loyalty now.
He longed to take the circular tower stairs upward toward solitude, but instead strode to the main staircase, set on reaching the courtyard and its deep, frigid well; despite the rain, he intended to pour bucket after bucket over himself, to wash his wife’s blood from his clothes. Two at a time, he descended the steps and in silence marched to the large oak doors that guarded his great hall. Before he reached the door, a servant’s cries rose with the smoke from the fire pit.
“Mother of God, he has killed Her Ladyship! Did ye see the blood?”
Chapter One
With blisters burning her feet, Clarisse du Boise tackled the hill to the Abbey of Rievaulx. The abbey commanded a view at the height of a crag, rising from the stalks of purple heather to lord over the valley below. Its walls seemed to waver in the hot July haze. She would not admit the illusion was due to her blurred vision.
For two long days, the sun had sat upon her shoulders and sucked the moisture from her mouth. Beneath the cloth hiding her auburn-flamed hair, Clarisse’s scalp was drenched with sweat. The gown that disguised her as a peasant chafed her limbs where her shift failed to cover her. She’d worn her slippers to tatters. Still, she was lucky to be alive.
Ferguson, her stepfather, hadn’t cared about the dangers of the road when he’d cast her out upon her deadly mission. He knew his threat to kill her mother and sisters would keep her fighting to survive any hardship. Aye, she would even risk eternal damnation of her soul to save them.
Ye mon gain admission to Helmsley as a freed serf in need o’ work, he’d commanded. Drop the powder into the brute’s drink at the first chance ye get. If the Slayer isn't dead in one month’s time, I’ll hang yer mother an’ sisters in the courtyard.
There were others he could have sent in her stead, men and women more adept at subterfuge. However, Ferguson had a reason for sending Clarisse to do his dirty work. Her sharp, strategic mind made her an ever-present danger to him. He could not control her except from afar.
The poisonous powder was concealed in a pendant that swung between her breasts as she pushed her way up the abbey’s hill. Ferguson’s plan was sneaky and cold-blooded, and it was riddled with flaws. The likelihood that she would be exposed and hanged for spying was high, but that did not cause her stepfather any great concern. He probably hoped she would be caught—one less thorn in his side.
Only one possibility for aid existed, and he went by the name of Alec. Six months ago, he had been Clarisse’s betrothed; now he was a monk. Had the Slayer not attacked Glenmyre on the eve before her wedding day, she would have been a Christmas bride. In a bloody assault, he had killed Alec’s father, prompting Alec to flee to Rievaulx Abbey in fear for his life. Clarisse’s dream of escaping her stepfather’s clutches through marriage had been crushed.
She had told herself Alec would stay at Rievaulx only a short while. He was a knight, after all, not a man of the cloth. However, the days turned to weeks and then to months. In letters too many to count, she pleaded for him to take up his sword and rescue her family from the Scot’s abuses. All her efforts had been in vain.
That day, however, she intended to petition him in person. How could Alec refuse to help when she told him of Ferguson’s threat to kill her family? Honor dictated that he summon an army and challenge her stepfather once and for all.
The scent of cooked meat wafted from a nearby village, distracting Clarisse from her introspection. Her stomach gave a hollow rumble, but she ignored it. The monks will feed me at Rievaulx, she assured herself.
Her footsteps faltered as she approached the abbey's only gate. The wall that rose toward the cloudless sky reminded her of her father’s tomb as it was hewn from the same gray stone.
Alec is here, she reminded
herself. When he saw her in person, he would remember his love for her. Surely, he would be her hero once again.
The only way to signal her presence was to tug on a bell rope. A few long moments after the bell's high jingle, the peephole snapped open. “Aye?” came a voice from the folds of a cowl.
Clarisse greeted the faceless monk in Latin. “I must share a word with Alec Monteign.”
The monk showed no reaction to her words. “We have an illness here. The abbey is quarantined,” he said.
Alarm rippled over her. “What manner of illness is it?” Without Alec's help, she would have no choice but to perform the immoral and dreaded mission, sending her soul straight to hell along with the Slayer’s.
“Fever,” said the monk shortly. “Boils and lesions.”
Clarisse repressed the urge to cover her mouth with one corner of her headdress. “Nonetheless, I must speak with Alec.” Desperation made her dizzy. She blinked her eyes to clear her vision, and when she opened them, the monk was gone.
Where did he go? Clarisse stood on tiptoe and peered into the abbey’s courtyard. The cobbled square looked strangely abandoned. An inscription over a pair of double doors drew her gaze. Hic laborant fratres crucis, said the message. Here labor brothers of the cross.
No one labored now. Neither did they tend the roses growing outside the abbey’s walls. The rows of trellises looked overgrown and unkempt. The suspicion that she’d come to the wrong place for help spread like a bloodstain, crippling her optimism.
Footsteps echoed from the courtyard coming closer. Another man approached the gate. He did not wear a cowl over his dark, tonsured hair but, rather, a stole designating him as abbot.
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