“And conveniently never return,” she bit back.
Let her slap him for it, he did not care. He reached over and pushed her chin up until she faced him. Looking her in her ruined eyes through the veil of gossamer black, he swore, “I would not. I won’t abandon you again.”
He waited for her denial. When it did not come, he rose and went to his bed.
“Wait.” She called to him, tears still evident in her voice. When he turned, she continued, “I would feel more… I would be at ease, if you would sleep in Wilhelm’s bed. Just until he returns. I do not like to be alone up there.”
“I’ll sleep there, then,” he told her, and went to the door. Upstairs, Wilhelm’s cot was still neatly made from the morning he’d left. Johanna had done that, with her two loving hands, so it would be waiting when her brother returned. Guilt lanced through Philipe’s heart. Perhaps his father had been right. He truly did destroy everyone around him. He’d helped his sister into exile, had led Jessop to his death. Now, Wilhelm likely awaited trial in Lord Fueil’s dungeons, unless he’d been hanged already. And Johanna. He’d destroyed her life twice, once when he’d been so cowardly to leave her behind then cast her aside, and a second time when he’d ridden wounded to her doorstep.
His arm hung limp at his side, too painful to move as he undressed for bed. He’d slept most of the day out of boredom, yet he still felt as though he could slumber for days. That did not bode well, he knew, but he would not let himself fret over it. It was an impossibility that he would not recover. He’d made a vow to Johanna. He would be damned if he broke another to her.
Though she could ignore Philipe’s perspiration and struggle to remain upright during their supper, she could not let his grunts of pain go unanswered in the chill of the night. She pushed aside the bed curtains and went to the hearth to light a candle from the coals, carefully tucking her nightgown around her legs to prevent a stray spark from setting her alight. She lifted the candle high above his bed. His face was drawn and shimmering with sweat, his eyes fixed on the wall beside the pallet.
She pressed her hand to his forehead. Though he perspired, his skin still burned, and she drew her fingers back. “Damn you, Philipe.”
“I didn’t…” his teeth chattered pitiably as he tried to speak. He didn’t move, but his eyes canted toward her. “I didn’t want to worry you.”
“And why would I be worried about you?” she snapped, pulling the coverlet back. He lay nude beneath, but his body held no fascination for her in illness.
“You might be worried you’ll have to bury me,” he managed, and though his words were very grave, she still heard his humor behind them. At least, he was not too far gone for that.
She tucked the blanket around his chest. His shoulder was angry red, with streaks reaching toward his heart like poisoned lightning. Johanna recoiled.
“As bad as all that?” he asked, and a tremor passed through him, making his words a sob.
She forced herself to scold him. If she treated him kindly, he would know the extent of his illness. “You’ll live, I fear. But something must be done. It’s gone sour.”
“Do you know how to treat it?” He shivered and spit burst from his lips as he breathed hard. The cords of his neck strained beneath the skin.
“That, I won’t know until I’ve seen the wound.” She went to the laver beside the bed and plunged her hands in, scrubbing her hands as clean as she could with the cold water. Nurse used to say the only thing that had saved Joanna’s life after the burns was cleanliness, and Johanna had taken it to heart. It would do no good if she were to introduce some different foul humor into his body while tending to the one that already lurked there.
She went to his side and lifted the corner of the bandage. The impossible heat beneath her fingertips confirmed her suspicion before the rancid smell assailed her. She had sealed the wound too soon, trapping disease inside. This was her fault.
“It isn’t as bad as all that, is it?” he asked through chattering teeth.
Though she’d found it difficult to drum up pity for him before, she certainly felt it now. Perhaps it was just guilt. “I’ll have to reopen the wound and purge the infection. I’m sure Nurse left something for that.”
“Yes, that sounds brilliant. Let’s cut me open and smear some ancient salve from a dusty box into the fresh wound. That should heal the infection from the old one.”
She ignored his venom, pushing herself to remember what Nurse had taught her. Mold to purge, honey to cure. Was it the other way? She remembered the moldering bread downstairs, and rushed to retrieve it.
The lower room was dark, but for the faint red glow from the embers in the hearth. She tiptoed across the room, one eye warily on those coals. The fires of Hazelhurn had burned for days after, with that same red malevolence. She sucked up a fortifying breath and knelt down to snatch up the bread Wilhelm had carelessly discarded. On the table, a kitchen knife glittered. She wiped the blade on her dress and hurried back upstairs.
“Are you to make a meal of me, then?” Philipe asked, when he saw the honey and bread.
She poked at the coals in the fireplace and used a long handle to hang a kettle over the cinders. “It’s a trick of my Nurse’s. The honey is hers. Did you know that honey will never rot?”
“I’ll remember that when I am too poor to buy fresh honey or too infirm to climb a tree and steal some.”
“I believe that time has come,” she said, and realized uncomfortably that she chided him not solely out of hatred. “But use some sense, highness. If honey does not rot, and I pour it onto your festering, vile, pestilent arm, perhaps it will send the rot there scurrying away. It was how Nurse explained it to me.”
“Then I will thank your Nurse personally when her medicine kills me.” He laughed weakly. “Do what you will.”
When the water heated enough to be effective, she retrieved the kettle and wet some clean linens. She pressed them over the wound, and he hissed. She hoped the heat would draw up the foulness and rend the original tear, so that she would not need to use the knife. After a time, she lifted the cloth and pressed at the reddened skin. It gave way, the healing pink flesh giving way to spill free the putrefaction inside. Philipe groaned in relief. “I realize this is disgusting, and you will never look at me without remembering it, but I don’t care.”
She smiled, but turned away to hide it. It seemed wrong to find anything about Philipe amusing, and especially now, with Wilhelm missing…
Put some steel in your spine, woman! she scolded herself. She had spent fifteen years tending the soil of her anger. She would not allow Philipe’s manufactured charm to wilt the fruit of it on the vine. “You don’t have to pretend that you care about retaining my good opinion. I know I am not the type of woman you’d drag to your bed.”
“I have never had to drag anyone,” he said through clenched teeth as she pressed a fresh, hot cloth to the wound. “You were the only person to refuse me.”
“I was waiting for our wedding night.” She sniffed with derision, so he would not suspect her tears. “And lucky was I that never happened.”
Philipe’s eyes widened. “Lucky, were you? I thought you loved me, then.”
“I thought you loved me, then,” she countered. “You must not have cared overmuch, if I could be tossed aside so easily.”
“I apologized!” Philipe brushed her hand away and sat up, then reeled to the side before throwing a hand to the wall to steady himself. With effort, he bit out, “I apologized. I treated you badly, I know that, now.”
“Lie down, I don’t feel like washing vomit out of my clothes,” she snapped, pushing his good shoulder back to the cot. He did not complain, but stared at the ceiling, jaw clenched. She mopped at the weeping wound, and lightly bound it. “Besides, hasn’t it worked out better for me? My life here isn’t the excitement and comfort of the palace, I’ll grant that. But your exploits at court are well documented. As much as tales of orgies and legendary numbers of women rotating in and o
ut of your bedchamber hurt me these fifteen years past, I can only imagine how they would have wounded me if I were some put-aside princess. It would be too embarrassing to bear. At least here, my pride has survived.”
“Do you really think I would have done that to you?” He laughed softly, grimacing as if the taste sickened him. “I’m an unmarried man, with wealth and privilege. Being with women, the way I do? That’s almost expected. I’d not have done it if I’d had a loving wife waiting for me.”
She shook her head, resolute in her anger. “You were the bane of the serving girls when you stayed here, as well. I’m stupid.”
“I was seventeen!” He sat up again, pushing her hand away. “I was seventeen years old, spending long, unfulfilled hours with the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, who was content to sit in my lap and kiss me from sunrise to sundown. Do you really expect fidelity from a stupid young boy?”
“Boy enough to tumble with every girl who’d let him get under her skirts, but man enough to promise eternal love? Oh, but boy again, when the beauty of his beloved is snatched away! I lost everything, everyone I loved. I needed you, and you abandoned me!”
“I was wrong!” His temper finally broke, and he shouted at her. It felt strangely satisfying, to see his rage and affront at her accusations. Far better than his unconcerned half-apologies over the past. “If I could go back and change what happened, I would, but I can’t. I should have taken you away from here when we fled. I have done so every night since. If I comforted myself over my past choices by finding some girl to distract me, it was not out of preference, believe me. I was lonely and heartsick. And it never mattered who was in my bed, because it was you. She was always you!”
If he had struck her, shaken her, if he’d slammed her bodily into the wall, all of those would have been easier. Though she’d never been in physical combat in her life, she was certain she could fight off those types of blows. What was she to do with this admission? If it was meant to comfort her, it did not. If anything, it proved that he had been in love with her beauty, not her self, as she’d always suspected. While it was nice to be right, it wasn’t as nice to be right at the expense of her feelings. She bound his wound, the heel of bread pressed against the freshly opened tear. She had expected some complaint from him, but it never came. “There. It should be fine until morning. Be careful of it. There shouldn’t be any bleeding now, but we must let it heal from the inside.”
She rose with the little dignity she still felt and went to her bed.
* * * *
Johanna screamed. Her gown was aflame, her head wreathed in fire. She ran to him, and he pushed her away. The nightmare visited him so often, it was hardly upsetting anymore. It would continue, he knew, with him running from her through the halls of the palace as the mirrors cracked from the heat and the chandeliers melted. Always, it was only her and him, playing a dangerous chase through the flames, constantly pushing her away.
This time, though, something changed. When he pushed her, his hands put out the flames, took them into himself. They didn’t burn, but moved like ghosts up his arms. He grabbed her to him, smothering the fire that burned her but turned to a harmless specter at her touch. She fell against him limp as a doll, her hair burned away, her scars long healed, but still she screamed.
“Philipe!”
He opened his eyes, confused for a moment at his surroundings. He’d almost expected to see his bedroom at the palace, burned all around him. The wretched sobs and shouts from his dream had followed him back to the tower at Hazelhurn, and the momentary respite of a blank memory gave way to a hellish crush of reality.
“Philipe!” Johanna called out, thrashing in her sleep.
It was one thing to ignore a wordless nightmare, but only a monster would leave her to call him and not respond. His head still muddled from sleep and fever, he rose on shaking legs and went to her bedside. He reached for her, brushing her shoulder gently, then, when she did not wake, giving her a little shake. Her eyes came open, wide and frightened in the dark. “Philipe!”
“I am here,” he told her, but it did not calm her, and he remembered then what Wilhelm had told him. When gripped by her terrors, she sometimes appeared to be awake when she slept on. What a diabolical torture, for her and for her brother. Philipe could not imagine it, appearing to be awake to the world, but senseless in horror, all the while tormented by nightmares and unable to wake in earnest.
Standing at her bedside, he was reminded too clearly of the night before he’d left Hazelhurn for the last time, the night that an easily bribed guard had seen to distracting Johanna’s old nurse so that Philipe could slip into her room for one last attempt at his ultimate end goal. He could admit now that it hadn’t been only his heart that had longed to possess Johanna. Now, the thought of that guard, and how quickly he’d acquiesced for a little bit of coin, tasted bitter instead of triumphant. If he’d been a smart prince, he would have known something was wrong at Hazelhurn, for a guard to so willingly desert his post. Forgive me, Johanna, I was so stupid then.
Now, just as he had done that night so long ago, he slipped into the bed beside her, to pull her against his naked body. Fifteen years ago, she’d woken, startled, then melted sleepily into his arms, eager for his kisses, for his hand between her legs, but she’d not surrendered her virtue even then.
When we are married, she had whispered to him, her fingers closing around his hard, eager flesh, I want you to take me as your wife, not as a lover.
Those words had been so naive, he’d believed them. Now, he knew better, that a wife should be a lover, that a husband should have that passion for her. It was why he’d never married. He could not sustain that passionate interest in any woman for long.
In the present, Johanna fought against him when he drew her to his body. She slapped at his chest and thrashed, and for a moment he thought she might have woken and gotten the wrong idea at finding him naked in her bed. But then she quieted, her body going limp against his, and she whimpered his name.
In the darkness, he could not see her terrible scars, and the body he felt through her thin chemise, though thinner than before, robbed by starvation and time of its softness, felt as familiar and exciting as that night so long ago. He remembered the way she had touched him innocently at first, then she’d grown bolder, using her hands and mouth on him. It had been over so quickly, too quickly, and they’d lain together beneath the thick bedclothes, talking of the life they would have at court and all the wonderful things the future held for them.
It had all gone wrong, and he was to blame. Not for the first time since the fire, he wished to open his eyes and be back there, that night when his father had insisted they flee. Philipe had begged to take her, but his father had convinced him…
His father had lied. Albart had not wanted to bring Johanna with them because he’d sought to distance himself from a part of the kingdom he’d thought lost. The northern lords had wanted to break away from his rule, and he’d seen it as inevitability. Oh, he’d let them draw up the marriage contracts, sure enough. But in hindsight, Philipe knew that the marriage would never have taken place, even if he hadn’t called off the engagement himself. King Albart was smart, and ruthless. The combination was an ill one.
Johanna’s burned fingers curled against Philipe’s shoulder, and he reached for her hand, daring to lift it to his lips. He shouldn’t, he knew. He could not simply wish her healed. He could not change the past. But as she lay, sleeping in his arms, he could not help but feel that they had been denied the life they should have had. He kissed her fingers and held her close.
It would not hurt to pretend, just for a night.
Chapter Six
The morning light and equally distinct morning cold were not what brought Johanna awake. It was a small, masculine sound, but it was not Wilhelm. Fifteen years of sharing the tower had been long enough to learn her brother’s mumbled sleep talk. She twisted under the weight of something across her ribs, then realized with a shock that it w
as an arm.
She sat up, pushing Philipe’s heavy body aside. He leaned up on one arm, blinking the sleep away, looking utterly baffled at being woken so rudely. Springing from the bed, Johanna flung out one arm to point at the door. “Get out!”
“Good morning,” he said mildly, trying not to smile. He didn’t try hard enough, for the ghost of a smirk flitted across his lips more than once.
“What were you doing in my bed?” she demanded, finger still raised toward the door. “Answer me, damn you!”
“Let me get a word in edgewise, and I shall.” He stretched, the sheets falling to his waist. An intentional display, she would wager. She supposed he thought himself irresistible to her, as he was to all the foolish women at court. He yawned loudly, cleared his throat, and said, “I heard you having a nightmare. I couldn’t leave you the way you were.”
“Oh, a convenient excuse. My brother told you of my nightmares, and you use them as a reason to climb into my bed!” Her very warm bed, with him in it. Now, she stood in the chill, in her linen nightgown, her nipples hard as ice against the fabric. Mortified, she crossed her arms over her breasts, but no doubt he’d already noticed. Philipe knew nothing except his own desires, and he would not have missed such a tantalizing detail. “And of course, I, the only woman in the entire valley, should be flattered at your attentions and open my legs for you. Was that your aim?”
“Never,” he swore, his expression growing dark. “Is that what you think of me?”
“What else should I think of you? Your exploits have reached us, simple beggars that we are.” She scoffed, far too angry to continue speaking. It was an infuriating habit, but any time she became angry, that anger turned to tears. She would not shed a single one before Philipe, when he could misconstrue their meaning. Instead, she grabbed her brother’s bedrobe and pulled it on, the wool scratchy even through her nightgown. “I must go and see to your breakfast, Your Highness.”
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