Knights of de Ware 01 - My Champion

by Glynnis Campbell

  A twinge of hope streaked up his spine. Maybe Linet had come back, repentant. Then he grimaced in self-disgust at how readily he would have forgiven her.

  But it wasn’t Linet. And he suspected, despite the shadowy profiles that appeared to belong to men of the cloth, that he was about to find himself in a great deal of peril. He watched through slitted eyes, barely breathing, as a pair of men stumbled across the room. One of them lifted a timber from the hearth, blowing upon it till it blossomed into a firebrand that lit up the whole chamber.

  Duncan had never felt so helpless. As he lay there, bound and gagged, Tomas and Clave threw back their cowls and swaggered up, leers on their lips and revenge in their eyes.

  The moon gilt the crests of the waves lapping the Spanish shore, making golden gems on the water. Ships rocked against their moorings—stately ships, old rusted skiffs, vessels that floated barnacle-heavy and low in the waves. But nowhere did Robert see the imposing sails of the Corona Negra.

  “The ship—she is not here?” Anabella clung to Robert’s side, placing one delicate hand on his chest.

  Robert sighed. How natural Anabella felt in his arms. It hardly seemed possible that they’d known each other only a few short days. “I don’t see her.”

  “What will you do?” She looked up at him with huge, dark eyes—eyes that trusted him, eyes that made him believe he could do anything.

  “I’ll find him. Somehow I’ll find Duncan. If he isn’t in Spain, I’ll return to England and—”

  “No, not there,” she pleaded. “I do not want to set foot in that country again, not after—”

  “Shh, Anabella,” he soothed, stroking her silky black hair. “I’m not the one who broke your heart. I could never leave you. You know that.”

  She smiled faintly.

  “Besides,” he added, running the tip of his finger down her nose, “I know a priest in England who will marry a couple without the usual fortnight of banns.”

  Anabella’s eyes shone. She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. Her lips were like velvet, her breath as sweet as honey.

  “How I adore you, Roberto,” she whispered, “and how lucky your friend is to have a companion so loyal. I only hope you find him.”

  “I have to find him,” he said with a wry grin. “Otherwise, how can I gloat over my good fortune and show him my beautiful prize of a bride?”

  He enfolded her in his arms once more and let his gaze ripple over the inky, endless sea. The smile faded slowly from his face. Somewhere out there, his friend, his lord, the heir to de Ware, floated in the hands of fate. Duncan might as well have been a needle dropped amid the rushes.

  Linet shivered. The moon peeped through the leafy canopy, leaving stepping stones of light along the winding path of the forest. Crickets ceased their songs as she trespassed into their shadowy world, and mice scurried off to safer corners of the wood. Every twig snapping beneath her step quickened her heart.

  This was by far the most reckless thing she’d ever done. If she didn’t freeze to death or lose her way in the dark, she might fall prey to wolves or their human counterparts—the thieves who frequented the high road. She was as vulnerable as a rabbit loosed among hounds.

  But remorse numbed her to fear. The chill embrace of night was a welcome penitence as she slogged through wet leaves, struggling with her conscience. She dared not even think about what had passed between them—the intimacy, the murmured words of passion. The memory was as painful as a fresh wound.

  With one simple act, she’d betrayed both her father and the beggar. She’d never be able to rectify that mistake. It was like a poor stitch taken in weaving. No matter how many more stitches one took to cover it up, the flaw still remained, and more often than not, each subsequent row of weaving only served to magnify the error. She’d just taken such a stitch. And she feared that flaw would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  The first blow was always the worst.

  This one was no exception. The fist slammed into Duncan’s stomach, folding him near in half with nausea. After that, the body’s level of tolerance was set, and nothing would get much worse. They split his lip, opened his cheek, and blacked both eyes, but he grew oblivious to the pain. He focused instead on the image of Linet burned into his mind, those culpable eyes looking down at him in anguish and betrayal before she left him.

  He had to understand. He had to make sense of her cruelty. If it was the last thing he did, he’d strip her soul bare to discover the truth. It was this obsession that kept him alive as the reivers beat him without mercy.

  Finally their enthusiasm and strength began to wane in the face of their sense-dulled victim. The brutes ceased their bludgeoning and chortled to themselves over their victory as they waited for him to revive. He jousted with the fog of unconsciousness for a while, whether for seconds or hours, he couldn’t tell. When he awoke, the two Spaniards were engaged in a stifled verbal battle.

  “We must find out where she has gone,” said Clave.

  “Let me beat it out of him.”

  “You’ve already beaten him half to death, imbecile! Besides, I do not think it will work. The fool will go to the grave with his lips sealed.” There was a long pause. “No, we must use our heads.”

  “Why not kill him now, eh?” said Tomas. “If he is not going to talk, what good is he?”

  “You have the brains of an ass!” Clave hissed. “He may not tell us where she is. But if we let him go—if we make him think he has escaped—he will lead us to her.”

  “Let him go? We cannot let him go,” Tomas whined like a petulant child.

  “How else will we find the wench?”

  Tomas spat in response.

  “We will do it my way,” Clave announced. “Later we will kill him.”

  Duncan was badly battered. There wasn’t an inch of him that wasn’t bruised or bleeding. When he flicked his tongue out gingerly along his lower lip, it tasted metallic. Every breath was an agony. His eyelids were so swollen, he could barely see Clave coming toward him with the dagger. He was in no condition for what he was about to do. And yet he knew he must.

  The instant Clave severed the cord at Duncan’s wrist, Duncan whipped his hand out of its prison, catching the reiver by the arm. With a violent wrench that took every ounce of his strength, he twisted the blade until it pointed at the reiver’s belly.

  The man’s jaw fell open in frozen disbelief. Before he could scream, Duncan plunged the dagger to its hilt beneath Clave’s ribs. The reiver let out one final rattling breath as a trickle of blood dripped from his still gaping mouth.

  “Clave!” the other reiver gasped.

  Duncan flinched in pain as he wrested the steel from the dead man’s falling body. Half on faith, half on instinct, he flipped the dagger around and sent it racing through the air. Luck was with him. With a deep thump, the blade pierced the remaining foe’s black heart. Duncan slumped back on the bed even before the reiver’s lifeless body hit the floor.

  After that, he drifted off. It seemed an eternity passed in that limbo of unconsciousness. It was still dark when he revived. The silence of death hung like a cloud over the room. His eyelids were gummed shut, and his lip stung where it was cut. The linen had fallen from his mouth, but his tongue was as thick and stifling as the cloth had been. He poked it around experimentally. Thankfully, there were no loose teeth. The smell of blood permeated his nose, but it wasn’t broken. His ribs ached, and his stomach felt as if a cart had rolled over him. Shite, he was as helpless as a kitten.

  He had to get away before more of them came. He couldn’t endanger his host by remaining here. First, however, he had to free himself.

  Every muscle in his torso complained as he rolled over to tug at the leather cord around his left wrist. He lifted his heavy head and tried to discern the secret of the convoluted knot. After a moment, he let his head fall back. If only the wool merchant could see what she’d wrought, he thought bitterly.

  When the dizziness abated, Duncan inched himsel
f across the pallet until he could reach the cord with his teeth. With frustrating awkwardness, he gnawed at the leather until it was bitten through.

  He rested again. It seemed as if the sky outside were lightening, at least the narrow patch of it he could glimpse through the arrow loop. He’d have to hurry.

  Fortunately, Tomas had fallen toward the bed. When Duncan pushed himself up on his elbows, he saw he might be able to retrieve the dagger from the dead man’s chest. His bones screaming in protest, he stretched out backward across the bed, dangling over the edge so he could reach the blade. All the blood rushed to his head, the pressure causing an enormous throbbing behind his eyes. Finally, flailing at the dagger, he closed his hand on the haft and drew it sharply from the victim. Blood oozed like honey from the wound.

  Leaning forward, he cut his ankles loose and cautiously swung his legs over the side of the bed. They seemed to be unbroken. He located his undergarments and performed the slow, painful task of dressing.

  Kneeling by the reivers’ bodies, he searched for anything he could scavenge. Pocketing a few coins and an extra dagger and buckling on a sword, he glanced one final time at the disheveled pallet. There were dark spots on the bed linens—blood. It wasn’t all his own. Some of it was Linet’s—maiden blood she’d surrendered in the heat of passion. Their blood would mingle eternally on the white linen. As their lives should have. He tensed his jaw. He couldn’t bear to think about it.

  As silently as a shadow, he stole into the dying night to find Linet. Whether he would kiss her or kill her, he was uncertain. But he had to find her before El Gallo did.

  The great hall of de Montfort castle was extravagantly furnished, almost to the point of gaudiness in Linet’s opinion. Richly detailed Arras tapestries hung from the walls, and the wainscoting that ran the full length of the room was painted with intertwined vines and blossoms in shades of green, rose, lavender, and yellow. A row of ornate, carved mahogany screens blocked the entrance of the buttery, where servants scurried back and forth making preparations for supper. Wall sconces with beeswax candles were located between each of the tall, shuttered windows. The beamed ceiling had been plastered and painted with biblical scenes. Glancing at her surroundings, Linet developed a new appreciation for all her father had sacrificed.

  “The medallion?” she repeated politely. The man before her—her uncle, Lord Guillaume de Montfort—so resembled her father that it took her breath away. And the hope in his eyes when he beckoned her to join him in the great hall had been raw and anxious. She wished she could give him any other answer but the one she must.

  The blood rose to her cheek, but she smiled graciously and tried to swallow her keen embarrassment. “I… It has been lost, my lord.”

  “Lost?” The word sounded hollow in the huge room. He doubted her. She saw it in the subtle flattening of his eyelids. He was disappointed.

  The trial of her long journey—the chill of the forest, the sleeplessness, and her futile attempts to make herself presentable after a night of trudging along the road to de Montfort—reared its head to torment her. She longed to throw herself upon her uncle’s mercy, to tell him everything, to bury great wrenching sobs against the shoulder that seemed so like Lord Aucassin’s. But that was fatigue motivating her—fatigue and frustration and heartache—not common sense. And it wasn’t befitting a lady.

  Instead, she took a shaky breath and fingered the fine, soft, forest green velvet of her new surcoat, the one she’d purchased from a local seamstress at the soul-wrenching price of the beggar’s ring. “I know I must seem a stranger to you. And I know my father was…exiled from—”

  “No!” Lord Guillaume cried. Then he turned his face aside. “Not exiled from me. He was my brother…God rest his soul.” He pressed a finger to his forehead, reliving some past agony. “Our father was too stubborn to beg Aucassin’s forgiveness, and I watched him suffer for it. I watched our mother grow old for want of a son’s love. But he was always my brother, by blood and in my heart. When he wrote that he was dying…” He choked back a sob.

  Linet felt her own throat constrict. Her nose stung with unshed tears.

  Lord Guillaume steeled himself, clearing his throat. “Aucassin wrote that he had a child of his…marriage—a daughter. He said that if anything should happen to her, if ever she needed the help of de Montfort, she would be known by the medallion about her neck.”

  Linet’s vision grew watery.

  Lord Guillaume studied her. “Your eyes are so like his,” he whispered. Then he sighed. “But without the medallion…”

  Linet sniffed. She understood. Without the medallion, she was no better than a pauper masquerading as a lady. She’d been a fool to hope she’d find salvation here. She executed a quick curtsey, and then wheeled away to flee before her exhausted emotions could turn her into a blubbering bowl of custard.

  “Wait!” he called.

  She stopped, but could not find the courage to face him.

  “There is enough doubt in my mind and enough shame staining my soul to extend you common courtesy at least.” He sounded very tired. “Until I discover otherwise, you are welcome as a member of this household.” He clapped his hands twice, beckoning a servant from behind the buttery screens. “Marguerite, see that Lady Linet is made comfortable in the Rose Chamber.”

  Linet, her throat thick with emotion, turned and gave him a deep, grateful nod. Then she followed the maid across the hall and up the stairs to her new quarters.

  The chamber was exquisite. Rose-colored velvet hung from the canopy of an immense bed, caught at the posts with yards of thick silver cord. The walls, freshly plastered, were painted with roses in every shade of pink imaginable—salmon, cerise, coral, mauve. Candles were copiously arrayed atop every piece of delicately carved furniture—table, chest, and desk all bearing the design of entwined roses. A pair of thick tapestries depicting lords and ladies a-maying framed the tall window, into which was set a panel of stained glass in the design of a rose. Even the freshly laid rushes were sprinkled liberally with rose petals, scenting the chamber like a garden.

  She’d seen wealth before, but never had she seen a room so luxurious. The maid drew open the shutters, and the sunlight streaming in illuminated the chamber until it almost hurt Linet’s eyes to look at the bright walls. Surely, she thought, even heaven wasn’t so wondrous.

  Once the maid vacated the room, Linet threw herself headlong onto the thick furs upon the bed. The pallet enveloped her in its feathery embrace. And despite her resolve to lay aside her new garments with meticulous care, despite her intention to explore every opulent corner of the room, to pick up and examine every ivory comb and silver candlestick, within an instant she drifted into a deep slumber.

  A cloud slipped in front of the moon, shrouding Duncan’s face in complete shadow within the cowl he pulled over his head. From the trees, he could see the sentries atop the wall walk as they strolled back and forth, guarding de Montfort castle.

  Then the pale moon emerged again, and anyone able to see Duncan’s bruised and battered countenance would have thought him a monster.

  His guise, one of the reivers’ cassocks, helped to conceal his injuries. It would also gain him entrance, if no one noticed the three feet of Spanish steel hidden beneath his holy robes.

  He let his gaze travel up the two tall corner towers of the castle and wondered if Linet was somewhere within. Did she rest peacefully, he wondered as irony twisted his lips, or was her sleep troubled by dreams of betrayal and vengeance? He grimaced at the bitter taste in his mouth and spat on the ground once before he emerged from the forest to beg entry to the castle.

  Linet awoke with a start, gasping at what seemed sudden immersion in a sea of darkness. At first, she couldn’t remember where she was. The objects in the moonlit room shimmered in ghostly blue, unrecognizable shapes. She rose up on her elbows and stared at the thin panel of light slashed upon the wall through the open shutters until it all came back to her—the beggar, her betrayal, this new home
she didn’t deserve. With a guilty heart, she pushed the hair back from her eyes, wondering what hour it was. She came to her feet, smoothing the crumpled fabric of her ill-gotten surcoat as best she could.

  The vertical beam of light crossed her face as she padded over to the window to peek out. A queer tingle of anticipation crept up her back as she drew close to where a chill draft slipped through the space between the shutters. She could see the barbican of the castle from her chamber. Two guards were standing watch over the cold, clear night.

  There was a visitor speaking with them, a late-arriving monk from the looks of him, probably seeking shelter. Something in the carriage of his body, his size and shape, disturbed her. But the vague sensation vanished almost as soon as it appeared. They let the man in, and she watched the shrouded figure disappear from view.

  A low growling from her belly intruded upon the quiet. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. No one had disturbed her nap for supper, and she hadn’t eaten since dinner of the night before. Perhaps she could find her way to the kitchen and turn up some scrap of meat or crust of bread.

  She plucked the stub of a beeswax candle from the holder beside the bed and tiptoed into the hallway, lighting it on a wall sconce. Shadows jumped out eerily, heightening the unfamiliarity of the steps as she descended.

  A hundred people or so lay strewn in the great hall in various postures of repose amid the rushes. Their presence was some comfort to her in the vast room. Some snored loudly, others slept like the dead. Every now and again, one of the hounds would chuff briefly, aware of her, but apparently unconcerned. In the midst of it all, the fire blazed healthily, tended by a single little girl who poked at it with a stick as tall as she was. Linet smiled. Here was someone who could help her.

  Duncan huddled against the wall of the great hall, his head hung wearily between his knees. He still shivered with cold from his long trek. But nothing compared to the chill of his heart, the chill that bore the name Linet de Montfort. He peered up beneath his heavy brows toward the fire crackling with false cheer. Then, almost as if he’d summoned her with his thoughts, Linet herself appeared, eclipsing his view, her silhouette stark against the orange glow. He sat breathless, watching her every move like a hawk.