Knights

by Linda Lael Miller

  “My uncle?” Dane spoke firmly, but he could not hide his surprise.

  “Merrymont.” she said. “Your mother, Jillian, was his younger sister, wasn’t she?”

  Dane looked as though she’d struck him. “Did Gareth tell you this?”

  “No,” she said, in all truth. “I found it out in my travels.”

  He sighed, rubbing his wrist where the irons had chafed the flesh. “You are past understanding, woman,” he said. “ ’Tis a good thing I am a patient man.”

  “You are anything but ‘a patient man,’” Gloriana countered, moving toward the stairs and trusting her newly freed husband to follow, which, of course, he did. “I fear your temperament is oft unsavory, and wants a great deal of work.”

  Behind her, Dane made a contemptuous sound. “While yours, my lady,” he drawled, “is beyond reproach, a shining example to lesser souls, such as I.”

  Gloriana looked back at him. “Thank you,” she said, as if he’d meant the words as a compliment. “For all your foibles and shortcoming, my lord, you can, with effort, be a charming fellow on occasion.”

  He gave her bottom a light pinch. “And tonight,” he said, “is going to be one of those occasions.”

  The bag rustled and bulged beneath her gown, at thigh-level.

  “What is that?” Dane asked, in a baffled rasp.

  Gloriana pretended she hadn’t heard the question. There was clearly no need to keep secrets from her husband, but if any of the servants or men-at-arms were to become curious, the results could be tragic.

  In Dane’s chamber, the fire had been lighted and the covers turned back on the bed. There was water for washing, and because word of Gloriana’s “rescue” by brave Sir Edward had surely reached everyone within the castle’s far-reaching walls, one of Lady Kenbrook’s favorite dressing gowns had been laid out for her use.

  Dane closed the door once they were inside, lest they be interrupted by Judith or some other wellmeaning maid, and stood facing his wife with one brow raised. He did not need to speak; his countenance said everything.

  Gloriana blushed slightly and brought the bag out of its awkward hiding place, offering it to him, holding it out wordlessly for his inspection.

  Kenbrook accepted, his frown deepening as he rubbed the thin plastic back and forth between his thumb and two fingers. After a glance at Gloriana, he took the strange pouch to the bed and upended it upon the mattress, causing the things inside to spill out in a colorful jumble.

  One by one, he examined the books, the bottles containing vitamins and various wonder drugs, such as aspirin and mild antibiotics. He examined the tubes of toothpaste, in their bright cardboard boxes, and unstrung a length of the dental floss, his brow still knitted in consternation.

  Gloriana laughed softly. “Be careful with that, my lord husband,” she teased. “It has to last more than six hundred and fifty years.”

  Dane put the floss down, still glowering, and took up one of the books. After touching the smooth paper and examining the many-colored pictures inside, he raised his eyes to Gloriana again in frustration and wonder. “I cannot make out these words,” he complained. “What language is this?”

  She went to him and kissed his cheek. “English,” she said, her eyes dancing.

  Dane peered at the dark, even print again, then slammed the book closed. For all its violence, the gesture was somehow reverent, too. “Can you read it?” he asked. He did not relinquish the volume, but instead held it tightly in both hands.

  Gloriana nodded. “It will come to you plain, my lord, when you’ve studied the letters awhile.”

  “Tell me about this,” he said, shaking a plastic pill bottle.

  “Medicine for fevers and infection,” Gloriana said. While in Lyn’s care and keeping, she had read many of his medical journals and overheard his telephone conversations with patients and the local chemist.

  Dane dropped both bottle and book, as if they’d burned his flesh. “God’s breath, Gloriana, if anyone hears you talking so, you’ll be put to the stake for serving Satan.”

  “But you won’t let that happen, will you, Dane?” Gloriana asked, feeling a little thrill of fear as she stood close to her husband and put her arms about his neck. “You promised to pierce my heart with an arrow, before matters reached such a pass.”

  He went white. “I made no such vow,” he breathed.

  And, of course, he was right. The oath had been offered in another time, a tributary of the future that they would now bypass completely.

  Gloriana simply looked at him, asking a new pledge by her silence.

  “I will not see you suffer,” Dane said gravely, after a very long time. “No matter what I have to do to prevent it.” He drew her close, and she felt his mood lighten, even as other parts of him grew noticeably heavier, harder. He glanced briefly at the magical items lying on the bed. “I mean to learn what there is to know about your books and medicines,” he said. “But just now, my lady wife, I wish to study other things.”

  Chapter 19

  Gareth stood on the dais in the great hall, holding his tankard of ale high in the air. His voice boomed, joyous, through that vast, drafty chamber, from the rush-covered stone floor to the huge oak beams supporting the ceiling.

  “Milady Gloriana has returned to hearth and husband,” he thundered. “Let us rejoice, one and all, and give thanks to heaven that she was spared from harm.”

  Gloriana sat at Dane’s side, at the head table, her eyes lowered, her breathing shallow and quick. She would have preferred that little be made of her homecoming; too much ado was bound to stir speculation and remind people of her strange disappearance. Their theories concerning the vanishing of Lady Kenbrook could only be dangerous.

  There was murmuring among the soldiers and servants, but the company lifted their own tankards in acknowledgment of the celebration, and the evening meal went noisily on.

  Music flowed, merry, tinkling stuff, from the minstrels’ gallery overhead, and a mummers’ troupe moved between the tables, capering, juggling, playfully snatching the occasional boiled turnip or bit of roasted meat from a trencher. Gloriana scanned the painted faces for Romulus or Corliss, but did not find them—these performers were strangers, then, and not members of the company she had met on her last visit.

  Said visit having never occurred at all, if one wanted to be precise. It was difficult and confusing, having memories of a time that no one else shared. And how could they remember, when none of those events had actually happened?

  “What is it?” Dane asked, startling Gloriana out of her convoluted reflections. He was seated beside her at the head table, but had forsworn the wine everyone else was drinking for plain water.

  “I am uneasy, my lord,” Gloriana confessed, looking at his cup and frowning. Given the state of thirteenth-century sanitation, she figured he would have been far better off drinking the wine. “Something troubles me, but I cannot account for it.”

  Kenbrook smiled, speared a roasted carrot from a bowl, and plopped it onto her empty plate. “Little wonder that you are distracted, my lady wife,” he said. “You haven’t taken a bite.”

  With a sigh, Gloriana pretended to nibble at the overcooked vegetable. She felt a strange, almost heady tension thrumming in the air, flowing beneath the surface of the happy music and so vibrant, so charged with portent, as to be nearly audible.

  Normally, Gloriana took care to nourish herself properly, whether she wanted food or not, because of the baby. That evening, the first following her return from the twentieth century, she could not force herself to take so much as a bite.

  Something was going to happen.

  She looked down the table, to her left, and saw Edward and Mariette engaged in quiet conversation, their youthful faces translucent with affection. Eigg and Friar Cradoc were at the other end of the board, talking with Gareth, who had by then returned to his seat of honor as lord of the castle. Nothing was amiss, as far as Gloriana could discern, and yet …

  Sudd
enly, the music stopped, but only after a great, silent crescendo, which couldn’t have lasted more than a moment or two, yet seemed to reverberate through the whole of the keep. This was followed by a whistling hiss, projected from the minstrels’ gallery.

  With an ominous thump, an arrow lodged itself in the thick wood of Lord Hadleigh’s table and quivered there, its thin, pliant shaft still making a faint, resonant sound. It was directly in front of Kenbrook.

  A furor erupted; Dane’s fighting men, and Gareth’s, overturned the benches at the trestle tables, so fast did they rise, arming themselves as they moved. Kenbrook drew his sword and, in virtually the same motion, tried to thrust Gloriana to the floor. She resisted and saw the mummers produce blades of their own from beneath their cloaks and costumes, the angry knights of Hadleigh and Kenbrook in immediate and fierce battle.

  The servants screamed and fled, the hounds whined and scattered, and high in the minstrels’ gallery, one false musician stood, bow raised, quiver upon his back, ready to send a rain of arrows onto the inhabitants of the great hall.

  The man was somehow familiar, though Gloriana was certain she had never seen him before. His hair was the same pale shade of gold as Dane’s, his eyes, even from that distance, were plainly the same icy blue.

  Gloriana felt a dizzying rush of sheer terror, followed by indignation. After all she had been through, being taken from her husband to a strange century, struggling to return, this knave thought to end her happiness before it had truly begun.

  She wouldn’t have it.

  “Hold!” shouted the man in the gallery, in a voice of authority. He was finely dressed in a green velvet doublet and hose dyed to match and looked to be about the same age as Gareth.

  The clamor of warfare ceased instantly as both sides raised their eyes to him in wonder, in consternation, in awe.

  Nobody, including Dane, Gareth, and Edward, was moving. If someone didn’t take action soon, all would certainly be lost.

  Disgusted, Gloriana clasped her eating knife, the only weapon at her disposal, and moved a little closer to Dane, who was looking up, his face an unreadable mask, his powerful muscles frozen as he readied himself to fight. He did not seem afraid, only alert, but there could be no doubt of his fury. He radiated anger, exuded it from his very pores.

  “Who is that?” Gloriana whispered.

  “Merrymont,” Kenbrook replied, spewing the name from his mouth as if it tasted foul.

  Gloriana looked at the invader with renewed fascination. This, then, was the dreaded foe, the mad uncle who had wished to murder Dane in his cradle out of grief for his lost sister, Jillian.

  She eased away from the table, drawing no notice from her husband or anyone else.

  “What do you want?” she heard Gareth demand as she moved along an inner wall, where the light of the oil lamps did not quite reach. His voice was low and fierce.

  “I have come,” answered the lord of Merrymont, “to avenge my good name.”

  Gloriana made her way up a rear staircase and along a secondary passage draped with cobwebs and littered with the bones of mice and birds. She and Edward had played in that seldom-used corridor often as children, pretending that the castle was under siege and they alone could save it. Knowing Gareth would have the hallway sealed off if he learned of its existence, they had kept it as a secret between themselves.

  Standing in the shadows, holding her breath and clutching her pitiful blade in one hand, Gloriana assessed the situation. It was not a heartening one.

  There were two burly guards outside the gallery, swords drawn, eyeballs gleaming white in the musty gloom. Gloriana sensed their fear and understood it: they were within the walls of an enemy holding, after all, and therefore in obvious peril. They were also superstitious men, as befit their time, and almost surely wondering what vengeful shades and spirits might lurk in the seemingly impenetrable darkness.

  Beyond them, inside the gallery, Merrymont was still speaking; Gloriana saw the back of his velvet doublet and the leather quiver filled with arrows and thought, He’s really quite splendid. It’s a pity he isn’t on our side.

  “You refuse, Kenbrook, to apologize for defaming me all over the realm, calling me a kidnapper and even a murderer?” the man demanded. His arrogance made him resemble Dane even more than his coloring and build.

  Gloriana bit her lower lip. Dane would surely be too stubborn to admit remorse, she expected, though for a moment she indulged in the vain hope that the problem might be resolved peacefully.

  “Yes,” Kenbrook replied, in a clear voice. “I refuse.”

  Gloriana picked up something from the floor, being careful not to see what it was, and tossed it into the deeper shadows. The guards advanced hesitantly upon the sound, prepared to fight. Before they could turn around, Lady Kenbrook was inside the gallery, with the knife pressed into the small of Merrymont’s back.

  “Order your men-at-arms to put down their swords and daggers,” she said evenly, “or I shall skewer your kidneys like a pair of hens on a spit.”

  Merrymont stiffened, then chuckled, down low in his chest. But she had not reckoned on his strength or his swiftness. In the length of a heartbeat, he had knocked the blade from her hand with a motion of his elbow and gripped her in both arms, holding her with her back pressed against his chest.

  Gloriana’s breath stopped in her lungs and throat as the baron swung her out over the stone railing of the gallery, her feet dangling at least thirty feet over the hard floor of the great hall. If he dropped her, she would not survive the fall.

  “Your lady wife is indeed brave, Kenbrook, if foolhardy,” Merrymont called down to a grim-faced Dane. “Had I known she had such a fiery spirit, nephew, I should surely have been guilty of the crime of which I was accused. Such a luscious morsel begs kidnapping.”

  “You have your apology,” Dane said, not very charitably.

  Gloriana was not only scared, but irritated. Couldn’t he see that this was no time for truculence?

  “Damn you, Merrymont,” Gareth put in, from somewhere outside Gloriana’s dazed range of vision, “this is an outrage—”

  Merrymont’s grip was tight, a fact for which Gloriana was eternally grateful, although she of course regretted that she hadn’t stabbed the blackguard when the chance afforded itself. “Just moments ago, Kenbrook, you begrudged me that simply courtesy,” he said in his loud, melodic voice. “Now, suddenly, you are willing to humble yourself?”

  “Yes,” Dane answered without hesitation.

  Gloriana squeezed her eyes shut. If she hadn’t been so afraid of falling, she might have felt some remorse herself, for putting Dane in such a position. He would be required to humiliate himself if he wished to save her.

  “Excellent,” Merrymont replied, holding Gloriana with just one arm now and brandishing his sword with the other. “I shall have my vengeance on the field of honor,” he called to Kenbrook. “When I’m finished with you, you will lower yourself to one knee, lay your blade at my feet, and call me ‘my lord.’”

  Dane did not reply, though Gloriana knew he was holding back a scorching reply for her sake. She was, after all, still dangling over the great hall like a butchered stag hung from a rafter when the hunt was over.

  “There is one more penalty,” Merrymont decreed happily, in apparent afterthought. “If you should lose our contest, nephew, the lovely Gloriana will live in my keep and be my ward for as long as I wish to enjoy her company.”

  Even from that terrible height, Gloriana saw pure wrath move up Dane’s neck to pulse in his face. Under the circumstances, he probably would have agreed to anything, but she knew her husband, knew he was aching to get his hands on Merrymont’s throat. Fur thermore, if by some miracle they both survived this predicament, Kenbrook was sure to be almost as furious with her as he was with his uncle.

  “If I lose,” Kenbrook said with just the faintest emphasis on the word if, “it shall be as you say.”

  Gloriana began to kick and struggle at this, her te
rror replaced by ire. Merrymont drew her back over the railing with ease, but did not release his hold on her waist. “Very good,” he said to Dane in the most patronizing of tones. “I’m sure you’ll understand if I keep milady with me, until I’ve reached the sanctuary of my own walls and roof. Our little tournament will be held there, on the morrow.”

  “Leave my wife here,” Dane said. The words were uttered clearly, and they made a command, not a plea. “You shall have your contest, on whatever terms you name.”

  “Ah, but I have already stated my terms,” Merrymont answered. “The lady will accompany me. What is it, Kenbrook? Do you dare malign my honor further, even now, by suggesting that this lovely creature would not be safe in my care?”

  Gloriana had given up the struggle against the baron; he was too strong, and to resist his hold would be a waste of valuable energy. Looking down at her husband, who stood white-faced in the center of the great hall, his sword still clasped, battle ready, in his right hand, she willed Dane to hold his tongue.

  A muscle in Kenbrook’s jaw tensed visibly as he fought to maintain control.

  It was Gareth who shouted a rash vow. “If you harm that girl, Merrymont,” he bellowed, “I’ll cut out your organs, while you yet live!”

  “Methinks you would do that anyway, if given the chance,” Merrymont responded. Then he swept out of the gallery and down the passage, carrying Gloriana in his arms, flanked by the two guards.

  “You do realize,” she said as he strode down a staircase where more of his men waited, “that what you are doing is hypocritical? You came to Hadleigh Castle to protest being called a kidnapper, and now here you are, living up to the name!”

  “If you are quiet,” Merrymont told her reasonably, “I won’t have to gag you.”

  Gloriana flushed and resisted speaking until they were outside, though it was difficult. There were men on the parapets, with bows drawn and arrows trained on the invaders, but no one dared shoot for fear of striking Kenbrook’s wife.