The initial sound had seemed deceptively close, distorted by the almost liquid silence of the forest. In reality her quarry stood more than fifty yards away, frozen himself against his own clumsiness, his golden hawk’s eyes searching the surrounding woods even as Brenna slowly ran her tongue along the arrow’s fletching, dampening the vanes to ensure there were no gaps or breaks in the feathers. The shaft itself was three feet long, tipped with a twice-tempered iron head that could, at this distance, penetrate clothing, flesh, bone, and muscle from shoulder to shoulder and pin him fast to the tree. The shot had to be perfect. Precise. She would not have a second chance.
Brenna nocked the arrow, blew out a final breath, then wasted no time in setting herself. She stepped out from behind the tree, her bow arm already raised and straight, her feet planted solidly apart for balance. She drew the fletching back to her cheek, took a split second to aim, then snapped her fingers away from the string and sped the shaft clean and true to the target.
Habit sent her fingers to her quiver for another arrow, but she knew she did not need it. She knew from the yelp of surprise and the stunned look on William FitzAthelstan’s handsome face as the bolt streaked past his nose, close enough for a lick of hot air to tickle his skin. The resounding f-f-bungg left the arrow buried nearly six inches in the wood and the shaft humming with lingering, resonant vibrations.
“Christ Jesus God, and all the Saints’.” He whirled in time to see Brenna give a small whoop of victory as she held up their scores on her fingers—two clean wins for her, only one for him.
“You could have cut off my nose!” he shouted.
“You should be more careful where you put it,” she countered, wading through the ferns toward him. The smile was wide and fixed on her face. It was the first time she had outfoxed him two straight strikes in a row.
His complexion stayed as red as his hair for the full minute it took for her to weave her way through the saplings to join him. The dark copper brows remained crushed together in a frown, the normally placid set to his mouth was distorted by a scowl.
“Cheer up, Will’um,” she said over a laugh. “We all have our bad days.”
He bent his head forward by a breath and tapped his forehead lightly on the shaft of the arrow. “Good shot, Bren. A damned good shot. All of them today have been damned good.”
“I know,” She slung her bow over her shoulder and laughed again—it was difficult not to, seeing the abject look on Will’s face. “And you, Sir Archer, are a far better sport than I would have been were our positions reversed. Ooooh …” She reached out a slender finger and touched the end of his nose. “Is that a feather burn I see?”
“You could have put out my eye if you had missed,” he said sourly.
“How could I miss such a fine, bold target?”
“It has been known to happen.”
“Not since I grew breasts and improved my balance.”
He looked up from under his brows and could not help responding to her teasing smile. A moment later, he sighed and shouldered his bow. “I suppose we should start back. Dag and Richard likely gave the game up long ago, but Robin seemed in a particularly stubborn mood this day. Do you recall where we lost him?”
Brenna shook her head as she glanced back at the deepening shadows. It was true her brothers Richard and Dagobert would have long ago lost interest in chasing elusive targets through the woods. No doubt they were back at the chateau quaffing mead and bickering over comely milch maids. Robin, on the other hand, could be anywhere. He had also tallied two hits this day, but not solely due to his own skill. He was a keen enough archer to be sure, but both Will and Brenna tended to cheat a little in his favor if he had gone too long without a win. He was far more comfortable on the back of his enormous warhorse, Sir Tristan, leading a company of knights into battle. Only this past July he had, with his brothers and the men of Amboise, joined forces with Philip of France to offer the mercenary army of King John a crushing defeat at Roche-au-Moine.
“Dearest Robin. On a battlefield or in a jousting run, he is undefeatable. Put him in lincoln green and fit a bow to his hand and … well…”
“Some men are suited to wear shining armour and do battle with demons and dragons. Others possess more human qualities, like a tendency to bleed, quake at the heels, and recognize their own limitations.”
“Then as long as he has you at his back, he has no need to fear such mortal failings,” Brenna added with an affectionate smile.
Will’s face mirrored her wry expression, but she knew he was thinking the same thing. He had been squire to her father, Lord Randwulf de la Seyne Sur Mer, since the age of ten, but it was Robin with whom he had developed a close, fast friendship. At four and twenty, Robin was six years his senior, yet there were times the younger man’s wisdom and patience far exceeded that of the passionate, impulsive heir to Amboise. In that much, it was said, they resembled their respective fathers, for Alaric FitzAthelstan had always been content to stand in the shadow of Lord Randwulf, letting the legendary Black Wolf establish himself as the champion and slayer of dragons while he himself sought only the position of friend, ally, and closest advisor. It was a role that suited Will as much as it suited Lord Alaric, for although he had trained as hard as any of the sons to earn his spurs and showed as much ability and courage to wade wholeheartedly into battle, his quick mind, instincts, and powers of perception had proved far more lethal. He was a brilliant strategist. He could look at a problem and see three solutions where others were left scratching their heads in search of one. Lord Randwulf had had no qualms sending him to Maine with the rest of the men from Amboise. It had been Will’s quiet advice and Robin’s genuine respect for it that had, as much as the brazen courage of the thousand knights who fought under the pennons of the Black Wolf, won the day at Roche-au-Moines.
With only eighteen years to his credit, however, he had not been among those knighted on the field by King Philip as a reward for their services. It had been a bitter disappointment, but as Brenna had been quick to point out upon his return to Amboise: “Your time will come. Even Robin was nineteen before the king took notice of him, though I am not sure he would not have ridden Sir Tristan straight into the royal bedchamber if all else had failed. Why are men in such a hurry to have their brains bashed out anyway?”
“You would not understand.”
“Indeed, I admit that quite freely. I most certainly do not understand. Richard and Dag have no brains to speak of, therefore they would hardly feel the loss. But you—you have the best bow arm … with one obvious exception of course … in all of Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, and Touraine, yet you fever with eagerness to clamber up on a horse, burden yourself under a few hundredweight of armour, then hurl yourself down a course knowing there is a good likelihood of breaking every bone in your body.”
Will had scowled. “Your confidence in my ability is touching.”
“It is not my goal to encourage you. Nor is it my father’s, I warrant. And before you puff up like a weed pod, I am not saying he is less than proud to bursting that you came this close”—she had pressed her thumb and forefinger together by way of emphasis—“to wearing your spurs home from Maine, but he has four sons who would sleep in their armour if they could find a way to do so without making eunuchs of themselves. What he needs and what they need is a cool, level head to guide them.”
“Now you think too much of my abilities.”
“Your modesty is commendable, truly it is. But who else in this or any other demesne within a ten-day ride can speak six languages fluently and quote great boring passages of Sophocles when it is least expected?”
“‘It is not the powerful arm, but the soft enchanting tongue that governs all,’” he mused.
“There. You see? Even he agrees and he has been dead for a few hundred years.”
Will had only laughed and shaken his head at her unaffected lack of reverence.
Less than four months separated them in age and they were as close as they
could possibly be without becoming intimate. She suspected both sets of parents had always harbored the secret hope that a lifetime spent in each other’s company would naturally have progressed into something more. There was no denying Will was painless on the eyes. He was long-limbed and well muscled, handsome enough to draw second glances from women of all ages and situations. From his father he had inherited his scholarly mind and an easygoing nature that hid a devilish humor and deep sense of honor. From his mother, Lady Gillian, had come the shock of red hair and the gilt-colored eyes, the keen sight and rock-steady nerve that had made her one of the best and most feared archers in all of Christendom.
To no one’s surprise, Lady Gillian had fit a bow to his hand as soon as he could stand. Brenna, because she was always underfoot and could not bear to be left out of anything, had stood alongside him learning how to find her balance, to sight along the shaft of the arrow, to listen to what the bow string was saying if the fingers plucked too hard or too soft. Under Gil’s expert tutelage they had become master archers in their own right with neither able to claim consistent superiority over the other. The game they had played today, they had been enjoying since they were children, and while they retraced their steps through the forest, it would be her pleasure to annoy him by verbally replaying each of the five winning shots, pointing out the errors made or the particular cleverness required to score the winning point.
As far as seeking a deeper intimacy, she could not deny she had thought about it, wondered about it. The trouble was they had been so close for so many years, their affection for one another was more like that of a brother and sister. To make more of it would have felt like incest—something both had acknowledged long ago despite their parents’ lingering hopes.
All was not completely lost, however. Brenna’s younger sister, Rhiannon, was only in her eleventh year, but just last month had presented their father with a petition, a contract of marriage for herself, drawn in her own hand with every word and phrase labored over as if it were going before the king to be made into law. In it she insisted Lord Randwulf and Lady Servanne recognize the immediate and pressing need to insure the future alliance of their noble house with that of FitzAthelstan. Since both Eleanor and Isobel had chosen to marry indiscreetly (meaning they had fallen in love with the landless brothers LaFer), and Brenna showed no inclination to marry whatsoever, she considered herself, Lady Rhiannon Wardieu d’Amboise, the last hope of salvation. Further to the point, she was the perfect match in temperament and passion for the more reticent William.
Upon hearing it, the prospective groom had remained oddly silent on the matter. He had not laughed aloud when Brenna had told him of the petition, nor had he suffered any prolonged teasing with his usual display of good humor. If anything, he grew downright prickly whenever she broached the subject, and of late, she had even caught him flushing whenever his duties caused him to be in Rhiannon’s company.
From a sister’s perspective, Brenna supposed she could not fault him for his taste. Rhiannon, like their two older sisters, shared their mother’s white-blond hair, cornflower blue eyes, and complexion as pure as milk on snow. Their figures were slender and delicate, their hands unblemished by any labor more damaging than the weaving of threads in a tapestry.
By contrast, Brenna had tough yellow calluses on the pads of her fingers and arms that were more like iron than velvet. Her complexion tended to be more in keeping with nature, lightly tanned with a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her hair was an equal blending of gold and brown threads, her eyes were a darker, more exotic shade of blue with hints of violet and flecks of indigo to suggest an underlying temper not precisely in keeping with the expected sweet compliance of someone groomed to be the chatelaine of some noble lord’s household.
In truth, she had tried to learn patience, she had even tried to learn embroidery once. That had been when Good-wife Biddy had still been alive and in charge of the nursery. Old Blister had known all of Brenna’s hiding places and had not shown the least bit of hesitation in storming the male bastions of the castle to root out her charge and drag her back to the classroom. But Brenna had never stayed put for long. She loved her sisters and admired their maidenly skills, but she had preferred the company of her brothers as far back as she could remember. She would sneak off to join them in the tilting yards, buckling on a sword and challenging them in the practice fields despite the dangers and risks that could not be avoided regardless how careful or indulgent the boys might be. After a while, indulgence was a long-forgotten sentiment as she proved she could hold her own with dagger, mace, and sword. A further challenge from Dagobert had put her up on the back of a destrier for the first time when she was but ten years old, and in spite of the rigid social conventions forbidding a woman to ride, much less own, a blooded warhorse, she had so impressed and pleased her father, he had presented her with a stallion sired by his own great champion steed.
As for her supposed indifference to marriage, it wasn’t that she didn’t want a husband. It was just that she had not yet met the man whose life and destiny she would willingly trade her freedom to share. She had never experienced the warm fuzziness her sisters trilled about constantly, nor had she felt the earth shift beneath her feet or the blood run cold and hot through her veins. And she certainly had never suffered the queasiness of a flock of butterflies let loose in her belly, as Eleanor had described it.
Love, in fact, sounded like more of a malady than a happy circumstance anyway, and there were times she watched Isobel and Eleanor—even Rhiannon who circled poor Will like a bird of prey—and wondered at the nonsense of it all. A kiss was nothing more spectacular than a pressing together of lips. What a man and woman did together in bed sounded like an uncomfortable chore, looked like an ignoble thrashing of arms and legs, and inspired only vague feelings of disgust when she saw how slack-lipped, dull-eyed, and witless a man became in the throes of lust.
Mercifully, neither of her parents were strong advocates of contracted marriages, and Lord Randwulf was certainly no ordinary father bent on using his daughters to make sound political unions. Kings already quailed at the sound of his name. Whole armies shrank at the sight of the black-and-gold. Troubadours as far north as Scotland, as far east as Jerusalem retold glorious chansons de geste boasting his accomplishments as Crusader, warrior, and sworn enemy of King John. They sang of his years as loyal champion to the dowager Queen Eleanor, and they spoke in awe of his seeming return from the dead to avenge his wrath upon a treacherous bastard brother. And they whispered, even to this day, of his adventures in the forests of England—whispers that had begun to take on the quality of legend, especially in the greenwood of Lincolnshire where there were deeds of outlawry still being attributed to a hooded man who fought like a demon to right the wrongs perpetrated by the king and his evil disciples. This, despite the fact that Black Wolf had not set foot across the Channel in over twenty-five years.
How could a man like that trade his daughter’s happiness for mere political gain?
Moreover, Will’s mother, Lady Gillian, had taught her more than just how to shoot an arrow. She had been branded and made a guest of the king’s prisons when she was not much older than Brenna was now. After escaping, she’d had nowhere to go but the forest, where she had joined the Wolfs band of outlaws and lived among them with no one the wiser for her more delicate attributes until her love for Alaric FitzAthelstan had made her sex difficult to conceal. Even so, she had not relinquished her position of trust or responsibility simply because she had unbound her breasts and allowed her hair to grow. In disguise as Gil of the Golden Eyes, she had proved time and again her skill and deadly accuracy with the Welsh longbow. As Lady Gillian FitzAthelstan, she had personally trained every knight and foot soldier who fought under the blazon of Amboise to have a healthy and lethal respect for the weapon.
“When I saw you just now,” Brenna said quietly, “just for a moment, I saw your lady mother standing behind your shoulder.”
Wi
ll rubbed a hand across the nape of his neck. “Mother would never have been caught out in the open like that. I felt her presence too, more than the heat of your arrow, pinching my nose in reprobation.”
“It has only been three months, yet it feels like three years since we lost her. I miss her dreadfully. She was like … like a second mother to me.”
Will nodded but said nothing. There was nothing to say. Gil Golden had died as she had lived: proud, stubborn, defiant, determined to stand by her husband’s side as his peer, not just his bedmate. She had taken a company of the best archers to Roche-au-Moines and led them in the assault against the English mercenary forces. When they had searched the bloody remains of the battlefield, they had found her body, blessedly unmarked save for the single bolt that had pierced her brave heart.
Brenna had been this close to winning her father’s permission to accompany Lady Gillian and her archers. Only her age—she had not yet turned eighteen—and Lady Servanne’s tears had stopped her. That and a particularly thorough search of the supply wagons before they passed through the barbican gates of Château d’ Amboise.
“How is your father?” she asked.
“Still devastated. I have tried to help him but he seems to have lost the desire to keep living without her. He eats very little. He never sleeps. He is turning into an old man before my eyes, and there is naught I can do to bring him out of it.”
Brenna thought of the passionate love between her own father and mother and knew either one would suffer the same agonies as Lord Alaric should one leave this earth before the other. Thankfully, Lord Randwulf’s past injuries had kept him well out of any fighting this time. A knee badly crushed beneath a horse some years back could no longer be trusted to support his weight, and the whole of his right side was riddled with pain from wounds suffered long ago. In three years, he would celebrate his sixtieth birthday, a mark few men with such a violent past lived to achieve.
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