“You again! I thought I told you to clear off.”
The man fell extravagantly to his knees. “M’ Lord. Sire. Forgive me. I only just thought of it. I should’ve said earlier but it fair slipped my mind and...”
“What?” demanded Tristan, alert now. “Just say it, man!”
“Us three. We weren’t the only ones.”
“The only ones what?”
“You know, men as was hired by LaBarque. There was three others as he was talkin’ to when we arrived. I seen him give them money, and he said, ‘Your full payment when the job’s done.’”
“What job?” snapped Tristan.
“I don’t know, Sir. He never said. But Sir—Sire—those men weren’t local lads like us, Sir. Rough-lookin’, they was. I never seen them in these parts before, and they didn’t seem, you know, like they were afeared of him. The one fellow, he says, ‘In gold, mind—and the ship waiting as we agreed.’ All business, like... Sire?”
With a startled shout, Tristan was on his feet and flying out the door. He cursed as he fumbled to untie his horse’s reins—cursed the knot, cursed LaBarque, cursed his own stupidity.
Then he was galloping down the road, not waiting for Normand to catch up.
Rosie. Those men were going after Rosie.
THREE MEN, HEAVILY armed, lay hidden in the strip of brush kept as a windbreak along the far side of the horse pasture. For the past hour they had observed the Martineau property from every angle. Now their leader, the man known to them as Shade, was ready to lay his plans.
“So. The two guards we weren’t expecting, but they won’t hold us back any.” His sharp eyes flickered from one face to another. His colleagues, as it amused him to call them, were nodding in cool agreement. He had expected no less. They had all handled tougher jobs than this.
“Aye, but Boss,” objected Thorn. It was a precaution Shade insisted on: nicknames only. Thorn and Wolf were both solid professionals, but Thorn was the faster thinker. “Those’re King’s Men, them guards. LaBarque didn’t say nothin’ about Royal Guards, and more’s the point, our fee don’t say nothin’ about them, neither.”
“True enough,” Shade agreed. As he talked, his watchful eyes scanned a circuit from the guard at the back door of the manor, to the barn, and across the nearby lawns and pasturage. “If LaBarque wants his girlie, he’ll have to pony up a little extra for our trouble. If he doesn’t—well, she’s a pretty little thing, and we have his ship. She’ll bring a high price in the Tarzine slave auction.”
The men smirked, but they knew better than to laugh out loud. Nothing interfered with business when you worked with Shade. He got back to business now.
“There’s no cover at the front entrance—just that wide driveway and low gardens. So we go in by the back. Thorn, you will distract our friend over there.” A finger flicked toward the guard.
“You gonna tell me how?” Thorn asked.
“Fire. You can make your way to the barn right along this hedgerow. An unfortunate thing, when a barn catches fire. Disastrous, if people don’t drop everything to help. Stick him in the confusion, if you can do it unobserved.
“Wolf, you and I go in the back. We head straight through to the front door, open it and take the guard before he realizes he has visitors. Then the girl. We meet up here, work our way back to where we left the horses.”
Two curt nods were his only answer. Crouched low, Thorn moved into the underbrush. Shade and his silent colleague waited.
ROSALIE WAS TIRED, all right. She hadn’t slept well in days, but it didn’t take her long to realize that she wasn’t about to sleep now, either. André’s suggestion that with a guard on each door they could enjoy an afternoon nap was sensible, but how could she relax knowing that Tristan might be face to face with LaBarque at this very moment? Rosalie flopped over onto her back, pulled the quilt over her face to block out the light slanting through the open window and made a last effort to stop her mental hand-wringing.
Tristan would be regent. There was a thought worth savoring. Chênier and life in the big castle were, she supposed, more exciting, but to Rosalie a city without a seascape would always seem lacking. She would marry Tris, and they would live on her beloved coast. With LaBarque as your neighbor? The words came unbidden to her mind—and she was back to worrying again.
Enough! With an impatient sigh, she slid out of bed and reached for the dress she had hung from the bedpost. Her hand stopped midair, its task suddenly forgotten. Someone was shouting. Just one of the field-hands, maybe, but it sounded urgent. Rosalie was on her way to the window when she smelled the tang of smoke drifting in on the breeze. Fear rose in her throat. Just a grass-burn, she thought. Please let it be a grass-burn.
It was the barn. Black smoke rose from the far end of the building. As she watched, men ran from the nearby fields to help; Tristan’s guard was already at the well, pumping water. Réjean, the groom, emerged from the barn, struggling with a pair of frightened horses. On his heels came a shrill scream from an animal still trapped inside. “Pray heaven, save the horses!” Rosalie whispered. She had the dress over her head in seconds, was reaching for her boots when she heard the other noise and froze.
Footsteps. Quiet slow footsteps in the downstairs hall. Not the busy trip of the maid. Certainly not one of the men bursting in to warn of fire. Rosalie had a sudden vision of the guard at the pump—the guard away from his post—and was sure. They had trouble.
For a second the blood pounded in her head so wildly the room swam around her. “Don’t you dare!” her own angry voice slapped at her. She took a deep breath, forced her eyes to focus. Another breath. Now think. Leaving her feet bare, she padded silently across the room to the hook where her archery equipment hung. She eased the quiver across her back, strung the bow, fitted an arrow into place. Her own practiced movements steadied her. She was not helpless, not by a long shot.
Rosalie was creeping into the hallway, thinking about sneaking down the servants’ stairway to the kitchen and how silly she would look if there was no intruder after all, when she heard the front door open. The rest happened in a blur: a man’s voice, confused scuffling, a shocked cry of pain. It should have sent her down the back stairs in a hurry; but instead she found herself crouched at the front banister, peering down to the foyer.
Two men dragged the guard through the doorway and to one side of the wide entrance hall. A dark trail of blood followed them across the stone tiles. The man carrying the guard’s ankles laid them down gently, and with a lithe, almost elegant movement, reached back with his foot and eased the door shut. He glanced down the long hallway leading to the back of the house. “Now for the girl,” he said softly, drawing his knife and gliding across the foyer toward the stairs. He motioned his companion to stand guard by the door, then swept his gaze up to the stair landing. Rosalie stood at the top of the stairs, her bow trained on his heart.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE chunk of dark hard bread Derkh was given for breakfast brought back a world of memories. “Soldier’s bane,” they called it, and Derkh had eaten it on journeys and in training camps for as long as he could remember. The taste was bitter to him now, the taste of a life lost. He ate it anyway, tasting blood with the bread as his split lip reopened.
And though he kept his eyes down, he listened while he ate. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, he had not yet lost interest in his own fate.
“So what’s next, Cap’n?” asked one of the men. “Do we take this’n”—thrusting his chin toward Derkh—”and head back?”
“You wish,” grunted the captain—Tarkhet, Derkh had overheard the men call him. “Our job’s to bring back one o’ their soldiers, not our own! This lad’s just gravy.”
So that’s what they’re doing here, thought Derkh. But why? He tried to think like his father. To what end would an enemy soldier be useful? Information, obviously. That suggested a second invasion was in the wind. But something didn’t add up. The information an invading force would need—numbers,
deployment, defense plans—you couldn’t just snatch some outpost soldier on lookout duty and expect him to know these things. And no one from Greffier, where only the highest rungs of the military were privy to big-picture plans, would assume otherwise. So then what...
His speculation was cut off by the next remark. “He’ll be a right burr in the butt, that one, though, won’t he? I mean, how quiet’s he gonna keep while we go sneakin’ up on his new friends?”
“The thought had occurred to me.” Tarkhet’s voice, dry, speculative. Derkh glanced through the dark tangle of his hair, to find Tarkhet’s cold gaze leveled at him. He means to kill me, Derkh realized. He dropped his head, as though he could escape Tarkhet’s notice by ducking under his sightline. The blood boomed in his ears and behind his eyes; he fought to keep his breathing normal and listen.
“Interrogation’s not really my line,” Tarkhet continued in the same flat tone. “But on a special mission you sometimes have to go a little beyond yer usual line.” Tarkhet hauled himself to his feet and walked heavily over to where Derkh sat, his legs and hands still bound. The heavy boots came to a halt before him; Derkh looked up the broad trunk to meet pale eyes that betrayed no flicker of emotion.
“We’ll question him here. If he convinces me he’s loyal to the Empire, and is still fit to travel, we’ll gag him and bring him along. If not,” he shrugged, “you know what they say about dead men.”
In the silence that followed, one of the men scratched his head and ventured a question. “Uh, what do they say about dead men, Cap’n?”
Tarkhet’s humorless smile was a brief baring of teeth, nothing more. “They don’t itch yer butt.”
FÉOLAN PUSHED BACK the hood of his cloak and stretched out his legs. How long would Gabrielle continue? The sky had brightened with dawn some time ago, though only now were the sun’s fingers of light able to penetrate their shadowed nook from above. Both the seskeesh appeared to be asleep, the female snoring in Gabrielle’s ear. How it had alarmed him when she first lumbered over there. Not that he thought she intended harm, not by then—rather he had feared some blundering, unintended injury. But no, the female had seated herself on the ground and arranged her huge limbs around Gabrielle with a surprising gentleness. And Gabrielle had hardly roused, just accepted the great beast’s protection.
The experience had filled Féolan with awe, and he would have been in no rush to cut it short if not for Derkh. Two hours of daylight wasted already, and the trail gone cold to begin with. In any case, Gabrielle would be exhausted from her night’s work. She would have to rest, and then they would have to make straight for the pass and hope to get there first. For the first time since they set out, it seemed a slim hope.
The seskeesh’s rumbling sighs cut off as she started awake. Gabrielle stirred as well. She stretched, wincing as she straightened her head, and raising a hand up to rub her neck before her eyes opened. She gazed at Féolan with that slightly blurry look he had come to recognize as the lingering remains of her trance—as though the world was not quite in focus. He couldn’t resist waving a hand.
“Over here, Sharp Eyes,” he teased in Elvish.
“I see you. You had better have some food at hand, or I’ll eat you alive.”
The green eyes were clear now, the smile tired but untroubled. She was satisfied, then, with her night’s labor.
Gabrielle squirmed around, laid a hand on the female seskeesh’s chest and murmured a few words. A thank-you, Féolan guessed, or perhaps detailed patient care instructions. He wouldn’t put it past her—her powers of communication, untrained as she was, were stunning. Untaught rather: she had trained herself to heal and evidently acquired other skills in the process. For a moment he was overcome by his feelings for her: his admiration, his desire. His father’s words came back to him and he sighed. When they got back to Stonewater, he would have to talk to her. He would rather be flayed alive than postpone their wedding, but he would urge her to do just that nonetheless.
“What’s wrong?” Gabrielle’s quizzical eyes upon him.
“Nothing. Just lost in the stream...”
“You were glowering as though you were lost in a pit of vipers.”
Féolan shook his head and offered what he hoped was a distracting smile. Not now. “How’s your patient?”
Now it was Gabrielle’s smile that was distracting. She was beaming. “I’m sure he’s out of danger. Once the repairs got started, and he got some strength back, it went amazingly fast. These creatures, Féolan, they are so...,” she groped for a word,”vital. I’ve never encountered anyone with such a strong life-force...”
Her words faded as she came back to reality. “Derkh’s even farther away now, isn’t he?”
Féolan gave a reluctant nod. “Only a few hours, I guess, and we had lost the trail anyway. If we make good time to the pass and hit it far enough to the north, we still have a chance of intercepting him.”
“Then let’s go.” Gabrielle got stiffly to her feet, making a visible effort to thrust away fatigue.
“Nay, Gabrielle. You will eat first and rest.” Féolan held up a hand to forestall her objection and spoke with quiet conviction. “We cannot overtake Derkh if I have to carry you over the mountains. Come and take some food.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“TAKE one more step, Sir, and I will kill you where you stand.” Rosalie had meant to sound commanding and confident, but the mortifying tremble in her voice betrayed her.
Tremble or not, the sight of her stopped the intruder in his tracks. For a second, shock and uncertainty played over his smooth features. Then, as he took in the silence of the second-floor hallway stretching behind Rosalie, the absence of any guards or companions rushing protectively to her aid, his face relaxed into a dismissive grin. “Good day, Mam’selle,” he replied with exaggerated courtliness. “I am afraid this is not a good time for archery lessons. You are to come with us.”
When the seas burn! thought Rosalie. Her voice might be wobbly, but her hands were steady. Steady enough. How steady did you have to be to hit a target straight on at ten paces? Just think of it as a target, she told herself. He has already killed at least once.
The man was muttering to his accomplice. Rosalie understood from their quick glance down the hall that he was sending the man to the back stairway. They would have seen it on the way in, she realized with consternation. He was out of her sight before she could gather her thoughts to act. Could she rouse the sleeping guards before she was sandwiched between the two men? You will have to shoot one of them—or both, she told herself sternly, though her mind recoiled from the coldness of it.
She kept her bow trained on the first man—the head, apparently, of whatever was going on here—holding him at bay, while her ears strained after the second intruder’s progress toward the back stairs. If she shot the one in the hallway the second he came into view, could she have the boss back in her sights before he reached her? She would do better, she knew, to shoot the one she had now, but she could not bring herself to hit a motionless man. She edged back a little into the hall.
He was talking to her, but she tried only to listen to the approaching footsteps. “There is no need for you to be hurt, Mam’selle. Simply put down the bow and come along with my colleague.”
Suddenly the back stairs thundered with running feet—he was coming for her, fast. Rosalie whirled about. The man was already charging down the hall at shocking speed. If she did not shoot now, he would have her. The bow twanged, and he fell, an arrow sprouting from his right shoulder. The sight of such a thing, in her own house, by her own hand, was paralyzing—yet she must move and now. Wrenching her eyes from the blood, pulling a fresh arrow from her quiver, she turned back to find the leader more than halfway to the top landing. She took two quick steps away, but could go no farther without losing her bead on his chest.
Once again they were at a standoff. Rosalie was light-headed with fear and shock, felt her arms tremble with it as she drew back the string. No doubt her a
ssailant saw it too, for his elegant face regained its confident smile, and he dipped his head in mock admiration. His voice, however, was hard and commanding. “A lucky shot. I congratulate you. Yet it is time to stop this charade. You are outnumbered—the rest of my men are outside, awaiting my call, and you, young miss, are alone.” Behind her, Rosalie heard furtive movement from the wounded man, the sound of a knife eased from its sheath. I should have killed him, she thought. He’ll throw the knife, and that will end it. Pray heaven he is not left-handed.
A slight movement yanked her jittery attention away from her opponents. Rosalie watched, aghast, as the front door eased open. Not more! she thought, desperation rising to drown out her courage. I cannot hold off more of them.
The leader’s grin broadened as he saw Rosalie’s face stiffen in dismay. “You see. It is better you come now, before I must use my knife. You cannot hope to shoot us all.”
“She can definitely shoot you, though,” said Tristan affably. He had slipped through the unlatched door and was nearly to the first stair. Now the trap was reversed, the would-be captor caught between a bow and an advancing sword tip. Even as he turned, he raised his knife-arm for the throw.
“Try it, if you wish to die.” Tristan’s voice rapped out, hard and arresting. “Rosalie can bull’s-eye a straw man at fifty paces. I’d put you at less than five.”
For a long moment the man considered Tristan’s words. Then, with a grunt that sounded more vexed than afraid, he glanced back at Rosalie. This time the bold eyes took in her neat stance, the relaxed three-fingered draw. With an ironic smile, he lowered his arm, turned his knife and presented its hilt to Tristan. “Well played. I concede.” A second later, Normand barreled in.
A door clicked open behind her, and Rosie’s heart surged. Then André’s voice floated down the hallway, bleary with sleep.
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