Sebastian sighed; this was news he did not want to hear this evening.
“Where did it happen?”
“The village of Elmcarden, about three days’ ride from here. I heard about it from the local priest.”
“And the girl was killed in exactly the same way?”
“The nearest I can tell.”
Dominic paused for a moment before plunging into the telling.
“The priest performed the last rites on the girl after they found her. She went missing and her parents were sure she had run off with her swain, but when the young man returned with the rest of his hunting party vouching for his whereabouts, the villagers started search parties.”
Subtly, the friar drew Sebastian farther into the darkened chapel to prevent their conversation being overheard.
“When they found her, the lassie’s hair had been chopped off and her eyes gouged out. The fingers on both hands were removed and clothing cut away.
“And, yes, the local wise woman examined her and she had been most grievously used.”
Sebastian nodded, absorbing the facts. He didn’t really need a detailed description of the girl’s injuries; he knew how the Beast, as he had taken to calling the murderer, defiled his victims.
He’d seen it himself.
He’d placed a woman in Tyrswick’s crypt with just those injuries. His dreams had been haunted with visions of her ever since.
Friar Dominic was right. If there was evil by the hand of man on his lands, he was responsible for stopping it. Even as a battle-hardened veteran, the thought of a woman being brutalized that way angered him. His right hand clenched as though it held a sword. It didn’t and that was probably just as well, he thought. Vengeance thrummed in his veins.
“I’ll send men on patrol at first light tomorrow,” he said.
“That’s some small comfort for the family,” Dominic observed.
“Short of catching the Beast in the act, what is it you expect me to do?” Sebastian retorted angrily.
“Calm yourself, Baron,” the clergyman soothed. “It was not meant as a criticism, but your men will need to do more than simply tear around the countryside. The last thing you want is for innocent men to have suspicion thrown on them.”
Sebastian sighed and nodded once.
“You’re right, of course. I’ll ensure they are visible but their enquiries discreet. At this point, events that happened before the girl’s disappearance are more important than those following.”
Dominic clasped Sebastian’s shoulder, looking at the younger man with a sympathetic expression. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news on your first night home.”
Sebastian accepted the gesture in the spirit it was given, but part of him resented it too. Dominic was assiduous in never interfering in baronial matters and yet, as someone old enough to be his father, there were times when a comment was more than just a friendly observation.
Sebastian scrubbed his face and pondered his next course of action. Tonight he would have loved nothing better than to call for a jug of mead to be brought to his chambers where, in a semidrunk sleep, he might forget the Beast and the destruction he wrought.
But he cast his own wishes aside. To be a man and a leader of men required self-sacrifice.
He would talk to Gaines about men who could be trusted.
Sebastian scanned the crowd for his man-at-arms when, at the far end of the hall, flickering in the candlelight, the vision from his nightmare stopped and looked directly at him.
The woman with hacked yellow hair.
A midnight blue dress.
One hand folded in front of the other to mask mutilated fingers.
Sebastian struggled for breath as though he had run hard. He looked about the room and no one was paying the specter any heed. The more he stared, the more pain tightened his chest.
Sebastian surged forward. As he did so, a man a little unsteady on his feet bumped into him. The man offered his profound apologies and, as Sebastian stepped around him, he saw the apparition round the stairs to the sleep chambers.
He picked up his pace, taking the stairs two at a time until he touched her.
Flesh and blood. Not spirit.
Sebastian grabbed Frey’s hand and spun her so her back slammed against the wall. He snatched the veil from her head. The circlet clattered noisily down the stairs while the head covering floated its way after it.
Frey’s own pale blonde locks, neatly braided and pinned, were intact, her face marked with surprise and annoyance.
He pulled her right arm between them and stared at her fingers, unsheathed like a cat’s claws, ready to strike out.
Fingers and a thumb, all where they should be. One, two, three, four, five…as Sebastian counted, his pulse slowed, but his anger continued unabated.
“That dress,” he bit out, “take it off.”
Frey lifted her jaw, not afraid of him—defiant instead.
“So that is to be the way of it?” she hissed. “You tell your sister that I am a guest, but I am to be used as a whore?”
Sebastian in his controlled fury did not trust his voice. His fingers increased their pressure on her wrist and he dragged her up the remaining steps and propelled her into the hallway and around into her chamber.
Heloise squeaked in alarm at the noisy intrusion. The maid who combed out the young lady’s hair jumped. At the terse command to leave, the servant scurried away.
“What is the meaning of dressing like that tonight?” he demanded.
It seemed Frey had lost her fear of him and some of her anger; her voice when she answered was more perplexed than aggrieved.
“Admittedly the dress is not the best fit, but Heloise was kind enough to lend me something of hers, which—”
Sebastian turned his ire on his young sister-in-law.
“Why in hell’s name would you do such a thing, Heloise? Do you hate me that much?”
Frey continued to stare at him as though he had lost his mind, but at least she hadn’t burst into tears as his young sister-in-law instantly did. Frey turned to the girl and placed a comforting arm around her. She turned back to Sebastian, her face contorted with fresh anger.
“Get out!”
Sebastian reacted as though he had been slapped. His eyes flickered between the two women, who stared wide-eyed at him as though he were a mad man.
He stiffly bowed and muttered an apology before backing out of the chamber. Walking back down the hall, he went only a few paces before he heard the chamber door close heavily and the lock slide home in noisy rebuke.
And at the sound, he felt relief.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
To claim she had slept would have overstated matters considerably. The best Frey could say was she dozed at some point after the final sounds from the Keep were extinguished along with the tapers.
Heloise cried herself to sleep and Frey could offer little comfort to her, having no answer to the girl's oft-repeated question of what she had done to upset Sebastian so. Frey was just as bewildered by Sebastian’s behavior last night. It was clear Heloise was devoted to her brother-in-law and the thought of displeasing him distressed her.
She offered to go find Lady Rosalind, but Heloise clung to her tightly and, between jagged sobs, begged her not to.
Frey heard the birds noisily herald a new morning. Knowing the last vestiges of sleep were lost to her, she arose and peered through a slit in the window shutter. As the portcullis chains rattled at the lifting of the gate, Frey glanced back at Heloise, still sleeping soundly, then returned her attention to the scene outside.
Through the ingress, three liveried knights, one bearing the Tyrswick standard aloft, galloped across the drawbridge into the outer bailey, through the gate, and into the village beyond.
A fourth man, whom Frey had first assumed to be the gatekeeper, did not reenter the keep’s walls as expected, but instead also crossed the drawbridge to the outer bailey, following a path toward the crypt at the eastern wall.
>
A shaft of morning light fell on the man’s features, confirming to Frey what she already kenned from observing his stride. Sebastian walked unaccompanied and purposefully toward the vaults.
She checked again that Heloise did not stir and backed away from the window, threw a kirtle over her chemise, and hastily tied her boots. Frey nimbly descended the stairs to the sounds of Tyrswick Keep stirring into life, but it was not so busy that it observed her leaving.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom inside the chapel. Thin streams of light revealed no occupant, and at first Frey thought she may have mistaken Sebastian’s destination.
At last, a voice spoke from the darkness.
“Has Heloise forgiven me yet?”
Frey started in surprise but moved toward the apse, her boots echoing noisily. She spotted Sebastian sitting on the front pew, staring at a spot on the ground in front of the altar. She sat alongside him, but his attention remained fixed ahead.
“She adores you. I think she would forgive you anything.”
They sat in silence for long moments while the chapel began to fill with the light of the emerging morning. The sun strengthened its claim on the day, illuminating the inscription on the stone that consumed Sebastian’s attention.
est anima mea quiescit
My soul is at rest.
The carving was crisp, Frey noted. Whoever lay beneath the slab had not been there long. To have been given such a signal honor meant it was someone very precious to the baron indeed.
As the light pushed back the gloom, it revealed more of the carving—four interlinked squares, the cipher of Tyrswick family.
Her family.
Frey swallowed with difficulty.
“Who is interred here?” she asked softly.
Sebastian did not answer. He might as well have been fashioned of the same wood as the pews for all the movement he showed.
Realization slid like a knife between her ribs.
“Diera?”
The question came as a sob.
Sebastian’s shoulders slumped and Frey had her answer. She pressed her fingers to her lips to stop the cry in her throat. She swallowed it down.
“Tell me,” she asked hoarsely.
The answer was a curt shake of his head.
“Damn you! Tell me all!” Frey punctuated her demand with a closed-fist punch to his shoulder.
Before she could land another strike, Frey was held fast in Sebastian’s arms, and her frustrated remonstration manifested itself in body-shaking sobs.
“She was my friend,” Frey gasped.
Sebastian loosened his grip and looked at her for the first time since she entered the chapel. His expression was anguished. The fleeting brush of his fingers against her cheek as he straightened sent shivers through her.
“Her body was found just outside the village two months ago,” he said, his voice low and even, yet his focus again fixed on the stone on the floor.
“How did she die?”
Sebastian shook his head once more.
“I need to know.”
He turned his face to her, eyes bright with anger.
“You do not need to know! No one needs to know what evil is capable of!”
Frey blinked away tears. How could she convince him that it was not out of morbid or prurient interest she asked, but rather something that pulled at her very soul.
“Please…I dream of her.”
Sebastian pulled himself straight once more. Frey saw in his face the war being waged within. Tentatively, she reached for his hand and with her touch he exhaled.
He accepted the contact, her hand in his.
“She was slain by a monster not like anything I have seen in battle, not like other transgressions I’ve seen,” he said.
“Raped?”
Sebastian nodded and then continued.
“But that was not the worst of it. The fiend gouged out her eyes and hacked off the fingers of her right hand, then left her by the road, posed as though she slept. He even chopped off her hair.”
Frey gasped at his words. Her dream! Exactly as her dream!
She shuddered, recalling every detail of the nightmare she experienced the night they entered St Cuthbert’s. And then there was last night—Sebastian’s strange behavior as he stared at her right hand and then yelled at Heloise.
Frey blinked and found herself subject of Sebastian’s scrutiny.
“Why?” she asked.
“That’s a question for Friar Dominic. He knows the mind of God better than I do.”
Frey shook her head.
“No. I mean why did you lay her to rest here?”
“What remained of her clothes showed they were finely made, not rough peasant cloth, and she wore a small ring on her right hand, engraved…”
Sebastian paused, a puzzled look on his face in response to her agitation.
“No,” she said, “I mean here! Not in the village churchyard but in your family crypt. Why here?”
Heat and cold washed over Frey in waves. She feared she knew the answer and wished she did not.
If Sebastian answered, she did not hear. Frey’s ears buzzed suddenly as though she stood in the middle of an apiary. A deeper memory tugged at her consciousness before playing before her like a vision.
They had been separated from their men that night in the hay barn. She held on to Brice so tight, wanting to shield the little boy from the violence and fearing he had already seen too much. Papa had been hurt, but he shepherded them into the building and ordered them to stay where he put them.
Then suddenly there was the young man, dressed in the armor of the invaders, who looked nearly as scared as she.
“Go! Get out of here,” he had warned. “I will buy you as much time as I can.”
In the years since, the memory of that night had faded and might have disappeared altogether like a will-o’-the-wisp had it not returned at Friar Dominic’s sermon just a few days before.
Frey pressed her recollection further but could not recall whether she had seen the color of his eyes. She was sure she had not in the feeble light, but her mind’s eye conjured up the young knight's face.
She knew that face!
Although matured by age and responsibility, there was no mistaking the fullness of the mouth and the determination of his jaw.
It was Sebastian de la Croix.
When Frey's mind returned to the present, she became conscious of being alone in the chapel.
Sebastian, it would appear, had withdrawn. Perhaps he was as uncomfortable with the implications of his revelation as she was, Frey mused.
Stunned by the realization Sebastian had been their unexpected benefactor those distant years ago, she considered how strange it was that…what? Guilt, perhaps? Might drive such a proud man to treat her vanquished family as his own.
Then his description of the outrage suffered by Diera came back to her, and she could only pray her friend’s soul really was at rest, her life taken in a way so wholly unnatural. It demanded justice; it demanded revenge.
She hoped no other family would have to experience such a thing.
Frey slid off the pew and sank to her knees, where she traced with her finger the inscription and the Tyrswick cipher that marked Diera’s last resting place. A small patch of the stone was soon darkened by falling tears.
* * *
It seemed to the man lodging at the Red Lion the addition of new faces would normally be the subject of intense scrutiny in the village of Elmcarden. However, the monthly markets coincided with the arrival of the band of traveling tinkers and merchants, including himself, so outsiders earned only a particular type of disinterest.
Even now, the tavern keeper and his family paid no heed to faces, only orders, and they were simple enough—ale or cider, roast or stew, room and a bath.
With only passing notice did anyone pay attention to three knights on horseback stopping at the green.
It would seem knights from Tyrswick Keep w
ere always welcome in Elmcarden, and why not? They always had coin to spend, were mostly well-behaved, and the man on whose authority they acted was, from the traveler’s casual enquiries, fair and just.
On recognizing the livery, the majority of the drinkers went back to their business with the exception of an ill-kempt young man who glowered resentfully at the party. The young man was unaware he was being observed. If he had, he might have been more circumspect in showing his animosity.
He would be useful.
The traveler had watched the young man for nearly a week; so alone and without direction, he appeared, but so filled with anger since that bastard, usurping baron had the lad cashiered from his service.
Now was the time to approach. Ensuring his cloth cap covered his pale locks, the man stood with two fresh ales in hand.
“Here, young man,” he greeted, putting one of the pints in front of him.
The recipient of his largess looked at him, silent and suspicious.
“You looked like you needed one,” the man shrugged.
“I know nothing’s for nothin’. What’s this going to cost me?”
He ignored the question and sat across from the tall young man whose dark hair and overtly masculine good looks, he assumed, probably never left him wanting for feminine company. He also looked like one who'd never given regard to the source of his next meal. Until now.
A nod toward the window drew the young man’s attention back to the knights outside tending their mounts.
“Look at them. Coin in pocket and little hard work for it,” offered the older man.
“I used to be one of them,” the younger replied bitterly.
“Is that so? What happened?”
“My lord was bewitched.”
“Really?”
“As I live and breathe. Bewitched.”
“Then you’ve been unjustly treated, to be sure!” the man said. “Ah, whose men are they?” he added, as if he didn’t know.
“The baron of Tyrswick’s.”
A shove of the mug toward the young man and this time it was accepted. He took a long draught of the amber fluid.
“Are you in need of work?”
“Aye,” he eventually answered.
Warrior's Surrender Page 13
