Three Nights With the Princess

by Betina Krahn

  “You are fighting men also . . . I can see as much,” he said in a graveled voice that carried a familiar accent . . . that of northern Spain. “I will tell you . . . for a price.”

  But the first words out of his mouth were all that Saxxe and Gasquar needed to hear. The poor light and the stale air of the dusty granary reminded them sharply of another place and time, and when they caught the scent of garlic, a stubborn memory was dislodged.

  Nantes. The tavern.

  They turned on their heels and strode straight for the palace and Thera. They found her just arrived in the council chamber, enduring discreet questioning about her intentions now that her debt to Saxxe was officially paid. When she saw him, she rose with a look of relief and the council was obliged to take its feet as well.

  “Princess, councilors, forgive the intrusion . . . but there may be no time to waste.” Saxxe strode straight to Thera’s side. “Something about the prisoner we captured has nagged at me. He seemed familiar . . . and now I know where I have seen him before.” He engaged Thera’s eyes. “Nantes. In the same tavern where I first heard you. He tried to recruit us to join the horde of barbarians and mercenaries pillaging the city. He is one of them, Thera. And he is here, now, in your kingdom.”

  Thera paled visibly and clasped her hands together. “How can you be sure it is the same man?”

  “We are certain, Princess,” Gasquar said, frowning. “When he spoke, we both recalled his voice. He is a Spaniard. And the leader of several men.”

  “Then what is he doing here?” Cedric said, stepping closer. He was roundly confused by Thera’s and Saxxe’s drastic reaction to his question. She sat down abruptly, looking ashen, and Saxxe glanced grimly at Gasquar before answering.

  “He is undoubtedly a scout, sent ahead to spy out the land for the army of barbarians and hire-soldiers that invaded Nantes. If he is here, they cannot be too far behind.” He looked to Thera, willing her to understand and praying that the lessons of the night would not be forgotten in the light of day. “We must make preparations to defend Mercia . . . if they come.”

  “They will not come,” Thera said, but with less conviction than before.

  “He may have already sent them word,” he said in solemn tones. “They may be on the way even now. We must prepare for the worst . . . and hope for the best.”

  She understood the message in his eyes, then took a deep breath, reaching past her fears, giving over some of her responsibility. “What must we do?”

  “We must post sentries at every entrance to the valley. Several men at each, with fast horses, to warn of a possible attack.” At his last word, there were several gasps. He turned and looked to Mattias. “We will need your fastest mounts.”

  Mattias looked to Thera, and when she nodded, his chest swelled. “You shall have them within the hour, sir,” he answered proudly. In several quick exchanges, plans were under way for a number of other defensive measures and several of the elders were assigned tasks. Soon Saxxe was striding from the palace with most of the male elders, leaving Thera in a silent chamber, under the eyes of a number of gray-faced women.

  “It has begun,” Audra said, swaying forward, her eyes dark and fearful. “‘This hour of darkness . . . this hour of travail . . .’” she repeated in ominous cadence. “‘A dark prince . . . a man of steel, a man of blood . . . will work schemes and treachery amongst us . . . spread conflict and chaos throughout the land.’ It has begun, Princess. . . .”

  Thera strode out of the chamber with her shoulders straight and her head high. But when she reached the colonnade leading to her chambers, a chill shuddered through her and she sagged against a pillar.

  A dark prince. Heaven help her, she had made Saxxe a prince of sorts only last night . . . crowned him with her own hands. The conflict within her was joined once more. Was her beloved Saxxe the dark, violent prince of the prophecy? And was her heart to be his first victim?

  * * *

  Throughout the city preparations for battle were begun . . . amid the people’s joyous anticipation of Thera’s marriage. To prevent needless alarm, Hubert and Castor and Pollux took the city’s best archers out into the fields to practice and calmly assigned them positions around the city from which they could shoot. Old Fenwick and Gawain set about ensuring food and water for a moving populace, and Elder Marcus and Randall, the head smith, began collecting all the weapons—however ancient or ceremonial—they could find.

  Thera walked the streets, maintaining a pleasant guise while her people inquired happily after her well-being and after their knight . . . Saxxe Rouen. By sunset, when she returned to the palace, she felt a storm brewing inside her. There was only one person in the world who would truly understand her conflict, and he was the very one who caused it.

  She called Lillith and started for her gardens to seek a bit of peace, when a page arrived with a message from Cedric bidding her come to the Great Hall at once. Arriving there, she discovered the hall filled with a small crowd surrounding a number of men in dusty, battered clothing and slumped on the benches and floor. The onlookers parted to let her pass and she stopped dead as she recognized the weary and disheveled figures as the traders she had sent several days before on a mission of mercy to the village of LeBeau.

  “What in heaven’s name has happened?” she demanded, looking to Cedric, who knelt by the leader of the group, Simon Monfort.

  “They were accosted by soldiers along the way, Princess,” Cedric said with a worried frown. “Tell Princess Thera what you told me, Simon.”

  “We left by the western pass, as always, the better to reach the trading road undetected,” the battered merchant trader began. “We found Jean of Poitier’s cottage at the first pass, where we always stop for water, burned to the ground . . . no sign of him or his good wife. We went on into the hills and found the shepherd Dorse’s cottage and byres in cinders . . . his sheep killed or scattered. And as we descended into the foothills, we saw more wanton destruction of sheep and goats.” He paused to sip from a cup of wine the servants had brought, and closed his eyes, giving thanks for it. “Then, as we approached the village of Durbin, we were set upon by a band of marauders . . .” He took another drink.

  Thera could scarcely contain herself. “What of these marauders . . . who were they, what were they like?” she demanded.

  “They appeared more like soldiers than just thieves and bandits. They wore armor, Princess.”

  She gently seized his arm. “What color, Simon? What color was their armor?”

  “It was black, Princess . . . like their soulless eyes . . . that much I will never forget. They rode down on us out of the rocks in an ambush. They knocked us from our mounts, beat us, and wounded poor Henri.” He pointed worriedly to a fellow stretched out on a makeshift litter. “We ran for the rocks and they gave chase, until they caught Harold Beau-vier. They broke off the attack and hauled Harold and our horses and supplies away with them. We started home, carrying Henri, but had to hide several times when we spotted more soldiers in black along the trading road.”

  “More soldiers?” Cedric looked at Thera, trying to make sense of it. “All along the road . . . and in the hills? What do you make of it, Princess?”

  Thera felt frozen from icy dread.

  “The force that invaded and pillaged Nantes wore black mail,” she said quietly. “Now soldiers in black mail burn and pillage the slopes leading to Mercia. Saxxe was right. That same dark horde has traveled north and east, into Brittany, toward Mercia.” The realization struck with the force of a fist in her stomach, taking her breath for a moment. “And into Mercia. We have one of them in our granary even now.”

  Her words echoed about the Great Hall in a silence so profound it was almost deafening. Soon, every council member present made the connection and understood the peril confronting them.

  “They may already know of Mercia,” Cedric said. “They may be—” He couldn’t say it; he didn’t even want to think it.

  “Coming here,” Thera fini
shed for him.

  The very thing Thera had dreaded in the depths of her soul, the thing she had vowed to prevent at all costs, seemed to be happening. When she glanced up, Audra was standing nearby with her hands folded and her face filled with tacit reminders of two prophecies.

  Sinking inside under the weight of despair, she thought of Saxxe and wished he were there to advise and reassure her. She looked around her at the faces of her councilors and the others who had crowded into the hall. They waited for some word from her; they depended on her to lead them. But for the first time she had come to the absolute limit of her capacity as their sovereign. She knew virtually nothing about fighting and defenses. She had nothing to give them . . . except her faith in Saxxe.

  “Saxxe must be told of this,” she declared, coming to life. “I’ll go for him myself.” Before anyone could object, she issued a number of terse commands setting Cedric and Hubert in charge, then headed for the stables. A messenger might have sufficed, Thera knew, but with the sun setting and the day’s tensions mounting, she felt a driving need for the reassurance of Saxxe’s presence.

  She rode along the usual paths to the east end of the valley, with its mazelike passes of rock, and discovered the sentries Saxxe had already posted along the tops of the cliffs overlooking the narrow entry into Mercia. They recognized her white gown in the lowering light and told her that Saxxe had left a while before for the western pass.

  She turned back, feeling a chill in the air as the sun sank farther into the hills, dragging the last remnants of light with it. Instead of riding all the way back into the valley to reach the far end, she decided to ride along the mountain ridge instead. The trail was seldom used and somewhat overgrown, but she had ridden it often as a young girl.

  The darkness gathered as she rode along, and the sounds of nighthawks swooping overhead and of her mount’s hooves against rocks seemed magnified in her ears. By the light of the rising moon, she could see the whole of her kingdom laid out like a scene from a printed woodcut, and all she could think was how vulnerable it seemed. She realized she was seeing it through Saxxe’s eyes . . . or through an invader’s. Then she suffered a vision of a dark tide of vicious mercenaries swarming over the hills and into her valley, of plumes of smoke rising, of her people crying out . . .

  She closed her eyes and shuddered, frantic to wipe those horrifying images from her mind. Searching for something good to fasten in her thoughts instead, she seized the memory of the previous night, when she and Saxxe had lain in a meadow making love and counting stars . . . learning lessons of loving that he had tried to show her were truths for the rest of living as well. Controlling and surrendering . . . needing and depending on one another . . . giving of one’s self. Where had he learned such things? How had he managed to keep that core of goodness alive in him during years in the wastes and barrens of the world?

  She was suddenly desperate to see him, to have a seventh night with him, now, tonight. And—please God—she would also have an eighth and a ninth . . . once they were through these present troubles.

  Troubles. She shivered and glanced around her, realizing that she had entered the forest on the steep western slopes. All around her were deep shadows, shifting and moving, dark places shielded from the light of the rising moon by the aged trees. And the gloom reminded her of the dark prophecy about their future . . . of the women’s doubts about Saxxe.

  When Audra and the others looked at him, they saw only his physical power, his unrestrained impulses, and the desires that he made no effort to hide. They recoiled from his potential for violence. They couldn’t know the extreme tenderness with which those big hands could move, the concern with which they could wipe away tears, the valor with which they could defend another. But she saw it and, in a strange way, understood it now. They were halves of the whole and she needed—

  Crashing sounds suddenly rushed out of the darkness at her. Shadows took form and substance as they lunged for her, and in shock she realized they were faces and hands . . . men!

  “Nooo!” she cried, beating at those dark shapes with her fists, kicking her mount and wrenching about in the saddle to free herself from their grasping hands. But they were all around her, stopping her horse and clutching at her garments. “Stop—let me go—nooo—stop!”

  Her cries turned to panicky screams as they overcame her and dragged her from her saddle. She tried to strike and kick at them, but they held her securely. She couldn’t get her feet free to right herself—everything was swaying and heaving—hands were pawing at her. She heard their vile laughs, smelled their filthy rancid bodies, heard their guttural speech . . . and suddenly it was the same as that night in Nantes, in the alley. Terror rose inside her like a wave of sickness, twice potent for having claimed her in the security of her home.

  Her attackers stuffed something in her mouth to stop her screams and pushed her onto the ground to tie her hands and feet. Then they hoisted her over their shoulders and flung her back across her saddle, face down. Through a swirl of flashing shadow and light and the roaring of blood in her ears, she managed to orient herself and realized they were taking her upward, to the pass. Her panic swelled. She had no means of escape, no way of calling out for help—no way to warn Mercia!

  They plodded upward, across roughening terrain . . . toward the pass. Saxxe and Gasquar—the sentries! They would be watching—they would rescue her! But the moments dragged by and there was only the scraping of hooves and feet on the rocky slopes and the groan of harness leather. When they reached the sheer walls of rock that lined the pass and continued through unopposed, her hope dissolved in a sea of new terror. There were no sentries—they hadn’t reached the pass yet!

  Scallion and several of his men waited on the leeward slope of the mountain, scanning the pale rock above for a sign of the barbarians the captain had sent in to scout the area and bring back confirmation of the Spaniard’s story. For all their sakes, he hoped the wretch had spoken the truth. He didn’t want to think about how the duc’s wrath would flare and scorch them all if the promise of his rich prize was not genuine. As they waited, he began to worry that he should have gone himself instead.

  Then he saw them emerging from the pass, outlined against the pale rock. They had gone in on foot, but they now had a horse with them. And draped over the back of that horse was a luminous slash of white . . . a body . . . a woman!

  A woman in white—the duc’s princess? He dug his heels and waved his men up the slope. The barbarians saw them riding hard up the mountainside and pulled their weapons, fearing they would lose their prize before they claimed a reward. There was scuffling and a few exchanges of blades before Scallion and his men were able to make the barbarians understand that the reward would be theirs . . . and took charge of the horse.

  * * *

  Thera heard the grunts and shouts. Her hopes roused again as her horse was pulled into a run and she sensed that she had been freed from her foul-smelling captors. But she soon realized something was wrong . . . they weren’t going back through the pass but downward instead . . . away from Mercia—downward, through several narrow passes, picking their way along the well-disguised trail that connected Mercia and the outside world.

  How long they rode, she could not say, but somehow through the blur of pain and jolting motion, she recognized that they had come to more level ground and were slowing. Noise increased around her . . . the smell of wood fires . . . the sound of men’s voices. Suddenly she was being hauled from the horse and carried . . .

  It was late and the Duc de Verville was just ready to retire to the fur-strewn bed in his luxurious quarters when Scallion burst into the tent and saluted him with a hard twist of a smile.

  “Mon duc . . . you will forgive the intrusion when you see what I have brought.”

  The duc turned with a hard glint in his eyes, about to disabuse his captain of that notion, when Scallion held back the tent flap and waved his soldiers inside. They carried in a bound prisoner . . . a woman clothed in white . . .
deposited her on the carpet at the duke’s feet, then withdrew.

  “Your princess, I believe, mon duc,” Scallion said with a bow to his dark lord.

  The goblet of wine in the duc’s hand shook as his eyes slid over Thera’s body, curled vulnerably at his feet. She looked up at him and blinked as if trying to right her vision, and suddenly all he could see was her sky-blue eyes. He came to his senses, flung the goblet aside, and sank to his knees beside her to pull the rag from her mouth.

  “It is her. And . . . God’s blood, she’s breathtaking!” he said. “More beautiful than I imagined.”

  Enraptured, he traced her face and shoulders, the curves of her breasts and hips with hands held away from her . . . as if she were too precious to touch. His eyes glowed, his perfectly chiseled features bronzed with emotion as he scrutinized the delicacy of her face, the lush bow of her lips, and the voluptuous curves of her silk-clad body. Then he turned his gaze back to her eyes and he caught a flicker of fear in their depths. The sight sent an exultant surge of lust through his loins.

  “Forgive me, my lady,” he said in a voice filled with emotion as he fell to freeing her hands and feet. “But the sight of you has quite undone me.”

  Thera sat up, rubbing her chafed wrists and staring at the man bent over her bonds. He seemed tall, though he was kneeling over her, and had dark hair. He wore a black silk robe over a rich-looking tunic trimmed in gold, and when he turned slightly, she glimpsed clean, striking features . . . the promise of handsomeness.

  She transferred her gaze to her surroundings and found herself in a spacious tent hung with heavy samite and exotic silk weavings from the Orient. She sat on a thick multicolored carpet amid elegantly carved furnishings more suited to a palace than a tent. Nearby was a table laden with silver bowls and goblets, and there was an elegantly carved wooden bed erected to one side and covered with furs and huge silken pillows. Light came from a candle stand bearing beeswax tapers, and a potent perfume from a censer atop the brazier filled the air.