Maids with Blades

by Glynnis Campbell

  She suddenly threw herself against the door with a thud.

  Startled, he jerked back.

  “Help,” she wheezed through the crack in the door. “Help…please…I can’t brea-…can’t brea-…”

  Alarmed, he let the bread drop to the floor, then lunged forward, shoving the bolt from the latch and flinging the door open. His heart knifing painfully in dread, he quickly scanned the dim room.

  She had flattened herself against the wall, and as he stepped in, before he even had time to regret his lack of caution, she charged at him, pinning him against the wall with a knife at his throat.

  “Make a sound, and I’ll cut you,” she bit out. “Move a muscle, and I’ll cut you. Even think of resisting, and I swear I’ll spill your reeking Norman blood all over the cellar floor.”

  Still reeling in shock, he muttered, “Where did you get—”

  He felt a sharp sting as the point dug into his flesh. He winced. Shite, the wench was serious, as serious as her sister, who’d marked Pagan with her blade yesterday.

  “’Tis your own dagger, fool,” she purred.

  The dagger he’d dropped on the stairs last night—somehow she’d acquired it.

  With her free hand, she irreverently searched him, patting him about the waist and hips, finding and discarding his eating knife, leaving him the coin he’d won off her father last night. Under different circumstances, Colin might have enjoyed such aggressive handling by a woman. But there was nothing seductive or affectionate about her touch, and to his chagrin, he began to sense, as incredible as it seemed, he might indeed be at the wench’s mercy.

  Men could be such half-wits, Helena thought, tucking her hastily scratched missive into her bodice as she prodded the Norman forward with her knife at his ribs. They always assumed women were defenseless creatures, devoid of muscle and slow of wit. Helena was neither. Aye, like many women, she was impulsive, but this time that impulsiveness would bear sweet fruit.

  “Slowly,” she told him, as he climbed the stairs. She needed time to assess the situation in the great hall before they emerged.

  To her surprise, as she peered out from the stairwell, she saw the household was alive with activity. Men took up arms. Miriel rounded up the women and children. Servants rushed to and fro with arms full of candles and cheese and blankets. Preparations were taking place for something far more serious than simple wedding festivities. Indeed, it looked as if the castle prepared for siege.

  Before the Norman could make his presence known, she hauled him back by his tunic and pressed him against the wall of the stairwell, placing the point of the dagger against the vein pulsing in his neck. She drew close enough to hiss into his face, “What’s happened?”

  Despite the fact she held his life in her hands, his eyes glittered with some secret amusement, and one side of his lip curved unbelievably upward, as if he was enjoying every moment. Which incensed her.

  “Speak!” she snarled.

  He complied. “An army is approaching.”

  Her heart raced. “An army. What army?”

  He hesitated.

  “What army?” she demanded.

  “The Knights of Cameliard.”

  She frowned. Could it be true? Did Pagan truly command a company of knights? Deirdre and she had speculated that his title was a ruse, that Pagan was a mere knight-errant with neither land nor coin, who had somehow convinced the King to wed him to a Scotswoman with both. “Pagan’s knights?”

  “Mm.”

  But Rivenloch was preparing for battle. Why would the Knights of Cameliard assail the keep wherein their commander resided? Unless…

  Perhaps Pagan wasn’t content with mere stewardship of Rivenloch. Perhaps the devil intended to claim the castle for his own.

  She cursed under her breath as she realized the truth. “They’re laying siege.”

  Colin was silent, but his eyes twinkled darkly.

  This put a twist in her plans.

  She’d intended to steal Colin away and hold him hostage at the cottage in the woods until Pagan agreed to annul his marriage to Miriel. But if Cameliard’s men were attacking Rivenloch, she was needed here to command the men-at-arms.

  On the other hand, she might be able to use her hostage for an even greater purpose.

  How valuable was Colin du Lac to the people of Cameliard?

  She gave him a quick, assessing perusal. He was undeniably sturdy and strong, long of bone and broad of shoulder, probably a competent fighter. But he was also a pretty-faced, cocksure, poetry-babbling knave, the kind of varlet the Scots scorned. Maybe the Normans measured a man’s value in different terms. If so, was Colin du Lac worth the return of Rivenloch?

  It was a risky wager, but one she was compelled to take.

  “We’re going on a journey,” she decided.

  He lifted his brows. “Now? But—”

  “Hist!” She raised the blade a notch, forcing him to lift his chin. “You will not speak again until I grant you leave. We’re going to walk through the great hall, across the courtyard, and out the front gates. Take care you do not draw attention to us in any way, for I’ll have this dagger at your ribs, and I warn you, if you disobey, you won’t be the first man to feel my blade pierce your flesh.”

  In the middle of all the chaos, it was fairly easy to skirt along the edge of the great hall undetected. Colin gave her no trouble, aside from making small grunts of pain when her blade dug a little too deeply into his side. Even crossing the courtyard wasn’t difficult, though she was dismayed to find the weather unfavorable for travel. Rain had made the ground soggy, and the brooding clouds looked as fitful as a lad with a bloodied knee, deciding whether or not to cry. Neither of them had a cloak, and she wished she’d thought to snatch the coverlet from the cellar.

  The challenge was getting out the front gates. As the Rivenloch guards had been trained for siege, once the cows and sheep were gathered inside the castle walls, the gates were secured. Thinking quickly, she called up to the guard manning the portcullis. “Open the gates! Three of Lachanburn’s cows have wandered onto our land. We’ll bring them inside as well.”

  The guard nodded. Lachanburn was Rivenloch’s closest neighbor, and the relationship between the two clans was one part alliance, two parts rivalry. The one thing they battled over with almost childish glee was cattle. Thus the guard would be understandably glad to raise the portcullis in the hopes of acquiring a few more of Lachanburn’s cows.

  Once outside the gates, Helena steered her captive quickly toward the woods. Already an impressive number of Normans crested the hill. She didn’t dare risk discovery. One slip of vigilance on her part, and she could just as easily become a hostage for the Normans.

  At last, under cover of the thick pines and oaks of Rivenloch’s shadowy forest, she felt safe.

  It was tempting to remain at that vantage point at the verge of the woods, to spy on Cameliard’s army, to watch what transpired. But for leverage, she had to go deeper into the forest, to a place only her sisters knew. She nudged him onward. “Move.”

  A sly smile stole across his face. “Ah, I see now.” He clucked his tongue. “You know, if you wished to ravish me in the dark of the woods, all you had to do was—”

  “Quiet!”

  The last thing Helena needed was the distraction of a pompous Norman who believed he was God’s gift to womankind. Perhaps Colin du Lac’s dancing eyes and beguiling grin seduced other maids, but Helena was not a woman easily fooled by such transparent ploys.

  She shoved him forward.

  A path wound through the woods, one the sisters kept carefully hidden. Leaf fall camouflaged the trail, and in places, overgrowing branches obscured the passage. But the Rivenloch sisters had used it for as long as Helena could remember.

  The abandoned crofter’s cottage at its end, roughly five miles hence, had served over the years as both a rendezvous and a refuge.

  They’d traveled perhaps two hundred yards when she pulled her captive up short. She needed
to take one more precaution. “Lie down.”

  The varlet’s eyes sparked with mischief as he arched a brow at her command. To her credit, she resisted the urge to smack the smirk off his face.

  “On your belly, with your hands behind you.”

  He gazed at her with lusty amusement. “As you wish.”

  While he lay helpless on the ground, she rummaged beneath her surcoat and used the knife to cut two strips of cloth from the bottom of her linen underdress. One of them she twisted and knotted about his joined wrists, roughly enough to make him grimace.

  “Easy, wench. No need for brutality,” he chided, adding smoothly, “I’m quite amenable to your pleasure.”

  “’Tis not a matter of pleasure, sirrah.”

  This time there was a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “In such sweet company, who could not find pleasure?”

  She didn’t care for the speculative gleam in his eyes. She wound the second cloth about his head, securing it with a knot at the back, effectively blinding him. In the event he escaped, she didn’t want him to know the path home.

  He clucked his tongue. “Now you deprive me of the sight of you. Alas, you cut me to—”

  “Up!” She had no time for his flowery nonsense. What she’d heard about Normans was true. They were as soft as babes, with dulcet tongues and downy curls and perfumed cheeks.

  She wrested him to his feet, then stole a clandestine whiff of him. He did smell different from the men of her country, but it was neither womanly nor unpleasant. Indeed, an agreeable spice lingered on his skin, like the cinnamon Miriel sprinkled on apple coffyns.

  “If you’d only let me know your desire…” he murmured coyly.

  The man was incorrigible. “If you continue your prattle, my desire will be to gag you, as well.”

  “Fine,” he said with a sigh of surrender. “I’ll rest my tongue.” Which he did, though the knave’s suggestive smile never completely faded from his face.

  Colin was mystified. Norman women never asked him to be quiet. They loved to talk. And they were always charmed by his flirtations. Every damsel he encountered, from crinkle-faced crones to babes in the cradle, giggled and cooed over Colin’s flattering turn of a phrase.

  What was wrong with this wench?

  She dug her fingers into his upper arm, maneuvering him forward, and he shuffled blindly through the leaves, his gait awkward.

  It was the Scots, he decided. They must all be mad. Their men wore skirts, and their maids carried swords. And this maid apparently had a heart as impenetrable as armor.

  Not only was she unrepentant of her violence of last night, but she seemed bent on continuing it. He grunted as she poked his ribs yet again with the dagger. God’s blood, did the maid plan to administer a slow death of a thousand nicks?

  As they wandered farther into the forest, Colin discovered his other senses grew sharper. Now he could hear Helena’s labored breathing, her light footfall, the soft rustle of her skirts. He took a breath of cool, rain-pure air. Layered over the pungent fragrance of pine was the faint aroma of his captor, an indefinable scent that was simply clean and womanly, as unpretentious as the maid herself. The place where she gripped his arm grew warm, from a touch as deceptively intimate as a lover’s.

  They traveled for what seemed like miles without speaking, until Colin began to wryly wonder if she might be marching him all the way back to Normandy.

  Helena’s abduction of him had been startling at first, then amusing. But now the wench was taking things too far. If they strayed much farther afield, the people of Rivenloch and Cameliard alike would begin to worry about them, with good reason. After all, bound and blindfolded, Colin was unable to protect the damsel from whatever bands of miscreants lurked in the Scots wilds.

  Deciding he’d had enough, he pulled suddenly against her grip, halting in his tracks, earning himself an accidental jab of her knife. “Ballocks!”

  “What?” she demanded.

  “I would speak.”

  She sighed heavily. “Go on.”

  Charm didn’t work on her. Perhaps candor would. “What exactly do you intend, my lady?”

  “’Tis not your concern.”

  “On the contrary, I’m the one at the point of your dagger. My dagger.”

  “True.”

  “So?”

  Her smug delight was almost palpable. “You, sirrah, are going to be my hostage.”

  If those words had come at another time, they would have stirred his blood. Abductor and hostage. It sounded like one of the games of seduction he enjoyed—the stable lad and the milkmaid, the sea reiver and the buried treasure, the Viking and the virgin. But he suspected this was no game. “Your hostage?”

  “Aye,” she gloated. “If it should happen that the Knights of Cameliard seize Rivenloch, I intend to hold your life as forfeit against its return.”

  For a moment, he was struck speechless as he digested her words. Then he realized her mistake. “You think the knights have come to seize the castle.”

  “What do you mean, I think?” she snapped. “You said yourself they were attacking.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did!”

  He shook his head. “I said they were approaching. You assumed they were attacking.”

  “What?” she whispered. He could almost hear her Scots blood beginning to simmer.

  “Curious. Your sister, too, made the same mistake. ’Twas she who gave the order to prepare for siege.”

  The point of the dagger suddenly jabbed under his chin, and he flinched in surprise. Perhaps, he thought as his vein pulsed beneath the cold steel, he shouldn’t have told the warrior maid the truth.

  Chapter 3

  Helena’s head was throbbing again. “They’re not attacking,” she reiterated.

  “Hardly,” he said with a smirk. “Why would they attack? We came to form an alliance.”

  She ground her teeth. The Normans had been here but a day, and already they were turning her world awry.

  She narrowed her eyes while her brain worked furiously. If the Normans weren’t attacking, then she didn’t need Colin du Lac to ransom Rivenloch after all.

  But that didn’t mean she couldn’t continue with her original plan to save Miriel. The ransom note she’d scratched out in the storeroom was still tucked between her breasts. All she needed was a messenger.

  “Come.” She lowered the dagger and pulled on his arm. “I have another use for you.” He lifted his lips in a speculative grin, but before he could open his mouth to make a bawdy suggestion, she pushed him forward. “Not a word!”

  They had to hurry. The detour would add another hour to their journey, but with luck, she’d find a trusty messenger for her pains.

  A solitary monk lived in a little cottage at the western edge of the woods, a meek servant of God who made daily rounds of the outlying crofts, caring for the sick, blessing the poor, living on what the crofters provided him. Helena knew she could rely upon him to deliver her missive.

  They quickly traversed the forest, following a narrow deer trail that wound through the firs and fern toward the monk’s lodgings. As they hurried along, Helena noted that her talkative prisoner had grown curiously subdued. Perhaps he’d resigned himself to capture. Typical Norman. Indeed, she wondered if they had any backbone at all. If it had been her, she would have gone kicking and bellowing all the way.

  In hindsight, she should have suspected from his silence that something was afoot.

  Just as she reached a small break in the trees where the sunlight had given birth to a patch of violets and cowslips, her captive stuck out his foot and tried to trip her.

  She was agile enough to catch herself before she fell. But he had successfully dodged out of her dagger’s reach and now twisted his head this way and that, trying to dislodge the blindfold as he shuffled awkwardly away from her and into the gorse ahead.

  She cocked her hands on her hips. “Where the devil do you think you’re going?”

  He successful
ly manipulated the blindfold enough to peer beneath it with one glittering green eye. “Back.”

  She shook her head. “You’ll have to go through me.”

  He sniffed and bent his knees, ready to charge. “I’d suggest you move aside.”

  In the next moment, he barreled forward.

  She stood firm until the last possible moment, then sidestepped him. As he passed, she gave him a gentle lateral nudge.

  His momentum was unstoppable. He stumbled over the brush and fell, hitting the sod shoulder-first with a thud that made even Helena cringe.

  “Bloody…ah!” he cried out, grimacing as he rolled off his shoulder.

  She frowned. God’s eyes, had he injured himself? She hoped not. Not that she cared if a Norman suffered a few bruises. But the last thing she needed was a hostage who required a physician.

  He twisted to the side, then gasped. “My arm, I think it’s…”

  She glanced warily at his arm. “Broken?” It didn’t seem to be. At least his elbow was bending the right way. Then again, he’d fallen with his arms bound behind him. He might have thrown his shoulder out of joint. She’d done that once. It was horribly painful.

  He tried to sit up, then spewed out a foul oath, dropping back down to the ground.

  She sighed in self-disgust. Ruthless warrior she might be, but she had no appreciation for needless suffering. She supposed she’d have to cut him loose and make him a sling or something. While he gasped in pain, she approached, wincing in involuntary empathy, tucking the knife into her belt. “Lie still. I’ll see if anything’s bro—”

  Before she could hunker down beside him, his legs swung suddenly around, catching her behind the knees to sweep her off her feet and knocking her backward into the wildflowers. As her elbows banged into the dirt and her skirt flew up over her head, shock took the breath from her.

  God, she hated the Norman.

  For a moment she lay stunned, trying to imagine how she’d fallen into his trap. Then she shook off the absurdity of the moment like a hound shaking off water. Angrily flailing her arms to free herself from the tangle of her skirts, she scrambled up, spit a lock of hair from her mouth, and drew the dagger.