“And there you are,” he said softly. “The strange, fierce beauty with eyes like flambeaux, who upsets the precious order of this court and scatters disturbance in her wake like alms to the desperate. A woman who could beguile even an angel to fall.”
Amid the bobbing flotsam of grief and anger, his words caught her like a net. She’d never known a man as alluring and unsettling and contradictory as the mysterious, maddening, impossible Lord of Briah. Incredible to believe he could find shy Linnet Norwood, the mouse, in any way beguiling.
Did he seek an English title? Was his friendship some Protestant ploy? Or was it all a game to him, this prodigal lord who laughed so easily?
Whatever he was, she wouldn’t encourage him. A less suitable husband she could scarcely conceive. Worse, the attentions of so scandalous a character could only dissuade other candidates who might otherwise be willing to consider her, despite her shortcomings.
Ducking her head, she released his arm and stepped back.
“Ye’ve a sympathetic ear, Lord Zamiel, and I thank ye for it. But I’ve kept ye too long from the revels.”
A sleek black brow climbed upward. “Now I’m to be dismissed like a groom or a pageboy, while you flee into the night in tears? What sort of rogue do you think I am?”
Furious, she swiped at her streaming eyes. “I’m not—”
His hand lifted, stilling her words. Starlight glittered on the silver thread of his gauntlet as a gloved finger, soft as velvet, brushed her cheek. Caught by the strangely gentle gesture, the breath hitched in her lungs. Nerves fluttered in her belly as he lifted the finger with a rueful smile to show her the glistening tear.
“Let me see you to your chambers, at least. If I’m in any way impertinent, you can slap my face.”
“Ye’re impossible,” she muttered. “Don’t think I won’t do it. I’m not one of yer doxies from the stews.”
“Oho! They’re telling tales about me, are they?” He sounded delighted, curse the man, brimming with barely repressed laughter. “Wherever I go, I seem to raise such mayhem.”
Exasperated, she pivoted on her heel and strode into the dark tunnel.
At once, darkness swallowed her. The torch that normally burned there must have gone out. Reluctantly her steps slowed. Infuriated though she was by her tearful susceptibility to this mysterious lord and his suspicious interest, she’d no intention of tripping over her own feet in the darkness and bloodying her knees on the cobblestones.
Zamiel’s boot-heels raised echoes from the stone. Still following her, damn the man! Placing one hand on the wall for guidance, she forged ahead. At the tunnel’s end, she glimpsed the icy expanse of the Fountain Court, its namesake cascade still and silent in the freeze.
Etched against the ice, a slender silhouette slipped into view—a page or stable boy, perhaps a linkboy with a light. Emboldened by that prospect, she gathered her skirts and hurried toward him.
Behind her, Zamiel’s footfalls paused. He inhaled sharply, as though he’d scented something that alarmed him. “Linnet?”
“I’m perfectly fine!” she said without turning. The servant had nearly reached her. A groom, most like, plainly dressed in boots and hooded cloak. “Ye ought to—”
Unexpectedly, the groom reached out and gripped her shoulder.
She halted in surprise. “What ails ye, lad?”
Beneath the hood, his face was cloaked in darkness, but a hand swept into view. Gripped in his fist, the cold gleam of steel congealed her blood to ice. Low and fast, the knife speared toward her tender belly.
No time even to scream. If she took the breath to do it, she was a dead woman. But she’d a lifetime of experience avoiding sudden blows.
Desperately she brought her knee up, striking the incoming hand a glancing blow. The blade he intended to bury in her stomach raked her ribs instead. The rasp of tearing cloth rent the air.
A tendril of fire licked her side. He’d barely grazed her, but she’d never stood so close to death.
Crying out, Linnet wrenched free of the crushing grip on her shoulder.
“Merde,” the groom spat. Deft as a master, he reversed the blade. A heartbeat later, its wicked length plunged toward her chest.
Her belly shriveled, contracting as though she could avoid the danger that way. She could already feel the red-hot agony of serrated steel ripping through her tender flesh—
A breath before impact, a streak of silver lightning flickered into view, sweeping between her and the knife. Steel rang as the two blades connected. The knife sailed from the groom’s hand and clattered against the wall.
Time slowed as Linnet whirled, every movement heavy as though she swam underwater, her skirts flying wide.
Beside her, Zamiel was lunging, rapier extended in a straight line that seemed to pull his slender body in its wake. Black cloak and hair unfurled like a ribbon of night behind him. She caught a bare glimpse of his face and stopped breathing.
To her fevered vision, with the fractured light of distant torches splintering on the ice, he was limned in a halo of silver light, glowing as though stricken by lightning.
He was deadly and cold and unbearably beautiful.
Violet light poured from his eyes.
His face shone with an unearthly fairness she’d seen before...somewhere...
The gleaming length of his rapier whispered through the air, a deadly promise no man could escape.
Somehow her assailant managed to twist aside, with the coiling agility of an expert blade. Deftly, the groom swept aside his cloak and unsheathed his hidden sword. Her heart plummeted.
The two blades met with a clash that raised echoes from the walls. Linnet floundered out of the way, shoe leather skidding on the cobbles. Zamiel roared something in a foreign tongue, his voice the clarion cry of silver trumpets.
That, too, she’d heard before—the uncanny resonance of a voice from another plane. Behind the fog that shrouded her memory, a phantasmagoria of images flashed.
A striding figure sweeping through a scene of carnage.
A warrior clad in shining white-gold mail.
The shadow of opalescent wings that spread from mighty shoulders.
From the clouded depths of memory, the thought surfaced like a leaping fish.
Uriel, Flame of God. Archangel in exile.
Blessed Mother, can this be another?
Before her, the two combatants danced over the cobblestones in an effortless rhythm of parry and retreat, blades flickering and flashing between them. Her attacker, an utter stranger in dark garments and clubbed fair hair, fought in grim silence. Little more than a boy, God save her, but he fought with deadly skill.
Why did he want to hurt her?
Zamiel, the being whose eyes burned like stars, laughed as he fought—laughed with a dark joy in violence that turned her blood to grue. He fought like a playful child, utterly fearless, darting close, dancing back, gifted with inhuman speed and grace.
Surely, she should fetch help. But the two fought between her and the Clock Court. Behind her, the smaller Fountain Court stood quiet. To find help, she’d have to leave.
She wouldn’t abandon Zamiel, not when he fought on her account. Even when he hardly seemed to require her aid.
But she could still scream.
She watched for a moment in the ebb and flow of combat when Zamiel was driving his foe back, the other hard pressed to keep him at bay. Then she screamed to the heavens.
“Foe, fire, murder! Help!”
The startled groom glanced back at her, eyes white-rimmed in the darkness. He was still looking when Zamiel’s rapier punched through his defending blade and drove into his throat.
Linnet screamed again as dark blood sprayed the plastered walls. The groom’s eyes bulged, sword clattering free as both hands flew to the foreign object thrust through his throat. Neatly, Zamiel withdrew his blade and stepped back.
Choking, the other dropped to his knees, hands gripping his throat. Rivulets of blood streamed through
his fingers.
Paralyzed by the sight and sound of death, the metallic tang of blood clouding the air, Linnet groped blindly for the wall. She felt like screaming again, surrendering to peal after peal of terror like a madwoman. But she couldn’t seem to spare the breath for it.
Zamiel stood over the man and watched as he died, his rapier held loosely, point down and dripping. Slowly that unearthly glow behind his face faded, until he was just a man once more.
Another hallucination, she told herself. Ye’re in hysterics. Did she think herself so important God would dispatch a guardian angel to defend her insignificant self?
A distant chorus of cries and running feet restored her wits. She pushed slowly upright from the wall.
“Is—is he—dead?”
Zamiel dropped gracefully to his knees and stripped off a gauntlet. A silver ring with a circular sigil flashed as he laid a slender hand like a benediction on the other’s brow.
“Oh, yes,” he said remotely. “And his soul departed. No hesitation about where this one’s going. No need for the Angel of Death to point the way.”
She frowned at that. Then she glimpsed the dark glistening fluid that soaked Zamiel’s sleeve and dripped to the ground. Concern twisted her belly, and all else was forgotten.
“For the love of Bride, ye’re injured!” Galvanized into motion, she hurried to his side.
“I am?” Bemused, he glanced down at himself.
Through the rent in his doublet, the pale silk of his shirt gleamed.
“But I’m never wounded. I don’t get wounded.” He stared in fascination at the tear and even, incautiously, raised his arm to see it better. A wince tightened his features, bringing a swift end to that business.
Incredulous, he gazed at Linnet.
“I’m wounded! This is mortal blood.”
“Merciful God, I hope not.” Spurred by the need to stop the bleeding, she caught up the groom’s discarded cloak—fine cloth, for a servant—and bundled it into a makeshift bandage. “Here then, man, sheathe yer sword and hold this.”
Absently Zamiel cleaned his sword and sheathed it. He gazed down on the injury with a look of wonder. “How extraordinary.”
She shot him a narrow glance. “No matter how fine a swordsman ye are, ye can be damaged. Ye’re not invincible, aye?”
“Apparently not.” Improbably, sitting cross-legged on the ice in his own blood, he started to laugh. Probably slipping into shock from blood loss, the poor man.
The searchers’ cries were mounting as they blundered about the darkened courtyard, calling for torches, the Constable, the Sergeant Porter. The whirling fog of fear and panic in her brain crystallized into clarity. She pressed the wadded cloak hard against his shoulder.
“Ye’ve killed a man, in the Verge of the Court, with the Queen in residence,” she told him. “Until we learn whom ye’ve killed, ye’d best flee. Do ye have a place here?”
“Flee?” He tore his fascinated gaze away from the injury. “I—no. I have a house on the Strand.”
“Too far. We’ll never make it past the Sergeant Porter at the gates. Ye’ll come to my chambers then. Hurry!”
Gripping him firmly by the good arm, she pulled him to his feet, his slight weight no impediment to her fear-driven strength. She spun him toward the Fountain Court just before torchlight brightened the walls around them. For a mercy, he let her propel him from the tunnel into the dark cloister with its ice-rimmed fountain.
Lit by the dim glow of candlelight through mullioned glass, she hurried their steps along the wall, kept to the shadows beneath the colonnade. Away from the reek of blood and death, she drank in great gulps of cold stinging air. Zamiel too was breathing heavily, the air forming clouds of vapor around their heads.
“Why—do we flee?” he gasped as they hurried along, clutching the makeshift bandage with his good hand.
Briefly she paused to adjust his grip, his gauntlet soft as sin beneath her fingers. “Hold tight. If ye bleed across the courtyard, we can’t hide it.”
“But why—should we hide it?” The flush of battle had faded, erased by the drawn pallor of pain. “We but defended ourselves. We weren’t—in the wrong.”
“Ye drew steel in the Verge of the Court, and him a foreigner ye killed by the sound of it. That means an inquiry. It means the bloody diplomats get involved—and it may well mean a scandal. Which may be all in a day’s work for you, man, but I can scarce afford it. Not after the interrogation I just had.”
“I see,” he murmured. “We wouldn’t want to damage your marital prospects.”
“Hush!” Linnet halted them before the narrow recess of a servant’s gate. Across the courtyard, torches flared and bobbed. In the tunnel, a great outcry broke out. The searchers must have discovered the corpse.
In another moment, they’d be swarming through the Fountain Court.
“No time,” she whispered, and pulled him through the servants’ door. He nudged it closed, and she breathed a little easier. They couldn’t afford discovery now, dripping with blood, steps away from a murder scene.
Before them rose a narrow stair, dimly lit by a guttering cresset.
“Can ye climb?” she whispered.
“Do I have a choice?” he said shortly.
Her apartments were tucked away in an upstairs corner, poorly placed for a countess, but she’d been thankful—never more than now—for the quiet aerie where she went largely unnoticed. En route, they encountered no one save a hurrying lady’s maid who passed with lowered eyes, intent on her own business.
Before her door Linnet hesitated, thinking of the monstrous scandal she risked if anyone glimpsed a lord of Zamiel’s notoriety stealing into her rooms at this hour.
Accurately following her thoughts, he grinned. “Can your virtue withstand my dissolute presence in your sanctum? I promise to do nothing you don’t explicitly—”
“Do be quiet.” She frowned at him repressively. “Not everything in life is a jest, aye?”
His dancing gaze darkened to indigo. “You play and you pray. And then you die. That’s the way of life for you mortals.”
A cold finger slid down her nape, raising the fine hairs on her neck. Suddenly she wondered whether welcoming this exotic stranger to her sanctum, as he called it, was the wisest course.
But she could hardly leave him bleeding in the corridor, when he’d incurred his injury in her defense.
Biting her lip, she forced her mind to practicalities. “We’ll find my tiring-girl within. She’s a simple lass I hired for court, no need to trouble her with this bloody business. Ye’ll oblige me by holding yer tongue—if that’s possible—and letting me deal with her.”
“Your house, your rules.” He shrugged, though the movement made him grimace.
“So it is.” Squaring her shoulders, she unlocked the door and let them in.
The sitting room opened before them: a cozy fire crackling in the hearth, a rack of candles burning on the escritoire, quill and parchment at the ready. Piles of books, her best-loved friends, stood in neat stacks beside her divan. Her borrowed furniture was nothing grand, for her modest coffers could scarce support the indulgence, but it was sturdy and serviceable.
As they entered, the girl dozing before the hearth popped up, plump and rosy in green wool parted over white linen, nut-brown curls bobbing beneath her cap.
“Ooh, milady, I’m that sorry for fallin’ asleep on yer settle—”
“Never mind, Blossom,” Linnet soothed. “Tell me, is there any wine? And warm water, if ye please?”
“Oh, aye, ma’am! We’ve a bottle of fine canary, and I’ll just set this cauldron over the hearth for ye, shall I, to warm the water? I think there’s some malmsey left from last night, do ye recall, ma’am, and then—”
Accustomed to the girl’s habit of prattling until diverted, Linnet spoke over her. “Blossom, be a good lass, why don’t ye, and fetch us up some soup and bread from the kitchens. Whatever ye can find at this hour, but mind it’s fresh and hot.
Ye’ll want to wait while they do that.”
The girl proved cheerfully willing to undertake this time-consuming task. She bobbed and chattered as Linnet herded her into the corridor—briefly diverted from any curiosity about their unaccustomed guest. Linnet closed the door gently on a flurry of last-minute questions.
Zamiel stood with his back to the fire, eyes half-closed in apparent bliss as the heat rolled over him. One corner of his mouth curled up with unquenchable humor.
“You manage her very well, don’t you?”
She snorted. “Oh, aye, if ye call that managing. Now she’ll stand in the kitchens with her tongue flapping about milady and her mysterious late-night caller. Since she doesn’t know who ye are or where we’ve been, we can only hope there’s no connection made between us and the...man in the courtyard.”
Abruptly, the repercussions broke over her. Sweet Jesus, they’d killed a man—after he’d tried his damnedest to kill her. The Queen couldn’t have ordered it, not in the few minutes since her audience.
But it was the second time in a month that someone had tried to have her killed.
A clammy chill settled in her bones, raising goose bumps on her skin. Her chest felt tight, her lungs constricted. She couldn’t seem to gather enough air. And she was shivering, bone-deep tremors that shook her like a wind-tossed leaf, until she locked her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering.
“My lady? Hell’s Bells, are you swooning?”
“Can’t...can’t breathe...”
Then Zamiel was there, urging her into a high-backed chair. She subsided into it before her legs failed, barely aware of deft fingers tugging at her laces, loosening her tight bodice down the back. She always laced too tightly in an attempt to reduce her bosom.
When the hard shell of her bodice loosened, her chest expanded gratefully. Blessed air poured into her lungs. She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing, just breathing. When she opened them, the world had stopped spinning.
Zamiel knelt before her, chafing her icy hands in his gauntleted grip. She gazed into his face, watching the firelight play over pointed chin, narrow nose, slanting cheekbones. His mouth was fascinating, she thought dreamily, with a full lower lip and corners that tilted upward even in repose. Longing to touch him, her hand floated toward him.
Laura Navarre - [The Magick Trilogy 02] Page 11
