The Conqueror

by Kris Kennedy

  Her ears started ringing, and the world slipped a little into grey. She leaned on John’s arm, trying to still the dizziness and panic flooding through her body.

  “Gwyn,” John murmured encouragingly. It came softly through the ringing. “Mayhap you ought stay and speak with Lord Marcus.”

  She ran her tongue over dry lips. He would ask questions she could not answer. Questions of where she’d gotten the cloak, of where she’d spent her night. With whom. Every answer revealed would doom Pagan. Every answer denied would seal Everoot’s fate.

  “Aye, John. I will stay.”

  Marcus smiled.

  John left and the abbot glided behind a tapestry leading to another room, leaving them alone. The only sound was the abbot’s robes shurrushing over the flagstone floor in the distance, then silence. Marcus gestured to an elaborate chair by the hotly glowing brazier.

  “Gwyn, sit.”

  She debated arguing the point, and then admitted it would be pointless, fruitless, and idiotic. She sat down.

  “We were all so worried.”

  “Do stop, Marcus,” she snapped. “They have all gone, and there’s no one else to fool.”

  He laughed. “You’ve a temper that will be the death of you one day.”

  “Or you,” she quipped sourly.

  His laughter slowly faded. He put one hand on the arm of her chair and bent down. “Where did you get the cloak?”

  She turned her head to the side, away from him. “What does it matter?”

  He braced his other hand on the other side of the chair, so she was sitting between his outstretched arms. He bent at the hip and leaned nearer her face. “Where did you get the cloak?”

  “’Tis mine.”

  “Not bloody likely,” he whispered very close to her lips.

  She swallowed. “Marcus, how is this helpful?”

  His lips pressed together so tightly they turned white. His usually aristocratic, aquiline face turned quite red.

  “’Tisn’t,” he agreed. His breath skidded by her face, and the acrid, choking scent of wet leather and iron filled her nostrils. “What would be helpful, is for you to answer my questions.”

  Gwyn started slipping off the chair, the sweat of her fear was building so thickly.

  “I cannot see how my clothes are of any interest to a man,” she said, hiding the tremor in her voice as she retreated to the only style of communication that would work with Marcus: self-assured irreverence. He had no patience for weakness, no respect for fragility, and without one or the other from him this night, she was in dire trouble. “Still,” she went on, affecting idle disinterest, “I can send you my dressmaker to consult, seeing you are so enamoured of her work.”

  He leaned back a bit and looked the torn and tattered gown up and down. “If she dresses you like that, I’ve no interest whatsoever.”

  Gwyn had a wild vision of Marcus fitzMiles, Lord d’Endshire, one of the most cunning lords of the realm, dressed up in a woman’s tunic and headdress, capering about a maypole. The mad humour of it almost sent her into hysterics. She shoved her tongue inside the range of her teeth and clamped down hard.

  “I know the cloak is not yours, Gwyn. That is why it matters.” He ran the side of his finger along the lump inside her cheek where her tongue was pressed. “Humour me.”

  She gave a wild laugh. “I cannot imagine how to begin doing that.”

  “You do it with every breath, lady.”

  The abbot flowed back into the room like a river of muddy water and looked at them askance. Marcus pushed away from the chair and paced to the far wall just as John returned, followed soon after by two servants. One carried a tray of wine and some foodstuffs, the other carried furs for Gwyn.

  The abbot propelled Marcus to the desk on the other side of the room and was speaking in low tones, his tonsured head bent over the sheaf of parchment that had fluttered to the floor upon her arrival.

  Marcus was looking directly at her.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  She sat, huddled in a chair, bundled in furs and sipping warmed wine. Almost an hour had passed, and around her the abbot and John and Marcus were still rehashing the latest news that had gripped the war-torn country.

  “Stephen has confirmation that the rumour of fitzEmpress’s spy is true. He fears he may have infiltrated some noble houses during the London council meetings.”

  Marcus and the abbot listened to John relay the king’s concerns, Marcus with a yawn, the abbot with a worried frown.

  “I had hopes he’d already been killed,” fretted the abbot. “We’ve had no confirmation from anyone on the matter, but we’ve lost no more lords to the Angevin’s cause.”

  “Yet,” concluded Marcus. “’Twould be unwise of them to announce their defection while in London. We shall hear what word comes in a few weeks’ time, when they are safe behind castle walls and the harvest is brought in.”

  John shook his head and leaned the heel of his hand against the wall, hitting the hilt of his sword on the stone. It clanged and he caught it with his free hand unconsciously, his pleasant, ruddy face serious. “We can’t simply wait him out, Marcus. Time is on his side. If the spy is here, we must flush him out ere we find Henri fitzEmpress camping on our shores come spring.”

  “Winter, I would venture,” Marcus suggested calmly. He sat on a bench with his legs pushed out in front of him. “One or two more nobles to his cause, and Henri will not wait for the marriage bed to dry afore he comes for England. And Pagan Sauvage is a convincing man.”

  Gwyn rose out of her seat like she was yanked on wires. “Pagan?”

  Every head turned to her. Marcus went still.

  His gaze, fixed on the far wall, shifted slowly over. He stared at her a moment, then smiled, a slow, terrible smile. He pushed to his feet.

  “Ready your men, Cantebrigge. She came from the south woods.”

  He and John were already striding out the door, talking rapidly of horses and pathways.

  “No!” Gwyn cried, running after. “No! You can’t!”

  They paused long enough for Marcus to lean back and run a finger by her cheek, whispering, “I knew it” in her ear. Then he strode away with the abbot quick on his heels. She started forward again, but John put a restraining hand on her arm.

  “Gwyn!” He gave her a small, impatient shake. “What is wrong with you? This is the spy we’ve been hunting. Due to him, your king may lose his crown!”

  “He saved my life!”

  John’s pleasant, kind face screwed up in an expression of disgust. “Do you know who he is, this Pagan of yours?” he demanded furiously.

  “N-no.”

  He made an impatient move with his hand. “Pagan is Griffyn Sauvage, Guinevere,” he fairly hissed. “Christian Sauvage’s son. Heir to Everoot.” Her face went cold and white. “Pagan’s father and your father were once friends. The best of friends. They shared everything. Women, wine, wars. They went everywhere together. Everywhere,” he repeated significantly.

  Something dim started coalescing in her mind. Something frightening. “The Holy Lands,” she whispered.

  John looked at her sharply. “Aye. And Marcus’s father was there too, my lady. The three of them. Do not forget that.”

  She felt nauseous. “What?”

  “Did your father not tell you anything? Marcus was your father’s page, years back—”

  “What?”

  “—long before you were born. He was forced on your father by Miles, Marcus’s father. Griffyn Sauvage was supposed to go to your father as squire too, but something happened. I do not know how, or why, or anything of the tangle, but something binds these three families together, something unholy. Sauvage, fitzMiles, and the de l’Amis.”

  “Marcus knows Pagan?” she asked weakly.

  “Marcus knew his father, and aye, he knows the son. And Marcus has as much reason to hate him as the de l’Amis do.”

  Hate, she thought numbly. I am supposed to hate him. “What are you saying?”r />
  “What I am saying, Gwyn, is that if you gainsay Marcus one more time, you are doomed. Everoot will go to him in wardship, and so will you. And then he will take you to wife.”

  Her hand went to her mouth, fear rushing through her like a raging, frothing wave of madness. The movement seemed to anger John.

  “Was your night with Pagan worth so much you would barter Everoot for it?” he demanded savagely. “Why did you not mention anything of your rescuer?” His face paled. “God save us, Gwynnie. You didn’t know, did you?”

  She shook her head wildly, denying it, all the while, inside, crying, Yes, yes, I knew he was not what he seemed, and that should have been enough.

  She held her hands to her face. Her fingertips were freezing on her cheeks. She could barely concentrate on John’s face. It was weaving and slipping in and out of focus.

  “I’ve no time to tell you stories, Gwyn. If you would have Everoot be yours, then it must be yours. Above all else. Do you understand me?” He looked at her oddly. “Did you father not even teach you so much as that?”

  She reached out instinctively for John’s arm, reaching for anything stable in her wildly shifting world. Papa knew Pagan. Papa hated him. There was something unholy binding these families.

  John touched her grasping hand and softened briefly, back to the gentle, companionable John she’d known for years. The one who could explain this madness to her.

  Only he didn’t.

  One of his men appeared at the end of the shadowy corridor and beckoned. “I must go,” John said. He turned her, gently this time, by her shoulders and led her back to the room, pausing before the door on his way out. “’Tis best this way.”

  He shut the door.

  Gwyn stared at the wall. The silence of the room was deafening, hurt her ears. She looked down at her hands, upturned and opened on her lap. They were the same hands as a day ago, a week, but they were not hers. She looked dumbly around the room, seeing familiar objects—a desk, cupboard, table—but now so hideously warped they seemed revolting.

  Two things her father had left her, the only two things she ever treasured—Everoot and the box of letters. She’d given one to a pagan she’d loved for a day. The other would be lost if she tried to save him.

  Thrusting back the chair, she ran to the door, flung it open, and plowed smack into one of Marcus’s knights. It was de Louth. Good God, she was surrounded by nightmares.

  “Get…off…me!” she shouted, fighting the hands that were suddenly wrapped around her.

  De Louth’s voice was quiet but firm as he caught her up and deposited her back in the room. “Be calm, my lady.” She thought she saw a small flicker of emotion cross his face, then it was gone. Limping, he took up a post by the only door in the windowless room, and stood with an expressionless face.

  “He said you’re to stay here.”

  Griffyn rode hard for London. He rode on the back paths, galloping past tree trunks and over downed logs, silent but for Noir’s thundering hooves. He was blasting past the treacherous woods near the Saxon outpost when they found him, spilling swords and fury across another moonlit night.

  Ten men were too much for one, and he was dragged off in chains. In their wrath, they missed capturing his horse, Noir, who cantered away under the eaves with a small bundle tied around his saddle. Later, Hervé slipped out of the forest shadows and took the horse. He and Alex silently tracked the company to the walls of London, then rode like demons to the Gloucester port where the others waited.

  Griffyn was thrown into the Tower of London, beaten daily, threatened with beheading, and lashed on his back within an inch of his life. Only Henri’s intercession, bartering him for a highborn hostage taken on their last campaign, won him his freedom six weeks later.

  Throughout his imprisonment, the only thing that kept madness at bay were thoughts of Raven. Of her laugh, which was almost scent here in the filth and grime. The look in her eyes when he’d promised to find her. The thought that the world might, indeed, be filled with light, and not the darkness of his father’s awful desires and unbreakable oaths. That he could go home again. That he had a home to go to, and Gwyn was waiting for him.

  The horrors of his rat-infested prison were not so vivid as these lucid dreams, and it was the hope of her that sustained him.

  Then he overheard two guards talking a week before his release, when his body had been beaten too many times to count, and his dreams shattered like a million shards of ice.

  Voices tinged with a Norman accent, mixed with Saxon roughness, lent a strange, rustic, lyrical quality to the rough talk of the wardens outside his cell one evening.

  “Aye, well, and what do ye expect? A woman gave him up,” said one gruff voice in reply to some unheard comment, then grunted. “We ought to begin hiring wenches as spies. I’ve said it before. Men can’t keep their cods and their brains working at once, and the women is a good bit cheaper to pay into the bargain.”

  This was greeted by a coarse laugh. “Aye, well, there you’re right. I wouldn’t mind a bit of spying bein’ done on me, if I had one as savory as they say this one was. But ’twasn’t a wench, Dunnar. ’Twas her ladyship.”

  Griffyn dragged one swollen eye open and stared at the slit of light coming under the door.

  “Aye, I heard she was tupped right well,” said the first, grunting again, “and ’twouldn’t have been given up mor’n what she already did.”

  More coarse laughter.

  “’Twas the lady, all right,” said the second. “Word is the king’s going to increase her lands, her bein’ the heiress ’n all.”

  “Pah,” came the spat reply, “as if Everoot’s not a big enough thing for herself to manage.”

  Griffyn went still.

  The other laughed in reply. “And ye’re thinkin’ ye might do wi’ some’a the rewards?”

  “And why not?” the Grunt retorted indignantly. “Ack, I know ’twouldn’t be right, but I do mor’n those rich earls and whatnot. Pah,” he spat again. “I’d like to compare what she done to the years of shit-hauling I been doin’ down here these past years.”

  The voices started to fade away. Griffyn rolled to his knees and braced his hand against the wall. It couldn’t be.

  “I could do wi’ a bit of som’in’ meself,” said the first guard with another coarse laugh, “but I’d ruther a piece of the lady than a piece of the land, iffen ye know what I mean.”

  The other spat a series of curses and their voices started to fade further. A squeal of rusted iron indicated they’d reached the outer door and would soon be gone. Griffyn dragged himself as far as his chains would allow and stood, swaying on his feet. He leaned one palm against the fetid wall and bent his head, listening.

  “Naw, the Countess Everoot stumbles ’cross a spy, gets rightly tupped as her first reward, then turns him over and gets an increase in the lands so’s now they reach halfway to York. Bloody nobility. Can’t trust ’em so far as ye can spit.”

  Griffyn staggered backwards, his head filled with a hot, hard roar. The agony of realisation dropped him to his knees. He slid down the wet wall, his knees bending under him, the back of his head against the hard, wet stone.

  Sometime over that one storm-tossed night, he had imagined, for just a moment, he had found love. Instead it was betrayal, the ever-present truth.

  He banged his head backwards against the stone, fighting the almost overwhelming urge to bellow his rage and fury. Traitor, deceiver, betrayer.

  Spawn.

  No one ever changed. It was in the blood.

  His heart was splitting and hardening all at once, so it was a splintered mass of frozen shards by the time he was ransomed seven days later.

  Interlude:

  A Fallow Year

  Winter through Summer, 1153

  All of England

  The armies of Henri fitzEmpress marched across the parched earth of England and laid it to waste. Castle, garrison, village, homestead; everything was decimated.

&nb
sp; King Stephen fought on, along with his combative, petulant son, Prince Eustace. Some said the king was goaded by those who feared Henri fitzEmpress’s wrath, or perhaps the obligation to tread, weary now, a path long chosen. The prince had more at stake: a kingdom.

  But for most, the truth was plain to see. The civil wars would end as soon as Henri fitzEmpress was crowned king.

  Still, a few loyal outposts held their castles, kept their garrisons manned. Kept their faith. They would die, of course. By sword or starvation, they would die or be subsumed.

  The fitzEmpress captains went out before the main army like locusts upon a field. They ate their way through the countryside, and everything fell before them. The good and the bad, the chaff and the wheat, and no one kept count anymore.

  And then, in August, the news went out: Prince Eustace, heir to the throne, was dead.

  August 1153

  The Nest, Northumbria, England

  “It’s all gone, my lady. The entire harvest. Wheat and rye, both crops, withered.”

  Gwyn looked up at her William, her balding, beloved seneschal, who sat opposite her at the table. He brushed all five strands back over the slope of his head and frowned at the parchment scroll he held aloft, the report just received from the eastern manors. He was simply repeating what he’d already said, thrice already.

  Gwyn nodded wearily and looked out the window. No breeze came through the wide, fourth-story window, only hot, dry air and the small voice of a child playing some game.

  “Sell the harps,” she said flatly.

  “My lady! They were your mother’s!”

  “Have Gilbert prepare the wagon. To Ipsile-upon-Tyne,” she said, referring to one of Everoot’s chartered towns. “Take it to Agardly the goldsmythe. His serjeantry includes providing travel for Everoot’s goods, and he knows every minstrel from the River Clyde to the Thames. They’ll fetch a middling price.”