by Kris Kennedy
“You burned the one I came back with, but you could not burn the one I delivered to Scotland. The one with your seal on it.”
D'Argent grabbed for him. The crowd booed. Chants of “Fight, fight, fight,” rang out.
The baron held onto Máel’s tunic. “What do you want?” he snarled.
Máel ripped his arm free. “Everything. All the money you owe me, and my father's sword.”
D’Argent’s eyes darted away. “I don't know anything about a sword—”
Máel swung, lifting his blade to deliver a crashing blow.
In other circumstances, were d’Argent not frenzied at the prospect of having his treason laid bare and his head cut off, the blow may have done little damage.
As it was, it knocked the sword out of his hand. The baron fell backward and sprawled on the ground.
Máel stepped forward and laid the tip of his blade to d’Argent’s throat.
The flesh dimpled and a small drop of blood appeared, a ruby jewel quivering at the edge of the blade point. He had to fight the urge to press forward and slice the twice-tempered steel through the baron’s neck.
“I will go get your rancid sword,” d’Argent rasped. His throat bobbed against the sword. “I do not have it here.”
“Go retrieve it.”
He nodded.
“Ride hard. I’ll wait.”
He kept nodding.
“With your daughter.”
D’Argent’s face washed white. “Christ’s holy blood, you cannot. She is to be wed.”
Máel smiled. “Is she? My felicitations.”
“You’ll ruin her.” He spoke through clenched teeth. “No one will take her if they know she was held hostage by an Irishman.”
Máel leaned closer. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
D’Argent’s face flooded red, fury and fear mingling so it almost glowed in the sun.
“You have one day,” Máel said. “Bring me the sword. Fail and your daughter will be the first to suffer.”
He stepped back. Only then did the sounds of the crowd return. They were booing. Their champion had been beaten.
Chapter 7
Cassia pushed her way out of the stands and stood in the dirt pathway. People hurried past on their way to a hundred other events.
Her father walked toward her, his face blank and stern. The Irishman followed a few paces behind. Her father stopped before her, still breathing hard.
“I warned you not to come, Cassia,” he rasped.
“What has happened?” she asked.
“I lost the match. I must…pay a ransom.”
Fear nudged its way across the landscape of her heart, for they had nothing to pay a ransom with.
They had so little these days, although their poverty was well-hidden. One could hardly make the rounds and gain allies if one were known to be destitute. It was a simple truth: the needy grew needier. Appearances were vital.
Still, while appearances might garner invitations and even marriage proposals, they did not pay ransoms.
She threw an evil glance at the towering Irishman before turning back to her father.
“What does he want?” she asked, keeping her voice as ever it needed to be: calm, controlled, placid.
Her father shifted. A puff of dust misted around his boots. “For now, daughter...you.”
She blew out a breath of astonished laughter. Her hands touched her ear lobes in confusion. “How could this be?”
“It simply is.” Her father’s voice was curt. “Go with him now. You will not be with him long.”
“No!”
“Yes. We have agreed—”
“I agreed to nothing.” She backed up over a rut in the mud.
He closed his hand on her elbow to hold her where she was. “You heard me, Cassia,” he said, his voice harsh. “Do not make this more difficult than it is. Recall who you are.”
She tore her arm free. “I am a hostage, I am told.”
“A noble one.”
“Indeed. A noble, bankrupt hostage.”
This time her father put his hand on her shoulder, and spoke close to her face. “Hush, you fool, and regard me well: this Irishman is not a man to trifle with.”
“I do not trifle,” she snapped, but her legs felt unsteady, as when she’d been a young child and gone without food for days. Once for a week.
But that hadn't happened for years and years. Her father had promised the hunger would never come again, and so it had not. Still, her knees wobbled and the sun, so golden and balmy, felt as if it was burning against the ice that had lodged in her heart.
“You trifle regularly. It is your biggest sin,” her father retorted, and pressed his heavy hand down on her shoulder. “Now heed me. Be still and silent and just go along easy.” He glanced over her shoulder at the evil Irishman.
“Do not fear.” Her father's hand squeezed her shoulder painfully tight, then he said in a low voice even Cassia could hardly hear, “I will get out of this.”
He turned away fast. As his hand was still on her shoulder, he pushed off of her. She stumbled back a few steps.
Stone-faced, he walked away, head down.
One might see in him a beaten man, but Cassia knew him too well; he was a political man, a maneuvering man. He had served King Richard for many years, and knew the intrigue of politics and power. Just now, he was thinking, planning, strategizing. It was never a pleasant thing for anyone who was the target of his strategizing.
Cassia usually had sympathy for anyone who bore the brunt of her father's schemes, but this time, she hoped only that he would be more vicious, more brutal, more scheming and conniving than ever he had been before.
She watched him disappear into the sea of brightly clad bodies, then balled her hands into fists and turned to face the Irish beast.
His blue eyes were impassive, arms crossed over his chest. He'd seen everything: how they'd argued; how her father had pushed off her; how she'd stumbled backward over the ruts.
She lifted her chin, trembling with fury. She wanted to strike at him, lash him with her fists and feet as a thing unleashed. Stab him with her nails, bite him with her teeth.
She composed herself and all the wild urges and looked into his arrogant face. “You must be pleased,” she said coldly.
“I'd not describe it that way.”
“If not you, then whom? You are the architect of this moment. I surely do not know how it happened.”
“Did your father not just explain?”
“My father said words. That is hardly an explanation.”
“He took something that did not belong to him.”
“My father has taken many things that do not belong to him,” she snapped. “None have hunted me down in his stead.”
Cold and remote, he met her gaze. “Be assured, lady, I hunted him down. He gave me you instead.”
“Then you neither of you have got what you wished for. What a sad world.” She averted her eyes to ensure she did not scratch his out. “Where am I to be kept?”
He pointed to the far meadow. A sea of colorful tents dotted across the meadow around the castle, which served as a campground for combatants and merchants who did not have lodging in the keep or the town below.
“Wear this.”
He was holding out a light cloak. She stared at it in confusion.
“Tug up the hood and keep your head down,” he said. “Unless you wish everyone to witness you going into the tent of a brigand.”
She snatched the cape, flung it on and pulled the hood far forward, to shield her face.
“Are we ready?” he asked.
She didn’t reply, just lifted her chin and started walking. He stayed close on her heels. So close that his cape, flowing out behind her, occasionally caught on his legs, which had the effect of almost tugging her back into his body.
Such things could not be noted. If the miscreant wished to walk barbarously close, so be it. She would be impenetrable, immovable, untouchable. Noble.
She looked neither right nor left, simply walked without slowing to the tent he indicated, the plainest, smallest, most dismal tent in the entire campground.
Of course.
She stopped at the flap and stood, waiting. When nothing happened, she looked pointedly over her shoulder at him.
The flap.
Grimly, he strode up, tugged on the ties, and held the flap aloft with the back of one broad hand.
She lifted her skirts and passed under without word or glance. Into the devil’s lair.
All she had to do was hold on. Just hold on, and her father would rescue her.
Chapter 8
Máel let the flap fall shut behind her noble arse and debated his options.
Follow her inside and spend the next several hours being subjected to her noble perfection?
Sit outside and watch the festival idiots get roaring drunk?
Join the idiots and get roaring drunk? Then lie down on the dewy grass until the sun rose on his face, as he’d done a thousand times before. Collect his father’s sword and return to…what?
A familiar, flat cord of coldness tightened in his chest.
Odin popped up at his side. “He rode off, out of sight. I couldn’t follow him anymore.” He tried to peer around Máel, into the tent. “She in there?”
He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and turned him. “Can you keep an eye out? Report back anything you see?”
The boy jerked straight. “Have I ever failed you?”
“We’ve known each other five hours.”
Odin straightened, all four feet, five inches of him. “And I’ve been loyal and true through all of them.”
“And expensive.”
They looked at each other. Odin held out a hand.
Máel reached for his pouch. “You’re a menace,” he said as the coins clinked in the boy’s palm.
“Like knows like,” Odin replied and darted off.
Máel heard a small, feminine exclamation break out inside the tent. “Oh, what is this?”
He ground his jaw and turned. The silhouette of Cassia was cast on the walls of the tent, revealing a curving female body and fine-cut chin that seemed to never go down. She’d been pacing, back and forth, back and forth, like a caged beast. But now she’d paused beside something.
He flipped up the flap and went in.
She stood beside his cot. Makeshift, aye, but more comfortable than the ground, and Máel had grown adept at making hard things tolerable.
This cot, though, was more than tolerable. The sturdy wooden legs were knotted together and hung with straps of leather, edge to edge. Easy to fold, they formed a low-slung frame for a feather mattress that lay atop, covered by furs. Easy for his horse to carry, better to sleep on.
He'd built his first cot when he was eleven, and he and his blood-brothers had washed ashore in England, exiled and alone. Hunted. Homeless. Shivering in a cave, Fáe had built them a fire and Máel had build them beds. It became a kind of mission, a purpose, a way to gain control.
He may have lost everything, but he’d used the woodworking skills his father had taught him and built a bed. Then he built a life—albeit a criminal one—and it served.
But she, of noble birth and endless coin, birthed of the men who'd stolen his home, Cassia d'Argent knew nothing of being washed away, homeless and hungry.
She'd never had to grab hold of any water-soaked log she could find ere she drowned.
She'd never built a fire or a bed. She'd never built a life.
She'd had all things gifted to her, and just now, she was looking at his cot as if it was lower than dirt.
Máel cared for nothing. Care did not inhabit his heart or burden his thoughts. But the way she looked at his cot, it generated some emotion, and he did not want it.
He strode past her without a glance.
Not without awareness, though, for how could he not be aware of the brightest thing in his tent. The brightest thing that had moved through his life these past twenty odd years.
Everything about her flashed and swirled and exploded with color. Light. Scent. Rosewater, he presumed, for it reminded him of summer paths laden with flowers. Paths he’d not walked on for decades now. Thanks to men like her father.
This time, one of them would pay.
The emptiness eddied again.
“What is this?” she demanded, flipping up the edge of the furs on his cot derisively. “And how long has it been dead?”
Cassia had stood her ground when he walked past, but now, when he looked over his shoulder at her, as he pinned those impossibly blue eyes to hers, she took an involuntary step backward.
Blue and cold. A winter's world in those eyes.
“’Tis my bed,” he said, then added, “Yours, tonight. I killed it this morning.”
She whirled to him. “You cannot think we would share a bed!”
“Difficult though it may be to believe, Cassia, arrogant ladies of privilege do not appeal to me.” It was a derisive drawl, an arrogant drawl, a self-satisfied, evil drawl.
“I?” Her voice arched high. “Arrogant? I, the arrogant one?” She waved her hand at the cot. “You are above your station when—”
He moved abruptly, slashing her words to silence.
Reaching down, he flipped up the edge of the furs on the bed, revealing a wood-framed cot with a thick feather mattress atop. “You.” He pointed to the floor. “Me.”
She sniffed and poked the cot with a forefinger. It was piled high with soft blankets. It looked like luxury.
“It will suffice,” she deigned.
He straightened. “Will there be anything else, princess?”
“My freedom, if you please.”
A smile barely touched his mouth. “The sooner the better for us all. All we're waiting on now is your father to be faithful. Tell me, how long do you think that will take?”
She thrust up her chin and turned her back on him.
Pride and disdain fueled the move, as well as a good measure of ignorance, for she could not in all honesty answer his question. But surely...surely her father would not break faith on this matter. Surely he would come for her, his only daughter.
Surely.
It all depended on what this knave wanted. His desires seemed to be a tricky thing. Unpredictable. Dangerous.
It would be wisest to watch and do nothing to arouse his attention. A simple enough thing, as he seemed utterly disinterested in her. He sat down on a low stool beside a single, small table and began whittling.
After that, he did not speak.
This silence, it was a device of torture. She paced the tent, marking its perimeter in a restless march, touching the things she passed—a shell, the satchels and packs lining the bottom of the tent walls.
But she soon stopped, for every time her hand brushed across something, his gaze came up from the wooden trinket and landed on her.
And every time, it was like a douse of cold water. Chills ran over her skin whenever his gaze touched her body anywhere.
Everywhere.
He was, at the moment, the center of her universe. She'd never been so aware of a man.
Unfortunately, he was nothing like the willowy, accomplished troubadours who floated from castle to castle, lutes in hand, singing of forbidden love and rarified passion between great ladies and high-minded, chivalric knights.
No, this one was the antithesis of that. Rough-hewn, blue-eyed, dark-haired, and black-souled.
He did not even smell like a perfumed courtier. He smelled of wood smoke and leather and...maleness.
His calloused hands held the gnarled butt end of the piece of wood with a surprisingly light touch. The small knife moved in swift, assured movements as he whittled.
Sprawled back on the stool, spine to a tent post, boots kicked out, his legs were hard-packed under his hose, revealing curves of muscle, ending in high, cuffed brown boots. Under his loose linsey-woolsey tunic, his body moved with a fluid, masculine grace even when he was doi
ng nothing more than shifting the wood to a new position.
His forearms were sprayed with dark hair, his head bent as he concentrated on his work, which made some of his hair swing forward, tugged out of the band at the nape of his neck. A single braid slipped from its confines and dangled beside his cheek and square jaw, roughened by a shadow of facial hair.
He was a handsome devil.
Devil is what matters.
Nonetheless, her cheeks flushed.
His gaze lifted and snagged her from across the room.
She jerked away as if she hadn't been watching him.
She wanted a drink. She would enter a jousting ring if it secured her a sop of wine.
Outside the tent, fires were springing up. Sunset was nigh. Darkness would follow close behind. The haze of fiery brightness flickered against the tent walls, and silhouettes of people passed by in twos and threes, walking through the crushed grass, greeting one another, joining around fires and sharing roasted meat, wine, and laughter. Occasionally a horse nickered or a dog barked.
Right now, inside the castle, people were feasting and merrymaking. Noble ladies were dancing carols and drinking wine, firelight shimmering off their silks and veils...having the same conversations as ever. Sharing the same mislaid concerns. Worrying whether this man or that had the greater estate, the brighter armor, the deeper bow...always the same...
Ever and anon, to the same end.
They were naught but packages to be delivered.
And here she was in a devil’s tent, held hostage.
A package. Worth no more and no less than how many coins could be accounted against her.
“Have you no wine in this accursed place?” she blurted out.
He made no reply. He seemed not to have heard at all. Then he abruptly reached behind him, into one of the many packs that lined the edges of his tent.
She half-turned to watch.
He extracted a pretty little silver flask and held it in the air, a brow raised in silent invitation.
She turned fully. “Is that wine?”
“Nay.”
She took a hesitant step. He laid the flask on the little table and went back to his whittling.
