The Fire and the Sword (Men of Blood Book 2)

by Rosamund Winchester

  She enjoyed the quiet. She enjoyed the simplicity. However, she could not stomach the flavorless food, the dirt beneath her nails, and all the time spent on her knees. Elric was correct, she wasn’t meant to be a nun. Thankfully, that had never been her plan.

  Minnette scratched at the coarse robes, and grunted most unbecomingly. As a guest at the convent, she was required to wear the more modest accoutrements of the sisters, so her own clothes remained in her trunk, along with her slippers, her jewelry, and anything else that painted her as a lady rather than a humble woman of God.

  Her back aching from sitting in hard chairs and lying on uncomfortable cots, Minnette stood, reached her arms over her head, and nearly moaned when the muscles in her back and neck popped and clenched.

  “Merde! I have never missed my bed as much as I do now,” she grumbled.

  A knock on her cell door made her drop her arms. She turned and called, “Come.” She assumed it was one of the sisters, and she was incorrect. It was one of the novitiates, Bron. She was a tall woman with long, blonde hair she kept wrapped tightly around her head and covered with a wimple. Her eyes were a warm brown, and her face was lovely, if she ever smiled. The one time Minnette had seen Bron smile, the woman had simply come alive. It was breathtaking, and a little sad. What made a woman as beautiful and humming with life as Bron dedicate her life to lonely contemplation?

  “Did you need something?” Minnette asked, waving Bron in so she could shut the chamber door. Though they were actually small bedchambers, the sisters referred to them as cells and Minnette couldn’t agree with that moniker more. Sometimes, she felt as though she’d been punished, but then she was reminded that these women did not need to give her sanctuary. She was there on their graces, and she could leave whenever she wanted.

  So why hadn’t she left yet?

  “Nay, I need nothing,” Bron replied, dipping her face to hide her blush. Minnette noticed that Bron often hid her face when any sort of emotion broke over her expression. What was she hiding now?

  “What is it then?” Minnette asked, placing a gentle hand on Bron’s shoulder.

  Bron cleared her throat and then lifted her face, her brown gaze catching Minnette’s.

  “I was not supposed to tell you, but, well, there is a man camped outside of the convent walls.”

  Alarm blasted through her. Had the monster found her? Had he come to finish what he started in that cottage so many nights ago?

  “He is a knight, I believe,” Bron continued, and her words took their time sinking in to Minnette’s horrified thoughts.

  She pressed a hand against her throat and drew in a long breath.

  “A knight?” Elric? “How do you know he is a knight?”

  Bron blushed again. “I made my daily trip to the well, and he was there. He asked after you. I told him to seek permission from the abbess if he wished to speak with you, and he said…” Bron looked quite uncomfortable, her cheeks flushed and her hands wrapping around themselves in front of her. “He said that he would not speak with her.”

  “Did he say why not?” Damn her curiosity! She wanted to know why Elric cared to ask after her at all. Was it some misplaced sense of chivalry? Did he not have better, more important things to do than visit the convent?

  “He did not say.”

  The small hill of excitement flattened to a barren plane. “Oh,” she murmured.

  “Though, he did say that he was waiting for you, so he could protect you on your journey to Chatteris.”

  The wind was snatched from her chest and she nearly fell to the floor in shock.

  “I cannot believe him!” she ground out. “He thinks that being handsome and charming means he can do whatever he wants, despite what I say?”

  Bron’s blush deepened. “He is rather handsome,” she muttered, stopping Minnette short. Jealousy was an ugly thing, and she hated feeling jealous over anything having to do with Elric.

  “Golden hair and eyes but nothing but blackness in his heart,” she sneered, curling her fingers into fists.

  “Golden?” Bron started, blinking at Minnette in confusion. “Nay, his eyes were the most incredible blue, and his hair as black as ink. And he spoke with the most dashing accent.”

  “Glenn?” Minnette barked, her anger gone in an instant. “It is Glenn outside the walls?”

  Bron nodded. “Aye, Glenn Fraser, he said his name was.”

  Glenn had come. But Elric had not.

  Is that not what you wanted?

  Her heart said it was not so.

  Chapter Thirty

  Castle Marchande

  Home of the Lord Elmore Gadot

  Claremont, England

  Fifteen years. It has been too long.

  Pulling Bellerophon to a halt inside the courtyard, Elric looked about at the castle that was once his home. It was where he was born, raised, where his mother died, his father remarried, and his brother was born.

  It was where he was a man with a family. But then the Homme du Sang became his family.

  The Homme du Sang are no more. His brothers were cast to the wind, going to their homes, finding places to hide, or hiding out in the open. Glenn was the latter, refusing to duck his head in fear. He remained behind in Bridgerdon, after their pointless journey to Furness.

  To Minnette.

  Refusing to give thoughts of her or what he had done to her any more of his time, Elric dismounted, tossing his reins to a boy he’d never seen before, quickly realizing he would recognize few of the people still remaining in his father’s house. The castle itself was made of white stones, but there was a layer of green muck over the topmost reaches of the walls. The portico before the door was crumbling, and the door itself was no longer the smooth and elaborate show of wealth that had once graced those hinges. Now, it was more an oak slab, cut to shape, with an iron ring affixed to it.

  After he’d paid the extortionate ransom for Elric’s return, his father had beggared himself on rich foods and drink, and many useless gowns for his lady wife, Elric’s stepmother. The woman who had thrust him from his home, from his family, into a world where he’d become the one thing he’d sworn to never be: a killer of innocents.

  When he’d first joined the Homme du Sang, he’d been honored to fight beside such honorable, valiant, and stalwart men. Men who would battle villains and save innocents, all under the protection of the Church. They were doing God’s work.

  But they weren’t. They were doing Calleaux’s work, wetting their hands in the blood of innocent people, and filling his treasury with gold that might as well be their thirty pieces of silver. For they were Judases, selling their souls and reaping nothing but death and betrayal.

  If Elton had lived, he would be disgusted with his only brother.

  Without his armor or his coat of arms, he felt naked, exposed, vulnerable, more so now that he was in the one place where he felt the weakest.

  Staring up at the edifice before him, Elric took a long, slow, unsteady breath. Then he took the steps up to the door one at a time, his booted feet making scuffing noises in the painfully silent courtyard.

  It looked like the corpse of a castle, left to rot in the sun and rain.

  Was his father even still here? Had the estate fallen into disrepair? Had his decision to seek reconciliation come too late? Now that Calleaux was loose and wealthy beyond what any many of the cloth should be, it was said that he was seeking information on the members of the Homme du Sang. Elric’s time on earth could be short.

  He could not meet the Devil without first having begged his father’s forgiveness.

  Before he could raise his hand to knock, the door swung open, and a haggard, skeletally-thin man who resembled his father stood there.

  “Elric?” the man rasped, his familiar golden eyes flying wide, his cracked lips thinning against the backdrop of a wiry, gray and brown beard.

  “Father,” Elric intoned, shocked at the broken man before him. “What has happened?”

  His father continued
to stand there silently as he took in Elric, from his boots to his mussed hair. He felt as though his father were seeing the boy had become a man, and the man had been handily defeated.

  Sputtering, his father raised his arms, a grin spreading over his cadaverous face.

  “Elric, my son! Welcome home!” Striding forward, Elmore threw his arms around Elric, hugging his son to his chest beneath the frayed and stinking furs. “Come, come! We will have meat and wine. Bastion!” he called to the castellan who had been older than Moses when Elric had left fifteen years ago.

  “Bastion? Surely the man is dead and with Mathilda,” Elric remarked, remembering how quickly Bastion’s wife, Mathilda, died once she’d contracted a disease of the guts.

  His father laughed, slapping Elric on the back. Taking hold of Elric’s elbow, he pulled Elric into the great hall, which was no longer great. The ornate stained glass windows were still there, but they were coated in layers of dust that blocked out the bright afternoon light. The immense hearth was still there, but the fire within it was much too small to heat a room of that size. The tables and benches were still there, but they were empty. Thirty armored men once feasted there, as the bard played, and the wenches served ale and wine to battle-weary warriors.

  It was a ghost of what it had been.

  “Father,” Elric murmured, his throat tight, “what has happened here?”

  His father spun to look at him, then at the room, then back to Elric. “Eh?” He looked confused, his bushy white eyebrows turning down into a frown. “What do you mean, Elric?”

  Elric raised his arms. “Father, look at this place, what has happened here?”

  His father blinked, his expression crumbling. “Much has happened since you left, Son,” he replied, turning back to walk to the far end of the great hall to where two chairs were set facing one another beside the fragile fire.

  “Where is Margaret? And Michael, and Terrance?” He named his stepmother and two of the men he’d had the honor of commanding before he’d killed his brother. “This castle is like a tomb, Father.”

  His father sat like a great weight had settled upon him. Elric took the seat across from him, planting his elbows into his knees to lean forward and take in the whole of the man before him.

  His boots were worn, scuffed, and muddy. His breeches were dirty, stained, and the hems were frayed. His coat of furs was going bald around the shoulders, and the tunic beneath it appeared to be covered in several nights’ supper.

  “When was the last time you bathed, Father?” Elric asked, his gaze scouring, searching for signs of illness. From the time he was a lad, he’d always thought his father invincible, strong. But the man sitting in the chair was emaciated, unkempt, and frail. “When was the last time someone took a broom to this place?” He kicked at a mouse carcass clumped up with old straw.

  His father’s expression hardened, his eyes flashing.

  “You think to abandon us, for years, and then return here to cast disparaging remarks around like ribbons.” His father rose to his feet, doddering unsteadily. “I do not answer to you, Boy. Be gone!” His father spat at him, moving around the chair to hobble toward the door which had been left ajar.

  His ears still ringing from the screech in his father’s voice, he focused on something his father had yelled.

  “Abandoned you?” he repeated, his voice heavy. “I did not abandon you! I was ordered to leave!”

  His father’s lips thinned. “That is a lie. I never ordered you to leave. You were my son, my only son. I was grieving for your brother. I needed my son with me to help me bear the burden of loss. But you were gone! Without a word!”

  Stunned, Elric returned to his chair, clasping his head in his hands.

  Trembling, he sat in silence, desperately gasping for breath. How was this possible?

  “Father…”

  His father appeared before him, placing a frail, spotted hand on Elric’s arm.

  “Margaret told me you had gone, that you refused to remain because you had allowed your brother to die.”

  Elric cried out, tears burning the backs of his eyes.

  “I had gone, aye, but not because of that. Aye, I had allowed Elton to die. I should have known that was a trap, an ambush. I should not have allowed the whelp to come, but I was so arrogant. I could not see the truth through the haze of my own self-importance.” He groaned. “But Father…” He raised his face to meet his father’s watery gaze. “I did not leave because I wanted to. I left because Margaret told me that you no longer wanted to see me, that seeing me only reminded you of the son you had lost.” A sob escaped. “I never would have left, Father. I wanted to mourn Elton with you.”

  His father sobbed, pressing a thin, spidery hand to his chest as if to catch his breath.

  “Why would Margaret send you away? You were my son.”

  “She told me that I would remind you of Elton, the son you lost, and that I would cause more pain if I remained.”

  Elmore Gadot wailed, clutching at tufts of his thinning hair.

  “You were my son, my only son, then. I needed you.”

  “And I needed you. But she was correct. It was my fault Elton was dead. I only would have reminded you of the son that did not come home that day.”

  His shoulders shaking, the man before him groaned.

  “Nay. It was not your fault Elton did not come home that day. It was mine.”

  Again, stunned, Elric gasped. “You cannot mean that. It was not you who led our entourage into a trap. It was not your fault Elton was left to rot in a cell.”

  Shaking his head, his father sputtered, “If it were not for me and my grandiose bragging and arrogance, Graham Pridie never would have sought to harm me or mine. It was my arrogance that led to your capture and your brother’s death. You cannot blame yourself for his death, Elric. If you could have, you would have given your own life to save his. I know that. I know you.”

  But he didn’t. He didn’t know the man he had become.

  “Much has changed, Father,” he husked. “There are many sins I have committed.”

  “No more than I, Son.”

  His father, the great Lord Elmore Gadot, Earl of Marchande, fell to his knees before his son, bowing his head in anguish.

  And they wept together.

  Two months later…

  Minnette laughed at the little girl as she attempted to kick the leather-bound ball through a rolling hoop.

  The little girl kicked the ball again, sending it through the hoop just before the hoop tipped over. The little girl, Hannah, squealed, throwing her little arms into the air. Minnette squealed with her, picking her up and twirling her around as they both laughed into the morning sky.

  “Hannah!” the girl’s mother called from their small cottage, “come inside now, ye have taken enough of the lady’s time!” Hannah groaned, her bottom lip trembling.

  “Hannah, charmant, I will visit again tomorrow,” Minnette offered coaxingly.

  The little girl’s face lit up, her chubby cheeks turning pink. “Promise Lady ’Nette?”

  She smiled at the child’s shortening of her name. “I promise, Lady Hannah.”

  Hannah giggled before waving and turning to skip back across the tiny patch of earth where Hannah and her parents held a farm. They provided the abbey and convent with fresh vegetables, when the abbey and convent were in need.

  The walled gardens on the Church grounds were adequate but, often times, the soil wasn’t good enough to raise large crops of life sustaining foods. And so, they purchased crops from Hannah’s family. That was one of the reasons Minnette made the short journey from the convent to the Croppers’ farm every day. It allowed her outside of the walls, but not too far, and she could be of use.

  “Ye really should consider lettin’ me carry that basket fer ye,” Glenn grumbled, coming up beside her. Over the last two months, Glenn was a constant. Whenever she left the safety of the convent walls, he was there, watching over her, like a wraith.

  M
innette waved him off, readjusting the basket handle over her arm. “I can manage, thank you,” she replied, fighting off a smile at his grunt of displeasure.

  “When will ye give up this life o’ sadness and prayer, and let me escort ye ta Chatteris as ye planned?”

  She sighed. This wasn’t the first time he’d asked that question. He’d asked her once a day, every day over the last sixty days.

  “I will go when I am ready,” she said for the sixtieth time.

  Glenn grunted again, slowing his movements so his long legs didn’t eat up the distance faster than hers did.

  “When will ye be ready?”

  This was not a new question, either. “When I feel I am ready.”

  “When will that be?”

  She gritted her teeth, swallowing back expletives in French. “Why are you here?”

  “Ye ken why,” he said, not for the first time. And the truth was, she did not know why he was there. He was Homme du Sang. Surely there were more important things for him to be doing, like bringing her uncle to justice so she could move on with her life without the fear of his retribution hanging over her head like a bladed pendulum.

  “Were you ordered to remain here? Like a nursemaid watching over an infant in swaddling?”

  He stopped walking so she stopped walking, turning to face him. He shrugged.

  “It wasna an order, nay. I choose ta remain here. I want ta make sure that yer aidin’ us hasna made a target o’ ye.”

  It hit her then. “You believe that my uncle will seek to hurt me?” She already knew that was a possibility, but to hear Glenn remark on it stole the warmth from her body.

  “Aye,” he answered without hesitation.

  She huffed, returning to her journey back to the convent, where her quiet, boring cell awaited her.

  “Will it ever be safe for me to venture to Chatteris?” she asked without thought.

  Glenn didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he walked beside her, his presence a welcome comfort to her.