The Last Knight

by Candice Proctor

  “Don't hurt her,” Sergei blurted out as Damion started to turn away.

  Her? Damion spun about, his boots crunching in the sand that lined the pond's edge. “Splendor of God—” He broke off, took a deep breath, and said with deliberate, low-voiced calm, “How long have you known she was a girl?”

  Sergei did not meet his gaze. “Almost from the first.”

  Damion walked back to stand at the boy's stirrup. “I won't ask how you knew,” he said, looking up at his squire through hard, narrowed eyes. “But what I do wish to know is, why in the name of all the saints didn't you see fit to mention it to me?”

  A faint flush stained the boy's cheeks. “I was afraid you might hurt her.”

  “She deserves to be hurt,” Damion hissed, feeling again that strange twist of angry betrayal and fierce lust, deep inside.

  “Messire,” said the boy with a gasp of alarm that startled his horse. “You would not!”

  Damion pursed his lips and blew out his breath in a long sigh. Having a squire with the instincts of a priest could be a sore trial at times, especially for a knight-errant with his own way to make in this brutal, cut-throat world. “I only intend to frighten her, lad,” said Damion, keeping his voice level with effort. “Just enough to make her tell me what I need to know.” Of course, he thought, if she refuses to answer me …

  “Oui, messire,” said Sergei, his face still dark and troubled as he gathered the spare horses’ leads.

  Once more, Damion started to turn away, then swung back again as a new thought occurred to him. “How did you know?” he asked, his head tilted against the harsh afternoon sun. “I mean, how did you know I'd finally figured it out?”

  Sergei swallowed. “I saw it in your face. When you looked at her.”

  “Ah,” said Damion into the short, heavy silence that followed.

  “You won't—” Sergei began, then cut himself off.

  “Force myself on her?” Damion felt his lips twist into a hard grin. “I already said I didn't intend to hurt her, didn't I?” He slapped the boy's mare on its hind quarters. “Go on. Get out of here.”

  Damion saw the girl's head come up, her troubled gaze following the horses as Sergei left the clearing. He walked toward her.

  “Where goes your squire?” she asked, her breathing so high and rapid, he could see the quick rise and fall of her chest.

  “I sent him ahead.” Damion planted himself in front of her, close enough that his body threw a long, dark shadow across her. “To prepare for our arrival in Laval.”

  She stepped back, one hand coming up across her chest to nervously clasp the other arm at its elbow, her face turning away so that he saw only the fine line of her profile.

  His gaze still on her face, Damion slowly unbuckled the belt that supported his scabbard and sword and set it on the rock, where it would be within easy reach of the pool.

  “Best hurry.” He pulled off his boots and unfastened his girth. “I don't want to be here all day.”

  She didn't move.

  “Don't tell me,” he said, his voice mocking as he stripped off his leather broigne. “You've taken a vow against bathing.” He watched a gentle flush suffuse her damask cheeks as he went to work on the points of his chausses. “Or is it just against taking off your clothes?”

  Her head snapped around, her lips parting on a quickly indrawn breath as she watched him pull his shirt over his head. “In the monastery,” she said, swallowing convulsively, “it was discouraged.”

  “Oh?” He tossed the shirt aside. “And which monastery was that?”

  He saw her go still, as if she were drawing deep into herself. He already knew how much she hated to lie; she always got the same expression on her face, every time he cornered her and forced her to answer a direct question—a sort of hunted look, quickly smoothed into a semblance of courtly serenity that made him want to smile.

  “Saint-Hervisse,” she said in that husky, boyish voice of hers. “The monastery of Saint-Hervisse.”

  He untied his braies and let them fall. “Oh? And where exactly is that?”

  He watched her nostrils flare in alarm as her wide-eyed gaze took in the sight of him naked before her. Her nose was sunburned, he noticed; she might not be a grand lady like Elise d'Alérion, but she obviously wasn't used to being in the sun all day.

  “In Aquitaine.” She kept her dark brown eyes determinedly fixed at some point over his left shoulder. “I was raised in Aquitaine.”

  And that, he decided, watching her closely, was probably the truth. Christ, he thought; Aquitaine. Home of Henry's high-spirited, hardheaded, treasonous queen, Eleanor, and more rebellious and treacherous nobles than in the rest of Henry's realm put together.

  Damion swung away from her and walked, naked, to his horse to retrieve the ball of soap and length of linen he kept in his saddlebags. When he came back, it was to find her sitting scrunched up on the rocky shelf, her arms wrapped around her bent knees, her gaze discreetly lowered.

  “Here,” he said, looking down at her determinedly bowed head. “Hold these for me.”

  He watched her gaze shift to the bare male foot he'd planted beside her, then lift slowly to midthigh—but no higher. She reached out one hand, blindly, and managed to snag the linen. He let the soap fall in her lap.

  He stood a moment, looking down at her and listening to the shifting of the leafy branches up above and the sibilant hiss of the marsh grasses blowing in the wind. The sun felt hot beating down on his bare skin. The ruffled surface of the pool beckoned, cool and glistening, the water so clear he could see the sandy bottom, far below. Curling his toes over the edge of the rock, he sucked in a quick breath and dove.

  The water was colder than it looked, a vibrant shock that sent a delicious shudder through his naked body as he plunged deep. He kicked out, his arms cutting in an arc that brought him back to the surface.

  He broke through to the air above and tossed his head, shaking water and a tumbled lock of hair out of his eyes. He found her watching him, a wistful, almost envious expression on her face. The heat had flushed her cheeks until they were almost as red as her burned nose, and as he watched, a bead of sweat formed to trickle down beside her ear.

  “You look hot,” he said, bobbing lazily amid the waves of his own creation.

  He was surprised to see a wry smile curl the edges of her lips. “I am.”

  “So, come in,” he invited, rolling forward to swim back to her.

  She shook her head.

  He laughed. “Then take off those boots and put your feet in the water. Monks wear sandals, don't they? Even Jesus Christ wasn't averse to baring his toes.”

  “Surely that's blasphemy,” she said, still smiling. But she must have been hot indeed, because she hesitated only a moment before reaching down to grasp one boot and tug it off.

  Which was a good thing, he thought, watching her kick off the other boot and then, more shyly, her chausses. Because he knew damned well she didn't have a spare pair of shoes in her bags.

  And she was about to get wet.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Yvette ran her fingertips over the tightly matted carpet of thyme beside her. She'd had the bench built only last year, along the eastern wall of her garden, and she'd come to love sitting here on days such as this one, when the air was crisp and clean and filled with the sweet song of birds. Sighing contentedly, she rested her shoulders against the sun-warmed stone wall behind her and closed her eyes to breathe in the heady scents of crushed thyme and honeysuckle and jasmine mingling with the rich, fertile odor of damp earth.

  There had been no garden in the old motte and bailey castle in Normandy, where Yvette grew up. Just a dark, dank wooden tower on a windswept hill and a muddy, manure-filled yard crawling with scrawny chickens and squealing pigs and the three-dozen scrambling, half-wild children her father had got upon his succession of seven wives.

  People used to whisper about old Alain Pardue, about the wives he'd buried. He'd been a brut
ish man, her father; short but stocky and thickly muscled, with a flowing gray-brown beard and great, bushy eyebrows.

  He knew what people said about him, but it only made him laugh. “God's bones,” he used to say, pounding the dais table with one meaty fist while throwing back his head to roar for more ale. “Why would I need to murder the bitches? I just breed them to death.” And then he'd laugh, and the rough men-at-arms he liked to surround himself with would laugh, too. Only Yvette, who'd been the death of her own mother, Alain's third and shortest-lived wife, never joined in the laughter.

  She'd been a serious child, Yvette, and never pretty or winsome, even when small. She'd never won the favor of any of that succession of ill-fated and often surly stepmothers, which meant she'd had to grow up fast, dodging kicks and blows, and hungry, always hungry. Not just for a good, filling meal but for other things, elusive things she yearned for even before she learned their names. Things like solitude and beauty.

  Especially beauty.

  There was little solitude and even less beauty at Alain Pardue's castle, but Yvette still managed to find it. She could stand alone in the middle of a wheat field after harvest and marvel at the grandeur of the clear blue sky, or the graceful arc of a sparrow's wing, or the vivid, unexpected brilliance of the beech tree near the crossroads after the first frost had touched it.

  Of her father, she saw little. Alain was proud of his sons— “my own private army,” he liked to call them—and he trained them well in the arts of war. But he had no use for his daughters, didn't know half of their names, and scarcely noticed when one or the other of them—those less stubborn and determined than Yvette—would simply give up and die.

  Most of Alain's daughters knew well enough that they had little to live for. Alain didn't have enough land for his sons. His daughters had to see to their own futures, and without dowries, they had no hope of ever securing knightly husbands. The best any of them could look forward to would be to find herself married off to some peasant, who would work her like a mule and get her quick with his sons, year after year, until he killed her the way her father had killed all of his wives.

  By the time Yvette was thirteen, she had already seen four of her older sisters suffer that fate, and she'd made up her mind that it wasn't going to happen to her. She wasn't exactly sure how she was going to avoid it, since she certainly had no intention of spending the rest of her days as an unpaid drudge to her father and brothers. She didn't know enough yet to know what she wanted; she only knew what she did not want.

  And then Gaspard Beringer came into her life.

  She'd been out picking strawberries on the hill that brilliant May morning when she walked into the yard, her pail swinging at her side, and saw him. He was mounted on his big white destrier, and although only eighteen, already he was taller by far than any of her brothers, broader in the shoulder, longer in the leg. The sun shone golden on his silken fair hair and kissed his handsome cheeks with a healthy flush, and she knew, in that moment, that she had never seen anything so fine. It wasn't until she'd beheld the subtle hues of Gaspard's expensive woolen surcoat and tunic, until she'd discovered the intricate workmanship of his saddle, the delicate metalwork of his rings and brooch, that it even occurred to Yvette that beauty could be found not just in nature but in things made by man. In the person of a man.

  He was the fourth son of the viscomte de Salers, and Yvette couldn't begin to understand why he had been sent as squire to such a poor, out-of-the-way castle as Château Pardue, until later, when she heard her father say, “He's as close to being an idiot as a man can come without actually being one. Which is why the old viscount sent him here, of course. I mean, he could hardly send him to court, now could he?”

  But Gaspard didn't fit in well at Château Pardue, either. It wasn't that Alain's sons were so much brighter than Gas-pard, because most of them weren't. But they were harder and cruder, as well as being sly and vicious and mean.

  Less than two weeks after his arrival at the castle, Yvette came upon the young viscount's son quietly sobbing in a dark corner of the hay barn. Until then, she'd found him simply too magnificently beautiful to approach. But after she'd held his hand in comfort and dried his tears, she discovered that he was just a boy—a shy, malleable boy, who looked at Yvette Pardue and saw not a plain, worthless female but a clever, strong person who could guide him and protect him and care for him.

  It wasn't long before Yvette discovered other things about Gaspard. She discovered that his skin was as smooth as it looked, and that when she touched him, her breath hitched and her own skin felt all warm and tingly, as if she'd stood too close to the kitchen hearth.

  Gaspard stayed at Château Pardue for three years. With each passing year, he grew both closer to Yvette and more dependent upon her. So that when word came one day that he must return to his family's principal estate at Châteauhaut-sur-Vilaine, he ran straight to her to pour out the terrible tale he'd just heard: that his father and eldest brother George had both fallen victim to a deadly fever, just days after learning of the death of his brothers Louis and Francis in a shipwreck off the coast of Marseilles.

  Gaspard was now the viscomte de Salers.

  “But what shall I do, Yvette?” he wailed, his head buried in her lap as she stroked his heaving shoulders. “I don't know how to be a viscomte. No one ever taught me to be a viscomte. I was never meant to be a viscomte. How shall I manage? I won't even have you there to tell me what to do.”

  Yvette sat on a stool beside the bubbling cauldron of wash she'd been boiling in the yard, her red, work-roughened hands clutching his broad, wonderful shoulders, her heart aching almost unbearably, as if someone were trying to rip it out of her chest.

  And then it came to her, how she could both keep Gas-pard and at the same time grasp at everything she'd always dreamed of. “You can take me with you, Gaspard,” she said, hearing her own words as if they were coming from a long ways off. “Marry me, and then I'll be able to go to Châteauhaut with you. I'll help you learn to be a viscomte.”

  He raised his head, so that she was looking into his anxious blue eyes, shining now with hope and gratitude.

  “You can do it, Gaspard,” she told him. “With me there beside you, you can do it.”

  And so Yvette Pardue, the plain, dowerless daughter of a poor Norman baron, became the viscomtesse de Salers.

  Except that when the new viscomte and viscomtesse arrived in Brittany several weeks later, it was to discover that Gaspard's second brother, Louis, hadn't died in the shipwreck, after all. He was alive, although suffering from a crushed leg, which had made the journey home both slow and painful. Gaspard was overjoyed to see his brother, and more than happy to abandon his claim to the family's titles and estates.

  Gaspard's new sixteen-year-old wife had different ideas.

  Louis might have died anyway; he was so weak, and his wound refused to heal. But Yvette had to be sure. So one night she fixed him a warm drink, sweetened with poppy syrup, to help him sleep. And later, when the castle was quiet, she crept into his chamber, covered his handsome face with a pillow, and held it there until he died.

  After that, she never went near a sickroom again.

  “Yvette?”

  Awaking with a start, Yvette opened her eyes to the sight of Gaspard weaving his way toward her through the intricately planted beds of lavender and dianthus and stocks, of hemlock and henbane and nightshade, the late afternoon sun casting a bronze sheen across his damp handsome face.

  “Yvette,” he said again with a gasp, for he'd obviously run the length of the castle compound. “I've just heard from one of the men-at-arms that you've taken Attica's groom, Walter Brie.”

  “Yes.” Pushing up from the thyme bench, she bent to pluck an aphid from the stem of a nearby white rose. “I found him at the monastery of Saint-Sevin,” she said, and squashed the insect between thumb and forefinger.

  “But you took him, Yvette.” Gaspard's voice trembled with the horror of it. “You had the men se
ize him. With violence. From a monastery.”

  She swung about, the soft leather soles of her slippers hissing over the stone flagging of the garden path as she walked up to rest her hand on his arm and pat it lightly. “He was in the infirmary, Gaspard. Not the church. There is no question of a violation of sanctuary. Besides, Saint-Sevin has no powerful protector. The monks might sputter and complain, but no one will pay them much heed.”

  “But what has happened to Attica?”

  Yvette wrinkled her nose at the sight of a drop of sweat cascading down his hard cheek. “Gaspard. You are perspiring.”

  He swiped his silk sleeve across his face. “I ran. Fulk has heard, you see. The man-at-arms said Fulk was very upset when he found out about some knight Attica seems to have met—”

  Yvette frowned. “This man-at-arms of yours has a loose tongue that needs fixing. Which one is he?”

  Gaspard's soft blue eyes shifted to a sight in the distance.

  “I … I am sure I could not say. They all look alike to me.”

  “Never mind,” said Yvette, looping her arm through Gas-pard's to draw him up the path beside her. “I shall find him.”

  “But this knight with Attica—” Gaspard swallowed. “Do you think in truth that she might have run away with him? That perhaps we were wrong when we thought she had learned something from that courtier—”

  “No, I do not think I was wrong.” Yvette lifted her gaze to the South Tower. “But I shall know more, soon. I told Wolf to report to me here.”

  “Wolf ?” echoed Gaspard, following her gaze. “You've given the groom to Wolf to question?”

  Yvette picked a spray of rosemary, her nose quivering at the pungent scent it released. “And why not, pray tell?”

  “The last man you gave to Wolf to question died before he had a chance to say anything.”

  Yvette frowned. She would like to have denied it. Except that Wolf could sometimes be unfortunately heavy-handed in his methods.

  She saw the door at the base of the South Tower swing open. The tower was old, square-built and little-used, for it had stood on this bluff overlooking the Vilaine for a hundred years or more, since before the viscomtes de Salers had come here and built Châteauhaut. A man filled the darkened entrance. A big man with an enormous head, as square and thick as a battering ram, and a body as solid and forbidding as the tower behind him. He had stripped down to his braies, his naked torso gleaming with sweat, as if he had been standing beside a hot fire. Yvette's frown darkened as she watched the man visibly hesitate. But Wolf knew better than to avoid her, and after a moment he cut across the ward to where she stood, waiting for him, beside the tunnel arbor at the entrance to her garden.