Gerome de Saintonge interrupted her musings with a scowl as he brought her horse forward.
“You had best leave now and rejoin Father. The view should be adequate,” he added, shielding his eyes to look up at the jagged dome of a hill that rose above the treetops nearly half a mile away. It was as thickly wooded on the crown as the surrounding hills and gullies, and anyone standing at the top would not be visible to those below. Only a careless glint of sunlight sparking off metal would betray their presence, and Malagane was anything but careless.
“Fight well, my bold lord,” Solange whispered, reaching up to press a kiss over Gerome’s mouth. “Bring us the head of Robert Wardieu and I will come to you tonight. I will come and you shall know pleasure beyond your ability to comprehend.”
A small bead of Saliva formed at the corner of Saintonge’s mouth as he watched her being handed up into the saddle. When she was gone, he grinned and cupped a hairy hand over his groin then turned and glared at Griffyn Renaud. He came slowly back to the oak tree and stood staring for a long moment before he drew his sword. It was Griffyn’s own blade with its polished steel surface and serpentine hilt.
“A beautiful weapon,” Saintonge murmured, running a thumb along the exquisitely sharp edge. He saw the writing on the shaft and tilted it to reduce the glare, his fat lips moving as he read the Latin inscription and translated it. “ ‘You … need not hope … that you will ever see heaven … for I have come … to take you to the other side.’ ” He grinned and glanced sidelong at Griffyn. “How prophetic. And heavy too. One stroke, I should think, would part a man’s head from his shoulders. I will test it on Wardieu, then leave it thrust in his corpse so that no one will doubt whose hand wielded it. But first…”
He brought the gleaming edge of the blade up and rested it just beneath Griffyn’s jawline, in the same place a scabbed stripe marked his own throat. He slid the blade slowly across the skin, parting the edges of flesh, sending a fresh sheet of blood down onto Griffyn’s collar.
“I owed you that,” Saintonge murmured. “The rest of your debts will be collected in full when our business here is done. Perhaps”—he leaned forward so that the rancid heat of his breath stung Griffyn’s nostrils—“I will even let Engelard have his fun with you. Right here. In the grass. With the other men cheering and vying for a turn.”
Cigogni grinned through black and furry teeth and, mimicking Solange’s caress, shoved his hand beneath Griffyn’s tunic and closed his fist around the bulge of flesh.
Griffyn strained against his ropes but was limited to a futile contortion that only increased the pressure on the rope at his throat and brought a gust of laughter out of Cigogni’s mouth. The fist tightened around his flesh and Griffyn could not think, breathe, or move through the blinding sheet of agony that tore through him. Only when the clawing fingers released him could he see clearly enough to acknowledge the leering grin on the assassin’s face.
“I look forward to it, my sweet,” the Italian hissed.
Laughing, Saintonge thrust the point of the sword into the ground beside the oak, temptingly close, impossibly far, then, aware of the pale eyes burning into his shoulders, he ordered his troop to conceal themselves in the trees.
Blinking his eyes to clear them of the sweat and blood that drenched his face, Griffyn saw that only a half dozen or so were knights; the rest were men-at-arms who carried pikes and thick-stocked crossbows. The latter weapon was cumbersome, armed by hooking a foot through the stirrup and drawing the string back by means of a pulley to hook around the trigger-release. The quarrels they fired were less than a foot long and stout; they would not carry far, but in the dense wood, they did not need to gain distance. Shot at close range, they would have enough force to knock a knight out of his saddle, where, in the first few minutes when he fought to regain his senses, he would be easy prey.
Saintonge had set a fine trap for Robert Wardieu and did not anticipate anyone walking away from it with the ability to decry his lack of courtesy. The location was ideal, for the road took a sharp turn just before entering the gully and Wardieu’s party would be fully in the sights of the bowmen before he suspected anything amiss. Moreover, Griffyn was tied in plain view, halfway up the far side of the leafy gorge, where the trees were thinner and therefore less threatening than what lay behind.
He tried to curse, but the rope cut into his throat, limiting his effort to a hiss; he doubted if he could rouse more than a crushed whisper. His head was a blister of agony, and he could barely move his eyes high enough to see the tops of the trees or low enough to see the inches-thick bed of decayed leaves that surrounded the base of the oak. He fought through the waves of pain and nausea to stay conscious, though he thought he lost the battle several times. And once he thought he had lost his mind completely when he pried a blood-crusted eye open and stared at a misty shadow so long, the watery shape began to materialize into a face with huge violet eyes—one of them aimed down the shaft of an arrow pointed directly at his heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Brenna snapped her fingers away from the string and a split second later was rewarded by the solid f-bungg of the steel tip striking wood. It quivered in the bark of the oak not two inches from Griffyn’s throat, cleanly severing the rope that was pinning his neck to the tree. At the same time, she heard another slish and a cry from across the gully, and she guessed correctly that Will had reduced the number of their adversaries by one.
She drew another arrow and nocked it, stepping out from behind the tree to take aim at a second crossbowman who had been startled out of his hidey-hole in the bushes. She loosed the arrow with almost graceful ease, yet the force behind it punched through the bullhide and byrnie and sent the man twirling on his heel to land facedown in the brambles.
She set another arrow and held it at the ready even as she bent low and ran toward the tree where Griffyn was tied. She had to stop once as a crossbow bolt kicked into the dirt at her feet, but her aim was more accurate and another victim fell to the side. The gully came alive then with an eruption of thrashing horses’ hooves and clashing swords as Robin and her brothers surprised their would-be ambushers from behind. She and Will had pinpointed their locations with laughable ease, and because the majority were on foot already, crouched behind bushes and tree stumps, relying on the crossbows to unhorse their intended victims, they were no match for the mounted knights. What few quarrels they did manage to fire were easily deflected off shields, but because the weapons required almost half a minute to reload, they were all but useless after the first flight. They were cast aside with curses, and the bearers were reduced to using swords against the fearsome might of the knights who came out of nowhere and bore down on them like furies.
Dag and Geoffrey LaFer each took two apiece, not by choice, but because the men-at-arms had huddled together hoping to present a greater threat in numbers. The pair in the forefront stood defense while the two behind struggled feverishly to reload their crossbows. Fully armed and armoured, however, a knight mounted on a seasoned war-horse could easily account for ten, twenty men on foot, and four terrified Brabançons posed no threat, offered no challenge.
The fiercest fighting was at the far end of the gully where Gerome de Saintonge and his knights had mounted quickly and raced into the fray. Richard, quickest to find trouble, charged into their midst, his lance aimed at the closest of the three helmed challengers. He struck the first in the throat, ousting him from the saddle, and because there was no room to turn or mount another charge, he threw down his lance and drew his sword. He fought like a fiend, standing high in the stirrups, bellowing loudly enough to startle a flock of rooks out of the treetops.
Robin set his spurs to Sir Tristan and thundered after a burly knight with two entwined snakes painted on his shield. He caught the man square and high on the hip, shredding the iron links of his hauberk, driving the point of his sword through flesh and bone and muscle. The knight screamed and wielded his own weapon, but it was too late. The blade struck
Robin’s shield and glanced off without harming more than the surface of the paint.
Robin turned and rode toward two crossbowmen who were winding their weapons to reload. One saw him coming and threw himself sideways, abandoning the fray with a scream. The second man froze as Robin’s charging steed ran him down and the quarrel he loosed flew high up into the treetops, nearly startling Sparrow from his perch higher up in the boughs.
Dag was engaged in swordplay with another knight when Gerome de Saintonge thundered out of the trees beside him. He managed to duck the first swipe of Saintonge’s weapon but, in so doing, leaned into a strike from the second knight. He went down, cursing and bleeding, as he fought to keep hold of his sword and avoid the thrashing hooves of all three destriers. Robin rode in, bellowing as loudly as Richard, trying to work the fight away from Dag. Geoffrey did what he could to help, slashing his blade across the rump of Saintonge’s horse to send him into a bolt.
Gerome turned with a snarl and rode back into the crush. He saw Robin and shouted a challenge, one that was met with steely gray eyes and ice cold nerve. They had room now, with Dag down and Geoffrey driving off the horses. Without a pause to exchange insults, Robin and Saintonge flew at each other, swords slashing, shields raised to absorb the shock of the blows. They wheeled, unhurt, and bashed at each other again … and again, until the sheer might of Robin’s sword arm forced Saintonge out of the saddle. It was in the act of falling that he swung his shield against the side of Robin’s head, tearing off his helm, camail and all.
Robin’s vision darkened under a rush of blood as the departing metal opened a cut on his temple. He was not down, though, and after a split-second delay to wipe his sleeve across his eyes, he found the floundering Saintonge and slashed his sword in a downward arc, catching the fallen knight with enough force to dent the back of his helm and knock him senseless.
Their leader undermined, the remaining crossbowmen scattered and the two surviving knights put their heels to their steeds and fled, their shields raised to ward off the pursuing hail of Sparrow’s six-inch arblaster bolts. One of them veered onto the road hoping to make better speed, but he cleared no more than a dozen galloping paces when a shaft from Will’s longbow brought him down. The other escaped and overtook the men-at-arms who were running in a panic without weapons, without any thoughts other than escape.
Sounds of sporadic fighting still echoed through the greenwood, but the battle, such as it was, was over.
Brenna, one eye on the surrounding woods, cut through the ropes that held Griffyn pinioned to the oak. He staggered heavily forward into her arms and they both went down onto their knees, with Brenna attempting to brace him while she reached around to the small of his back and sliced the cords binding his wrists.
Once freed, he gasped as the pressure on his shoulder was eased and groaned as he cradled his pain-wracked hands to his chest. His face was a mass of purpling flesh. The front of his tunic was liberally splattered with blood; his hair hung forward in thick, matted strands over his shoulders. There was more blood on his thigh where the point of Saintonge’s boot had torn his hose and gouged the flesh, but despite the bruises and the battering, he managed a weak smile.
“When I saw you standing there,” he murmured, “I thought I was dreaming.”
“You will think it a nightmare when you see yourself,” she chided gently, using her cuff to wipe at the blood over his eye. She could not keep herself from looking at his mouth, or from touching her sleeve to the split on the lower lip, nor could she keep the overwhelming sense of relief from spilling down her spine and pooling at the base of her belly.
“Can you stand? Is anything broken?”
“Only my pride,” he answered, draping an arm over her shoulders as she helped him rise. The pale eyes were still glazed with pain, but there was a glimmer of something else in their depths as he looked long and hard at her face, and once they were on their feet again, he drew her forward into the circle of his arms. The embrace lasted only seconds before a crashing in the woods beside them had Griffyn flinging Brenna to one side and leaping himself to avoid the red-eyed, screaming charge of Engelard Cigogni’s rampager.
The horse’s flanks brushed Griffyn’s shoulder, spinning him around and thrusting him hard against the trunk of the tree, but he shook off the pain and lunged for his sword, grasping it in both swollen hands as the Italian wheeled around and came back for a second charge. The assassin’s weapon of choice was a starburst, a round, spiked metal ball swung overhead at the end of a length of chain. A single swipe could tear away a man’s face, especially if that man was without a helm or armour of any kind.
Cigogni roared and came at Griffyn, the starburst wind-milling overhead, the spikes shredding the air, causing a small hurricane of sound as horse and rider leaped into the charge. The one did not lean far enough, however, and the sheer unbendable bulk of his armour kept him straight in the saddle, causing him to clip a low-lying branch with the spikes of the starburst. The branch was ripped away from the trunk and exploded into splinters, but the split-second delay caused by the strike was enough for Griffyn to swing his sword up and catch the stunned assassin high under the upraised arm. The force behind the blow severed the links of Cigogni’s hauberk and bit deeply into the flesh and muscle. There was a brief glimpse of white bone at the heart of the wound before that too shattered and split away, and then it was the weight and the momentum of the swinging starburst that changed Cigogni’s roar of triumph into a high-pitched scream of pain. Armless, the assassin rode blindly into the woods, the blood gushing from his shoulder as if from a fountain.
Griffyn spun around, braced for another attack, but Cigogni was finished. Brenna was still lying in a crush of spongy leaves, and for one heart-stopping moment he thought she had been struck. But no. The air had just been knocked out of her lungs when he had pushed her out of the way, and even as he went down on his knees to help her up, she was cursing, spitting dirt and decayed pine needles out of her mouth.
Robin came riding across the road then, the side of his face streaked in blood but otherwise unhurt.
“We have accounted for twelve,” he said, swinging out of his saddle.
“There are more,” Griffyn cautioned roughly. “Twenty at least.”
“They are likely half way back to the chateau by now,” Robin guessed. “And if so, we had best not waste any more time than necessary. Is anyone hurt?” He looked around. “Where is Dagobert?”
“Here” came a grunted response. “I am here.”
He emerged from the woods, his arm slung around Will’s shoulder. The sleeve of his hauberk was torn, the shirt beneath showed bloody, but he was just winded, he was quick to point out, “From learning how to dance with my horse.”
Richard and Geoffrey appeared a few moments later, both of them showing minor wounds but grinning ear to ear as they squabbled over strikes and misses. Sparrow swung down out of the trees, landing with a boastful caper to show himself free of the smallest bruise. There were six other Amboise men in their company—to have brought any more would not have been sporting, Dag had declared—and these six also emerged from the greenwood and converged on the forest road, two of them dragging a semiconscious Gerome de Saintonge between them. He was missing his helm and his yellow hair was plastered to his skull with pink-tinged sweat. At the edge of the road he lost his footing and went down hard on one knee. No one moved to help him up again, and after a small struggle to regain his balance, he stood, his eyes dull and glazed as they went from one face to the next.
“What should we do with him?” Richard asked casually. “Hang him?”
“A single arrow,” Brenna said, drawing one out of her quiver, “would do just as well.”
Saintonge curled his lip in a sneer. “Murder me, and my father will stop at nothing to hunt you down.”
“I would enjoy giving him the inconvenience,” Robin said. “But no, I have no intentions of murdering you. The lowly curs you brought with you … aye … I have no c
ompunctions about teaching them a lesson in chivalry.”
He glanced pointedly at the severed arm lying a few feet away in the leaves. Saintonge followed his gaze and his eyes widened as he recognized the starburst and the gloved hand that clutched it. He found Griffyn then and saw the bloodied length of the serpentine sword, and before anyone could stop him, he drew his dagger and lunged for Renaud’s throat.
The six-inch bolt from Sparrow’s arblaster caught him high between the shoulders, punching through mail and leather and cutting the spine with an audible cra-ack. Saintonge froze, his arm still raised, his dagger gleaming in his fist … then fell facedown, almost in slowed motion, dead before he struck the ground.
For a full ten seconds no one moved or made a sound.
“Actually”—Robin pursed his lips and frowned—“I was hoping to make use of him if Malagane sent more troops after us.”
Sparrow snorted wetly and shouldered his arblaster. “Fine. The next time a viper sets himself to strike, I will ask your leave first.”
“He will send more men,” Griffyn warned quietly. “You may count on it. He knows where you are going and why.”
One by one the Wardieu men turned toward him, their faces showing a combination of curiosity, wariness, and open distrust.
“Your man already warned us,” Robin mused. “But we would hear it from your own lips.”
“Fulgrin? He is alive?”
“Alive … and most insistent about leaving nothing of value behind. We might have been here sooner had he not been so adamant about collecting horses and armour … and saddle pouches that make a fine tinkling noise when shaken.”
Griffyn’s gaze touched on each hostile face before he sighed and nodded. “I suppose I do owe you an explanation.”
“It had best be a good one,” Robin said, smiling faintly. He gave orders to have the bodies collected and hidden beneath a layer of leaves, then pointed the way, politely enough, to the river. “You can clean yourself up and at the same time give us a good reason why we should not leave you here with the other corpses.”
The Robin Hood Trilogy Page 119