by Lynn Kurland
He stepped back and shook his head sharply. It had been a very trying handful of days and he needed nothing so much as sleep. Unfortunately, he suspected that wasn’t to be found that night. But before he took up his vigil in the passageway, he would go make certain Phillip was seen to and the hall as secured as it was going to be. He took one last look at the women in his bed, shook his head, then turned and left the chamber.
He ran bodily into Ranulf before he realized his captain was standing in the passageway, waiting for him.
“My apologies,” Montgomery said with a weary smile. “It has been a very long day.”
Ranulf waved aside his words. “Not to worry, my lord. Our young lord Phillip told me you’d wanted to see me. Forgive me if I took the time to make one last check of the hall.”
Montgomery was profoundly grateful for the lads nearest him who were consistently diligent beyond what he could reasonably ask of them. “And?”
“Most of the guests are snoring where they’ve fallen, Lord Phillip is safely ensconced in your solar, and the gates are secured.” He paused. “Lord Everard seems to be looking for someone to tell questionable tidings to, but there are none sober enough to listen to him. I had no interest in them, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”
“He has a vivid imagination,” Montgomery said slowly. “I’m not sure I would give credence to what he says, either.”
Ranulf shrugged. “The world is full of inexplicable happenings, but there is no purpose in discussing them overmuch.”
Given that Ranulf had squired for Montgomery’s brother-in-law, Jackson, Montgomery supposed Ranulf had seen more than his share of inexplicable happenings and had acquired the good sense to leave them alone.
Would that he himself had had the same good sense.
“I’ve arranged for the watch, my lord,” Ranulf continued, “and will take my turn when appropriate to see that all is well. Is there aught else you require?”
Montgomery shook his head. “You’ve done more than enough, Ranulf. Thank you.”
Ranulf made him a bow, smiled briefly, then went off to see to his duties. Montgomery made himself at home against the opposite wall from his door. He was beginning to wonder if he hadn’t so much stumbled into a dream as a nightmare. He had a hall full of drunken guardsmen, cousins, and neighbors. He had holes in his walls and rats in his cellar with no cat in sight. And now, if his own eyes were to be believed, two faeries in his bed. He was half tempted to ask Fate what else it was she planned to throw at him, but he decided he’d best not, as he was quite sure he didn’t want to know.
Magic.
Despite how thoroughly he had shunned any mention of it for years, he’d known it would catch him up eventually.
He could only hope it wouldn’t be the death of him.
Chapter 6
Pippa fought her way out of what was without a doubt the most unpleasant night’s sleep of her life. She couldn’t quite call it a nightmare because there had been no monsters in it besides her sister, but it could definitely be classified as a very bad dream. Obviously she’d indulged in too much British chocolate the night before. Tess had warned her it was powerful, but she’d ignored her sister, trusting in her own ability to ingest vast quantities of it and remain unaffected. Never again. If her head ever stopped killing her, she would swear off the stuff for good.
She lay still for quite some time, then opened her eyes.
And she rather wished she hadn’t.
The light in the room wasn’t all that great, but perhaps that was just as well. She couldn’t understand why Tess would have kept one of the bedrooms in such a, well, rustic state, but what did she know? Maybe people paid good money to sleep under scratchy sheets and wake up to a canopy that looked as if it had been carved with a woodsman’s axe. And what was that horrible smell—
She realized, with a start, that it was her.
She would have given that a bit more thought, but she was too distracted by the noise. She carefully turned her head and found her sister lying next to her so profoundly unconscious that Pippa might have thought she was dead if she hadn’t been snoring like a trucker. Why she herself was in her underwear and her sister was still wearing her party clothes was something she probably didn’t want to know. Maybe Tess had rescued her from the moat and decided taking off her dress was enough and been too exhausted after the fact to mess with Cindi. Maybe Cindi hadn’t wanted to let go of that small fortune in crystals she was wearing and had kicked up a fuss, beating Tess with the wand she still held in one of her traitorous hands.
When she could see straight again, Pippa fully intended to check the scene of battle and collect more crystals. If she was feeling particularly feisty, she just might start cutting them off Cindi’s dress while she was passed out. She could probably start her own bead store with the plunder.
She lay there for another minute or two until the smell—which was definitely coming from herself and not Cindi—became just too bad to endure any longer. She pushed herself gingerly to a sitting position. She was going to find a robe, then go get in the shower before she went immediately back to bed. Maybe Tess had a friendly family doctor who would come look at her head and give her something for the pain. She was a little surprised her sister hadn’t done that already, but maybe things had gone too crazy to. She wouldn’t have blamed Tess for wanting a little rest. In fact, that sounded like a very wise idea. Pippa lay back down, vowing to get back up when the stars stopped swimming around her head.
Once she could think straight again, the events of the night before came back to her in a rush. She had gone swimming in Tess’s moat, which was definitely not as clean as advertised. She suddenly remembered with perfect clarity the events leading up to that, all of which were overlaid with a nagging annoyance directed toward her sister for once again hogging the spotlight. She remembered standing at the end of the bridge, talking to Stephen de Piaget and having Cindi repeatedly try to come between them. She wasn’t entirely sure someone hadn’t pushed her once or twice. She actually wasn’t entirely sure that someone hadn’t been Cindi herself doing that pushing, especially given that the final shove had landed Pippa in the moat.
No, that wasn’t right. Stephen had grabbed her hand and kept her from falling into the moat, only he had let go. That had probably been thanks to the fact that Cindi had passed out conveniently close to his outstretched arms and he’d had no choice.
She had specific, unpleasant memories of resurfacing to discover the true contents of Tess’s lake floating all around her and covering her from head to toe. Things were a little hazy from there. Someone—Stephen, probably—pulled her out, then she had stepped into a full-blown hallucination where Tess’s castle had turned into a dilapidated wreck and Stephen de Piaget had ignored her in favor of her sister.
She frowned. That had been a pretty damned vivid hallucination. She had serious doubts that even British chocolate could produce that sort of delusion.
She remembered panicking, screaming her head off, then bolting right into a brick post that hadn’t been there five minutes earlier. She had bounced off it, turned, and been caught by someone she had been fairly sure had said eewww.
Though that could have been her.
She turned away from that memory because it made her queasy. The sooner she was clean, the happier she would be, but she didn’t think she would enjoy her shower until she could stand up all the way through it. She reluctantly put off getting up for another moment or two, distracting herself with a few things she hadn’t noticed before. The mattress she was lying on felt as if it were a collection of twigs, and she thought there might have been things chirping in her pillow. Her blanket was scratchy and not really up to the task of warding off a chill that was listing toward arctic, though she supposed she couldn’t blame Tess for covering her up with something she could simply pitch when she was finished with it.
But none of that explained why she was still in her underwear.
She decided she would talk t
o Tess about that sooner rather than later, so she put her hand to her head and very carefully pushed herself back up into a sitting position. The floor was ice cold under her feet, but that was rather bracing in a useful way so she didn’t complain. She kept her hand pressed against her head and staggered across the floor, using first the footpost of the bed, then various bits of furniture to get herself over to the hearth. She managed to nudge a couple of pieces of wood onto the burning coals left there from the night before, then hung on to the mantel until the fire caught and her dizziness receded a bit.
She found her dress hanging on the back of a chair, but it was sopping wet so she didn’t bother to put it on. She did check the pockets for her thumb drive and collection of crystals. They were still there and would probably dry out in time, so there was no sense in taking them out to stash them somewhere else. She shuffled across the room and bumped her toes on a trunk sitting there underneath the window.
She sat on the trunk and looked around her—carefully, to spare herself any more spinning than necessary. The bedroom was much more rustic than she’d remembered any of Tess’s bedrooms being, though she certainly hadn’t had the chance to look through them all. For all she knew, she was in a place Tess had left in a more Middle Ages sort of state to remind her of the castle’s beginnings. Pippa sighed, then knelt beside the trunk and felt inside it. She was somehow unsurprised to find a pair of tights and a tunic inside instead of a fluffy, monogrammed bathrobe.
She stripped off her disgusting underthings and put on what she’d found. The shirt was huge and the tights less baggy than she might have liked, but there was nothing to be done about that. She rolled the tights at her waist as if they’d been dance gear and decided the tunic would have to do as it was. After all, she was just getting decent to go to the bathroom, not to make a formal appearance. She tossed her underclothes in the chair, put her feet in her shoes, and trudged over to the door, keeping her hand to her forehead and trying to keep her non-breakfast down where it should have been residing.
She fumbled with the latch, then braced herself against the doorframe and opened the door. Stephen was leaning against the wall opposite her, dressed in his medieval gear. She couldn’t see him as clearly as she would have liked thanks to both her squinting and the dimness of the torchlight, but maybe it was best they not have too close an encounter in her current state.
“Hey,” she said, wincing and declining to wave. Her tights weren’t cooperating, forcing her to keep one hand clutching them in place and the other over her eyes. The flicker of torchlight was particularly annoying, but she didn’t suppose turning the lights off would improve matters because then she wouldn’t be able to see anything at all. “I’m just going to run to the bathroom . . . to . . . um . . .”
She felt herself wind down like a music box that had seen better days, one note at a time with increasingly lengthy pauses between those notes.
Flickering torchlight?
Stephen de Piaget with hair that had suddenly grown a few inches and a sword that even in her feeble state she could see was lacking the bright, shiny newness that blanketed most things for sale at Renaissance faires?
Pippa wished quite desperately for some place to sit, but since she wasn’t sure she would make it to a chair, she settled for leaning heavily against the doorframe and having a good long look at a man who wasn’t Stephen, but couldn’t have looked much more like him if he had been Stephen.
Then again, he somehow didn’t look like Stephen at all. Stephen was tall and very nicely fashioned, of course, but this guy . . . well, she wished she’d been able to do something besides squint. She was certain she was missing quite a few details she might otherwise have enjoyed. All she could say with any certainty was that he had a face modeling agencies would have killed for and the homespun he was wearing did nothing to obscure broad shoulders, powerful arms, and a long, very muscular pair of legs—
“Good morning, demoiselle.”
She jerked her gaze back up from where it shouldn’t have been and focused on his mouth, a rather beautiful mouth, as it happened. Then she frowned, even though it hurt her to do so. He was speaking French, but it was done with a sort of accent she most definitely wasn’t familiar with, and she had had a different private French tutor each year during her incarceration at Aunt Edna’s Victorian Institution of More Painful Learning so she would be able to function in all sorts of polite society.
She considered, then frowned a bit more. There were actually quite a few things that just didn’t add up.
First, there was a guy standing ten feet from her with a sword belted around his hips and his foot propped up against the wall underneath him who looked as if he belonged on a medieval movie set not in her sister’s castle. He was showing off his quite buff self thanks not to a handful of fake torches, but thanks to what looked to be the real deal—
She felt her mouth fall open as she realized something.
It was him.
It was the medieval knight she’d seen years ago in that full-blown, daytime hallucination she’d had near Artane. She could hardly believe it, but it was the absolute truth. She had no idea why he was standing not ten feet from her when he should have been safely tucked away in her childhood dreams, and that was something she supposed she didn’t dare ask him yet. She tugged self-consciously on her shirt, wishing she’d had a decent push-up bra to give herself courage—Cindi swore by that sort of thing—and that she could see straight. Deciding that wouldn’t really help with what she couldn’t possibly be seeing, she did the only thing she could.
She stepped back and slammed the door shut.
She rested her head gingerly against the wood and waited until the new batch of stars stopped spinning. It took quite a while, which gave herself time to get a hold of her rampaging imagination. She felt fairly confident that she would open the door and see what should have been there, namely an empty hallway.
She took a deep breath, then made attempt number two.
Really, she never should have called the man gorgeous, because he wasn’t. He was actually so handsome, it almost hurt her to look at him. His face was perfectly proportioned, his cheekbones chiseled, his eyes the most remarkable shade of something that wasn’t brown but wasn’t blue. She supposed she would have to get a closer look at him to tell. She imagined when she did, she might be privileged to have a closer look at his mouth, which was very nicely done as well.
But somehow, in spite of all that male beauty, there was something just a little bit rough around the edges of his features, something that kept him from being pretty. Maybe it was that little crook in his nose that said that at some point in his life, it had been broken. Or that little scar that ran just above one of his eyebrows. Or the grimness that seemed to be settled around him like a cloak.
One thing was for sure: that wasn’t Stephen de Piaget.
And he was staring at her as if he’d seen a ghost.
She shut the door again, because she panicked. She looked for a lock, but there wasn’t one, so she had no choice but to lean back against the wood where she could take stock of her situation and keep herself safe at the same time.
She wasn’t sleepwalking, so chalking things up to waking nightmares was out. She wasn’t on drugs—unless one counted a night spent breathing Cindi’s brownie-laced breath as a contact high—so a drug-enduced stupor was out as well. That left the possibility of Tess’s castle having been taken over by marauders, marauders who looked like hunks from her teenage fantasies.
Well, her choices were obviously limited to escape or a quicker escape. She pushed off the door and staggered over to the window. She managed to get the shutters open, then leaned over to see what lay beneath her. Granted, she hadn’t really had time to check out the scenery yesterday, but she was fairly sure the bedrooms overlooked the moat. But there was no moat beneath her now.
She frowned. It wasn’t possible that someone could have drained that lake while she slept. Was it?
She started to
shut the shutters then looked at them with dismay. Those were certainly not the nice, tight-fitting reproductions she had seen before. And there was no glass in the window. She turned around slowly and looked at the room. Austere was one thing—goodness knows all of her siblings were acquainted with that virtue—but this was taking it to an entirely new and rather medieval level.
Obviously, there had been a disaster of some sort.
She couldn’t help but wonder if that guy standing in the hall was responsible for it.
She felt a little lightheaded, as if she weren’t firing on all four cylinders, because she was starting to wonder if the entire castle had been overrun by bad guys. That wasn’t the sort of thing modern-day castle owners were prepared for. There was no one walking along the walls, ready to shout, “Drop the portcullis, Bob!” the moment he caught sight of a group of medieval-looking guys with mischief on their minds. Pippa half wondered if Tess even had a big key for that outer gate.
No, they were sitting ducks, and they had obviously sat too long.
She looked at Cindi and realized there would be no help there. Her sister was still sawing logs like a drunken lumber-jack. Pippa walked unsteadily over to her, then leaned over to look at her. There were crumbs on her pillow. Pippa picked one up, then sniffed.
Brownie.
She could only imagine what was in it. She would have frisked her sister for other contraband substances, but she thought that perhaps it was better to let sleeping show-stealers lie. Cindi certainly wasn’t going to be of any help should a crisis arise, though Pippa supposed the crisis had already arisen and its ringleader was standing out in the hallway looking every inch the appealing bad boy.
She considered jumping out the window and running to get help, but two things stopped her: one, the window was too small; and two, there was nothing beneath her but grass to break her fall.