Never Love a Lord

by Heather Grothaus

  She would do her part then. Her father was a leader of men, getting too old for battle, but once this civil unrest was at an end, he would be at Fallstowe nearly all the time. Sybilla could sit outside his tower room on the topmost step while he worked at his ledgers, waiting for him to call for her. She would not have to help tend the little girls, Cee and Alys. She would be busy learning to run Fallstowe. Her father would teach her; he’d promised. And Morys Foxe always kept his promises.

  Sybilla dared a peek around the sidewall of the tent. No one was coming, and from here she could clearly see her destination—the largest shelter in the encampment, one of the flaps was pulled back revealing a triangle of lighted interior. She looked both ways again, took a deep breath, and then ran toward the tent.

  She ducked inside with a gasp, drawing a startled frown from the man seated inside on a folding chair pulled up to a cot he was using as a makeshift table.

  “What in the bloody hell?”

  “I know a way through,” Sybilla whispered. “I know the unwatched way to Lewes. I can tell you how to go . . .”

  Crying, crying, wailing—echoes all through the great stone room.

  Her father was dead. Dead at Lewes.

  “Oh, what have we done, my daughter?” Amicia whispered bitterly into Sybilla’s hair. “What have we done that we are now so betrayed and alone? He’ll come for us now, unguarded as we are. All these years, to come to this end.”

  Sybilla felt as though her body had turned to icy stone. She could not weep, even silently like her mother. She could not comfort Amicia nor be consoled by her. She could not ask how they were betrayed or who was coming for them. She didn’t care.

  It was her fault. Morys Foxe was dead and it was somehow entirely her fault.

  Sybilla’s eyes snapped open, finally shaking loose the grip of the nightmare, but she made not a sound in her bed.

  She was not alone in her chamber.

  Sybilla heard the rattle-scrape again, coming from her table beneath the bank of windows, and she strained her eyes to try to make out the wooden surface, awash with the glow of the moon beyond the glass. She thought she saw a glimmer, and then something crashed to the floor.

  Her eyes narrowed. She threw the coverlets aside and soundlessly swung her legs over the edge of the mattress, the cold air patrolling the floor like sentries swirling around her bare ankles, investigating her. On the floor just beyond the bedpost, Sybilla could make out the edge of something rounded. With a scrape so quiet she might have mistaken it for her own breath, it started to slip out of sight toward the foot of the bed.

  Sybilla’s brows lowered. “I think not, Mother,” she said, and slid off the bed. In three steps she was around the piece of massive furniture, staring down at the miniature portrait Julian Griffin had given her hours ago.

  It was stuck against the edge of the thick rug, wiggling in short jerks toward the hearth, where small flames occasionally perked. The shadow covering the center of the rug was dense, inky, rippled around the edge.

  Sybilla leaned down and swiped up the miniature with one hand, ready for the ear-splitting wail that followed her action.

  “No!” Sybilla shouted. “It’s mine! He gave it to me and you can’t have it!”

  The shadow seemed to boil for an instant and then began to roll awkwardly toward her, clumsily gobbling up the space between them. Sybilla turned her back to it and walked to her table, determined to ignore it, even when the mumblings started in her ear.

  When Sybilla refused to acknowledge the garbled warnings, the mumbles deteriorated into the screams once more, and Sybilla sat down in her chair, pulling her feet beneath her and pressing her wrists to her ears, her right hand still clutching the portrait of two girls little more than babies.

  In a moment though, the screeching ceased, and it was as if the voice had squeezed beneath Sybilla’s wrist to whisper in her ear.

  I gave you everything! I gave you Fallstowe! And you are going to hand it over so easily, so prettily, so nicely! Can you not trust me?

  Sybilla dropped her hands to curl together between her chest and her drawn-up knees, the portrait resting over her heart. It was pointless to try to block her out.

  She stared at the moon-drenched curtain wall in the bailey beyond her window. “Why?” she whispered. “Why, Mother?”

  The voice stopped. The chamber fell silent.

  “Why would you name me after a woman you hated so? I only did everything you ever asked of me. Have I not kept my promise?”

  There was no answer, still.

  Sybilla unfolded her hands and dropped her face into them. She had obeyed her mother in everything. Listened intently, performed the duties charged to her. She had kept Amicia’s dreadful secrets, carried her burdens, looked after her other children, retained possession of the castle. All at the expense of her own soul. She could call no one friend save her two sisters and old Graves. She was wanted by the Crown, and Sybilla knew now that she could not win that trial. Even the Foxe Ring had failed her.

  And still her mother’s ghost drove her like a dumb beast.

  Maman, what does my name mean?

  Why, it means little Sybil, of course.

  Sybil de Lairne had loved Amicia like a sister. The family had thought enough of the child to have her portrait made with their blood daughter. She had been raised with the manners and lessons of the nobility. And still, Amicia had hated Sybil de Lairne enough to try to destroy the entire family.

  Maman, what does my name mean?

  Why, it means little Sybil, of course.

  She was not my sister!

  Sybilla raised her face from her hands. “After all I have done,” she whispered aloud, wonderingly. “After all you have made me do, all I have forsaken for you. How could you hate me so when I was only a baby?”

  Sybilla felt a hot track on her cheek and she reached up with a frown. Wet. She was crying.

  She thought of sheltered, perfect Cecily. Indulged, wild Alys. And then there had been Sybilla. Older. Reserved. Cool. Yearning more for her father’s attention than that of her busy mother. More lessons for her. More responsibilities. More discipline, in the name of being the oldest, an example. Her sisters had never lacked for their mother’s love.

  Sybilla thought now that she had never had it.

  And now she was alone, crying unlike she had since she was a very young girl, and haunted by a woman who held her in the grip of a deathbed promise. Alone, and unwanted by anyone who didn’t have something to gain from her. Power, money, notoriety, sex. Not one person wanted her just because of her.

  Julian Griffin does, a voice in her mind said to her. And that voice sounded like Sybilla’s own, only younger, gentler, with something resembling compassion.

  Julian wants you, and he can make her go.

  The moonlight seemed to echo the words with its glow across her table, the lead hatching of the panes growing thick and long, like ancient standing stones at some forgotten ruin.

  Go to him. Go to him. Go to him . . .

  “Yes,” Sybilla sobbed, nodding, and uncurling from her chair. “Yes,” she repeated as she stumbled across the rug toward the door, the portrait still in her hand but forgotten now.

  She couldn’t stop long enough to don a robe or her slippers, crashing into her chamber door, struggling with the latch while her shoulders shook and she wept. She did not care about the icy air of Fallstowe in the dead of night as she half ran toward the rear staircase, weaving around corners, reaching out a hand to catch herself against a stone wall.

  At last the steps were in sight, and Sybilla threw her body at them, clutching at the railing and half dragging herself up the long spiral, stumbling, crawling, then running as best she could until her lungs could no longer keep up and she collapsed at the top of the flight. It was so cold, like being out of doors in a snowstorm. Her eyes were blinded by tears when she stretched out her arm to lay her shaking palm against the wood of Julian Griffin’s door. It slid down the old, oiled wo
od, her fingernails leaving little soundless grooves.

  But he heard them any matter. Before she could try to draw another choked breath into her convulsing body, Julian’s door swung open with a frigid blast of air up the stairwell behind her.

  She looked up and could see only the burst of twinkling light that was his fire filtered through her tears, and then his shadowy outline.

  “Sybilla,” he said in a low, alarmed voice. And then in the next instant, he was crouched at her side, his arms strong beneath her back and knees, lifting her from the cold, stone step and close against his bare chest, so warm and solid.

  Her arms went around his neck as he turned back through the doorway and Sybilla sobbed into his shoulder as he kicked the door closed behind them both, leaving the tiny portrait lying forgotten on the stairs.

  She clung to him like someone rescued from a rushing, flooded river, her body seeming frail and slight, limp, and so cold. And she was crying, pressing her damp face into his shoulder, her labored inhalations pulling at his skin.

  Julian did not hesitate—nay, he did not even think twice about it—when he took her to his bed, kneeling upon it carefully and then twisting to lay Sybilla down. Her arms did not relent and so he stretched out beside her, still holding her close against him. He pressed one palm between her shoulder blades; the other cradled her head, stroking her hair.

  This was unlike any Sybilla Foxe he had heard tales of. Unlike any Sybilla Foxe he had seen during his time at Fallstowe. Here was no ice-cold matriarch, no notorious demigoddess, no traitorous villain. This was a woman devastated, lost, so defenseless and defeated that she could not hold her head aright. Julian could almost feel the pain seeping out of her chest in the area of her heart and leeching into his flesh. He could almost hear the rending sound that gentle organ was making behind its thick fortress.

  He held her closer.

  “Shh,” he whispered against her hair, and then pressed his mouth there at the crown of her head. She smelled of sunshine on a winter’s day, like a steamy exhalation around a melancholy smile. Her hair was soft and clouded like silk, the vague scent of her particular soap lingering there like a nosegay of dried flowers forgotten in the snow. “Shh. Sybilla, it’s all right.”

  “She hated me,” she choked out against his chest, her words hot and wet with tears and emotion. “My own mother hated me.”

  Julian had no response.

  It was several moments before her sobbing quieted to the occasional hiccough. “You don’t understand,” she said in a raspy whisper, and Julian imagined that her throat must be raw. “She named me after . . . her. After ... Sybil.” She pulled away slightly to look up into Julian’s face, and he was struck breathless at the beauty of her, the raw emotion spread across her face. Her eyelids were pink, the lashes black and spiky, like tiny weapons. Her nose and cheeks flushed atop her ivory skin.

  “She denied her as her sister,” Sybilla clarified. “She spoke of her so . . . so coldly. As if she was a stranger. Only she never told me her name. But now I know—she named me after the woman she considered an enemy.”

  Julian frowned. “But she let you assume you were named after her, and she never revealed that Sybil was not part of her given name. Surely you must take that as some sign of her consideration for you.”

  Sybilla put her cheek against his chest once more, gently this time though, without the desperation of before. He could no longer see her face, and Julian didn’t like it.

  “It was a little joke to her, I think,” Sybilla said in a low voice, a dark voice. “It makes sense now. She took the name Sybil out of practicality, to lend authenticity to her stolen identity as a lady. She took a family name, that of a woman who had everything my mother wanted—money, status, privilege. Those things she did eventually gain. Then when I was born, she gave that name to me.”

  “I fail to see the humor in that particular joke,” Julian hedged.

  “I was a reminder of her past, the time before she was a lady. Morys Foxe would be my father, though, legitimize my birth in a way that no one could go back in time and do for her, no matter how she schemed, whom she married. So I was to be known as a lady, but Mother knew the truth all along—I was no lady. I was just like her. And she gave me this name to remind her of it every day.”

  Julian was silently rocked by such an insight, and infuriated at this new information about Amicia Foxe. Infuriated at himself for introducing this new pain to her.

  “It means nothing,” he said, pulling her minutely closer for emphasis. “You are who you are. She could not change it then, and she cannot change it now.” He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “For what it’s worth, Sybil de Lairne seemed a lovely, lovely woman.”

  “Of course she is,” Sybilla huffed. “How could she be anything but, to have saved a memento of a woman so quietly wretched and not to have sought her out through the king? She could have destroyed my mother at any time. My mother likely knew that.”

  “Sybil asked me if I had met you,” Julian said, stroking Sybilla’s back now. “Of course I hadn’t yet, but even she had heard the tales of your boldness and success. We compared stories.” He felt a smile come to his mouth. Was this a dream? Was he truly comforting Sybilla Foxe in his arms? In his bed?

  Her voice was uncharacteristically hesitant. “Was she appalled?”

  Julian frowned, looking down at the curve of her cheek, the crescent of her ear—all of her that he could see. “Appalled? No. She was quite pleased and intrigued, I daresay.”

  “I would think it to be an embarrassment to her.”

  Julian took hold of her shoulder then, and held her slightly away from him so that he could look into her eyes. “How could you say such a thing? Sybilla, how could you think yourself to be an embarrassment to anyone?”

  Her eyes searched his hungrily, helplessly, and it was in that instant that Julian realized how frightened Sybilla Foxe actually was. How frightened she had likely been for so long, and how alone.

  “You,” he said slowly, emphatically, “are a legend. You are amazing. Tremendous. Brave. Strong.” He paused, swallowed. “I would be honored to even call you my friend, to proclaim that I know you. I would shout it from the very top of Westminster, and I would be the most envied man in England. In the world.”

  Julian was surprised when her chin flinched, her eyes filled with tears again. He had not wanted her to cry.

  “Oh, but wait,” he said quickly, pulling a disappointed face. “There is one person you have likely embarrassed deeply.”

  Her brow crinkled into a frown, but her eyes held their wetness at the brim without spilling over. “Who?”

  He leaned his face close so that the tip of his nose barely touched hers. “The king, I’m afraid. I’ve seen him face a score of wild rebels alone in a foreign desert, and yet he can’t bring one tiny woman to heel in his own country. Quite humiliating for such a manly monarch, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Then Sybilla Foxe actually giggled. And Julian felt such relief, even as her mirth caused a rogue tear to roll down her cheek.

  “I’m not a tiny woman,” she objected.

  “Oh, you give the impression that you are quite intimidating,” Julian said. “But there’s really almost nothing to you. Quite small, actually.”

  She gave a short gasp of outrage.

  “No, really, see?” He ran the back of his fingers down her face. “This jawline—delicate.” Down her throat and over her bare shoulder, where he encircled her bicep. “Your arms, strong, but slight.” Down to the curve of her waist, stopping just shy of the crest of her hip. “Your waist, fragile. Vulnerable. Your legs, so shapely, and yet you come only to my shoulder when you stand.” He was whispering now. “I daren’t go on.”

  “Why?” she whispered back, and he could see a familiar spark in her deep and glistening eyes now. A glimmer of the Sybilla he had known since coming to Fallstowe.

  “Because I want to so very much,” he choked, and skimmed his hand back up her side and t
o her arm, where he let the pads of his fingers swirl against the perfect satin that was her skin. “And I don’t wish to become a regret to you, Sybilla.”

  Her gaze never wavered from his as her palms came to the sides of his face. Slowly, keeping him pinned with the ethereal blue of her eyes, she moved her head toward his. And then her lashes fluttered against her cheeks as she slid her open mouth onto his lips.

  Julian’s eyes were open when Sybilla pulled away from his mouth. She looked up at him, their eyes little more than a hand’s-breadth apart, and she knew her desire had to be washed plainly over her face.

  “Holy God, woman,” he rasped. “Sybilla, you must know, I cannot in good conscience take you when you have been so recently distraught.” The words seemed to dangle between them in the humid chill of the room.

  “But?” Sybilla dared, looking at his mouth, unable now to look away from it, hungering for the taste of him on her tongue once more.

  “But I am at your mercy,” he confessed, and even as he spoke he drew her even nearer to him, until her flesh was pressed against him, into him. “I beg you, have pity on me.”

  His plea seemed anything but helpless, the fire in his amber eyes warming the skin of her face, and Sybilla could not slow her heartbeat. She didn’t want to. And she knew fully that it was not Julian Griffin who was at anyone’s mercy now.

  “Pity you?” she said, unable to stop herself from reaching out her tongue and tasting him once more, just the slightest flick. “Julian—oh, Julian—how could I pity you when I can’t stop thinking of the things I want you to do to my body right now?”

  She felt his sharp intake of breath before he said, “If they are even a shade of the things I want to do to your body, perhaps you should have pity on yourself.”