The Black Thorne's Rose

by Susan King

  With cautious exploration, he had discovered that the chamber hall had rooms filled with drunken and exhausted sleepers, and a few storage rooms, but no dungeon cells. Most of Whitehawke’s soldiers and servants and the king’s mercenaries lay sleeping on pallets scattered everywhere, even in the corridors. Those few remaining awake were noisy enough to give him ample warning as he slipped through the halls and out of the building. Deciding that the mural towers were likely places to keep prisoners, he headed for the nearest tower.

  Once inside, he followed the curved stairs upward, finding no lower level. Investigating each of the three floors carefully, he found only empty guard rooms and snoring men. The strong drink in Whitehawke’s guest cups had made his search uncomplicated so far, he thought, as he slipped outside. Three other towers, explored in a similar fashion, yielded nothing.

  Hesitating just inside the fourth tower, he ran cold fingers through his dampened hair in frustration. Hearing voices above, and the clanking thud of iron-trimmed boots on the stairs, he went back outside to press into a dark corner. The door swung open nearly in his face.

  Three guards emerged from the tower and set off across the bailey, murmuring indistinctly. Then one whooped, a gleeful echo, and scooped up a handful of snow, tossing it at the others. A few snowballs danced back and forth among them as they crossed the yard.

  Catching the door, Nicholas eased back into the tower and moved stealthily up the steps, through the profound silence that filled the cylindrical space of the stairwell.

  On the first level, a door left slightly ajar opened quietly beneath his hand. The scant light of a glowing brazier cast long shadows, illumining the head and shoulders of a man at the table, bent over a parchment.

  Outside, faintly heard, the guard whooped again. The man at the table glanced up, then slowly turned his head.

  Curling his fingers around the slim hilt of the long dagger tucked at the back of his belt, Nicholas stared into the surprised, uneven gaze of Hugh de Chavant. Making a quick decision, he stepped into the shadowy room.

  “What do you want?” Chavant demanded irritably. “There are no sleeping quarters here for villeins. Begone from here, man.”

  Nicholas crossed the room so fast that Chavant barely had time to rise from the table. The knife flashed and the glistening point rested against Chavant’s throat as he stumbled back, half falling against the bench. Nicholas leaned over him, a glaring, shadowy, unkempt wild man, his hair dangling in damp, snow-dusted strings over his brow.

  “Who are you?” Chavant rasped. “What do you want?”

  “Where is she?”

  Chavant blinked at him, then narrowed his eyes. “My God,” he said slowly. “I know you. The Black Thorne.”

  Nicholas pressed the blade tip closer. “Tell me where the lady is held. Your throat is soft as any pig’s belly, I trow,” he hissed. “Call out to your guards, and they will slip in your blood. Where is Lady Emlyn?”

  “God’s eyes!” Chavant said suddenly. “Nicholas! I thought you were the—”

  “Answer my question, Hugh,” he growled.

  “Your lady is well, my lord. But I cannot say where she is held. Whitehawke would be loathe to see her go just yet.”

  Slowly Nicholas drew the point across Chavant’s throat, raising a thin scratch. Blood welled in tiny drops. “I seek no courtesy from you and I return none. You seized my wife and the children like a true coward. Give her up to me now, or my troops will destroy these walls.”

  Wincing at the sting of the cut, Chavant flared his nostrils. “Whitehawke has shut her away until she says where—” He inhaled sharply as he studied Nicholas. “Ah,” he said, “By the rood. I believe the Black Thorne has come for her after all. You—”

  Nicholas grabbed a handful of chain mail, hauling Chavant up to a seated position, pressing the blade close. “By God, I feel inclined to slit your craven throat here and now and find her myself. I make no meaningless jests. Where is she held?”

  Chavant whimpered softly, sweat on his brow. “Please—” With swift strength, Nicholas hoisted him to a standing position and wrenched him around to trap one arm behind, resting the knife blade just under his ear. “Take me to her. Now.”

  Chavant stumbled forward as Nicholas pushed him toward the door. “By God,” he said, “you have been the Thorne all along. Your father will be greatly disappointed in you.”

  “An improvement, then, in his opinion of me,” Nicholas said as they descended the curving steps.

  Stepping meekly through the outer door, Chavant started across the bailey. They slogged through fresh snow piled in blowing drifts. Ahead, a bulky cluster of wagons took on the shape of a ghost-white hill.

  Biting cold snapped at Nicholas’s ears and nose and filled his lungs. The dagger felt like silver ice in his hand, numbing his bare fingers.

  “Christ’s arse,” Chavant said, his words blowing back to Nicholas. “ ’Tis bitter as demon’s milk out here. Your garrison would never attack in such weather. Horses could not make it across the moors.”

  “My garrison stands ready and close by. Snow will not hinder them. If they do not hear from me within a certain time, they will advance on Graymere.”

  “Fool! King John is here.”

  “I know that. But the king’s presence is not much of a deterrent, since he may already plan to ride for Hawksmoor when he leaves here. What matter, then, where the battle is fought?”

  Bursting out of the swirling snow, something whacked Chavant full in the side of the head. He threw up his free arm and folded to his knees, collapsing forward. Another snowball rushed between them. Nicholas struggled to keep hold of Chavant as they went down in the deep snow. Nearby, he heard laughter quickly change to shouts of alarm, and footsteps shushed through the snow toward them. Regaining his balance quickly and half standing, he dragged Chavant to his knees.

  “Stand!” he ordered.

  “Guards!” Chavant yelled. Nicholas dropped the dagger and yanked at the hilt of Peter’s sword just as he was broadsided by two men. His knee plunged into a cold, deep snowdrift, but he managed to clear and swing the sword. With a ragged scream, one of the guards fell away from him, clutching at a wounded thigh.

  Nicholas leaped to his feet in a wide, swaying stance. The other guard drew his sword and faced him, competent enough with the broadsword, but without subtlety. Even in the darkness, Nicholas saw the opening and plunged forward with the force of his weight, feeling the sickening crunch of rib bones as the blade penetrated the unprotected area beneath the guard’s arm.

  Before he had a chance to swing again, he was rammed from behind and tossed like a sack of grain. Several guards held him down; he could not tell how many piled on him. Their weight pressed his face and body flat in the snow. Struggling for breath, he turned his head to the side. His arm was pinned and the sword was torn from his numb fingers. Shouts and thundering footsteps seemed to come from every angle as he lay in the frozen, powdery depth, pushing futilely against the weight of those who held him down.

  “Bring him to his feet,” Chavant snapped.

  Nicholas was hauled upright. Guards seemed to circle everywhere nearby. Two men held his arms, angling them behind his back, pulling forcefully on his frontal chest muscles. A mailed fist grabbed a handful of Nicholas’s long hair and yanked his head back. Someone tilted a sword tip at his throat, ensuring that he made no move.

  Chavant stepped forward. “Well, then,” he sneered, “I have snagged the prize for Lord Whitehawke.” He jerked his head to one side. “Take him to the hall, and guard him well. And send someone to wake the earl.”

  As Nicholas was led away, he thought he heard a voice, sweet and high, call his name. The faint sound was lost in the cold whisper of the wind. Turning his head to hear, the blunt end of an axe smashed into his cheekbone. Stars blazed in his eyes.

  “Emlyn!” he answered, screaming out into the night as he was dragged relentlessly forward. “Emlyn!”

  The stone wall was slick with
a thin layer of ice beneath her fingertips. Emlyn raised on her toes and leaned as far into the deep-set window niche as she could, straining to see.

  Shouts and the solid clang of steel had drawn her to the window. Craning her neck and peering down and left, she could glimpse movement below. An amorphous shape rolled in the yard beneath the keep, finally recognizable as two men engaged in a vicious sword fight. Several guards ran through the bailey, converging on the two who fought.

  The guards jumped one man and wrestled him to the ground. He struggled as they jerked him to his feet. When someone yanked his head back, the snow light gave his face a pale clarity.

  Emlyn’s eyes widened. “Nicholas!” she screamed, but her voice seemed to fade against the snow and wind. “Oh, God. Nicholas!” The guards pulled him out of sight of the arrow slit.

  “Emlynnn!” The poignant, anguished cry wrenched her very soul. She felt utterly, painfully helpless. Sobbing bitterly, she slid to the floor, covering her face in her hands. Tears drenched her face and her shoulders collapsed inward.

  Whitehawke would soon discover, she thought in a panic, that his son was Thorne. The awful destiny that Nicholas had teased, time and again, had finally come to him. She feared that Whitehawke, in his rage, would kill Nicholas.

  Even as she wept, she realized that Nicholas would maintain his calm, steady courage no matter what course Whitehawke took. Best, she thought, to try to do the same.

  But no such bravery dwelled in her, she thought miserably, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. The only flashes of courage she had ever felt had burst from no more noble place than her quick, hot temper. She had always struggled with her fears.

  Thinking of Nicholas, she could almost feel his strength flow into her, palpable and warm. Straightening, she drew a shaky breath, her need to be with him growing even more urgent.

  Somehow, she would leave this tower and find Nicholas and the children. Hawksmoor’s garrison would be coming soon to aid them, she was certain, and they could get away from here together.

  Thrusting to her feet, she sniffed and turned to pace. Nicholas would tell her to think and then act, not fret. She could not sit and weep while her husband and family suffered.

  While she could try to free herself, she would have to trust to God and the saints for the rest. Faith, honor, courage, hope, all these, she had been taught, were virtues cut of the same cloth, the fabric of inner strength. That was what she sensed, had always admired, in Nicholas. If ’twas within her, too, then now came the test that would find it.

  Going to the door, she passed her hand slowly over the flat, bolted iron lock. The original latch was a simple iron pin that pivoted, pulled by a leather thong. The lock below it must have been added when the chamber was converted to a prison.

  Earlier, Emlyn had tugged on the latch pin and the iron ring in the center of the door until her fingers were bruised. Still, she thought, with the right tool, the lock could be forced open.

  She determined to tear apart the chamber, if necessary, to find some object that would break the lock. Hoping to find scissors or a knife or some other metal tool in the wooden chest beside the bed, she went to it and knelt down, pulling at the lid until the stiff hinges creaked open.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Bitter, bone-cracking cold, like death, like hell’s own ice, crept into his limbs. All around him darkness, and an eerie, flat silence. This would be his eternity: the cold, the dark, silence without end, and total helplessness.

  Nicholas awoke with a start, and shook his head to dispel the clinging misery of the dream. A dream that echoed his reality—pitch-black, and freezing cold. The chamber was the same one that had held the children, but the low fire had extinguished, allowing the damp, bitter chill to settle in, while more cold seeped through the window shutters.

  He lay on the floor, ankles and wrists bound tightly with ropes. Blinking, he looked around, unsure how much time had passed. But he doubted that Whitehawke, once informed of his capture, would let him lay here long. The light through the shutter cracks hinted at early dawn.

  He had not come along to this chamber easily, and the process of dragging him here and binding him had given him, in addition to the bruised cheek, a swollen, tender lip and a couple of very painful ribs. He lay curled on his side, now fully alert, and breathed deeply to conquer pain, thirst, and hunger. His mouth felt as scummy as old rushes. He wished, quite simply, that he had eaten before he came here. He wished he had a cloak.

  Chavant had ordered that Nicholas be taken to the only chamber in the overcrowded castle that housed no other guests: the room where the children were kept.

  Erupting into a fury upon discovering that the chamber was empty, its only guard apparently passed out drunk, Chavant had whipped Nicholas across the face with the end of his mailed glove. Then he had stalked off to find Whitehawke, grumbling to one of the guards that the earl was being detained by the king.

  Now, bending his legs as he lay on the floor, Nicholas tried to grope for the small steel dagger tucked in his boot, but could not reach it with his wrists bound behind him and his ankles tied. Finally he lay on his back and lifted his legs, shaking them until the blade eased out of his boot-top and thunked down onto his chest. Then he dumped it onto the floor and shifted to grasp the wooden hilt with his long fingers.

  Sawing laboriously at the thick hempen ropes, wincing as he nicked his hand once, he manipulated the thin sharp knife until he felt less resistance in the ropes and scratchy tendrils touched his arms. The work was not near finished, for the ropes were wound three times or more around his leather wristbands.

  Once he had the use of hands and feet, he would get free of the chamber, even if it meant calling in the guard to use the dagger blade on him. Emlyn was here somewhere, and he meant to find her. All the better if he could get out before Whitehawke returned to delay him, he thought cynically.

  The problem that remained was what had gotten him into this thick soup in the first place: where was Emlyn? He had lived at Graymere as a child, and did not remember a dungeon. And the design of the new hall and older towers did not allow space for such cells.

  Struggling, lurching, writhing, he managed to sit up and scoot over to lean against the bed, though his ribs paid him with such pain that he regretted the movement afterward. He creased his brow as he wielded the dagger behind him. Where had Chavant been leading him when he was set upon by the guards? They had been crossing the bailey toward the old keep, and beyond it, to the remaining two mural towers.

  But there was no dungeon, he knew for certain, in the old tower keep, where the living quarters had been when he was a child. Built like its Norman counterparts, high and blocklike for defense, it rested on a stone foundation with a few storage rooms below, a massive limestone coffin set on end.

  Still, Christien had said dungeon.

  Nicholas stopped sawing and nearly dropped the knife. The boy had said “dungeon”—in English.

  Whitehawke might have spoken to Emlyn in French. The Frank word for keep was donjon.

  Sweet Christ! Emlyn was in the keep.

  A rumbling blend of voices and booted feet sounded out in the corridor. He slid the dagger beneath the bed just as the draw bar was lifted noisily and the door was thrown open.

  “You are not my son!” Whitehawke roared, his face a grimacing mask, his hair flying wildly around his head. He advanced toward Nicholas, arms stiff at his sides, hands fisted with barely controlled rage. “No son of my seed would thus betray me!”

  Nicholas tilted his head back to stare up at Whitehawke calmly. “My lord,” he said, “I believe, to both our misfortune, that I am your true son.”

  Whitehawke backhanded him, and the blow set his wounded lower lip to throbbing. Nicholas probed it with his tongue, tasting salty blood. Whitehawke glared down at him, wheezing heavily.

  “Pull him up,” he snapped to a guard. Yanked roughly to his feet, Nicholas clenched his wrists together, thankful for the moment that the loosened r
opes were not yet sliced through.

  Turning away, Whitehawke scrubbed his big hand over his face and hair. Chavant entered the room and edged over to Whitehawke to murmur quietly.

  Whitehawke rounded on Nicholas. “Where are the children?”

  “Gone to play in the snow, I trow,” Nicholas said.

  “He’s removed them, no doubt,” Chavant said. “How did you do it? Where are they, and where are the men who aided you?”

  Nicholas cut him a contemptuous glance. “The children are safe. Would that I had found Emlyn before I found you.”

  Whitehawke advanced toward Nicholas. “I swear to you, boy, you’ll not see your lady again in this earthly life. How many men do you have outside these walls?”

  At the earl’s threat toward Emlyn, Nicholas clenched his jaw muscles. “Hundreds by now. The rest will come as soon as the moors are passable.”

  “None will come without a signal, I think. And you will send no sign now. Likely you lie, as you have lied to me for years. Jesu. I have harbored a viper in my own nest.”

  “I have spent little of my life in your nest, my lord.”

  “Why have you done this?” Whitehawke demanded. “God’s eyes! You the Thorne! I thought to catch myself a villein ripe for hanging—and instead I find you! You smear the name of de Hawkwood by your actions!”

  “What dishonor I have was learned at my father’s knee, who murdered my mother when I was a child.”

  “I have proven repentance times over for her death. She betrayed me. I do not forget that.”

  “Still, your mistreatment of her was not the whole part of why I took to the greenwood when I was a youth.” Nicholas leveled a glance at Whitehawke.

  “Why, then?”

  “An entire dale has suffered for years due to your greed, my lord. Barns and homesteads have been burned, profits stolen. Little by little, parts of the dale have surrendered to your tactics. You began this relentless pursuit of the monks’ land when the king decided to persecute the York monks. Even the king desisted when the Pope threatened him with excommunication. But you did not cease your persecutions.” He glared at his father, feeling a hot, angry blush creep up his neck to stain his cheeks. “None could talk reason to you. I tried, barely in my majority, as have others over the years, Rogier de Ashbourne among them.”