by Greg Keyes
“Sleepy. Concerned about you. She doesn’t think you’ve been well. Now that I see you, I understand why.”
“I’ve been working. It’s taxing.”
“I daresay. Roll over.”
“Milady?”
“Onto your belly.”
“I really don’t see—”
“I’ve risked my life to speak to you,” Lady Gramme said. “The least you can do is obey my every whim, especially when it’s for your own good.”
Reluctantly, Leoff complied, careful to keep the sheet over him.
“Do you always sleep without a nightshirt?” she asked.
“It is my habit,” he said stiffly.
“Lack of habit, I would rather say,” she replied.
His back felt cold. He wondered if she had been sent by someone to slip a knife or poisoned needle into his spine so he couldn’t write Robert’s singspell.
He should have cared, but he didn’t; his outrage was still around someplace, but his dreams tended to misplace it. It took some waking distance from them for him to recall it.
Lady Gramme’s fingers brushed against his back, and to his horror he heard himself moan. It was the first really nice thing his skin had felt in a long time, and it was incredibly good. The tips began to tease gently into his muscles, pressing out soreness and tension.
“I was never trained for much of anything,” she said softly. “No coven education for me. But William hired me tutors, to train me in certain arts. The one who taught me this was from Hadam, a thick-fingered girl with dark, dark hair named Besela.”
“You shouldn’t—it isn’t—”
“Proper? My dear Leovigild, you’ve been imprisoned by a mad usurper. You think that proper? We’ll decide—you and I—what is proper. Do you like this?”
“I like it very much,” he admitted.
“Then relax. We have things to discuss, but I can practice this upon you while we do so. Are we agreed?”
“Yes,” he groaned as she worked up either side of his spine, then sent each hand kneading in a different direction along his shoulders and upper arms.
“It’s nothing very complicated,” she went on. “I think I can help you escape, all three of you.”
“Really?” He tried to sit up and engage her gaze, but she pushed him back down.
“Just listen,” she said.
When he didn’t protest again, she went on.
“An army has laid siege to Eslen,” she said. “An army commanded, or so it seems, by Muriele’s daughter, Anne. What chance they have of defeating Robert I do not know. He will have help shortly from both the Church and Hansa, but if Liery weighs in, this war could last for quite some time.”
Both of her hands had gone to his right arm now, her fingers digging deeply into the twisted tendons of his forearms. He gasped as he felt small spasms in his fingers, where he thought no feeling remained. His eyes dampened with mixed pain and pleasure.
“My larger point being that Robert is at the moment quite distracted. I have a few friends in this castle, and I believe I can take advantage of them to spirit you, Mery, and the landwaerden girl to someplace safe.”
“Surely that is too much to hope for,” Leoff said. “I would see Mery and Areana safe. As for me—”
“It is all the same,” she said flatly. “If I can get them out, I can liberate you, as well. But it is a noble thought. And there is only one thing I would ask of you.”
Of course, Leoff thought.
“What is that, lady?” he asked.
“Muriele likes you. You have her ear. I admit that once I thought I might place my son on the throne—he is, after all, William’s son—but now I only wish protection for my children. If Anne wins and Muriele is again queen mother, I only ask you to put it in her ear that I helped you. Nothing more.”
“I can do that without reservation,” Leoff said.
She was massaging him with only one hand now, and he was wondering about that when she pressed down on him and he felt something sticky and warm against his back that sent a thrill all the way to his toes. A ridiculous gasp escaped him. She’d been using her other hand to undo her bodice and was pressing her naked breasts against him. What kind of bodice could be opened with one hand? Did all women have them, or did courtesans have specially designed clothing?
Then she was straddling him, moving down his back, kissing along his spine, drawing the covers down with her torso, and his whole body was instantly awake, on fire. He couldn’t take it; he twisted beneath her, and she was neither heavy nor strong enough to stop him.
“Lady,” he gasped, trying to keep his eyes averted. She still wore her gown, but it was pulled up around her waist, and he could see the ivory skin of her thighs above her stockings. And of course her breasts were there, lily and rose…
“Hush,” she said. “Part of the treatment.”
He held up his hands. “Look at me, Lady Gramme,” he pleaded. “I am a cripple.”
“I should think you might call me Ambria under the circumstances,” she replied. “And you seem to be functional in the parts and territories that interest me.” She leaned down and kissed him with a warm, familiar, very practiced kiss. “This is not love, Leovigild, and it is not charity. It is something between—a gift for what you have done for Mery, if you wish. And to deny it would make you uncharitable indeed.”
She kissed him again, then on the chin, the throat. She rose up and after a bit of bustling was suddenly all flesh upon him, and he certainly couldn’t protest anymore. He tried to be active, to be a man, but she gently guided him away from everything but experiencing her.
It was slow, and mostly quiet, and very good indeed. Ambria Gramme wasn’t the first woman he’d been with, but this was far beyond anything he’d ever experienced, and he suddenly understood something about her that he never had imagined before. What he could do with music, she could do with her body.
For the first time he understood that love could be art, and a lover an artist.
For that insight he would be grateful for however many days he had left in the lands of fate.
And so he felt a bit of guilt when, at his most helpless moment, it was Areana’s face he saw and not Ambria’s.
When they were done, she poured them wine and reclined, still nude, against a pillow. She had seemed tall when he first met her, but she really wasn’t. She was quite small—almost as narrow-waisted as she appeared in a corset—but her body curved luxuriously, and he could just make out the tiger-stripe marks on her belly from bearing William’s children.
“And now you feel better, don’t you?” she said.
“I admit it,” he replied.
She reached over and shuttered the flame so that she became an alabaster goddess in the shaft of moonlight seeping in the window. She finished the wine and crawled under the covers, turning him so she was spooned against his back.
“In three days,” she whispered into his ear. “Three nights from now, at midnight. You will meet me in the entrance hall. I will have gathered up Mery and Areana. Be prepared.”
“I will,” Leoff said. He thought for a moment. “Should you—will you be discovered here?”
“I will be safer here for the next few hours than anywhere I can imagine,” she said. “Unless you want me to leave.”
“No,” Leoff said. “I don’t.”
Her warmth against him was pleasant, still sexual but in a subdued mode that allowed him to drift off into an agreeable, comforting sleep.
When he awoke again, he wasn’t sure why, but he looked up at a faint sound. At first he thought it was Ambria again, looking down at him in the darkness, but Ambria was still nestled against his back.
And then, even in the feeble light, he recognized Areana, tears glistening.
Before he could think of anything to say, she hurried away in her stocking feet.
CAZIO THOUGHT he understood what was going on pretty well, until Anne stood up in her stirrups, flourished a short sword, and shouted, “I
am your Born Queen! I shall avenge my father and sisters; I shall have my kingdom back!”
For one thing, the sword she brandished was so silly; he’d rather fight with a piece of stale bread. But then again, she wasn’t fighting with it; she was leading with it.
Men in surcoats who didn’t look friendly were pouring into the square, and Anne didn’t seem surprised. From his point of view, she ought to be surprised, and if she wasn’t, by Lord Mamres, he ought to know why.
Had this been her plan all along, to be ambushed in a public square? It wasn’t a plan that made a lot of sense.
“What shall we do?” he shouted.
“You stay close to me,” Anne replied, then, raising her voice, gestured toward the men entering the square. “Keep them back!”
Forty of the fifty men in Anne’s company responded by charging across the square toward the city guard, or Robert’s guard, or whatever it was. It was a messy business right away, as the plaza was full of people, and though they were trying to clear the way between the two armed forces, there was a good deal of pushing and tripping and falling down.
Anne’s remaining guardians clumped around her as she dismounted and strode toward the actors. Taken by surprise, Cazio dismounted so quickly, he nearly fell.
As his feet hit the square, he was suddenly very pleased to have cobbles under them again. Not grass, not tilled land or wild forest floor or a lord-forsaken beaten desert of a track in the middle of nowhere, but a city street. He nearly laughed with joy.
He realized then that he had mistaken Anne’s target. It wasn’t the actors but Sir Clement, who had leapt from his horse and run to stand by the patir, arming himself with a sword from one of the churchman’s guards. The other Church soldiers lowered their spears into a hedge around the patir, keeping their swords in reserve.
But Clement, their betrayer, was a knight, so he would prefer a sword.
Cazio sprinted to put himself between Anne and the knight.
“Allow me, Highness,” he said, noticing the somewhat unnatural look in Anne’s eye, not unlike her aspect that evening in Dunmrogh. He realized he was doing Clement a favor.
She nodded curtly, and Cazio drew his steel as Clement rushed at him.
It wasn’t Caspator, but Acredo, the rapier he’d taken from the Sefry dessrator. It felt unfamiliar, too light, oddly balanced.
“Zo dessrator, nip zo chiado,” he reminded his opponent. “The swordsman, not the sword.”
Clement ignored him and came on.
To Cazio’s delight, the fight wasn’t as simple as it might have been. Knights, Cazio had discovered, were extraordinarily hard to fight when they were in armor, but that had nothing to do with their swordplay, which was uniformly clumsy and boring to the point of tears. Part of it was the weapons they used, which were really more like flattened steel clubs with edges.
The sword Clement bore was a little lighter and thinner than most he had seen since leaving Vitellio, but it was still essentially the same sort of cutting tool. What was really different was the way the fellow held his blade. Knights in armor tended to cock their weapons back, to swing from the shoulder and hips. They didn’t fear the swift stop-thrust to the hand, wrist, or breast since they were usually sheathed in iron.
But Sir Clement dropped into a crabwise stance not so different from that of a dessrator, although he put a little more weight on his back leg than Cazio would recommend. The sword he held in front of him, arm extended toward Cazio’s head, so that he was looking straight at the knight’s knuckles, while the tip of the sword slanted curiously down, aimed roughly at Cazio’s knees.
Curious, Cazio lunged for the exposed top of the hand. Moving the sword far faster than Cazio would have guessed was possible, Clement merely flipped his wrist, with only a slight motion of his forearm and none from his shoulder at all. That quick, simple turn brought the forte of his blade up to intersect Cazio’s thrust. The tip came up, too, and sliced quickly down along Cazio’s rapier, forcing it away and exposing his wrist to a cut that would have arrived if Cazio hadn’t been ready to take a step back.
“That’s very interesting,” he told Clement, who was following up his riposte by bounding forward, inside the point of Cazio’s weapon, dropping his tip again and raising his hand to keep Cazio’s sword parried to the outside. With that odd twist of the wrist, he cut at the right side of Cazio’s neck. Cazio lengthened his retreat and parried swiftly, bringing his hilt nearly to his right shoulder, then quickly threw himself to his left, dropping his point toward the knight’s face.
Clement ducked and made a stronger, arm-driven slash at Cazio’s flank as he closed. Cazio felt the wind of it, and then he was past his opponent, turning in hopes of a thrust to the back.
But he found Clement already facing him, on guard.
“Zo pertumo tertio, com postro pero praisef,” he said.
“Whatever that means,” Clement replied. “I’m certain I’m fortunate your tongue isn’t a dagger.”
“You misunderstand,” Cazio said. “If I were to comment on your person and call you, for instance, a mannerless pig with no notion of honor, I would do it in your own tongue.”
“And if I were to call you a ridiculous fop, I would do that in my own language for fear that speaking yours would unman me.”
Someone nearby shrieked, and with chagrin Cazio suddenly realized he wasn’t in a duel but a battle. Anne had gotten away from him, and he couldn’t look for her without risking being hamstrung.
“My apologies,” he said. Clement looked briefly confused, but then Cazio was attacking him again.
He started the same as before, lunging for the top of the hand, and drew the same result. The cut came, just as before, but Cazio avoided the parry with a deft turn of his wrist. To his credit, Sir Clement saw what was coming and took a rapid step back, dropping the point of his blade again to stop the thrust now aimed at the underside of his hand. He let his blade recede a bit and then cut violently up Cazio’s blade toward his extended knee.
Cazio let the blow come out, withdrawing his knee quickly, bringing his front foot all the way back to meet his rear foot so that he was standing straight, leaning forward a bit. He took his blade out of the line of the cut at the same time and pointed it at Clement’s face. The cutting weapon, a handsbreath shorter than Cazio’s rapier, sliced air, but Clement’s forward motion took him onto the tip of Cazio’s extended blade, which slid neatly into his left eye.
Cazio opened his mouth to explain the action, but Clement was dying with a look of horror on his face, and Cazio suddenly had no desire to taunt him, whatever he had done.
“Well fought,” he said instead as the knight collapsed.
Then he turned to see what else was happening.
He got it in sketches. Austra was still where she ought to be: away from the fighting, watched over by one of the Craftsmen. Anne was standing, looking down at the patir, who was holding one hand to his chest. His face was red and his lips were blue, but there was no evidence of blood. His guards were mostly dead, although a few still were engaged in a losing battle with the Craftsmen guarding Anne.
Their forces seemed to be winning across the square, as well.
Anne glanced up at him.
“Free the players,” she said crisply. “Then mount back up. We’ll be riding in a few moments.”
Cazio nodded, both elated and disconcerted by the strength of her command. This wasn’t the Anne he remembered from when he’d first met her—a girl, a person, someone he liked—and for the first time he feared that she was gone, replaced by someone else entirely.
He cut the actors free, smiling at their thanks, then got back up on his horse as Anne had commanded. The battle in the square was all but over, and her warriors were rallying back to her. By his quick count of the fallen, they’d lost only two men—quite a good bargain.
Anne sat tall.
“As you can all see, we were betrayed. My uncle intended our murder or capture from the moment we entered the
gate. I’ve no idea how he intends to escape his own punishment, but I’ve no doubt he does. We are fortunate we discovered this before setting foot in the castle, for we could never have fought our way out of there.”
Sir Leafton, the head of her detail of Craftsmen, cleared his throat.
“What if that isn’t what happened here, Majesty? What if those troops attacked us by mistake?”
“Mistake? You heard Sir Clement; he gave the order. He knew they were there.”
“Yes, but that’s my point,” Leafton said, pushing his long black hair from his sweaty brow. “Perhaps Sir Clement was, ah, incensed by your conversation with the patir and gave an order Prince Robert would not have wished him to give.”
Anne shrugged. “You are too polite to say it, Sir Leafton, but you suggest that my poor judgment may be to blame. That is not the case, but it hardly matters now. We cannot continue to the castle, and I strongly suspect we could not fight our way back out of the gate. Even if we could, the fleet stands between us and our army.
“We certainly cannot remain here any longer.”
“We might take the east tower of the Fastness,” Sir Leafton offered. “Perhaps hold it long enough for the duke to come to our aid.”
Anne nodded thoughtfully. “That’s rather along the lines of what I was thinking, but I was considering the Gobelin Court,” she said. “Could we hold that?”
Sir Leafton blinked, opened his mouth, then fingered his ear, a puzzled expression on his seamed face.
“The gate is sturdy, and the streets within are all narrow enough to throw up workable redoubts. But with this many men, I don’t know how long we could keep it. It would depend on how determined they were to stop us.”
“A few days, at least?”
“Perhaps,” he replied cautiously.
“Well, it will have to do. We’ll go there now, and quickly,” she said. “But I need four of you to volunteer for something a bit more dangerous.”
As they made their way down the crooked street, Anne had to resist the temptation to take her mount to a run, to leave Mimhus Square and its surroundings as quickly as possible.