by Laura Parker
“Served the bastard right!” Fey continued as the desire for revenge flowed in warming pulses through her bruised body. If she ever found the stranger who had tricked her with gold, she would drive the sharp length of her blade through his liver, too.
Fey suddenly shot to her feet. If she was to die, she would not die easily or as a coward. She had perhaps five hours before daylight, time enough to find a new hole to hide in.
*
Killian felt more alive and less angry with the world as he and his companions followed a meandering street through the dockside of Nantes. It was nearly daybreak. The brandy humming in his veins would soon claim him in sleep. Only the promise of a clean, louse-free, goosedown mattress awaiting him at the Fitzgeralds kept him from dismounting and taking a bed in one of the boardinghouses they passed.
He glanced at Conall and Darragh, who rode ahead of him. Darragh dozed as his horse walked a familiar path. Their loquaciousness had been drowned by spirits and for that Killian was grateful. The Fitzgerald brothers shared one of the more lamentable qualities of their countrymen: they loved the sound of their own voices. For hours he had been subjected to story after story until it was all he could do to keep from deserting their company and the tavern. To ease his frustration, he had drunk far more than he was accustomed to doing.
Killian smiled in the darkness. He felt a fluid ease in his body and mind that was all too rare. Spirits usually left him in the mood to sermonize. Well, he had done his sermonizing that morning, on the streets of Nantes. The young scoundrel had no doubt accounted himself blessed to have earned five gold francs for nothing more than a thrashing.
What a fool he had made of himself. He had tossed away the coins without glancing at them. Five gold francs! That would teach him to act in the heat of righteous anger. “A costly lesson, to be sure,” he murmured.
The clip-clop of their horses’ hooves made the only sound on the street as Killian momentarily closed his eyes. Immediately the image of gray-green eyes and bright wheat-ripe hair stirred behind his lids. The thought of her stirred him more deeply than he had expected. She was lovely, like a rare marsh orchid sprouted suddenly in the midst of a bog. The fact that her beauty was marred by a wandering mind made him unaccountably sad.
Yet, he was too experienced in the ways of the world to wish her different. Had she her full wits, doubtless the lass would trade on her good looks. If guile were added to that loveliness, she would be a hardened flirt, an aspiring courtesan worthy of a king. It was just as well that her feeble mind kept her from knowing the power she might possess over men. Perhaps it was God’s grace given to a lovely fragile spirit. Still, it was bitter to contemplate.
Suddenly there was a movement across his path. It might have been nothing more than a cat’s paws on the sandy lane, but then again…Killian reined in his horse as the others went on ahead.
A shadow moved, ejected from the gloom of a doorway with unexpected speed. It was much too thick and brief to seem human, but Killian did not wait to find out whether it was a ghost or his imagination. His right hand reached for his pistol as his left hand shot out to grasp at the wind. He did not encounter empty air. His fingers closed hard and tight on a small fist flashing a blade. The fist twisted in his. Killian held tight, muttering a curse as the blade pricked him in the arm.
Bending from the saddle, he expected to face the man who had dared to attack him, but when he looked down into the gloom he saw nothing. If not for struggling hard within his grip he would have doubted that anything had happened, for the Fitzgerald brothers were riding ahead, the only sounds in the lane made by their horses.
“Damn!” Killian felt the blade prick him again, this time in the thigh. In anger he wrenched up his prize and found himself dangling a boy by the arm. For the second time this day he had been accosted by a child. He tucked his pistol back into his pocket and with his free hand jerked the knife from the boy with a vicious twist.
The boy yelped but Killian was too angry to care. He stuck his face close to the child’s and said in French, “What a place is this, that children plague men!”
“Let go of me, ye great stinking whoreson!” came back the tear-choked reply in Gaelic. The boy kicked and twisted as he dangled by his captured arm.
It was too dark to see, but a feeling of recognition stole over Killian. Throwing a leg over his saddle, he dismounted without releasing the child. Then, looking back down the lane, he spotted a lantern’s glow at the far end. Without saying a word, he dragged the boy toward it.
“Wait! Where are ye taking me? Stop! Peste! Merde!” the child cried, only to be silenced by a box to the ear.
“Yell again and I’ll choke you and have done with,” Killian answered in Gaelic. Immediately the boy ceased struggling.
The lantern was posted at the corner near the entrance to a pub. A couple stood within its glow but they were occupied in an embrace and did not give heed to the man and boy who came toward them.
“You, ratling, who are you?” Killian muttered as he swung the boy around to face him.
Recognition was swift. Even with the mud and fake pox boils washed off, he knew it was the beggar boy he had met that morning. Now a smooth child’s face looked up at him, marred only by a mutinous anger in the large, luminous dark eyes.
“You!” Killian spat as fresh anger surged through him. “Did you not steal enough of my gold this morning?”
He paused thoughtfully as his gaze switched to the knife he had wrested from the child. When he looked once more on the cherub-sweet face twisted now in pain and fear, his eyes were wintry.
“Did the gleam of gold whet your appetite for more? God! What a greedy little savage you are. You did not count on being caught, did you? Well, I hope you’ll remember what you got for your trouble this morning, for I mean to give you again a generous measure of the same!”
The boy’s dark eyes did not even blink as Killian raised his hand. If anything, they seemed to welcome the expected violence. The child did not plead or beg. There were no false tears or sobs. Killian’s hand halted in mid-stroke.
“Well, have you nothing to say for yourself?”
The boy did not move or speak.
Killian took in once more the soft contours of the child’s face, almost too pretty to be a boy’s, and then the emaciated body. Only then did he notice the shredded shirt and the suspicious dark stickiness seeping through the tatters.
He spun the boy about and swore under his breath at the sight of the many vicious bloody welts visible through the ruined shirt. “Who did this to you?”
“Darce.”
The boy said the name as though Killian should know it. “Why did Darce do this?”
For a moment, naked fear blazed through the boy’s composure. Killian was familiar with the many faces of fear and realized that the child was near blind panic. Then the expression changed and the childish features hardened into a mask of violence. “Because of ye!”
Despite the fact that he held the dagger and had the child in a viselike grip that precluded his doing any harm, Killian’s blood chilled. The rage in those childish eyes was mature beyond reckoning.
“Your master or father, or whatever the fiend’s connection, beat you half to death because of me, bouchal? Raumach!”
“MacShane! We thought we’d lost you!”
Killian looked up in annoyance to find Darragh and Conall riding toward him. In the last moments, he had forgotten their existence.
“What have you there?” Conall peered down at the two people under the lantern. “A lad, is it? Did he throw himself under your horse’s hooves? ’Tis an old trick to gain your sympathy. Do not be taken in.” He drew his pistol and aimed it at the boy, but he was so drunk that the barrel wavered back and forth until it came to point at Killian’s chest. “Away, rascal, afore I end your miserable life!”
“I’ll thank you to put that away before you blow my head off,” Killian said coolly. “I can handle one wee bairn with murder in his heart.” He s
hook the boy roughly by the collar as he tried to twist free. “Not so fast, bouchal. What’s your name?”
Fey hesitated. From the moment she had launched herself at the tall stranger, nothing had gone as she had planned. Chance and outrageous luck had brought her to the tavern where the three Irish nobles were drinking. At first she was not certain that this was the same man who had thrashed her and then given her money. Then she saw the man’s eyes, the bright piercing blue depths, and knew that he was.
As she had waited, hiding in a corner and listening, her desire for revenge had changed into the more practical one of theft. With money, she could buy passage on a coach out of Nantes. He had money. She would take some of it. But nothing had gone as she had planned and now she was trapped.
Fey gazed up into the angry face hovering above her and suddenly felt very much a child in an adult world. There was violence in that face but no cruelty. Perhaps it was the man’s eyes, Fey never reasoned it out. She knew only that the child inside her responded to the mixture of rage and pity and sympathy that lurked in those blazing light eyes. That, and the lilting Irish brogue that flowed from the man.
“Oh, sir, have pity!” Fey flung herself against the man’s chest and dug her broken-nailed fingers into his arms. “Save me! Please save me! They’ll kill me, they will!”
It was a ploy and Killian recognized it as such, yet the child’s bloody back was proof enough that he told only a partial lie. And the sobs racking the thin body were genuine. Against his better judgment he put an arm about those frail shoulders and heard himself say, “I don’t believe this performance, but ’tis late and I’m more drunk than I prefer to be. Until I’m of a better frame of mind and can sort this out, you will come with me.”
Fey did not protest when she was picked up and carried back to the man’s horse. Her battered skin burned like hot coals, and her anger dissolved into fear as she remembered Darce’s throat washed in a scarlet flood. If she went with the stranger, at least she would be in a place where Darce’s friends were not likely to search.
Killian felt the child’s shiver and an unwanted tenderness blossomed in his chest. He held no illusions about the ruffian’s being a good child or a pleasant one, but the accusation that he was in some way to blame for the welts on the child’s back had made it impossible for him simply to walk away.
“He’s coming with us, then?” Darragh questioned, too filled with ale to have understood anything of the last moments.
“Aye.” Killian climbed into the saddle with the boy in his arms. A moment later, he swung the cloak from his shoulders and tucked it about the child as he would have swaddled a babe. “Lie still, bouchal, or I’ll tie you across my horse’s flanks.”
“Me name’s Fey,” she offered in a tiny voice. “Fey? What sort of name is that for an Irishman?” Fey did not answer but huddled deeper in the warm folds of the cloak as the man urged his horse forward. She was safe for the moment. Perhaps her luck was changing, but she was cautious by nature and her secret was better kept until she knew this man better.
*
“What will you do with the bairn?” Conall asked when they had dismounted before the Fitzgerald residence.
“The stable will do well enough for the likes of him,” Darragh offered.
“I’d rather the lad were where I could keep an eye on him,” Killian answered as he scooped the sleeping child from his saddle.
“You mean to tuck the brat in your bed covers?” Conall shook his head in amazement, then groaned as the effects of the liquor reeled through his bram. “I’d as soon sleep with a wolf cub.”
“If he’ll not conduct himself civilly, I’ve a length of rope that will secure him to a bedpost until morning. Good night.”
By the time Killian had climbed the stairs to his room, he knew that the child in his arms was no longer asleep. His dead weight had lightened into a tense bundle of expectancy. He did not blame the child. They were strangers and neither of them trusted the other.
Killian dropped his bundle into a chair and stood back, folding his arms across his chest as the child struggled to disentangle himself from the cloak. Finally the dark head emerged.
Fey’s eyes widened as they took in and valued every inch of the large, lavishly furnished room. She had heard that some men lived like kings, but until this moment she had never guessed what that phrase meant. Now, confronted by silk tapestries and bed curtains, fancy carpets from the East, and lavish furnishings, she could only gape. “Is all this yers?”
Killian followed the child’s greedy gaze to the silver-and-gold cigar box on the table nearest the chair. “As it happens, none of it is, and I’ll thank you not to touch a single item in the room. I’m certain you claim thievery as well as beggary as an accomplishment.” He pulled the child’s weapon from his belt and turned it over in his hand. “I will not concede to you the appellation of murderer, for you do it so poorly, bouchal.”
Despite the man’s bantering tone, Fey blanched at the mention of murder. In fact, she had accomplished that act with surprising ease.
Killian studied the small boy wrapped in his cloak and remembered that this was a child, after all, and in obvious need of some sort of mothering. “Are you hungry?”
Fey’s head shot up. “A pint of ale would nae come amiss!”
“Ha! You gave yourself away then, I’d say. You’re an Irishman—uh, Fey. Fey, what sort of name is that?”
Fey lowered her head, the long sweep of her dark lashes brushing her cheeks. “Me mother was thought to be a bit queer in the head. When I was born, she claimed ’twas a fairy’s trick, for she never lay with any man. ’Twas the work of fairies, the gift of this fey creature in me bed.’ That’s what they told me she said just before she died. The Fey part stuck.”
Laughter, coming unexpectedly from the sober-faced man, startled Fey.
“So, you’re a changeling,” Killian said when his laughter subsided. “Well, ’tis a good tale, not the best I’ve heard, mind, but a good tale. So tell me, Fey, where do you live?”
Fey lowered her head. “Nowhere.”
“Come, everyone lives somewhere. The gutter? The sewer? A brothel, perhaps. Nae, you’re yet young for some vices, but I dare swear that will change.” Killian looked about, the dampening effects of the brandy beginning to supersede his interest in the foundling. “’Tis late, bouchal. Sit quietly in that chair while I stretch out for a short while.” He turned toward the bed and then looked back over his shoulder, his gaze hard. “You’ll not run away?”
Fey shook her head.
“Nor steal a thing?”
Again, the head shake of denial.
Killian shook his own head. It was the height of madness to trust the child. A few quick strides brought him to his door, where he turned the key in the latch and then pocketed it. When he had discarded his boots, jacket, and vest, he lay back on the inviting softness of the feather tick and fell instantly asleep.
Fey watched the sleeping man for several minutes before curiosity brought her to his bedside.
Darce had taught her to judge a man at a glance, for in a moment’s hesitation an opportunity could be lost. There was a streak of perversity in this man; she had seen it at work twice this day. It showed itself in his face. His gaze was hard, uncompromising, ruthless…but not cruel. The high forehead and straight nose were those of a thoughtful, educated man. Darce said that when a man took time to think, he lost an opportunity for action, but it did not seem overly to hamper this man.
When she came to the mouth Fey grinned. Softened now in sleep, it betrayed a man of sensitivity and deep feeling, things that he kept hidden from the world in his waking hours. She did not fault him for that.
Satisfied by the inventory, Fey moved on to other things. Where it spread upon the pillow, the man’s black hair shone in the candle’s faint light. Fey picked up a strand. The cool smooth tress slipped easily through her admiring fingers. Men were not the only things Darce had taught her how to judge. She knew the qualit
y of silk and laces and many other items of contraband. This gentleman’s head of hair was of the very best quality and would fetch an excellent price on the wig market.
Fey banished the thought. She doubted the man would sell his hair. He was a gentleman. As for stealing it…
Fey looked about until she spied her skean sticking out of the man’s waistband. With a thief s touch she slipped it free. Then, with a last guilty look at the blue-black head of hair, she tucked the skean inside her waistband. She would not steal from the man who, perhaps, had saved her life.
Fey turned away from the bed, her eyes seeking a window. If she kept to the country lanes and traveled by dark, she would escape.
The window opened with little noise, and a stiff sea breeze greeted Fey as she climbed out onto the ledge. The second-story perch did not faze her. She pulled the window shut behind herself and, grasping with fingers and toes a perch in the house’s stone facade, began a slow descent. In less than a minute her feet touched the ground.
She was turning away from the house when the distinct aroma of toast and cinnamon reached her. She paused in mid-stride as her empty stomach twisted in hunger. How long had it been since she had eaten? At least a day. Darce had not given her a chance to consume her only meal of the day.
Almost against her will, Fey retraced her steps until she spied a candle’s glow behind the shrubbery to her right. Squatting, she peered through a crack in the window and down into a kitchen. Not a yard from where she crouched lay three thick slices of toast topped with sugar and cinnamon. From a steaming cup nearby, the rich dark smell of cocoa arose.
Fey clutched the windowsill, near swooning with delight as her mouth watered in anticipation. A quick look confirmed that no one was about. Ten seconds, that was all it would take to steal the bread. The cocoa, alas, would have to be left behind.
The basement window was much more shallow than those of the upper stories, but Fey was small and adept at fitting herself into small places. She squeezed through the opening and landed, catlike, on her feet. The bread was in her hand, its buttery surface slicking her fingers with a warm golden drizzle, and then the taste of cinnamon tingled her tongue.