That did bring a harsh laugh. “None of those reasons are compelling to me. The answer is nay.”
“You are always so impulsive, Jamie.” Eva was fairly certain Jamie was the opposite of impulsive, but Jamie didn’t bother to point that out, so neither did she. “Wait until you hear what Lord Robert has planned. Mayhap I can get an aye out of you yet. For this”—Chance reached out and touched his forearm—“is an alluring offer.”
He glanced down at her fingertips. Eva edged half out of her seat to do the same. “Nay.”
“Why not?” Chance asked.
“Because Fitz would have me tied and splayed with picks under my fingernails before I made it through his outer gates.”
“Not so, Jamie.” Chance pitched her voice low and persuasive. She’d learned the concoction at Baynard’s feet. Jamie knew the tone; it generally preceded beatings. “Lord Robert is . . . repentant. For the way things went. For the way he treated you.”
Jamie shook his head. “He has not the inner coffers for such a sentiment. He is all acquisition. I am done with him, with them.”
Eva sat up a little straighter. Done with the rebels? He could not mean that. She must be misunderstanding.
“You have not even heard the offer. It concerns retribution, Jamie. Or, if you please, reparations.”
“It does not please.”
The woman’s hair was like a sheet of white-gold in the torchlight, shimmering as she leaned closer to Jamie, a tone of glee in her voice. “We have taken London, Jamie.”
Jamie’s face remained unreadable, hard and implacable.
“Come join us,” she urged in a voice at once coaxing and steely. “’Tis time to force the king’s hand, as he has repeatedly refused to extend it. We shall parley no more. Archbishop Langton was useful, but the time for peacemakers has passed.”
“I am sure it has,” Jamie agreed coldly. “Seeing as you are en route to barter for Peter of London.”
Her face extended into a delighted grin. She touched his arm again. “We are close, Jamie. Much closer than your lord. Do not think Mouldin will ever sell Peter of London to the king, not after what John did to him. He would sooner slit his own throat. All these maneuverings, they are playacting for coin. Mouldin will sell to us, then we will have the priest, and everything inside his head.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“The heirs,” she whispered, almost sounding gleeful. Eva felt her stomach turn. She swallowed the thick spit filling her mouth. “Peter of London is the only one who knows where the missing heirs of England are.”
Not the only one. Jamie knew too. Eva’s heart slowed. Jamie knew precisely where Roger was.
“And whoever has the heirs, has the crown,” the woman concluded.
Jamie pursed his lips. “Is that what fitzWalter is planning? No more charters, big or small? He wants the throne?”
Chance shook her head. The silver and gold threads woven in the narrow band around her head glinted in the torch- and candlelight. “If you wish to concern yourself with the travails of the rebels again, Jamie, you will have to come with me.”
Eva’s head was spinning, her heart falling, her belly churning. She was in a maelstrom. Again? What was this again?
Jamie burst into low laughter. “To London?” He tipped his head toward the guards. “It will take more than four of them to ever get me through the gates of London again.”
“Come, Jamie. I can assure you, fitzWalter can make it worth your trouble. Should you recall your loyalties, he knows you can be of use again.”
“My loyalties?”
Eva saw the edge of what she could only describe as a cat’s smile. “And in return for such a pledge, he promises to rectify the situation that has plagued you so long and ensure you are invested with lands. Many lands.”
“My pledge? Of fealty?”
The woman nodded.
“My pledge, to a man who has renounced his oath? My fealty to a man who tried to commit regicide?”
The woman’s fingers tightened around his forearm, like a cat’s claws. “You misremember, Jamie Lost,” she hissed, but Eva heard the wet syllables as clear as a stab. “He did not try to assassinate the king. You did.”
Eva sat back as if struck.
Jamie? Regicide?
Thirty-two
The tavern air chilled around Jamie, colder with each beat of his heart.
It was not that he was surprised to hear the truth; he knew his past well enough, as did Chance. It was a splinter of something deeper than shock or even fear, a small dart, barely visible, sharply painful, a small dark shadow untouchable without peeling back the skin of his heart.
After years of surviving on the streets of London as a child, with the occasional visit to Ry’s home for patching up his head and heart, Jamie had found himself a mentor in the aggressive, ambitious Robert fitzWalter, powerful lord of Dunmow and, moreover, Baynard Castle in London.
Perceiving the urchin’s ruthlessness and skill with weapons on the streets, Baynard took Jamie in and shaped his proclivities into fearsome proportions, for a precise purpose: to be his royal assassin.
FitzWalter ensured Jamie gained employ as part of John’s personal guard, but Jamie himself ensured he rose quickly through the king’s ranks, a junior among the likes of men such as Engelard Cigogné and Faulkes de Bréauté, Brian de Lisle, and John Russell. Eventually he became favored even among the favorites, until the king trusted Jamie with everything. He was sent on missions of utmost secrecy and gravity, reporting back only to the king. Paymaster, diplomat, counselor, captain of his men—come a time, Jamie knew everything that passed in King John’s realm. Every court case involving high justice, every baronial wife John lusted after, every invasion planned, every expense recorded: Jamie knew it all.
Then, three years ago, the fruit had ripened. King John planned an incursion into Wales, and his murder was plotted to the smallest detail. Jamie had been ready, prepared to execute his destiny—even now he recalled the dull throbbing that had filled his ears—until, at the last moment, he learned whom Robert fitzWalter and his ilk planned to put on the throne instead: the brutal, canting butcher of the holy war against the Albigensians in southern France, Simon de Montfort. This crossed some line Jamie had not understood and could not, even now, put into words. But he did not need to name it to know it.
So he turned. He revealed the assassination plot to the king, betrayed his mentor, aligned with the king he’d sworn to murder.
John had turned almost rabid with fury and fear. Heads rolled, estates were seized, the rebel leaders fled into exile, and an escort of crossbowmen with quarrels cocked and ready had surrounded the king ever since.
Jamie’s role was never discovered. Once the king’s assassin, he was now John’s reluctant protector, the only one who stood between him and a legion of nobles who would like nothing better than to draw and quarter their anointed king and bury his innards in a pile of manure, then place his crown on their own heads.
Chance’s feline eyes glittered at him.
“And yet Lord Robert spoke no word of it, did he? He took you in off the streets as an orphan, raised you up, found you service in the king’s employ, and you had to do but one errand in repayment. Instead, you betrayed him. He left the realm, left his lands, fled in ignomy. You owe, Jamie.”
Something happened to Jamie’s eyes, something not so much of hardness but recoil, and his reply was twisted in its low-pitched fury. “I have paid, Chance.”
“Not yet you haven’t. Tell me, do your illustrious, loyal companions know of your role in the plot? Archbishop Langton, William the Marshal—do they know you are an assassin?” She hissed the word. “Shall we tell them? I do not think the king would be happy to learn of your past. I think he would be positively murderous.”
She leaned forward. “’Tis is a well-deep debt, Jamie. FitzWalter is giving you a chance to repay, before you are made to recall exactly who created you. Do you understand?”
Jamie leaned
forward suddenly and she jerked back, banging into the wall.
“I understand you, Chance. Now understand me: should Fitz wish to speak with me on matters of loyalty, let him come and find me himself. If he dares.”
In her corner, Eva felt like cheering, an odd and utterly inappropriate response, surely.
Chance tipped her head to the side and a thoughtful tone entered her words, but beneath it was fury. “Who is she, Jamie? She was comely. In a rare way. And yet, so petite and . . . windblown. Earthy. I am surprised. You always went for the rarefied sort.” Eva heard the snake-smile in Chance’s voice. “Oh, not that you wouldn’t taste the rest of us, but I saw you, I watched. And your eye always tracked the nobles.”
Eva felt a tiny pinch at the corner of her heart, as if something heavy had been dropped upon its edge.
She must have moved in response, for Jamie’s gaze snapped away from Chance’s like a whip and locked on hers.
It was a physical thing, this look. It grabbed hold. Jamie saw her, knew her, then let her go, released her the way a hawk drops its prey, snapped his gaze back to the woman who so clearly wished Jamie were hunting her instead.
“You have had a great many chances to crawl out of the muck, Chance, but you will die there,” Jamie said coldly. “And you are foolish to have your men stand so far off when you are delivering threats to me.”
She lifted her pale brows. “Surely you would not lay a hand on me, Jamie?” On the surface, her voice was filled with disdain and threat, but clearly, underneath that lay hope.
Jamie pushed up off his stool. “My fealty is a defiled commodity, Chance, as you have pointed out. In any event, I have none to give. Let us bypass it for what truly matters: how much is fitzWalter offering for the priest?”
A sickening feeling began in Eva’s belly, as if she were on a boat crossing the Channel.
The woman angled her head to the side, considering him. “A great deal. Why? Do you know something?”
“I know Mouldin will not be bartering the priest to the rebels. I know I have something better, for the right price. Where were you told to meet Mouldin?”
She hesitated, then said, “Gracious Hill. Why?”
Jamie shook his head. “Already you’ve been crossed. The king was told Misselthwaite. Mouldin, I expect, will not be at either location.”
An even longer moment of hesitation, suspicion, ensued. “Why have you have changed your mind so suddenly?” Chance asked.
Jamie gave the woman a look Eva had also received and did not much like: hard intent. “My mind has ne’er changed. I am as I have always intended to be: self-serving and rich.”
Eva felt frozen in an unconscionable way. This news should not freeze her like ice. Jamie had never been her ally. She was not bound to him, nor he to her. But this . . . this felt like something breaking inside her chest, like kicking out the stained-glass windows of a church.
Chance was breathing through her mouth. It was choppy, as if she’d been running. “What do you have?”
Jamie glanced around the room. His gaze did not avoid Eva so much as slide over her as if she no longer existed. “Not here.”
He kicked his stool back, the woman straightened, and Eva got to her feet. The soldiers pushed off the wall. Another two moved in from a more distant position at the front of the tavern. The woman put her hand on Jamie’s arm. She looked . . . happy.
Jamie gestured to the back door. “Come, this way, and—What the hell is that?”
Eva’s hand went, shaking, to the little blade always tucked within her skirts, before she remembered that Jamie had long ago disarmed her.
Thirty-three
Jamie tempered his shout of surprise just enough to furrow Chance’s brow, to make her glance toward her men, but in the end, to hurry to his side, just outside the back door.
In a single swift move, he clamped his hand over her mouth, which muffled the sound of his other hand coming up and hammering into the back of her skull, knocking her senseless against the wall.
Her goons were already on the move, pushing through the crowds, shouting, but no one else seemed to care, except that now they were all looking at the goons. And standing, jostling, getting in their way.
Jamie dragged Chance out the back door, into the small, shadowed courtyard, thinking, What the hell is Eva doing here? And where the hell is Ry?
He didn’t stop to reflect on possible answers, just pinned his spine against the wall as the two closest guards came rushing through the doorway.
Jamie turned to the side and kicked out, smashing his boot into the first man’s kneecap. He went down with a shout of pain, clutching his leg.
The second man, running up behind, flung his arms out reflexively. Jamie grabbed hold of one and yanked so hard the shoulder snapped as it popped out of joint. The man howled in pain as he swung around entirely until his face smashed into the wall. He rebounded backward and fell across the downed man, who was writhing in pain, trying to stand on his broken knee.
Jamie crouched beside him. Making a fist and cupping it with his other hand, he slammed his elbow into the back of Broken Knee’s skull, just as the one with the dislocated arm staggered back to his feet, swinging his sword in an indiscriminate, rage-fueled arc. Jamie ducked as it swooped overhead, then leaped to his feet and launched himself shoulder-first into the man’s stomach. They went flying, scuffling as they rolled.
Jamie was staggering back to his feet when he heard a soft call. “Dick?” It was one of the two guards who’d been stationed in the front. “Dickon? You a’right?”
“I have to change my horse’s name,” Jamie muttered as he drew his sword, keeping his attention on his current target, uncertain if he’d have time to select a second before they came rushing up behind him.
Then he heard the low crunch of boots on pebbles. He froze and slowly turned his head.
Ry and Roger stood there, swords drawn. In a swift glance, Ry took in the unconscious man on the ground, his leg bent at an unnatural angle, and the bloody soldier, facing off against Jamie, one arm hanging helplessly. Then he looked at Jamie.
“You didn’t save me even one?”
“Oh, they’re coming,” he replied grimly as the first beefy soldier barreled through the doorway. Another lumbered through behind. Both had their swords out.
They took them down quickly. He and Ry had been doing this sort of thing for over a dozen years; it was almost ridiculously simple. Skill and cunning always won over brute idiocy, but it was gratifying to have Roger’s sword arm in the mix. It took hardly a minute to sprawl them senseless on the ground, then another couple to lash them together like hogs for the fire.
Ry had his boot on one man’s shoulder while Jamie gave a final yank to the rope that bound him to his mate. “I owe you, friend,” Jamie said roughly.
Ry nodded, tossing his head back to get hair out of his face. “You had best hope I never start collecting, friend, or I will bankrupt you.”
Jamie gave a laugh as he dropped the rope. “You would know. You handle the money.”
“Only because you have fooled yourself into thinking I have some talent for it.”
Jamie clasped his shoulder. “Only because you do,” he said, then turned to Roger, who was standing a few paces off, breathing hard. “Roger?”
“My lord,” he croaked, holding his left hand to his right upper sword arm, as if in pain.
“Do not call me that,” Jamie muttered as he prised Roger’s hand up to inspect the arm. “Are you injured?”
“It is naught,” the boy scoffed, but Jamie walked him backward, out from under the shadow of the willow, and examined the wound in the wash of late afternoon sunlight. “’Tis but a flesh wound,” Jamie said, releasing him. “You fought well. Now we must retrieve Eva. She was inside—”
“I am here,” came her soft voice.
Jamie spun. She stood in the doorway of the tavern draped in her dull-blue overtunic and hard brown boots, her hair flowing down over her slender shoulders. S
he examined each of them in turn, their gashed cheeks and bleeding chins and Ry, who was limping slightly. Then she looked at Jamie. “Did you make them all sorry to have met you?” she asked quietly.
“Aye,” he said, rather fiercely, because he could neither describe nor understand the feeling of rightness at seeing her there, waiting for him, her gaze calm on his after the fighting.
“That is good,” she said. “I did not like her, with the long hair.”
Jamie gave a soft half-laugh, Roger laughed outright, then the scowling, barrel-chested innkeep came rushing through the doorway. He stopped at Eva’s heels.
“Now, lass, what’s this about—”
Everyone froze. Jamie, Ry, Roger, even the innkeep. The only one who moved was Eva, who pointed gracefully to the bound and bloody collection of unconscious men and one woman sprawled across the innkeep’s courtyard.
“There they are,” she explained calmly, as if she were indicating buckets of water. “They were causing problems, you see.”
He stared at the downed men, then at Chance. “They Baynard’s?” he asked shortly.
Jamie readjusted his grip on the sword. “Aye.”
The innkeep’s gaze came back up. “You the king’s man?”
He hesitated slightly. “Aye.”
The man wiped his hands on his apron as two burly guards he clearly employed for the purpose of bouncing unruly guests out the door appeared. The innkeep nodded. “Men who can’t keep to their word do more damage than pestilence. That’s what I’ve always said.”
Jamie gave a small laugh. “I agree entirely.”
He turned to his men and hooked his thumb. “Take them into the reeds, down by the river. They’ll awaken come morn. Or not.” He turned to Jamie. “You’ll want away, sir. The ferry’s offloading again.”
Jamie sheathed his sword. “We could greatly benefit by having a place to pass those moments, Master Innkeep.”
The innkeep examined their battered crew somewhat doubtfully, ending on Eva. She smiled. He nodded and said, “My root cellar’s around the back.”
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