Thirty-four
It took only a moment for them all to be ensconced in the vaguely musty earthen pit that was the innkeep’s root cellar.
Twice as wide as a plough and again that long, it housed few vegetables this time of year, but a great many roots. They nudged out of the fertile earth as twining brown fingers and indignant elbows. A wide swath of russet sunset light spilled down the steps into the room before the innkeep shut the door above them with a sudden, shocking slam.
Eva stared into the flesh of darkness around her. She was in the belly of dark. She could see nothing. The only sounds were the others’ breathing, the dim, distant thud of boots on pebbles on the road above, and the unrelenting absence of breeze. Around them, as if in vapors, rose the peaty scent of earth, ensuring things aboveground could grow, while down here in the dark, it was . . . dark.
“It is dark,” she announced quietly.
Her words could not even bounce back against the enclosing earth; they were sucked into it and disappeared. Silence. Someone shifted, the creak of leather and a miniature clang of metal against metal. Eva’s heart beat faster, and faster yet. She could hear it deep in her ears, feel the whipcords of coldness ripping through her. If anything had ever counseled “Run!” this dark tomb did.
“Eva?” Roger murmured.
She could not answer. The ridiculousness of this fear, of dark and dirt, when the dangerous things all lurked aboveground. The mind had no power over this panic, though. She opened her mouth to breathe.
Suddenly, there was movement, boots thudding on hard-packed earth. A dull bump, then light, glorious red-gold light, came pouring in as Jamie threw back one of the two doors that lay flat atop this lifesaving grave.
“’Tis naught,” he said curtly, sitting on the step. “It lies flat to the ground; they will neither think to look, nor notice if they do.”
Eva stared up at the entrance, glowing with light, Jamie’s dark silhouette in the foreground, and breathed. The sun, the fresh air, Jamie, and that he had known what she needed; she inhaled all the things that made her feel alive.
He leaned back, looked up, then got to his feet, bent at the waist, and peeked out. He turned.
“They have passed.”
“Roger,” Eva murmured, getting to her feet. “Pull down your hood and look scrofulous.”
Thirty-five
Roger looked at her, startled, but he did so a second later, almost as quickly as Jamie had at the top of the hill. Ah, there was a lesson in that. If she kept them on this way, he would turn out as lethal and lost as Jamie.
“All of you,” she said briskly, “pull down your hoods, put on your gloves, tend leeward on the path. Yes, most certainly, you too, Ry, for all you are nothing but a very common bedstead.” Jamie’s leather creaked as he turned to look at Ry. “And you,” she said, turning sternly to Jamie, “for once you will keep your good mouth shut and your wolf eyes down.”
Jamie slid his hand down off the wall. “My what?”
She turned away. “Your everything.”
Ry grinned. Gog gave a small laugh, and these things helped to pass the tense moments wherein they pulled their hoods far down over their faces, then trod down to the ferry.
They waited for the next group of soldiers, with all their clanking steel and iron, to off-load. Eva felt the ground shudder beneath her feet as they passed. But more than that, she felt Jamie’s strong body an inch behind her own, felt his intent appraisal of every man passing by, and knew at the least the first man would die before he could strike.
It was the hundreds following that so terrified.
They hurried down the rutted track as soon as the last man passed. The tall, long-faced ferryman glanced up in surprise as Eva and her hooded little group approached. The sergeant stood on the bank above, grim-faced and potbellied, a subordinate wearing the livery of Robert fitzWalter.
Eva stepped forward.
“Nothing for ya,” the sergeant said before she’d even opened her mouth. “Get back.” He turned to the oarsman. “Push off.”
The ferryman, tall and pale, had his pole in the water when Eva caught his eye, a finger lifted slightly. It was not a command, not by any measure a commanding action, but he stopped. She turned to the sergeant.
“Sir, I am sorry to trouble you, but we must needs cross the river this eve.”
It took a moment for his leathery, glittery bulk to turn fully. He was easily a head taller than she, which must all be filled with empty air, for he cast a squinted, suspicious glance at her and said, “What?”
She nodded as if this were a wise thing to say. “Indeed, you are correct, we must pass tonight, sir.”
Setting him up to think agreeable thoughts did not seem to be effective, but the repetition helped her words penetrate the depths of his skull. It also made him scowl.
“Not t’night, you don’t. The lot o’ you can spend the night enjoyin’ the pleasures of the soldiers’ hospitality. Or lettin’ them enjoy the pleasures o’ you.” He gave a bark of laughter. “In the morning, mayhap, you can pass. If you make it worth my while,” he added with a smirk.
Eva gestured behind her, to the men whose lives were in her keeping at this moment. “You will not wish these ones here near your soldiers’ camp, sir. Lord Robert would be most displeased. I would rather not have this worrisome chance taken with all his honorable men.”
He scowled. “What chance?”
She gave a helpless shrug. “’Twas a most virulent case.”
His eyes narrowed, marked between suspicion and utter confusion. He looked at Ry and Jamie and Roger again, all with their hoods drawn down to their noses, all slightly hunched over, all gloved, and all holding reins of horses.
“Case? Case o’ what?”
She sighed. “A passing sad one. Now, ’tis true that they’re all remarkably scrofulous.” She gave a general hand-waving to include the three of them, then extended one finger to indicate Jamie more directly. “But on him, it has spread everywhere. I do not exaggerate a whit: everywhere.”
She aimed in the direction of his groin and spun her finger a few times, drawing an invisible circle in the air around this most private of places.
The guard took an involuntary step back.
“’Twas most was awful to see, sir. Or not see, as the case was. It simply shriveled up and . . . fell off.”
This time the guard took such a large and decided step back he almost tumbled off the embankment. Pressing her advantage, Eva took that step with him, lowering her voice.
“Even the monks were uneasy, which is why I am hurrying them to the leper colony by the priory, where they tend only the most virulent cases.”
She neglected to mention which priory, but he did not seem to be bothered by the omission.
“Christ’s teeth, go.” He snapped at the ferryman, whose face had gone pale. “Take ’em, you. Go on,” he ordered again, keeping his distance, willing to risk the edge of the muddy bank rather than come close to the lepers. He kept a careful eye on Eva and Roger and Ry as they passed, but he did not so much as glance at Jamie.
Eva nodded her thanks with a calm, dignified nod, letting her patients board first. The ferryman, too, kept his distance from the hooded lepers as much as the small craft would allow, and thus they began their river crossing, four men rowing, the horses swimming behind in the high, gently burbling waters.
STANDING as far to the rear of the flat-bottomed ferry as possible, Jamie murmured to Ry, “We cannot walk into that nest of soldiers. The horses alone will draw their eye. It appears fitzWalter has given no looting orders, but one cannot trust an army on the move.”
“At the least, we shall not.”
“So, we bribe him.”
Eva, standing a foot away, shifted with the bobbing flow of the river beneath their feet. Roger, standing at her side, looked slightly pale from the bobbing.
“Let me manage the negotiations,” she suggested in a low voice. Her and Jamie’s eyes met and she put out her h
and. “I understand your reluctance to share with me your coin, but he might rather deal with me than a tall, angry leper whose . . .”—she lifted her brows delicately and tipped her head to the side—“fell off.”
“Shriveled up and fell off,” Jamie corrected.
She smiled the faintest bit. “So sad. Such potential wasted.”
Ry snorted quietly. The winds blew with brisk efficiency down the channel of the river valley, bobbing the boat, as Eva moved with light, weaving steps to the ferryman’s side.
“Good sir, might we inquire about a small detour?”
She might have asked if they could please carve out his eyes. His jaw fell, then snapped shut. “A detour? Are ye bleeding mad? Lord Robert has this ferry now, and if I don’t get his men across . . .” His voice faded at the sight of silver coins in Eva’s flattened palm.
“Just a few dozen yards downriver is all we require. I do not like to think what those soldiers might do to a woman and three lepers.”
“I know what they’ll do to me. They’ll have me head,” he said with feeling. But he was looking at the coin.
She looked at it too. “But these currents can be swift and shifting, can they not? They must trust you in this, no? And then, of course, you will be removing a terrible threat from his men, keeping the lepers away. Even the brave sergeant at the dock agreed. How can Lord Robert argue with this?”
Before twilight came, they were downstream at the head of a small footpath, armed with directions on how to get through the darkening woods toward the road north, to their new target, the town of Gracious Hill.
Thirty-six
Silently they climbed the path, then stopped to let the horses dry off before resaddling them. Jamie stood beside Dickon, rubbing him down with a rough cloth. Roger stood with Ry, practicing feints with a sword as sunset light came down in thick streams of yellow glow through openings in the branches. Where the bands of light hit the earth, the soil glowed a rich brown.
Eva sat in the middle of one such shaft, on a mossy log, an ankle resting atop her opposite knee. She had closed her eyes and was rubbing her calf with two thumbs, making slow, circular motions. Jamie watched a moment, then tore his eyes away and went back to brushing Dickon.
“Do you not find this all rather tiresome some days?” she inquired of his back. “All this hunting and capturing and running from soldiers?”
“Most,” he said drily. He made a long sweep with the rag down Dickon’s glossy back. The horse swept his chestnut tail. “I would much rather be sitting by a fire with a mug of ale.”
She made an impatient sound. “You Englishmen and your ales. I would sit by a river with a little cup of wine and have the sun shine on my shins.”
He was nonplussed and paused. “Your . . . shins?”
“They so rarely see sun. They are jealous of the top of my head.”
He smiled faintly and looked over. “Not of the inside?”
She gave him an arch smile. In the single thick cord of sunlight, it looked positively sultry. “You mean my brain? My very smart thoughts?” She switched ankles and began rubbing the new one. He looked away, back to Dickon. “My shins are surely not envious of your head. Taking us to that ferry was a most bad plan.”
Ry and Roger paused in their mock battle and Ry chimed in helpfully, “I agree with Eva.”
Jamie rested his arm on Dickon’s back and shook his head. “I should have pushed you into the Thames twenty years ago. What other course of action could we have taken?”
Roger at least remained a staunch supporter. Sweating lightly from his exertions, he said, “There were none, sir. None a’tall. And you mustn’t mind Eva. She likes to . . . instigate.”
She looked over with all the solemn wisdom of an elder sister. “This is a shameful lie, Roger. I do no such thing. I simply point things out. Such as the fact that your hose are unlaced, there in the front.”
He jerked his head down to where she pointed and immediately began making repairs to the little leather thongs that kept his hose bound to his belt. Eva smiled at Jamie over the top of Roger’s bent head. Slowly, he smiled back.
She not only had a fiercely sharp, insightful mind but a body he’d known was made of lush curves. Now he’d ranged over them and wanted her more than ever.
But it was more than that. Like the ray of sunshine she was sitting in right now, she kept shining up pathways of thought he’d never encountered before. Enough so that, amid their dark business, she made him want to smile and even laugh, and the wanting was even more rare a thing than the act itself.
But then, Eva made him wish to do many things he’d never done before, and not all of them involved hiking her up against a buckle maker’s wall and stepping between her thighs. The remnants of that adventure still pounded between his legs. Looking at her body, her face into the sunset light, did little to reduce it. The opposite in fact.
“You were speaking about your river wine,” he prompted, which proved she was a faerie.
“Ah, see?” She smiled happily. “Already I am turning you from the ale. Let me think . . . where was I?”
“Standing by the river getting snockered,” Roger piped up, his head still bent as he fumbled with his ties. He must be well accustomed to Eva telling such fanciful tales. Perhaps she had told them as bedtime tales when Roger was a boy and she was laying him down to sleep.
Jamie felt a sharp, dusty tug inside his chest.
“Ah, yes, Roger, thank you for reminding me,” she said in that voice Jamie could only describe as graceful, which boded no good for him, to find grace in her, not with what was to come. “We would be snockered,” she began again, and Roger grinned, “and as I sipped my wine, I would look over my shoulder and see my little home, with its red roof and garden. I would make supper, and before covering the fires, just about this time of night, I would go out and sit by the river and...” Her voice faded away.
Jamie was utterly captivated by the potency of the simple images, the red roof, Eva cooking supper, Eva sipping wine, Eva sitting by the sunset river. Eva.
“And maybe there are some little children,” she finished, so softly he could hardly hear.
Everything kept this last far away. Her volume, her words; everything was sent away on the breath leaving her body. She owned none of this. There were no my’s or I’s or One day I shall’s. It was all indefinites and passives and things that might have been.
Eva knew as much about standing apart as he.
Thirty-seven
They set up camp quickly. Ry took the first watch. At Jamie’s murmured request, he took Roger with him.
Eva stood beside the fire, toeing little pebbles out of dirt pockets and shredding sticks in uncharacteristic restlessness. Jamie sat cross-legged and thrust a fat branch into the low flames. A few spindly twigs still clinging to it spat into angry flame, but the branch itself was a huge dark center in the midst of the glowing hot coals.
Eva broke the silence.
“Assassin?”
He countered this by looking up with his dark eyes and saying, as if picking up an interrupted conversation, “I believe the most surprising thing of all is that you were telling the truth all along. Just not about what.”
She let out a long breath. “Jamie, you lie. You have not once seemed surprised.”
He looked at the fire.
“You do not understand,” she said quietly.
“And you do not explain.”
“Jamie,” she said with a helpless, laughing gasp, “what is this you ask of me? How could this be, this ‘explaining’? We are on the top and bottom of a map, you and I. Mountains and seas divide us. How can it be that I would explain myself to you? And in the end, it would not matter.”
He did look up at that. “It matters.”
His eyes had darkened to that deeper blue, something she now knew happened when day fell to night. It felt a very intimate thing to know about someone.
“Oh, Jamie,” she said softly, “you have done poorly, to bind
yourself to King John.”
“And you have done poorly to bind yourself to no one.”
She took a swift, quiet breath and gave a sad smile. “We are a poorly matched team, then, you and I. The naught and the darkness, one of us bound to nothing, the other to the devil.”
His eyes slid back to the fire. “I am what I am, Eva. You know what that is, or you do not.”
As he looked at her with his hard, dark, dangerous eyes, Eva saw it all, stretched out before her like a road, the truth of what would be with Jamie. It had already begun. Her heart turned toward him like a flower to the sun.
To her horror, tears of impotent fury pricked at her eyes. This was the dangerous thing she’d seen in him from the first: this connection. But all of it was a lie. A dirty lie. She’d never known it before; what on earth had made her think it was a true thing now?
This was the truth of her life: everything was exactly as it seemed.
Patterns repeated and people were just as they appeared. Jamie was not decent, no matter how desperately she wished him to be. Given sufficient cause, everyone bent. Even she.
That was what she feared the most.
“Tell me what happened.”
She looked away. “We hid, and then we ran.”
He rolled the tip of his stick in the fire and said quietly, “Some said ’twas a massacre, that night at Everoot.”
She nodded. She did not see the memories anymore, a small gift from God. She recalled what had happened only as dim, rote collections of images, such as one might collect plate or silver.
“I had been living at Everoot for years. I was sent there . . .” She took a breath. “When my mother displeased the king.”
“When was that?”
“When he took the throne.”
“So you lived there for...” He did swift computations. “Six years?”
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