by Tamara Leigh
She stood and started forward.
“There is naught you can do, Nedy. Wynland and Crosley will meet and Crosley will die.”
She looked over her shoulder. “I have to try.” She hiked up her skirt and ran. Heavenly Father, let there be something I can do to prevent the bloodshed that will forever taint Fulke. He is not a murderer.
“Nedy!” Leonel called. He was behind her, determined to deliver her from Fulke’s wrath—but not as determined as she was to deliver Crosley. Nor as fast. She cranked up the volume on her legs and, nearing the torchlit monastery, tuned into the voices that resounded from the center of the gathering. Angry voices. Familiar voices.
“This night my blade quenches its thirst,” Fulke’s ominous words sluiced the night air, followed by the ring of steel that announced he had drawn his sword.
Kennedy searched for an opening among the men who were too caught up in the promise of violence to notice her. As for Leonel, he was closing in.
Steel rang again. “It ends here,” Crosley dished out his own threat. “To the death.”
As Kennedy elbowed her way between two knights, realization hit. She did not need to see the man advancing on Fulke to know who had spoken. She halted and, for one teetering moment, feared she might pass out.
“Mac?” she strangled past the shock.
She felt the punch of Fulke’s gaze and heard the murmurings around her, but it was the Gulf War vet who held her attention. Outfitted in armor of mail and plate, sword raised, he spun around. It was Mac, minus the wheelchair, less the multitude of years sleep deprivation had aged him.
“Oh, no.” She had dreamed him into the role of Sir Arthur Crosley. Just when she was beginning to understand the order of things in this whacked out dream, it threw her for a loop. She should have known what her mind was up to.
From his expression, Mac was just as surprised. He took a halting step toward her. “Is it you, Ken?”
She jerked her chin up and down. “It’s me.”
Another step toward her, his duel with Fulke forgotten. “What are you doing here?”
“Remove her, Sir Leonel!” Fulke commanded. “And know that I shall deal even more severely with you if she escapes again.”
Hands fell to her shoulders and held her so tightly she felt bruises rise. “Come!” Leonel commanded.
He was angry. He had tried to help her and she had repaid him by thrusting his head into the lion’s mouth. Still, she couldn’t leave Mac to certain death.
“No!” She thrust forward. The release was abrupt, nearly toppling her. She lurched between Mac and death, laying herself open to Fulke’s accusing gaze. “Please, don’t do this.”
Then Leonel had her again, his grip cruel. But as he dragged her back, Fulke called, “Release her.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Leonel pushed her forward.
Kennedy halted before Fulke. The alternating light and shadow of torches turned his flawed features harsh, making him appear frighteningly diabolic. Still, her heart beat for him.
“You do know Crosley,” he ground out, “Ken.”
She winced at the loathing with which he spoke her name. What a tangled web. Was there no way to unravel it? “I didn’t know Mac was Crosley. I mean. . .I knew that was who he was in his dreams, but. . .it’s just a dream!” She looked over her shoulder. “Isn’t it, Mac?”
“It’s real, just as I told you. He will kill them.”
As if this figment of Mac could be believed! However, in spite of the turn of events, that the man she loved had become her enemy, Kennedy longed for life beyond the voracious tumor. But as close as she was to believing it, the slender thread of reality held.
“Your lies are like disease, Nedy Plain,” Fulke said. “Ever reaching, grasping, choking.”
“Burn the witch!” someone shouted.
“Burn her!” another called.
“Silence!” Fulke roared. “Do any of you think to usurp my vengeance, you shall pay ten-fold.” He looked once more at Kennedy. “Are you and Crosley responsible for the attack on Lady Lark?”
“No!” She stepped nearer and laid a hand on his sleeve. “We had nothing to do with it. You have to believe me.”
He pulled free. “Did you not, on the night past, deny that you and Crosley had ever met?”
“I didn’t know it was—”
“Enough of your lies. Stand aside, your friend has a meeting with the devil.”
“If ‘tis the last thing I do,” Mac shot back, “I shall free John and Harold of you and the fiery death you plan for them.”
Kennedy turned to him. “He didn’t do it, Mac.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do. Fulke couldn’t have done such a thing.”
“Is that who he is to you—Fulke?” His smile was bitter. “’Tis not your first trip here, is it? You’ve been before, allowed this devil to seduce you. You always were too gullible.” He shifted his gaze past her and swept his sword up. “I am ready, Wynland.”
Kennedy surged forward and braced herself before him. “You’ll die, Mac.”
“Is that what you read?”
“Yes. You can’t stand against him. This isn’t the Gulf, and that isn’t a gun you’re holding.”
“Perhaps, but now you are here, and that changes everything—it’s called the domino effect.”
“You don’t stand a chance.”
“I may not, but it isn’t as if I haven’t died before.”
It was the war he referred to, not sleep deprivation in that abandoned warehouse.
“Should I die this time, ‘twill be wholly.”
Kennedy turned back to Fulke and dealt what was surely her last card. “Have you forgotten Limoges?”
No amount of night could disguise his darkening face. “This is not Limoges.”
“No, but you will regret this as you regret that.”
His lids narrowed. “Do not profess to know me, Nedy Plain. Here death is due and here death will be dealt.”
“I’m begging you—”
“I do not see you on your knees.”
Was that what he wanted? What a terrible, powerful thing pride was, but she crossed to him, dropped to her knees in the moist earth, and turned her face up to him. “If that’s what it takes.”
He was as stone. “Blood is what it takes.” He waved Sir Leonel forward. “She may watch if she wishes. It should not take long.”
Kennedy resisted the hands on her, kicked and strained all the way to the sidelines.
Sir Leonel pulled her up. “You wish to watch your friend die?”
She looked into his eyes that were no longer those of an ally. “I’ll stay.”
It took no more than a single meeting of swords to know Fulke was a force to be reckoned with. Although Mac’s handling of his weapon was to be commended, he was no match for one who had been trained up in the blade. Time and again Mac was driven back, time and again Fulke’s blade threatened death. And it could have made good the threat more than once, but it was a game of cat and mouse Fulke played. Too soon and his vengeance would be incomplete.
Around they went, Mac grunting and struggling to hold back Fulke’s blows until Mac’s legs finally went out from under him and his sword skittered out of his hand. Flat on his back, chest heaving, he looked up at judge and executioner.
Fulke hefted his sword high.
“No!” Kennedy screamed
He stilled, looked to her.
“Please, Fulke.”
He was unmoving for what seemed forever, his men’s shouts of encouragement echoing around him. Then, with a bellow, he swept his blade downward.
Kennedy jerked her head to the side, unable to watch her friend die and the man she loved shatter.
Mac’s shout of pain turned her legs to water and she had to lean against Sir Leonel. She had been wrong about Fulke. She was gullible. A hopeless fool, just as she had been with Graham.
“Finish him!” someone shouted.
He was
n’t dead? She looked to where Mac lay twenty feet out.
He struggled onto his elbows and stared beyond his waist. “No! End it now, miscreant!”
Blood staining his blade, Fulke looked to Kennedy. “’Tis done.”
He hadn’t killed. A hum began in her heart as if it might turn over.
“For God’s sake,” Mac roared, “do not leave me half a man.”
“Let me go to him,” she pleaded with Sir Leonel.
His mouth tightened. “That I might suffer for you more than already I shall?” He leaned near. “You had your chance.”
“Sir Malcolm, Sir Waite!” Fulke shouted.
The knights emerged from the throng.
Fulke looked one last time at the man Nedy Plain called “Mac,” undoubtedly the same one she had mentioned the day she had wonderingly beheld her reflection in the mirror. He should have killed Crosley, should not have let the witch dictate his revenge, but she had. At the instant he should have parted Crosley’s head from his neck, he had turned his blade down. Unless the injury became infected—and it was possible—Crosley would not die, in which case a prison cell would be his end.
“I give this man into your charge to be returned to Brynwood,” he said to his knights. “And the woman.” Sir Leonel would not disappoint him again. “Bind them both. We ride at dawn.”
They bent and positioned themselves to carry Crosley who cursed and fought them until Sir Waite’s fist to his jaw brought silence. They lifted his unconscious form and carried him toward the tents.
Fulke returned his sword to its scabbard and considered the woman who had come back to him only to betray him.
As Crosley was carried past her, she turned her gaze to Fulke. “How could you?”
Were the two lovers? He halted before her. “For what do you complain? He is alive.”
“Not without his leg.”
Fulke smiled, knew the turn of his lips was cruel, as were his next words. “He still has the other—not that he shall need it where he is going. Now I must needs collect my nephews. And my betrothed.”
She closed her eyes and lowered her face as if to hide her pain.
Fulke started toward the monastery door at which one of the king’s men awaited him—the knight who had brought him word at middle night that Sir Arthur would challenge him for wardship of his nephews and told that Lady Lark would come unto the victor.
“Wait!” Nedy called.
He nearly stopped, nearly turned, but he was done with her.
“Please, a doctor for Ma—Sir Arthur.”
The sooner he forgot her eyes, her mouth, her words of love, the sooner he could turn his efforts to his nephews and the marriage King Edward pressed on him, a marriage to which he was more strongly opposed than ever. Whatever the sacrifice, Lady Lark would return to London an unwed woman. So firm was he in his conviction that he was shaken when the king’s men ushered the woman from the monastery.
Harold asleep on her shoulder, John clinging to her side with his face pressed amid the folds of her skirt, she looked the mother they did not have. A mother they ought to have—
Nay! He braced his weakening resolve. This time he would be a father to them. Did they yet require a mother, a kindly village woman would serve.
Fulke halted before her and refused the impulse to take the boys from her. After all they had been through this past fortnight, and that they were only four and six, they would be confused and frightened. If he was to become to them what he had previously refused, he must go slowly.
He surveyed the woman who fell short of Nedy Plain by at least a hand and was smaller in the waist by as much. Here the reason the gowns had poorly fit the impostor. He supposed Lady Lark was lovely with her russet hair confined to a fat braid drawn over her shoulder, her oval face set with sparkling eyes of a color he could not distinguish in the night, her wide curved mouth, but he could not forget darkest hair, greenest eyes, and the sweetest lips perfectly met with his. He would, though.
Lady Lark lifted her chin. “Lord Wynland.” The color of her eyes might not shine through, but her dislike did.
Sir Arthur had surely told her all manner of ill about the one she was to wed. It should anger him, but he found good in it—better her aversion than a simpering female bent on taking him to husband. “Lady Lark.” He looked to the boy on her shoulder. “How fares Harold?”
“He is improved.” She shifted him. “The good monks tell that his malady is well enough past that he may return to Brynwood Spire.”
“I will take him.”
He was certain her hold on the boy tightened. “He is not heavy.”
She did not speak true, but he would not argue it.
She laid a hand on John’s head. “John, dear, your uncle has come for you.”
He burrowed his face deeper in her skirts.
“Now, then,” she gently admonished, “greet him as is proper.”
He pushed the skirt aside and showed an eye. From his drooping lids, he longed to return to his child’s sleep.
Feeling as awkward as a youth, Fulke dropped to his haunches and forced a smile. “Hello, John.”
The boy chewed his bottom lip, then said in a small voice, “Hello.”
“Are you well?”
He nodded, showed the rest of his face, and eyed Fulke’s tunic. “Is that blood, Uncle?”
Not his, but Sir Arthur’s. Fulke cursed himself. He had been too bent on retrieving his nephews to consider it. “I fear I cut myself, but see”—he opened his arms—“I am well.”
“Where is Arthur?”
Fulke glanced at Lady Lark and wondered if she or anyone else had been fool enough to tell the boys what had transpired. Hoping John would be too fatigued to pursue the matter, Fulke said, “He is resting.”
He heard Lady Lark’s muffled gasp of surprise. Had she thought the knave dead?
“I want Arthur,” John said.
“When he is finished resting, I will take you to him.” Hopefully, come the morrow the boy would forget the promise. “But I am here, and I have missed you, boy.” Only after he said it did Fulke realize it was true. Though he’d had little to do with his nephews while at Brynwood, their presence—uncertain smiles and muted laughter—had rooted a place within him.
Perhaps John sensed it, for he released Lady Lark’s skirt, took a tentative step forward, and barreled into his uncle’s chest.
Fulke gathered the boy to him. The small, warm body felt strangely agreeable and temporarily displaced the woman he had believed would share his life. Nevermore. “We are going home on the morrow. Would you like that?”
John nodded.
“Good. Now ‘tis time you slept.” Fulke scooped him up and gestured for Lady Lark to precede him. Telling himself he and the lady would talk once the boys were at rest, Fulke followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“It can happen here, too,” Mac murmured, the words so embittered they seemed to scorch the air.
Kennedy looked from Sir Leonel who warmed himself before the fire some thirty feet away to the man whose head was in her lap. Though his hand convulsed on his bandaged thigh—made it obvious as to what he referred—she said, “You’re awake.”
“And yet dead.”
She shifted against the tree at her back. “Mac, listen to me—”
“Where are John and Harold?”
“In the tent with Fulke and Lady Lark.”
His fingers on his thigh clawed into a fist. “I failed them.”
“Fulke won’t harm them.”
“Won’t he?” His slit eyes pierced her. “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”
Even now. She eyed Mac’s injury that she had cleaned and dressed with strips torn from her chemise. “How does it feel?”
He continued to scrutinize her, but finally levered onto an elbow and regarded his leg. “I’ll lose it. Just like before.”
Though the bleeding had eased considerably, he was right. Without proper medical attention he would lose it
, perhaps even his life. His pain slid like a knife between her shoulder blades and made her long to hug him.
“Wynland!” Mac burst. “That devil’s spawn!”
The two knights who stood watch over the roped pen between the trees tensed as if expecting Mac to leap to his feet and rush them.
Kennedy laid a hand on Mac’s arm and urged him to lie back.
He wrested free and struggled to sitting. “Don’t you understand?”
She glanced at the knights and lowered her voice in hopes Mac would do the same. “I do.”
His upper lip curled. “You don’t believe, do you? You still think it’s only a dream.”
The irony of it was that, as he said, she didn’t believe, and yet she had once more allowed it to become real.
“You’re wrong, Ken. It’s everything I told you it was. And more.”
The knights were listening, their interest punctuating the night like question marks. “Please, lower your voice, Mac.”
He laughed. “You’re worried about them? If it’s only a dream, why concern yourself?”
He was right. It was becoming harder and harder to distinguish dream from reality. But then, she didn’t want to. Despite her predicament, despite Fulke turning from her, there was no place else she longed to be. Here there was hope—and love, even if not returned.
“What I don’t understand is why you did it,” Mac said. “If you don’t believe, why are you here?”
“I’m my own subject.”
His jaw slackened. “Your research. Why you? What about your other subjects?”
“The university closed me down.” She gave a bitter laugh. “I never could leave anything unfinished.”
“They shut you down because of me?”
“It had just as much, if not more, to do with my illness. I was having a hard time—” She shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.”
Mac shifted around to face her, winced, and gripped his thigh. “How many times have you been here?”
“Please, Mac, lie back.”
“How many times?”
The knights were taking it in, superstition gaining momentum. She leaned near Mac. “I’ve had the dream three times.”