The King's Man

by Elizabeth Kingston

  He remained where he was in his carefully careless pose, while she went down on one knee, tightening the loose leathern cords that held her boots in place. Her mail chinked softly as she moved, instead of the harsh assault of sound he was used to from such a maneuver.

  “We have run away from my men, and not to them. Will be another day or more of pushing hard through these woods before we rejoin them, now we have run so deep among the trees.” She jerked hard on the laces. “Be assured they will find us, do we not find them soon, or haps more bandits will set upon us. Will my lord come peaceful with us at last?”

  It was true that it was safer with her than alone, in this place. There was no knowing the dangers he might come upon. Stay with her, or fight her off and run. The sword fairly hummed beneath his fingers, and he imagined lifting it again, lunging into the fight. But not with her. Never with her, never again.

  “Where did you learn to fight?”

  The question was out of him before he realized how much he wanted to know. Now the words were out, he felt a strange relief in the simple admission that he wanted to know. Nothing about Gwenllian of Ruardean was familiar, or commonplace, or reasonable. There was no rhyme to her, and the discord struck his ear and his life, a calamity of noise when he wanted only peace.

  She looked at him, startled in the moment he asked his question, and then she blinked and returned his frank stare, before countering his question with one of her own.

  “Why did you kill your father?”

  He could not bring himself to laugh at it, try as he might. Nor could he shrug it off, bored, nor think of any cutting words to turn on her. Not when her eyes bored into him. No one had ever asked him that. Not even Edward.

  They stared at each other. He pushed off the tree and took a step toward her in the stillness. She did not retreat, did not even flinch from his advance. It felt, suddenly and without warning, as though they were truly seeing one another. He felt an unknotting in his chest, as though something that had been clenched tight for days had finally let go. I only want to know what she is, he thought. And she had said trust, and honor. She had given him a choice expected more than villainy from him. She saw through it.

  He stood a pace away from her and looked at her expectantly until she took his meaning and jerked her chin slightly, indicating that they would move north.

  She turned that way, and he followed her through the trees. He did not think she could know any better than he where exactly they were, but he let her lead, allowed that she was mistress of this roundabout journey. Silence reigned between them, broken only by the monotonous sound of her mail’s dull clink as it swung to and fro and the crunch of his own heavy footsteps.

  After a mile or more, he spoke.

  “My father did not die by my hand.”

  Her pace slowed for only a beat. “You deny it?”

  “All know well that my true father died fighting for his liege lord, when I was just a lad, recently become a page at Morency.”

  She did not apologize for calling Aymer his father when he was not. She said nothing at all, allowing the silence to grow between them again. In it, he saw what he had not noticed before: her pace had slowed infinitesimally, her stride narrowed just enough to bring her even with him. Two could walk astride here, and they did so by her very subtle design.

  “My master at arms,” she said as though there had been no pause in the conversation, “was my father’s baseborn brother, Gilbert. When my lord father took the cross, the keeping of Ruardean was given to his trueborn and younger brother, Richard. Without husband or father to rule me, and with the heir assured, my care was given almost entirely to my mother.” She shrugged. “I was indulged. And I was a good student to both Master Edmund and my master at arms.”

  To hear her speak like this, with casual confidence and quiet warmth, made him understand as nothing else did, why her men gave their hearts and their swords. She had an easy manner, when she chose to employ it, which invited camaraderie and soothed the awkward hostility that had reigned between them. It was clear she expected return confidence from him. An exchange.

  He was not used to this. Only with Edward had he felt anything similar. He was more accustomed to careful distance, or fascination. He was more accustomed to feeling apart.

  For now, he held back his questions about her mother’s indulgence and the strangeness of her tale. Instead, he answered her own question more fully. “My true father was a knight who sent me to be page at Morency. Upon my natural father’s death there was none to claim me, and so Aymer of Morency called me his son. I called Aymer my father, and is Aymer I slew. That I have never denied.” Nor had he ever baldly admitted it to any save his king.

  “Aye, and why?” she asked simply. “Wherefore kill the good man who called you son, if not only to steal my marriage lands?”

  She sounded no more than curious, but an incredulous laugh escaped him. “Oh yes, such a good man that none mourned him then, nor do they now. Did you never wonder, lady, why his body was left to rot where it lay for near a week? Why the priest sent to bury him found not even one faithful servant attending him?” He reached forward and, too forcefully, cleared their narrow path of a low-hanging branch. “A fair amount of gold it took to convince the brothers to step foot in that place.”

  He watched her face for reaction, when he wished for nothing more than to turn away. He could hear the bitterness in the echo of his voice, more than he’d wanted to show to her.

  “A harsh man, and feared, I have heard this.” She looked at him, thoughtful. “What evil did he do you, that you must kill him by your own hand?”

  Faces passed through his mind as her words hung in the air. Harsh, and feared. How small a thing it could be made, with those words. Terrorized and tortured, those were the faces he remembered. He may as well tell her the truth of it, and make himself yet more vile to her.

  “Never did he harm me.” He wished for darkness, to hide from the bright light of day. “Not a hair of my head did he touch.” Aymer’s perversions and wrath were reserved for everyone else.

  “And so it is right to kill a sleeping man, save that the man is unloved by his servants or the church?” She asked it carefully, and he could hear her Master Edmund in her philosophical tone. And then she answered herself. “But he was mourned, my lord. I mourned his loss.”

  “You mourned the life you believe you would have lived.” He stopped walking, and she stopped with him. He looked at her significantly, a look that ran slowly up her mail, to her hip where her sword was buckled, coming to rest on her begrimed face. “Do you mourn it still?”

  Her eyes turned to him in the stillness, large and gray and beautiful, full of the light that he remembered from his sickbed.

  “Sometimes.”

  This was so obviously the truth, accompanied by such a vulnerable and very female look crossing her face that it took his breath away. But it was gone with a blink of those heavy lashes and replaced by a blank wall. He felt it again, the familiarity of spirit, a glimmer of himself in her. He shook his head slightly. It was that they both knew life with a sword in hand, no more in common than that. He would allow no other thought than that, no memories of his fevered dreams.

  “Then we shall drink to you, lady,” he said, pulling out the flask of ale he had pilfered along with the sword. It made him thirsty, to remember how it felt to be young and murderous. He found a convenient rock and sat, his back against a tree as he took a long draught. “But a brief pause in our march, to honor Gwenllian of Ruardean, the only mourner for Aymer of Morency.”

  She only watched him, not objecting to his sudden stop for refreshment. Even sitting, he was not used to anyone towering over him the way she did. “Giants,” he mused. “Are there giants in Wales? And which one fathered you?”

  Her face lost the neutral look. She had a distinct lack of humor when it came to her parentage. He saw her hand drop to her sword, an unthinking reflex. “It will not protect you from insult,” he said wearily. �
�If it did, I would hear no whispers when I pass by courtier and peasant alike. And priest, and prince, and maid dressed in mail.” He took another long drink and looked up at her, thinking of that he would rather speak of her strange youth than his own. “What kind of mother or teacher would allow you to become this? Come, tell me. Is madness, you must know it.”

  “I was named for Gwenllian ferch Gruffydd,” she said, as though he were to understand this as anything other than a string of breathy mumbling. He continued looking at her blankly, until she spoke again, a faint smile chasing across her generous mouth. “She was married to one of our Welsh princes of the south long ago, in the time of King Stephen. She raised an army during the great revolt.”

  He raised his brows. “She won?”

  “No, she was beheaded. Her army was routed. The Normans won, the first of many such victories.”

  “What was meant, then, in naming you for a woman who lost? A reminder to your Welsh kin of Norman might?”

  She shook her head at him, and gave him a memorable look. It was as though she wished to say much but was afraid, and all the while under that tension was her amusement. How strange, that there should be so much suppressed feeling around the question of her name. Stranger still, to see the ghost of a smile still on her lips.

  “Did you not hear her name three years ago, my lord, when you fought in the middle March? The men of Wales shout Revenge for Gwenllian when they take up arms. It is their battle cry.”

  “I was not there,” he answered, so quickly that it no doubt sounded suspect. But it was the truth, and he was anxious that she know it. The fiercest fighting to quell the Welsh rebels had been in the middle March. He had heard tales of the bloodiest butchery done by men who swore themselves more Christian than the savage Welsh. Many times when he’d heard the men of her party speaking among themselves in Welsh, he had thought of what he’d heard about the fighting back then, and was glad Edward had sent him to the south. He was only too ready to distance himself from a brutality that her people would not soon forget, or likely ever forgive. “I was at Carmarthen only. There were no battle cries there.”

  She nodded once, firmly, accepting what he said with so little hesitation that he thought she must have already known where he was during the rebellion. “The Gwenllian of old is a legend. A hero and a battle cry. They say she was also beautiful, but there was little of that in me even as a babe.”

  “And because you were named for her, you were allowed to take a sword?” That seemed far too simple-minded. To teach her, to hide it from the priests and other men who would call it a perversion and a sin, to orchestrate her upbringing so that she could become a leader of men and as good with a sword as he himself – this was not some passing whimsy, indulged merely because of her name.

  But that explained the look on her now, the way she did not look at him direct. There was more to it than just a name, but she would not say it. Instead, she lifted a shoulder and said, “My mother called it a fine Welsh notion, to make a woman fit for battle. She believes that if our bards sing of it, it cannot be a sin. Besides, I had little else to do after my husband was murdered.”

  He felt the ale warming his belly and loosening his bones. She looked wistful and sad, which made him feel old. “You mourn for what you do not know. You had – what, only ten years? You can be forgiven your ignorance of childhood, but be not so empty-headed now. I did you a favor, Gwenllian of Ruardean.”

  “Was a favor? To take my protection, my future? You killed much with your blade in the night.”

  This made him laugh. It felt good here in the solitude of the forest, a flask of ale in hand and the solid roughness of the tree at his back. He wished there were enough to make him drunk.

  “Unwittingly, I did more to protect you and your future with my blade in the night, than ever Aymer would have.” He took another long swallow of ale, memories coming on him like another fever. “His first wife died, you know. I lived there ten years and never heard how, or why she died. The second wife I remember, just barely. Maude, her name was. I saw him beat her.” He remembered cowering behind Alice’s skirts, hearing Maude crying. Maude, who had been so fierce when teaching him courtly manners at table. “I was too young to know her offense, but she never did learn to move quick enough. She died the next day.”

  He rolled the ale over his tongue, its taste a perfect match for the bitterness in his gut; and he looked at her. She was not a lady like they had been, this wench in the armor of a man. “You are quick, though. You have speed. Did you have it then?”

  He didn’t expect her to answer, but she did. “Aye,” she said softly, a faint curve to her mouth. “Was my only advantage over my cousins, speed.”

  “He would have caught you, girl.”

  “You did not.”

  “And I am not Aymer of Morency,” he burst out, startling birds from the brush, a flurry of sound behind him as he glared at her. But the flash of anger faded quickly. Why did he tell her anything, the stupid wench. She did not hear him and it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. It was all history, over and done, and he was more bored than angered by it any more.

  He relaxed against the tree, shifting his weight and looking up into the branches. “Your speed would not have saved you and you are not half so clever as you think, do you believe it would. Know you of the wife who came before you? Alice. Her name was Alice and she bore him a son who did not live past infancy.” He could not stop himself from telling her. “She was eight months gone with his second child when she died. No more than a month later he signed the papers that bound you to him.”

  She did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed on her own leather boots. “He killed her?”

  She made him remember it. He could see Alice’s face still, swollen and ravaged. He could feel her hands on the sides of his own face, her lips on his hair, as she stood on her toes and gave him a motherly kiss. He had been seventeen, tall and strong and already good with a sword.

  “She killed herself,” he said to the branches, to the sky. “Made a rope of the sheets from her marriage bed to hang herself.” He raised the flask to his lips and drank the last swallow. “Is a good thing you married by proxy, my lady Gwenllian,” he observed, “Else your wedding might provide your winding sheet, too.”

  He waited, watching her. She made no move even to look at him, her eyes trained on the ground through long minutes of silence. He listened to the birdsong and wondered what he would eat tonight, what they would trap in these woods for dinner. It was pleasant here, with the world so far away. He envied her, that she had nothing but the wilds of Wales and the company of her men for all these long years.

  “He wrote to me,” she said suddenly. “He wrote to me only days before you murdered him.”

  “Oh? And what did he write of?” he asked. He braced himself for her answer, a slow breath drawn deep into his lungs. He opened his eyes and looked into hers, the infinite gray of them, the unblinking mirror that bore his self back on him.

  “He wrote of his great love for you,” she answered, the accusation in her voice so faint that he could almost convince himself it was not there at all.

  He carefully lifted his mouth in a faint smile, still looking her in the eye even as he fought down the familiar and frantic fear rising in his throat. Love. The priests may say what they will of murder as a mortal sin, but it was not the killing that weighed heavily on his heart.

  “Aye. He loved me well, even better than his own son. I always knew it. Even as I slipped the blade in, I knew it.”

  He waited a long time without moving, as long as he could bear it. But she did not turn her eyes away. It was he, fearing that he could not go another moment without losing control, who shifted his glance to look into the distance and say, “There’s game aplenty here, and a hot supper awaits us, do we make haste to build camp before night falls.”

  CHAPTER 8

  After days of hiding behind leaden clouds, a hot sun beat down on them – a summer day fresh from the
cleansing rains in the night. Ranulf could have almost believed himself in the Holy Land again, but for the lush green all around him and the woman in front of him.

  They had walked all morning in silence. He stared at her back now as she led the way through the trees. There was no cause to question her direction, though he knew from the talk of her men that they had never wandered so far from Ruardean. She read the signs of the forest as well as he could have, probably even better. Surely, they would soon come to the river again, and her men, and they would be on their way to Windsor.

  He had given up the notion of running entirely, somewhere in the wet night. He had managed to catch three fine hares and she had taken them from him casually, remarking with a note of admiration that he’d chosen fine fat things for dinner. When she began to skin and clean the first, she silenced his protest with an easy, “One kills and the other cleans, is only just. Build the fire, and we’ll have the oatcakes from my purse.” And so they did. In the night, she woke him when the first drops of rain sifted through the trees and bade him move himself under the shelter of the nearby rock overhang. He lay there listening to the rain, warm and dry and with a sword at his side because of her, and considered his options.

  In the end, he knew, he would be found. No matter if he returned to his Morency lands or continued in the vain wandering that had brought him to Wales, Edward would find him. He could not feel the anger anymore when he thought of the summons. He felt only futility. Edward commanded him to court, and though Ranulf did not know what service was needed, he could well guess that it would require blood and the sword. It was unjust to assume that Edward would require any service more villainous than dealing with the tiresome Gascons, and France was as good a place as any to live and fight and die.

  He heard the quiet sleepy breathing of Gwenllian reach him in the dark, and spent the dawn hours pondering which truth was more astonishing: that she could fight the king’s battles as well most men could, or that she had trusted him well enough to have slept in the night.