Lady's Pursuit (Knight and Rogue Book 6)

by Bell, Hilari

  That meant any chance to claim that reward, and the small estate I needed to support my wife, was now sliding out of my grasp ... unless I took the sheriff up on his offer.

  He could use his own men to take Rupert in. All I had to do was turn to him and say, Half the reward? I lied. This is Liege Heir Rupert.

  And I couldn’t do it.

  It wasn’t because of Kathy’s bright gray eyes, fixed on me in imperious pleading.

  And it wasn’t any need to defy Jack — who’d have sold his own child for a sum like that. Nor was it because my kindly father would never have done such a thing, or Michael either.

  I didn’t want to do it. I liked Rupert, I respected Meg, and I wanted to help them.

  Though I felt more than a twinge, at the thought of so much money slipping out of my grasp.

  “I’m sorry,” I said sincerely. “I’d love to claim even half that reward. But Benton isn’t the Liege Heir. Though if I should come across him, and need help to get him home ... well, I hope I’m in your fief if that happens.”

  “I hope so too, sir,” the sheriff said. “In fact, I’d hoped... Oh well. Can’t blame a man for thinking, with all that money at stake.”

  You couldn’t ... but a man didn’t have to succumb to it.

  Kathy’s shining eyes were the only reward I needed.

  First I had to return to the town where I’d left my companions. From there I was able to track the coach, as we’d been doing all along. And several of the people I asked about it told me of two men and a “smart-looking” young lady who’d done the same.

  I resolved to keep this description to myself; Kathy had been teased about her spectacles as a child. And Fisk found her beautiful, so I saw no reason to mention that most considered my sister perfectly ordinary.

  However, the coach seemed to vanish into thin air after Tottenham. Three people on horseback were much less memorable — though between Kathy’s spectacles, Tipple’s spots, and the fact that even disguised as an ordinary horse Champion was still very fine, I was able to follow their erratic route.

  I was a lot less memorable, which would hopefully make it harder for Wheatman to come after me. In addition to leaving him bound, I’d taken his horse and sold it in a town some distance from the keep. And his crossbow that “couldn’t miss” was buried deep in my pack, so he’d have to acquire a weapon as well. But while all of this might slow him down, I had no illusion ’twould stop him.

  Some have called me both obsessed, and insanely stubborn, but Wheatman was worse than I in both those ways — he would no more quit his grim vocation than I’d have given up on errantry. I couldn’t continue my search by day and stay awake all night, but I took care to hide my camps, and trusted my good True to keep watch.

  After two days and seven towns, I realized they were searching for the coach by riding outward from where it had disappeared in a slowly widening spiral. I stopped a traveling tinker and paid him to draw me a map of all the towns and villages in the area, figured out their most likely route, jumped out one ring and started traveling it backward.

  I rode into Scranton at dusk. It wasn’t a timber milling town, but it was the center of a wide agricultural area and big enough to support two inns. No one at the first inn had heard of my friends — though they spent some time telling me how superior their food, beds and even baths were to those of the Blue Crow.

  This told me the Blue Crow’s prices would be lower. My purse was growing thin by this time, so I whistled True away from trying to make friends with the inn’s cat — who, judging by his hissing, was not fond of large playful dogs — and rode on down the street.

  At this hour and season, with the day’s work done but the sky still bright, many of the townsfolk had come into the street to run a few errands, or simply stand and chat.

  Despite the crowd, I recognized my friends from half a block away — all three of them, alive, apparently intact ... and as usual, arguing amongst themselves as they approached the inn.

  They didn’t see me until Chant caught Tipple’s scent, and emitted the bellowing neigh for which he’d been named.

  Kathy called my name, but ’twas Fisk’s face I was watching. The light of the setting sun glowed on the flash of relief that crossed it, followed by a most joyous welcome.

  For just a moment, I let myself feel how much I’d miss him when he married my sister and settled down — wherever they settled, for I had a hard time envisioning Fisk running an estate.

  But no matter where they ended up, Kathy was Fisk’s future and his happiness. I refused to begrudge it.

  By the time I rode up to them, Fisk had gotten control of his expression, the beaming joy transmuted into sardonic satisfaction.

  “Thank goodness!” Kathy leaned out of her saddle to hug me. “I was never going to forgive you for running off without a word like that, but I’m too relieved. Did that dreadful man try to kill you?”

  “More to the point,” said Fisk, “did you find some way to ... discourage him, shall we say?”

  “You sound like I buried him in an unmarked grave,” I said. “I found him more tragic than dreadful ... though I suppose his results merit that description. I’m not certain I managed to discourage him, either, but I had to come and warn you — someone wants Rupert dead!”

  I wasn’t about to name that someone in the open street, where several people had stopped to smile at our reunion.

  To my bemusement, none of my friends looked startled by this news.

  “We found that out the hard way,” Rupert explained. “But tracking Meg down again — and this time, curse it, we need to get her free! That seemed more important.”

  “I can see that. But have you figured out why the ... why your stepmother had her taken?” I asked. “I’ve been thinking and thinking, but I still don’t...”

  They stared at me as if I’d sprouted horns, and I realized my haste hadn’t been completely wasted.

  “Ah, so you knew someone was after him, but you didn’t know who.”

  “Caro?” Rupert’s voice rose in astonishment, and Fisk looked around the crowded street sharply. “Why would Caro want to—”

  “A private parlor,” Fisk interrupted. “Right now, because we clearly have a lot to talk about. Come along,” he added.

  I thought that command was redundant, till I followed his gaze down the rope tied to his pommel, to... It had to be the ugliest dog I’d ever seen. At least, I assumed ’twas a dog. There was nothing else it could be. But it looked as if some sculptor in clay had tired of working on it, squashing its rump down and its short back legs into its torso before changing his mind and letting it survive.

  Looking down from Chant’s back I couldn’t make out its expression, but True confirmed my guess as to its species by leaping up to it in a series of playful hops and then crouching, shoulders down, butt up, with his tail wagging furiously. He also appeared to be barking, but I couldn’t hear the soft rasp. The creature erupted in a panicked howl, and tried to bolt.

  When the leash checked it, it tried to join Fisk in the saddle. Tipple is short enough it might have succeeded, if not for those truncated back legs. As it was the dog managed half the distance, clawing at Fisk’s leg and Tipple’s side, but it would have fallen back to the street had Fisk not grabbed the scruff of its neck and hoisted it into his lap.

  “He just started trying to do this,” Fisk explained, ignoring the way the crowd scattered and women shrieked. The dog thrust his toothy muzzle under Fisk’s unbuttoned coat, and the terrified yelping stopped. “If I don’t pick him up, he makes even more noise.”

  His voice was indifferent, but the calm hands stroking the dog told a different tale. Would he one day handle my nieces and nephews with the same casual assurance?

  ’Twas a strange thought — Fisk, a father? But a glance at Kathy showed me she didn’t find it odd at all.

  At all events, we descended on the Blue Crow en masse — and with four people, four horses and two dogs we created a fair amount of
chaos. Particularly since True kept trying to join his new friend in Fisk’s lap.

  I called him to heel, and made sure he obeyed with a touch of my animal handling Gift. I don’t usually use that on True, for it feels like cheating, but given the way the inn’s staff responded to Fisk’s dog — honestly, you’d think he was a grizzly bear — I thought it wise to show them one well-trained beast. And ’twas not as if the dog offered any threat, cowering as he did in Kathy’s skirt. Though I thought naming him Timorous was taking matters a bit too far.

  I soon realized the matter of a name was not yet settled, for Kathy called him to heel as Preposterous, adding, “Here Prepee, here Prepee,” for good measure.

  Fisk winced.

  But eventually we settled in a parlor, still so warm from the day that we threw open the shutters, promising that we’d only discuss “Caro” or “Rupert’s stepmother,” lest our voices carry.

  With Peculiar huddling under the table, we gave the serving maid our orders. True had figured out that his new friend was too frightened to play, and lay beside my chair, his tail thumping the floor.

  The first question that arose, long before the maid returned with our dinner, was why I thought the Liege Lady had anything to do with it.

  So I explained how I’d tried to determine who might have lent their keep to kidnappers, and what Wheatman ultimately told me. Then I had to explain how I came to be chatting with my would-be assassin. This took longer than the first question, and my duck breast was getting cold by the time I finished.

  “If he’s at all like you,” said Fisk, “he won’t give up. Not that easily.”

  “He’s not like me.” I found it disturbing that Fisk, too, had seen a resemblance between us. “But that’s not important now. What’s important is that, ridiculous as it seems, it appears the Li— that Rupert’s stepmother is trying to have him killed.”

  “Why is that ridiculous?” Kathy asked. “Once you think about it, she has a clear motive. Just because she’s got big dark eyes and shows off her bosom, that doesn’t mean she can’t have ambition and brains. How do you think she got to be ... to marry Rupert’s father in the first place?”

  “Well...” Looking back on it, I had thought that.

  “According to the ladies who don’t like her — and there are a lot of them,” Kathy added, “—she came to court for the sole purpose of marrying Rupert’s father, and she didn’t let anything stand in her way. The fair ones admit she’s been a good wife to him, but I’m starting to wonder if she didn’t intend to make her son liege all ... hmm. That would be awfully hard. If Rupert married one of the girls he was supposed to, instead of running off to university and meeting Meg there, he could have several sons by now. Any accident she arranged should have happened to him years ago, before she ever married the Liege.”

  “I think you’re making her too villainous,” said Fisk. “And it’s not because I’m moved by her dark eyes, or her bosom. But you’re right about the timing. If she always intended to dispose of Rupert, she’d have done it at the start. I think she was content with being the wife, and one day the widow, of the most powerful man in the Realm ... until Rupert came home with Meg on his arm, and volunteered to take himself out of the succession by wedding a Giftless girl.”

  “I didn’t take myself out of the succession,” said Rupert. “I wanted Father to accept Meg, and our children, Giftless or not.”

  “That may be what you wanted.” I was thinking of my own father as I spoke. “But what was the likelihood?”

  “The most likely outcome,” said Fisk, “if you held firm and married Meg, was that Rupert’s father would choose his second son as heir instead. Was Caro sympathetic to your romance, by any chance?”

  “No,” said Rupert. “She sided with Father. So that doesn’t...”

  “So she was too smart to do anything that suspicious,” Kathy put in. “All she had to do was sit back and watch, while the Liege’s opposition to Meg made Rupert even more stubborn. Everything was going her way, and she didn’t have to lift a finger!”

  A memory flashed into my head, and suddenly it all made sense. “I know what changed! Fisk, remember the man who paid Master Quicken for secret reports, on the experiments to find some way Mistress Margaret might bear a Gifted child?”

  “I can see why the ... someone would be interested in those experiments.” Kathy caught herself this time, but we all looked guiltily at the open window, having forgotten to be discreet in our excitement. “But those results were faked.”

  “Those results were,” said Fisk. “Others may not have been. I’ll bet her henchman, whoever he might be—”

  “Gifford Noye,” said Kathy and Rupert together.

  “He’s always hanging around her when he’s at court,” Rupert went on. “Father jokes about her having an admirer, but of course she’d never...”

  He suddenly realized how much else he’d have thought the Liege Lady would never do, and fell silent.

  Behind her spectacles, Kathy’s eyes were distant, as she tried to remember things she’d not noticed at the time.

  “I’m not so sure about that. If they’re lovers, they’ve been discreet ... but you can be. Discreet, I mean, even at court.”

  “And how would you know that?” The teasing in Fisk’s voice was warmer than a smile.

  Kathy waved him to silence. “They may not be lovers, but he does what she says. He’s been absent from court quite a bit lately. He fits the description too; smallish and slight.”

  “And capable,” said Fisk. “If he’s been gathering reports on all those experiments, without anyone else finding out about it.”

  “That’s why she kidnapped Meg!” For all his innocence, Rupert was no fool. “One of the experiments must have seemed promising. They’re all still working with animals, of course, and none of the reports I saw looked like anything either Meg or I wanted to try. But someone might ... someone must have had a breakthrough! They may have wanted to make sure they got the same result consistently, or tone down some side effect — some of the side effects were pretty ghastly. But they must have thought they’d have something to offer us pretty soon, because the one thing all of their theories had in common was that they had to be applied while the child was forming — most of them in the first four months of pregnancy.”

  “So when she learned of this promising report...” I was working it out as I spoke. “...her first thought was to tuck Mistress Margaret away, until her pregnancy was too far advanced for anything to make the child Gifted. And then she could ... just let Meg go?”

  “Why not?” Fisk asked. “The last thing our Caro wants is for Rupert to get over his dead love — which he would, sooner or later — and then marry some noblewoman and produce a litter of Gifted heirs. This dramatic kidnapping had the beneficial side effect of keeping Rupert’s attention fixed on Meg, and making him even more determined to marry her. It’s a decent bet that she could then persuade her husband to disown him before any more children came along.”

  “I am going to marry her,” said Rupert. “The first chance I get — even if that’s exactly what Caro wants, and Father chooses Liam in my place. This is what Meg and I want. Assuming she’ll still have me, after I failed her so badly.”

  “You haven’t failed,” I said stoutly. “Not yet. But if all this is true, why take the risk of trying to kill Rupert now?”

  “I don’t know,” Fisk admitted. “Maybe his father is changing his mind about disowning him. Though if he were my son, having to shell out four thousand gold roundels would make me even more... Oh, all right. I have no idea why she changed her mind, but she clearly has. She probably sent Wheatman after Michael when her men reported we were helping Rupert, instead of trying to bring him home — which means there must be some messenger riding back and forth. You wouldn’t send this kind of information off with a letter carrier. But the timing’s about right for that. The last thing she wants is for Meg to return when those formulas might work.”

  “A
nd if Rupert does meet with an ‘accident,’” Kathy added slowly, “she has no reason to keep Meg alive. It sounds like they managed to keep Meg from finding out who hired them, but she’s pretty smart. If they didn’t need her alive, to keep you from marrying someone else, I doubt they’d take the risk.”

  “I’d try to avoid getting assassinated, even if Meg’s life wasn’t hanging on my survival,” said Rupert. “Though that does make it worse. We’ve got to get her back. And we don’t even know where that accursed coach is!”

  “We’d also better find some evidence against the ... against Rupert’s stepmother,” said Kathy. “If she’s capable of kidnapping and murder, I’m not sure her husband is safe either. And no offence, Michael, but I don’t see him taking the word of an unredeemed man — about what an assassin told him — as enough evidence to charge his own wife with treason and attempted murder.”

  They were all right, and I had to admit...

  “It does seem as if they’ve gone to ground once more. And if they hide themselves better than they did the first time, it might take months to find them. If Wheatman hadn’t used the information to gain his release — and I know that makes his testimony less credible, though I believe he spoke true — we’d still have no idea who was behind this. Mistress Carolyn has been remarkably careful about leaving evidence, but no one could have predicted the man she sent to kill me would end up talking to me instead.”

  “She doesn’t know you,” Fisk murmured.

  “So,” Kathy summed it up, “we have two sets of assassins after us, and we’ve no idea where Meg is or how to find her.”

  A depressed silence fell, and ’twas not only Rupert who felt like a failure. As a knight errant, I had failed at both rescuing damsels and returning missing heirs — not to mention getting Fisk and Kathy married. Even my nascent magic, as it came more and more under my control, was useless.

  “We have no choice,” I said. “We must keep looking for Mistress Margaret, whether it exposes Rupert to assassins or not.”