Fair, Bright, and Terrible

by Kingston, Elizabeth

  She did not bother pretending he was wrong about her intention or her target. It was dawning on her now, the truth of it sinking like a stone thrown into her spirit, that she would not realize her goal. There was no use dissembling, not with what he had seen. She looked down at the poison in her hand briefly before opening the purse on her belt and dropping it in. He watched her closely. At his politely questioning look, she said, “Nightshade.”

  He acknowledged this with an appreciative expression, then seemed to consider it for the barest moment.

  “But you would use poison only if you must. You prefer the blade, and the blood it brings.” It was matter of fact, offhanded in a way that only a murderer could be about such a thing. “The maidservant who helps you, what is her part in it?”

  “She has no part. I only promised her a coin if she told me when he was alone and asleep.”

  His brows lifted with skepticism. “What good fortune, that he should fall asleep alone by his fire while the rest of the court is gathered in celebration.”

  She took a breath, waiting for more. But he did not accuse, or mock, or demand answers. “The girl is innocent entirely.” She looked at the dagger gripped comfortably in his hand and felt the bitterness of defeat rise to the back of her throat. It welled up under her tongue. Thwarted. Again. And by him, again. “When you tell your king, you may say in honesty that none knew of my plans this night. I have laid them well, and all in secret and alone.”

  “Nor do I doubt there will be hints and proofs of it, exactly such bits as will paint the very picture you wish the king to see. Well do I know your skill in that art.” He shifted his weight, leaning his shoulder to the wall and crossing his ankles – a casual, conversational pose. “But you do not answer me. Why Roger Mortimer?”

  All the reasons tumbled through her mind, a blur of anger and hate that reached beyond one man. She gave him the simple answer.

  “He set the trap for Llewellyn. He carried his head as trophy to the king.”

  She felt Ranulf’s eyes on her, and kept her own blank and staring into nothing. So close. She had been so close. Mortimer should be dead, right now. She pictured it and felt a pang that was like hunger or sorrow, and knew it showed in her face. It occurred to her that of anyone she had ever known, Ranulf of Morency might recognize it.

  Even as the idea came to her, he said, “So sweet is the thought of his death that you ache with wanting it.” He spoke like one reminiscing about a pleasant dream, nostalgia for something lost. “You think…the blade slides into flesh and there will be relief. Satisfaction. You think the ache will stop with his heart.”

  She met his eyes, calm and deep blue. She knew, even before the small shake of his head, what he would say.

  “It never stops,” he said, utterly still, utterly certain.

  He had been only seventeen when he killed his father. Foster father, she reminded herself reflexively, but it was a distinction that was almost meaningless. The man who had raised him, loved him as a son. A cruel man who was dreaded and loathed, from everything she had learned. She had made it her business to learn about that brute because he had been betrothed to her daughter. Eluned had done everything she could to delay the marriage and keep Gwenllian safe, ensuring her child learned every necessary defense against the day she must be given to him. And then he was dead, suddenly and most fortuitously, by Ranulf’s hand.

  She should thank him for it. But he hadn’t done it for her, or for Gwenllian. He had done it to gain the king’s favor. Murder in cold blood, the unsuspecting victim asleep and alone, a knife in the night as he lay helpless in sleep. It was not a comfortable thought, to know how nearly her actions mirrored his own.

  “Never tell me you have come here to save me from the disappointment of success.” She pressed her palms, suddenly damp and shaking, to her skirt. Would he take her to the king now, or would he give her time first to go to Robert and explain? She did not know what to hope. She could not imagine what to say to her husband, how he would react. Robin, she thought, and a pang worse than hunger or sorrow bit into her.

  Ranulf’s face changed subtly, a tightening of his mouth that said he was no happier than she, to find himself here.

  “I have told you true – I come for the sake of my lady wife, who is troubled by your silence.” There was the faintest trace of disgust in his expression. “And what can I tell her on my return, but that you have spared no thought for her grief, sent no word of comfort, because you cared more for bloody vengeance than for her?”

  There was a delay between his uttering the words and her comprehension. There was no mistaking the accusation and it caused a cold rage to shoot through her, to her very fingertips. “Do you dare to say I have abandoned her?”

  “I say you are here with dagger in hand, while she mourns alone.”

  “Alone!” she fairly shouted at him. Her anger, so long and deeply hidden beneath the cold, burst into riotous bloom. “I watched him die. I held his hand and heard him speak of her with his last breath. I mourned alone as they lowered him into the ground, him and his father, my uncle who I loved with my whole heart. I watched alone and helpless as Wales was vanquished, and I could give no aid, I must watch it happen, I must bear all of it alone because she chose you.” She was breathing hard now, heedless words tumbling out. But she did not care. Let him see, let anyone see what she felt, what did it matter anymore? “The sword that might have defended him, the sword that I put in her hand, she yielded it to you.”

  She could still see it, the image burned into her mind: Gwenllian striding away, offering up her weapon to this man. The sight of it had touched off something in Eluned, something like a mortal terror so overwhelming that she remembered nothing of what she had done or said in that moment. The memory of it must show on her face now, for Ranulf looked at her warily, too obviously unsure of what to say.

  His uncertainty brought her up short, calmed her with its very humanness. He was only a man. Not a monster, not a thief who had set out to rob her of her hopes and her daughter. Just a man in love who, like any other, could not see beyond that love. The resentment drained from her, leaving only an honest appeal in her eyes as she looked to him.

  “Do you know what it cost me, to put that sword in her hands? Can you fathom the price?” She turned her gaze on the flame from the torch. She stared at the brightness until her eyes burned, until it blinded her. Still she could see Robin, young and smiling, summer sun on his hair.

  “Would you change it, if you could?” Ranulf asked. “Knowing she would never use the sword as you wished, would you keep it from her and spare yourself the cost?”

  She knew the answer. She had always known the answer, but she waited a long time before telling him. “No. I would not.”

  “I am glad to hear it,” he said, “for she still wields it, sometimes. She would not have the women of Morency as weak creatures, and so she teaches them such defenses as they may need against lecherous men. And she would not have her husband grow soft.” He quirked a sudden smile at her. “She trains with me in secret. There is none can match her skill.”

  Eluned felt her heart burst back to life at the picture his words painted. What a wonder was her daughter: strength like hope, stubbornly growing in places it was never meant to thrive. What a scene it must have been, if she was determined to seek out Eluned and her husband was equally determined to prevent it. It almost made her smile.

  In the silence, she turned her back to Ranulf and rubbed her hands over her face. She let herself imagine Gwenllian grieving at the news of Madog, bewildered at her mother’s hasty marriage. “Did she fear I would grow mad?”

  “Nay, she feared your spirit would wither, and you become like a ghost. It was I who thought madness, or something like. Nor did I tell her so, for I would not add to her distress.” She turned back to find him looking down again at the dagger, turning it over in his hand. “Did you think to slit his throat or put it in his heart?” There was a note of professional interest in his voice.
“I think you would not put it in his back.”

  “The neck,” she said, through lips grown suddenly numb. “To sink it at the base of his throat.”

  “And leave it there?” He raised his brows in appreciation. “So to stop the blood from rushing over you, and the dagger left planted in his corpse as message.” He shrugged. “A fitting symbol of vengeance, even if only you would understand it fully. And your daughter, and me.”

  She could not say how she knew it, but she was suddenly certain that he would not tell the king, or warn Mortimer. He would stop her tonight, and then depend on her to abandon her plot for the sake of her daughter. Or maybe he meant to menace her, she thought, as he leveled a speculative look at her.

  “You would do it on the Epiphany. In truth I had little time to remark who was in the hall before you quit it, but I can think of no one who was absent from the revelries that you might easily blame.”

  “Because there is no one.” He stared hard at her and she lifted her chin abruptly, a jab at him and his presumptions. “What is left of my life is little value to anyone. I will not have an innocent hang for my sins.”

  The look he gave her was supremely skeptical.

  “Little value? It was a short time I spent observing in the hall, but it wanted only an instant to recognize Robert de Lascaux by the way he looks at you.” She blinked, but gave him no more than that. “I know naught of him and would say it marked him a fool, did not one so worthy as Gwenllian look on you also with love. Would you have her lose her mother to the noose, then, even as she has lost her friend to your war?”

  “Not my war,” she said. “You saw to that, as did she.”

  He inclined his head in acknowledgement. “And if you sought to entangle Gwenllian in this scheme, be assured we would not stand here in peace. It does seem as you will harm only yourself, by design. I would wager you have labored to keep your new husband safe from this plot, and your son. You even try to protect the serving girl.”

  He looked at her a long moment, the dark eyes considering her closely, as she thought how different was this man from any other she had known. He was dangerous without the edge of lechery or madness. Like Kit Manton, he was quietly observant – but with none of Kit’s kindness. She knew he saw her, what she was, in a way no one else had ever done. No one except Robert. But Robert saw her true nature and loved her. Ranulf of Morency saw and understood her, a cold recognition with no room for anything like love in it.

  “Do you know why I killed my foster father?” he asked, as idly as though he were inquiring after the dinner menu. Still it made her heart stop, so strange and sudden was the question. “The true reason, that lay beneath the furious hunger for revenge – what there was in the clearheaded moment of choosing? I have not even told Gwenllian, but I will tell you.”

  His eyes were still fixed on hers, demanding attention, but he seemed to see more than just her face before him. He was looking too at the memory of that moment, the memory of the decision that had changed the course of his life.

  “I chose to be a villain,” he said simply, and his mouth curled up gently at the corner. “The one who would be feared, and respected. Who they would whisper about, and dread to see. I knew well what I chose. And yet I did not know. Villainy outlasts the vengeance, you see.” He looked her up and down, a brief assessment, curious. “What will outlast your moment of revenge, my lady? What do you think to accomplish this night?”

  She watched the play of torchlight on the wall. How strange, to speak of such things so easily. She said, “His death. That he will not be allowed to claim a slice of my homeland as his own.”

  “So Roger Mortimer is dead, and then what?”

  “Then his brother Edmund, if I am granted the opportunity.”

  “And then their sons? Their sisters, their nephews? Yet when every one of them is slain and buried, some other lord who is just as cruel and brutish as Mortimer will take his place, and Wales will still be under Edward’s rule.” He shifted, leaning both shoulders against the wall, looking down at her with faint but unmistakable contempt. “Such wit as you possess, and you find no better use for it than the work of a butcher.”

  She did not even feel the insult of it. She knew he was right. Some rational part of her had known it from the first and she had paid it no heed. It was easy to bury the sound of that small voice of reason when all of her cried out for a reckoning.

  “I want…” Revenge for Wales, she thought. An impossible thing. Wales was lost. No amount of blood could ever serve as payment for so huge a loss. “It is no matter.”

  “Oh it matters, else we would not be here now. What do you want?”

  She closed her eyes and saw Robert, moonlight falling on his face as he called her cariad and reached for her. And with it, she heard the sad finality in his voice when he declared that loving her now would be the ruin of him. These crucial lessons she had forced herself to learn: she could not have Robert; she could not save Wales.

  “Impossible things,” she said, opening her eyes again. “It is my fate to want impossible things.”

  He shrugged. “Verily, how impossible for the wife of a new marcher lord to care for the Welsh who will fall under her protection. To allow them the exercise of their own laws, to preserve their customs and help them to prosper under an English king. To accomplish something lasting.”

  There was irony in his voice, but it spoke volumes that he did not mock her, or sneer. She let the import of his words sink in, allowed the voice of reason to be heard over the voice that cried out for blood. How singular, that he of all men would make her see this.

  “To build instead of kill?” she asked lightly, assessing him in her turn. He had stayed away from court and king for three years. Three years at least, then, that he had played at being not villain but noble lord. “Was it a fine harvest at Morency this year?”

  His mouth twitched in suppressed laughter, a sign that he would not belabor the point. “Very fine.” He straightened from the wall and let his arms drop to his sides, the dagger still in one hand. “Come, it grows late and Sir Ademar will want his bed soon enough,” he said with a nod toward one of the mattresses.

  He reached up and took the torch from the bracket, then stood watching the light play off the blade of the dagger again. His thumb rubbed across the crude etching on the pommel, the markings that identified it as Madog’s weapon.

  He held it out to her, hilt first, for a long and silent moment. The air between them was heavy, crowded with countless unvoiced thoughts, the blade shining at the center of it all.

  “If you will do it,” he said, “do it far from court. And it is worth the time and forethought to make it look like an accident.”

  The torch lit his face from beneath, shadowing his eyes. She stretched out a hand to the dagger, felt its heft again and saw all the gleaming possibilities in the sharp point. Then she set it back in his waiting palm.

  “Take it to Gwenllian,” she said. She swallowed hard around a sudden swelling in her throat. “It should never have left her side.”

  Drunken revelers were beginning to drift from the hall as she reached her chambers. She walked slowly, feeling no need for haste. Robert may be within, and she was unsure if she was yet ready to speak to him after her encounter.

  But when she entered and found the outer room empty, a sudden and terrible loneliness swept over her. She stood with it, breathless and cold in the face of her longing for him. What would she not give to lean on him in moments like these, to come home to his embrace? She looked at the glowing embers in the hearth and remembered him on the night they were wed, all openness and hope and affection. And she, cold and unhesitating, had pushed him away. It was as much a sin as any the priests taught, she was sure, though they were like to call it venial while she thought it more unforgivable than most she had committed.

  She lit the small lamp and took careful, quiet steps across the floor until she reached the threshold of the inner room. His bed curtains were drawn shut, but
she pulled them gently aside, to be sure he was there. The sound of his breath reached her first, and then the soft light fell on his sleeping form. His back was to her, or she might have watched him longer. Instead, she stepped back and let the curtain fall closed again.

  With the sound of his occasional sleeping sighs to interrupt her thoughts, she stood in the cold beside his bed. The conversation with her daughter’s husband echoed through her mind. What did she want? Choose carefully what you dare to desire, she had told herself, time and again. And Robert had spoken true: she had no small ambitions.

  She could still choose villainy. It was plain as the dagger he had held forth that Ranulf would not stop her. Her mind was churning without her prompting, as it so often did, calculating details and possibilities – but not for revenge. No, now she was thinking of the manor house at Dinwen, which the king would grant to Robert, and how it should be better fortified to serve as refuge for the nearby town. She was thinking of how the Welsh priests had complained of interference from the English archbishop, and of a cousin who would lose her right of inheritance under English law, and of what could be done for them. She was thinking that she wished Robert was awake so that she could tell him all these things, and hear his thoughts.

  She could have revenge, or she could have him.

  There was a faint sound in the outer room, and she went to find one of the servants entering. Eluned whispered instructions to the girl, then bade her leave. When she was alone again, she uncoiled her braid to let it hang down her back, then removed her belt and the phial from inside the purse. She wrapped her heavy cloak around her shoulders and walked to the makeshift bed where she had slept these many nights. Her ivory box rested there amid the cushions. Taking the key from around her neck, she opened it and saw the letter she had so carefully written, neat and easy evidence. She put the phial in the box and lifted the letter out, sparing a long moment to look at the keepsakes that lay beneath it.