At the King's Command

by Susan Wiggs

  The combatants were both winded and panting. Alexei wielded his rapier in one hand and a short stabbing dagger in the other. He fought with the cool, taut skill of a seasoned warrior. Stephen used his sword and poniard with equal skill but a good deal more passion. He took risks, lunging recklessly and feinting back only inches from the Russian’s razor-sharp blade.

  The king called for refreshments and remarked expansively on the skill of the fighting men. Laughing with glee, he sat in the royal litter, a snow king with a red face and a hunger for blood sport.

  Juliana wished Laszlo were here or at least near. She stood alone and shivering, apart from the loud-mouthed nobles. When the daylight waned, bearers brought torches and set them in sconces along the walls. The orange glow gave the snow-clad yard a look of eerie familiarity.

  And that, more than anything, caused fear to rise in her chest. She moaned softly and swayed. The day had been long and eventful. She was pregnant. She was tired.

  Stephen and Alexei were killing each other.

  She could not forget the look on Stephen’s face when she had touched him. It was clear to her that he believed she had fled to meet Alexei.

  She flinched as the Russian’s blade lopped off Stephen’s sleeve. With his left leg boldly leading, Stephen slashed back. Alexei’s dagger stabbed at the basket hilt of his opponent’s sword.

  She started forward, but a strong hand held her back.

  She turned to see Jonathan Youngblood, who looked grim and travel weary. “He’s holding his own,” said Jonathan. “Don’t humiliate him any more than you already have.”

  “I? Humiliate Stephen de Lacey?”

  “You intercepted a royal summons and came racing to court to be with your Russian lover. In the eyes of most, that is something of an embarrassment.”

  “I had no idea Alexei would be here,” she protested. “I’d had no contact with him in five years. He—”

  “By God’s body!” Jonathan scowled at the distant, towering gatehouse. “That’s Kit coming in the gate.”

  For a moment Juliana looked away from the swordsmen. An amazing sight greeted her.

  Good God in heaven, they had all come. They resembled a troupe of traveling players, some in gypsy wagons, others on horseback. She saw Kit riding in the lead like a captain of the vanguard with Pavlo running at the stirrup. Then came Rodion on horseback with Jillie on pillion behind him, and even from a distance Juliana could see her bossy maid giving directions, pointing ahead while her mouth worked ceaselessly.

  In the wagon Dame Kristine and Nance Harbutt sat beside William Stumpe. And between them sat a small, pale-haired Oliver.

  Oh, no, she thought, her worst fears hardening in her gut. Please God, no. This will kill him.

  “A pox on my son,” Jonathan muttered. “I told him to stay in Wiltshire.”

  A grunt of surprise diverted her attention. She looked at the duelists in time to see Alexei recovering from a lunge. His smile was a cruel red slash in his beard.

  Stephen wore a look of shock and agony. The entire side of his face ran red with blood.

  With a sob, Juliana surged forward once again. And once again, Jonathan grabbed her. “ ’Tis not so bad as it looks. Head wounds, even shallow ones, bleed copiously.”

  “Do not be ridiculous. He must yield to Alexei.”

  Jonathan gave her a little shake. “Damn it, woman, what will it take to make you understand?”

  “Understand what?”

  “He’ll die before he yields.”

  She pressed her fist to her mouth and inhaled deeply. The smells of burning pitch and new-fallen snow wafted on the frosty air. She forced herself to watch. The combatants circled each other. Stephen’s cold eyes tracked his opponent with pinpoint sharpness, and she knew he was looking for the slightest hole in Alexei’s defense. Stephen sighted down his rapier, readying himself for a lunge. Alexei put up his own blade in defense while his gauntleted left hand hung low, beckoning. Taunting.

  Stephen thrust with the swiftness of a lashing whip. Alexei’s blade came up and parried the blow. Stephen was already in retreat, backing toward the makeshift pavilion where the king and his court sat enraptured.

  Alexei followed, his rapier whipping little rings in the air.

  “Aye, come for me, you rank Russian pestilence,” Stephen said through his teeth, his gaze never leaving the circling blade. “I make a big target, and you can see I already bleed.”

  “In my country,” Alexei said, “there is no dishonor in conceding the battle at first blood.” His sword thrust in and out like a bolt of lightning, but Stephen eluded it, backing toward the towering wall.

  “This is about a woman,” Alexei said. “Truly, my lord, is she worth dying for?”

  The bald question caused the merest crack in Stephen’s defense. In the blink of an eye, Alexei had him plastered against the wall, the deadly point of his rapier tickling Stephen’s throat.

  Stephen froze. So did the crowd. The only sounds were the shallow rasp of his breathing and the distant jangle of harness as the party from Lynacre approached.

  “Yield or die!” Alexei shouted.

  Stephen’s mouth curved into a smile. Then his booted foot came up and out, thudding against Alexei’s chest.

  Alexei stumbled back, then recovered into a defensive stance. But he had changed the terms of the battle. He had meddled with the alchemy of Stephen’s emotions and set loose a volatile mixture of passion, rage and injured pride.

  Stephen’s blade slashed in wide, relentless strokes. Back and back went Alexei, displaying real fear for the first time. His dark eyes showed white around the centers as he struggled to meet every slash and thrust.

  Stephen was like an animal toying with its prey, opening a wound in Alexei’s left arm, his right shoulder, his thigh. It happened so fast that Juliana saw the bleeding rather than the blow.

  Her husband was like a man wielding a scythe, hacking with unceasing rhythmical blows as Alexei grew more and more disoriented.

  Juliana’s mind played one of its tricks again. Stephen and Alexei were both raining blood upon the snow. In the torchlight their shadows loomed huge and menacing as demons. She was back in Novgorod again, under a snow-draped bush while soldiers butchered her family. She put her hands to her mouth to stifle a moan.

  A clattering sound broke the spell. Alexei’s sword went skittering across the snow-crusted courtyard and came to rest against a flight of squat stone steps.

  Stephen drew back his blade for the coup de grace.

  “No!” Juliana heard herself scream. “I beg you, Stephen, do not kill him!” She was not sure why she begged for mercy for Alexei. Perhaps because she knew the act of vengeance would make a murderer of Stephen and haunt him for the rest of his days.

  He lowered his blade. “I suppose,” he said calmly, between panting breaths, “we should have asked the lady to settle this in the first place. ’Twould have spared us a heap of trouble.”

  Alexei sank, bleeding and groaning, to the ground. Juliana started toward Stephen. The mother-sickness threatened to drive her to her knees, but she stumbled forward. She wanted to explain. She had so much to tell him that the words crowded into her throat.

  And then, before she reached him, the nightmare came to vivid, terrifying life.

  It was heralded by the furious bark of a dog.

  Alexei dove to reclaim his weapon. Like a creature possessed, he sprang forth out of the snow and shadows, shouting, “Be damned to hell!”

  Suddenly Juliana knew. It was the same voice she had heard all those years ago. The same words.

  The present became a mirror of the past: bloodred fire on new-fallen snow. The flashing sword slicing the air with a high-pitched whine.

  A hoarsely shouted curse. A deadly blade going down and down …

  Stephen must have heard Juliana’s formless cry of horror.

  He spun around, but he was too late. Alexei’s blade drove closer and closer. A canine snarl broke the moment.

>   A streak of ivory lightning lashed at Alexei, knocking him sideways and pinning him to the icy ground.

  The world had gone crazy. And yet everything made perfect, terrible sense. Juliana felt faint, struck down by shock and rage and memory.

  Seventeen

  Stephen paced like a sentry in the passageway outside his wife’s chamber door. Evening had slipped into night, when Hampton Court became a maze of cramped, torchlit corridors and draughty halls.

  “Damnation, Jonathan!” He winced as the cut on his face pulled taut. “What can be taking so long?”

  “Woman things. Do not try to fathom them. They are a danger to a man’s sanity.”

  Stephen pounded his fist on the smooth stone wall. He was sore in every bone and muscle from the sword-fight. “She dropped like a felled sapling. She was like a corpse when they carried her off. It’s been hours.”

  “She swooned, Stephen. Now, to you and me that is a foreign notion, but women do it all the time. Doubtless she was overcome by the sight of her beloved in peril.”

  “Alexei Shuisky was never in peril,” Stephen snapped. “That dog wouldn’t have killed him.”

  “I wasn’t speaking of the Russian,” Jonathan said, slapping his ample girth. “I meant you, good brother.”

  A foolish leap of hope surged in Stephen. Ruthlessly he beat it back. “I am no witling. She fled Lynacre because the king sent word that the Russian had come for her.”

  “Are you certain that’s why she left?”

  Pained remembrances of their quarrel ached in him. He had all but driven her away.

  Nance appeared and bobbed a curtsy. “Has she awakened, my lord?”

  Stephen shook his head. “Dame Kristine is with her still. How fares my son?”

  “Well, my lord. He is already fast friends with tiny Prince Edward. They are both asleep in the royal nursery.”

  Stephen had been shocked by the appearance of Oliver at Hampton Court. Come the morrow, he would thrash the brat within an inch of his life. No, he would not. He would hug the boy and try to find a way to explain why Juliana would never come back to Lynacre.

  “I wonder what the king has to say about the duel,” Jonathan said.

  Nance poked a finger under her wimple and scratched her head. “ ’Twas a curious thing, my lord. His Majesty called a privy meeting, he did.” She shrugged. “The ways of princes be a great confounding bother to my brain, but even such as myself knows—”

  “She sleeps,” Dame Kristine whispered, coming out of the chamber. “She came around just for a moment or two. Spoke in that foreign tongue of hers. Something about the Russian prince.”

  “Alexei Shuisky.” Stephen tasted the bitterness of his rival’s name. “I shan’t disturb her. I just want to sit with her awhile.” He turned to Nance. “Go to the nursery and watch over Oliver. If he so much as coughs, come and fetch me.”

  He stepped into the darkened room and closed the door behind him. The only illumination came from the glow of embers in a brazier beside the bed. Crossing to the window, he opened the shutters, letting in a stream of indigo winter moonlight.

  He saw, with a tingling of dread, a vigil stool beside the bedstead. Such a stool had been his constant perch while he had watched Meg bleed to death after the birth of Oliver.

  He set the stool aside and parted the bedcurtains.

  The moonlight fell slantwise across the sleeping form of Juliana. The bluish quality of the light gave her face a fairy glow that pierced his heart with tenderness.

  God’s teeth, he loved her.

  The stark certainty of it filled him with a terrible joy. He had vowed never to love again, never to lay his heart open to agony. Never to make himself vulnerable to the emotional vagaries of another.

  And yet in just a few short months, Juliana had made him fall in love twice: with his son, and with her.

  That love had crystallized into a sense of purpose he had thought lost to him forever. He stood looking at her, with her skin as pale and smooth as cream, bruised shadows under her eyes, her hair a halo of dark silk spreading out over the pillow.

  She had come like a whirlwind into his life, stripping away his defenses with more precision than a gifted swordsman. From the first moment he had seen her—a grubby, beloused horse thief—a part of him had somehow understood that their destinies were inevitably entwined.

  And now he stood to lose her.

  “No.” He spoke the vow aloud to the silence. He would beg her on his knees if need be. Generations of stern de Lacy pride flew out the window. His life was empty without Juliana.

  The thought ran through his head as he banked the embers in the brazier and then stretched out on the bed beside her. To his shameless gratification she turned to him and snuggled close.

  “Aye, beloved, you belong here, right here in my arms,” he whispered in a stranger’s voice. “And when you awaken, that is the first thing I shall say to you.”

  “I love you.”

  The words came to Juliana from out of a dream. She smiled in her sleep and curled closer to the warm, long-bodied man in the bed beside her. She inhaled his scent of fresh air and leather and the faint hint of woodsmoke that clung to his hair. A stray lace from his shirt tickled her cheek.

  She brushed it away and came awake to complete amazement. “Stephen!”

  His warm lips pressed against her temple. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  She raised herself on one elbow and blinked at the darkness. He loomed very close, an inky shadow against the curtain enclosing the bed. He angled his head toward her, and the sleepy glow of moonlight glinted in his eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  His shoulders went rigid. “I had to make certain you were well. Are you?”

  “Yes. I had not eaten all day, and the winter air made me light-headed. I am fine now.” The half-truth burned in her throat. She was quick with a babe he did not want. And somewhere in the palace slept the murderer of her family.

  She nearly confessed all to Stephen—about the baby, about Alexei. But now she knew the value of caution and the imprudence of Stephen’s temper. If she told him that Alexei had murdered her family, Stephen would challenge the Russian again. And this time Alexei might prevail.

  The thought of losing Stephen made her shiver. It was her fight, her revenge. Hers alone.

  “Cold?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he parted the curtains and dragged the brazier on its brass stand closer to the bed. He stared at her for a long moment, then seemed to come to some decision.

  In one swift movement, he pulled off his shirt. Juliana tried not to look at him, tried not to see the beloved lines of his profile, tried not to feel the love rise inside her. Her contentment with Stephen must wait until she had confronted Alexei and brought him to justice.

  Stephen turned to her and cradled her face in his hands. “How beautiful you look in the moonlight,” he whispered. His thumb caressed her cheek and then her lower lip, slipping inside to touch the moistness there. “Juliana, I do love you.”

  She was unprepared for the blaze of joy that swept over her, leaving her breathless. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how badly she had needed him to love her. Certain he would know she was hiding something, she sat up and turned away. “I thought I’d dreamed hearing you say that,” she heard herself whisper.

  “ ’Twas no dream.” He moved close to her from behind, lifted the hair away from the nape of her neck, and traced his tongue over her sensitive skin. A hot tingle of pleasure shimmered up her spine.

  “Stephen?” Her voice held a low thrum of yearning.

  “Do you want me to stop, love?” He loosened her chemise and bared her back inch by inch, his lips following in the wake of the wispy fabric. “If you’re still feeling unwell, I’ll stop.”

  “No, I feel fine,” she said hastily, greedy for him.

  His hands cradled her breasts, gently caressing, bringing her to a state of mindless passion.

  “I
want … I …”

  “Yes?” The chemise pooled at her waist, and he turned her, placing his mouth where his hands had been. “Say it, sweetheart.”

  Her desire for him was one thing she could not hide. “I want you.”

  As soft and startling as the beat of a moth’s wings, his lips moved lower, awakening every inch of her flesh, parting her legs for a kiss so intimate that she was certain she was close to dying. Her response was swift and blinding, a profound splintering sensation followed by a breathless moment of oblivion. In a half-dazed state she drew him up and embraced him fiercely until they were fully and deeply joined.

  His climax was as lightning-sharp as hers had been, and she loved him for the honest wonder she saw in his face when he cried out her name. For all of his carnal accomplishments, he still seemed to find something new and shining and delightful about making love to her.

  Like the calm after a storm, passion subsided and they lay replete in each other’s arms. Stephen drew the thick layers of blankets over them and pressed her cheek to his chest. “Sleep, Juliana,” he whispered, his voice thick with slumber. “On the morrow we’ll speak of … everything.”

  She knew he meant Alexei, and that thought kept her awake long after he had drifted into contented sleep.

  When she felt certain he was deeply asleep, she slipped from the bed, dressed in the dark, and extracted Stephen’s sword from its sheath. Before leaving, she paused to look at him, his face relaxed and unbearably appealing in the pale moonlight. He said that he loved her.

  She clasped the thought close to her heart as she went alone, into the night, to confront the demon of her past.

  “Bloody hell!” Stephen sat up in the big draped bedstead. He had awakened to empty arms and an empty bed.

  Where in God’s name had Juliana gone?

  He ripped back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, blinking at the early dawn light and shoving his feet into his boots.

  A skin of ice had formed on the surface of the water in the basin. Without a moment’s hesitation, he cracked the ice and scooped frigid water over his face.