by Kris Kennedy
They didn’t look happy, but their protests subsided. The rest of the group, after a final consultation on plans and backup plans, mounted their horses and reined into the woods. Alex and Hervé sat on their horses, one like a willow tree, the other like stump of petrified wood, in the centre of the clearing. Griffyn looked pointedly over his shoulder.
They reined around and plodded under the dripping eaves of the forest, then paused just beneath a low-lying branch. A shower of rain dribbled down on them. Hervé glanced up dismally.
“I know what Pagan said, but—” Alex began.
“—we wait,” Hervé finished.
Alex nodded. “He’ll come this way no matter what, on his return.” He looked over his shoulder. “She’s trouble. I feel it in my bones.”
Hervé glanced back at the inn too. “What harm is there, Alex? She’s just a woman.”
“She’s more than that.”
“How much more?”
Alex shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Turning away, they slowly dissolved into the brown and green dampness.
Griffyn walked back to the inn, aware of a truly novel thing: without warning or bidding, the rage of seventeen years was slipping away.
Ionnes de l’Ami had become as greedy and single-minded as Christian Sauvage—simply look to the hand he’d laid on the world. Forsworn an oath, stolen a castle, betrayed a blood brother.
Surely then, Gwyn, too, knew the desperation of watching your father warp before your eyes.
Like ice that has melted to just the right degree, everything started flowing. And that was, he admitted, surprisingly welcome. Rage had fanned his actions for too many years to count, driving him onwards, making him friend of kings and counts, but also making him unnatural. Mayhap it was coming time to focus his energies elsewhere.
Soon they would retake the country and he would go home. To the Nest. Mayhap, seeing as the woman abovestairs would be there too, would one day be his wife, he might settle his bones into this new thing: family.
It need not be as it had been for these last seventeen years, as it had ended for his father. It might, possibly, be like what he’d had a glimpse of last night. There was only one way to find out.
Chapter Twenty
The sun was westering by the time they reached St. Alban’s Abbey. Gwyn rode behind Griffyn, constantly aware of his bulk before her. They sat silently just inside the covering of trees, a few dozen, hidden paces from the abbey walls.
A handful of monks were arrayed out front, milling nervously and talking in animated conversation Gwyn could not overhear. Hands gestured, people pointed. She pressed her cheek against Pagan’s back and sat quietly, absorbing his heat and solidity.
He reached around silently and held her wrist. She knew this for what it was: a parting. Not that it should matter, she chastised herself savagely. She neither knew who he was nor whence he came, but somewhere deep inside her she knew what he was, and that meant good-bye.
It should mean her head being separated from her shoulders.
She ought to be grateful. She felt like dying.
One of the monkish voices rose above the others clustered outside the Abbey. “They come!”
From over the far crest of a hill, a handful of riders approached. They wore silk tunics diagonally split with colours, red and gold.
“Lord John,” called out one of the monks, his dark robes floating over the soggy earth as he hurried to greet them.
“Why, that’s John!” Gwyn exclaimed quietly, peering over Pagan’s shoulder. “The one I sent the message to, just last night. How on earth did he get here so quickly?”
John of Cantebrigge flung one foot over the saddle and bypassed the monks, heading straight for the abbot, who was lingering inside the gates. He tore his helm off as he went, and pulled the churchman aside, bringing both closer to where Gwyn and Pagan stood in the shadowy eaves. The men spoke quietly and in rapid voices.
“I ne’er thought you would make it,” said the abbot, Robert de Gorham.
John of Cantebrigge looked at the abbot hard. “So my messenger arrived?”
“Barely an hour ago.” The abbot lifted his hand and waved the others inside. A trail of monks and armoured men started inside the abbey walls. “We ought go in, my lord. ’Tis a dangerous place—”
“With Endshire about,” John of Cantebrigge finished grimly. He wiped his arm across his sweaty face. “I was returning to home from the London council—praise God, or who knows when I’d have been found—when a rider caught up with me, giving word that Lady Guinevere was making her way here.”
“But how?” exclaimed the abbot. His dark Benedictine habit shrouded his frail figure, and with the onrushing night darkening the skies, he looked like an enrobed spider with pink cheeks. And a shiny, tonsured head.
John shook his head. “I know not. I did not know the messenger. He wore no emblem, carried no seal, gave no information, and disappeared before my men could apprehend or question him. Unheard of, that. I thought,” he added grimly, “it might be a trap.”
“None that I know of. But the countess is not here.”
“Christ,” snapped John of Cantebrigge.
“My lord!” The abbot’s voice rose an octave on his emphasis.
“My apologies to you and your God. But where in Christ’s name is she?”
“My lord!” The abbot’s voice dropped an octave on this reprimand. John sighed.
“I have been doing penance for many years, my lord abbot. A few more won’t hurt me. You can lash me inside, but right now I’m more concerned with Lady Guinevere. You’ve heard nothing? Seen nothing?”
“Nothing.”
John said something unintelligible, then: “I’ll send out my men out to scour these woods. Perhaps she’s lost.”
“But how then did she ever send word?” enquired the abbot.
John shook his head as they turned and walked back towards the abbey.
Gwyn had been sinking further and further into Pagan’s back during the conversation, as if hiding, which was the oddest thing, for had not this been her destination for the entire day and previous night? And was that not her very own friend, come to save her?
Why then did it feel so like being hunted?
“You’d best go, Raven.”
“Aye,” she agreed tonelessly. She slid off the horse. He hopped down beside her. “And you?” she asked fiercely. “What will happen to you? Where do you go now?”
He didn’t say anything. She held back a shameful sob. The world was tilting, sending every thought into the tangled nest of her emotions. She stepped backwards, towards the abbey, out of the trees, into the solid, sunsetting world.
“Pagan—”
He reached out, his fingertips reaching out into the sunset, and she held her breath, hoping somehow he could change what had to be. But he didn’t. His fingers ran along her cheek, then dropped back into the shadows. His blue-grey gaze travelled slowly over her face, as if he were memorising her.
Nothing mattered but that look in his eyes. Not John, not the abbot, not the king nor his wars nor Papa from the grave. Nothing but that look in Pagan’s eyes.
Someone shouted. She jerked. His gaze tore from hers. Another shout. Her name. Someone was calling her name. She’d been seen.
Pagan melted back into the trees. Gwyn looked over her shoulder. One of John’s men was calling and running for his horse.
She spun desperately. Pagan’s perfect, dark shadow was disappearing into the dimness of the wood.
Another shout rose up from outside the abbey gates. She twisted around again,. There were John of Cantebrigge’s men, then she saw the others. A whole host of others, with crossed red swords on their tunics and a sable-black pennant, riding under the Abbey gates.
Marcus d’Endshire.
Her heart stopped beating. She reeled backwards. Something hard thumped against her thigh. She looked down wildly. Papa’s heirloom chest. Shivers spread outward over her skin like cracks
on an ice-bound lake. If she went in with that, Marcus would take it. The letters, and whatever lay beneath.
The knight from the abbey was galloping towards her.
She made a choice. Her only choice. Reckless, intuitive, dangerous.
She slipped back under the eaves, heart hammering. “I don’t even know you,” she whispered, more to her self than his.
Griffyn heard her murmur and ripped his gaze from Marcus’s men to her lovely, frightened face. “You know me, Raven.”
She wrenched the lumpy felt sack from around her waist and shoved it into his hands. “Take this.”
His fingers closed reflexively around the bag. “What is it?”
“Family heirlooms. For God’s sake, take it!”
Her whispers were short, staccato bursts of sound. Griffyn felt himself standing at a crossroads. Guinevere obviously thought it wasn’t safe inside the abbey, and deep inside, he knew it too. But neither was Everoot safe, if she was not there to keep it until he returned. So he let her go.
Her face was white and frightened under the shadows under the wet trees. Her dark hair slid forward over her shoulders as she reached out to him.
“You will find me?” she whispered.
He grabbed her hand and held it to his chest. “I will,” he said, thinking she’d never been so beautiful as she was just then, disheveled and desperate and needing him.
“Promise,” she insisted, tears filling her eyes.
“On my life,” he vowed hoarsely.
The tears started spilling down her cheeks. “On mine, Pagan. Promise on mine.”
He grabbed her face between his palms and crushed her lips under his in a harsh, possessive kiss. “On our lives.”
Releasing her, he pointed to the abbey gates, which were slowly rolling open. He swung up on Noir. “Go.”
Gwyn turned towards the abbey, barely able to see through her tears. She pushed under a low-hanging branch and looked over her shoulder. “You promised,” she whispered.
There was a shout from the abbey. Two men were coming through the open gates. Pagan melted into the shadows. She barely caught an outline of black-edged cape astride a dancing stallion. A lifted hand. And he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
Gwyn made her way clumsily, stumbling through growing darkness, over rutted dirt and tufts of dried grass of the outer abbey gardens. The shiny chestnut rump of the last horse of Marcus’s entourage had just disappeared through the gate when the knight on the galloping horse reached her.
Gwyn sighed as she was, once again, hoisted onto a horse by a strange man. He hurried her through the outer gate, which was pulled shut behind them, and trotted past the orchards and the maze of buildings that crowded inside the protective wall of the abbey fortress. Chapter house, cloister, slype—a wide, roofed corridor connecting the cloister with the cemetery—barn, friars’ dining hall. They finally arrived at the abbot’s lodgings on the west side of the abbey church.
She was bustled up to the abbot’s dormir, where she was met by John of Cantebrigge himself, who was pacing in front of the brazier. The abbot turned, stunned, frozen in the act of holding out a sheaf of parchment to Marcus fitzMiles, who was taking off his gloves.
They all gaped at her. The extended papers ruffled unheeded to the floor. She tried to look at John, but it was Marcus’s glittering gaze that held her.
“Good. You are safe,” he observed coldly.
“Aye,” she snapped, regaining her voice and moving into the room, “though by none of your efforts.”
John hurried to her side, and, giving her a brief hug, held her upper arms between his hands and looked her over carefully, his eyes missing nothing. “Gwyn,” he murmured, “Are you all right?”
“I am.” It was tempting to relax into his concern, but instead she nodded briskly and looked over his shoulder at Marcus. She mustn’t appear weak. “Why is Lord Marcus here?”
The abbot of the wealthy and prestigious abbey, glided over to her. “Lady Guinevere,” he said, taking her hand. “We were worried greatly. Praise God you are safely returned to us.”
“My lord abbot, I would praise God if I were returned to you, but why, I ask again, am I returned to him?” She nodded at Marcus. The abbot looked enraged.
Marcus smiled, the picture of calm, solicitous concern. “Lady Guinevere, you have ever been prone to fits of exuberance. ’Tis one of your charms. But with your father’s passing, and none to guard you, I am growing concerned that you may do yourself harm.”
He moved to her side, took her hand and kissed it.
A small, binding thread of good sense made her hold her tongue until he was close enough to be the only one to hear the whispered venom of her words. “Marcus,” she hissed as he bent over her hand, “I will surely do you harm before this night is out. I suggest you worry more on that.”
He unbent. “But I do worry for you, my lady, as do we all.” He gestured to the others.
A small, pricking fear snaked up Gwen’s spine. Her friend John was looking at her as he would a small child who’d nearly been crushed beneath a horse’s onrushing hooves. The abbot was looking at her as if she she’d been the one guiding the horse. He nodded his tonsured head pretentiously.
“You speak truly, my lord Endshire,” he droned. “And well do we appreciate your concern. Without you, we might ne’er have known to watch for the lady.”
“You sent word that I was missing?” she cried, looking back at Marcus.
He bent his head in a humble nod. “I thought perhaps you might come here, after you left London so swiftly last night.”
“I left swiftly,” Gwyn gasped, unable to believe this mummery he was performing, “because you threatened to wed me against my will!”
“I did but explore the possibility with you, my lady. That you took offence was not my intention, nor my desire.”
“Your desire? You explored it? Why, you threatened me!”
“I explained to you the value of such a union.”
“You sent troops to the Nest—”
“For your defence.”
“—and said if I did not wed you—”
“Then you at least would have some protection from the forces arraying against you,” he finished smoothly. “My men are there for the defence of Everoot. These are dangerous times, Gwyn,” he went on, his face becoming more serious as he dropped the use of her title and affected intimate concern, “and with your father so recently dead, there are those who conspire against the House of Everoot.”
“Indeed! With you among the worst!”
She turned to John, but his look of concern had deepened into one of unease. She spun to the abbot, but his hands were pushed up the sleeves of his robe and he was nodding his shiny head pompously. Gwyn wanted to fly into a rage.
“My lady,” John interjected quietly. He took up her hand again, kindness and worry in his look. “You need to be cleaned up.”
She stared numbly at the far wall, reality hitting her. They did not believe her. They thought ’twas as Marcus had said—either that, or it was more convenient to believe such. They thought she had fled like a small, impetuous child, unable to know her own mind nor to think clearly. They thought her…incapable.
She turned numbly and let John’s gentle hand guide her to the door.
“Where did you get the cloak, my lady?”
Marcus’s voice slid up her back like a cold hand. Her foot paused on its way to the ground, then she hurried forwards, pulling on John’s arm, trying to get out of the room before Marcus could ask his dangerous question again.
“My lady, where did you get the woollen cloak?”
“John,” she turned pleadingly to her old friend, “perhaps I am a bit turned in my head.” She swallowed the bilious rancor that accompanied pretending to be witless, and peered into his concerned eyes. “It has been a harrowing night, and I would rest now.”
“Stay, lady,” Marcus ordered quietly. “I would speak with you a while longer.”
Marcus laid a hand on her arm. “Wait.”
Gwyn threw him off with a jerk. She was dangerously close to flying into that rage, and it would be the worst possible thing. Assaulting Marcus with bared teeth would hardly prove her a reasonable, capable adult.
She and Marcus stared at one another, eyes glittering, shoulders squared.
“My lady,” interjected the abbot into the silent showdown. “Lord Endshire has not only brought word that you were in danger, for which you should give thanks rather than a critique of our Lord’s grace.” Here he frowned firmly. “But he also brings word that our lord king is considering giving your wardship to Lord Endshire, to ensure protection for you and your estates.”
Her mouth dropped open. “My king would not do that!” she cried. She wheeled to John. “Stephen made a promise to Papa! He promised he would not…he would not—” She tossed a helpless look over her shoulder at Marcus. “Give me to anyone without my consent!”
“King Stephen has other subjects than you, Lady Guinevere,” Marcus observed.
The abbot sniffed. “This childish selfishness bodes ill.”
Marcus glanced at the abbot, then took a sip of wine before continuing as if the churchman had not spoken. “Subjects who must be kept happy, as must you, of course.” He smiled. “I will do my best.”
This was not happening. She could barely control herself. Her hands clenched into fists and her face flushed hot.
“And so,” Marcus was saying, “our king felt the need to protect his interests. Namely, Everoot.”
“You mean Endshire,” she spat back. “You threatened him. You threatened my king.”
“Lady Guinevere,” the abbot reprimanded.
“He did,” she said, suddenly calm. “You sold your loyalty for a wardship.”
Marcus bowed slightly. “You shall be worth it, my lady.”
“It is not decided yet, is it?” she demanded, spinning to John.
He shook his head sadly, but the abbot interrupted. “By your actions,” he proclaimed, “’twill be determined if such a thing is necessary.” Here he sniffed, as if doubting they would see much to convince them otherwise. “To mine own mind, ’tis becoming more and more clear that such governance is indeed required.”