by Lara Adrian
“How sad to think this little angel might be without a home,” Alys had said in her gentle, compassionate voice.
Dom saw the hope in her eyes, sensed with budding alarm the direction of her thinking. “He's likely just lost,” he interjected, scowling furiously when the babe gurgled and cooed in Alys's arms. “Someone might be looking for him. He must belong somewhere.”
Alys's understanding smile only angered him further. She looked to her husband then, something warm and unreadable in her gaze. “Perhaps we should keep him here, my lord,” she suggested, “until we can be sure.”
Standing in the sunlit center of his father's solar, Dom had waited for Robert of Droghallow to refuse Alys's plea, to toss out her rescued whelp with equal impassivity. He waited to see the stern scowl he knew so well turned for once on his pretty stepmother. He waited to hear the hard impatience in his father's tone as he told his wife to take the child and its likely troubles away from his castle.
Dom had waited, but Robert of Droghallow's refusal did not come. Instead, he lovingly reached out and cupped his bride's face in his palm. He kissed her brow, then looked down to inspect her squirming bundle. Dom could hardly breathe. His every muscle had been coiled and tense, expectant, as he watched his father's mouth begin to quirk into slight, rare grin.
Then, to his complete and utter fury, Robert of Droghallow nodded his head.
“If it pleases you, my lady,” he had said to Alys in a tender voice, “it pleases me.”
“No! You can't! This isn't fair!” Dom had actually shouted his disbelief, the first time he had ever raised his voice in his father's presence. His outburst shocked himself as much as it shocked everyone else in the room. And it had earned him a severe cuff aside his head when his father whirled on him in that next moment.
“Enough, Dominic,” Robert of Droghallow growled, jabbing a hard finger at him. “No son of mine will whine and wail before me like a little girl.”
“Robert, please,” Alys had chided softly when Dom's tears welled and began to fall. “He's just a boy. He can't help how he feels. Give him time, my lord, he'll understand.”
But Dom did not understand. Resenting his foster brother from the start, he prayed the boy's kin would come and take him back. He prayed he would simply vanish from Droghallow, and when the weeks he stayed turned into years, Dom did everything he could to destroy Griffin, beginning with the subtle yet unrelenting sabotage of his relationship with Lord Robert, a sabotage that did not end until the earl was dead of a failed heart at the age of forty-two.
Robert of Droghallow had been hunting with Griffin earlier that day, enjoying a brisk autumn excursion while Dom nursed a head cold in his chamber. His father had come back laughing but pale and exhausted, complaining of indigestion as he took to his bed to rest a while.
Alys had been worried. While Griffin was stabling the horses and delivering the day's bounty to Droghallow's butcher, Alys ran to fetch Dom. “Your father is not well,” she told him. “Come quickly.”
Dom had raced to the lord's chamber where Robert of Droghallow lay, fully-clothed and unmoving atop the fur coverlet of his large bed. He looked strangely small in that moment, Dom recalled, a pallid shadow of the boisterous, masculine giant his son had long feared and revered. Dom went to his side and clasped his hand around his father's big sun-browned fingers.
“He's so cold,” Dom had said to Alys, who stood at his back, her jaw quivering, gentle eyes filling with tears. “We must do something!”
“I'll go get the priest,” she whispered brokenly, then hastened out of the chamber, leaving the two men alone.
Dom had nearly jumped out of his skin when he turned back and heard his father rasp out a single, incomprehensible word from between his white lips. “Shh, Father,” he said, squeezing the limp hand he held so tightly in his own. “Rest easy now.”
The earl's eyelids fluttered slightly as a small spasm seized him. “Griffin,” he breathed, and Dom's blood seemed to freeze to ice in his veins. “Griffin . . . is that you, my boy?”
“It's me, Father,” Dom whispered, pained beyond measure. “It's me, your son.”
But Robert of Droghallow likely did not hear him, for in that next instant, he sucked in a shallow breath and his entire body went rigid. A moment later, that thready gasp of breath and all the air that yet remained inside of his lungs leaked out on a queer, prolonged rattle that marked the ebb of the man's life.
Just like that, he was gone.
Alys and the chaplain arrived not long after, Griffin racing in but a few steps behind them. Dom released his father's dead hand as his stepmother threw herself over her husband's body, weeping with sorrow. The priest crossed himself and murmured a prayer for Robert's soul. Griffin stood in the doorway, his sandy hair still wind-tousled, his cheeks still ruddy from the day spent outdoors. His eyes were as sad as any grief-stricken son's, his strong jaw clamped tight, a sixteen-year-old man too proud to cry.
“I can't believe he's gone,” he said, shaking his head as Dom approached him. “He seemed well enough all morn--robust as ever I've seen him, jesting about a dozen different things. There was no hint at all that he was ill.” Dom felt his hatred coil a little tighter when he pictured his father riding beside Griffin, clapping him on the shoulder, making jokes, bonding as he never had with his own flesh and blood son. “Would that I had known,” Griffin was saying. “Would that I had been here. Did he say anything to you, Dom? Anything at all before he passed?”
Dominic had met Griffin's searching gaze and held it, choosing his words with cool deliberation. “Yes, actually. He did say something,” he replied evenly. “He said that he was glad I was at his side. He said he was proud to have me--his son--beside him in his final moments on this earth.”
Dom did not understand Griffin's quiet acceptance of the lie. He did not understand why he chose to stay on at Droghallow after Dom became earl, a position that allowed him to lord over his foster brother and the rest of the folk as he had always dreamed, ruling with a demanding, unforgiving nature that would have--perhaps, at last--made his father proud.
Dom easily could have turned Griffin out of the keep and never thought twice about it. Alys would have protested, surely, but he could have ignored her, and soon enough she was dead anyway, perished of ague the winter after her husband's death. Dom instead had decided it would be more amusing to keep Griffin on at Droghallow, to have the idealistic golden boy serve him as captain of the guard. Dom had worked hard to corrupt him, charging him with the most unpleasant of tasks and watching with private glee as slowly, day by day, year by year, Griffin's damnable sense of honor lost more and more of its luster.
The sad truth was, Griffin was a born leader. Even through his blinding animosity for him, Dom could see that plain fact. In another place, under other circumstances, Griffin might have been a great man, capable of great things. But he'd had the misfortune of arriving on Droghallow's doorstep twenty-five years ago, and if anyone was to blame for what became of him while there, Dom was of the mind that it was Alys, not him, who should have shouldered that guilt. After all, it was she who took him in. She who pretended to know nothing of his origins when in fact he was blood kin to her--the son of a highborn cousin, a babe sent away in secret to be raised by the barren Alys and her devoted husband.
This knowledge came to Dom quite by chance, upon his discovery of a cache of correspondence hidden away by his stepmother and not unearthed until a few weeks after her death. Dom had ordered her chamber cleared of all belongings, a task nearly completed when a maid came to him with a small coffer she had found hidden behind a loose stone in Alys's chamber wall.
“I don't know how I missed it until now,” the maid had said when Dom broke open the box to see what it contained. “Lady Alys must have kept it hidden there all along, right under our noses.”
Dom expected to find some manner of treasure secreted inside, something to warrant Alys's care in concealing the sturdy wooden container. Though he had not discover
ed gold, he had found a boon of another sort, for inside was a collection of letters. Hundreds of them. One for each month that Griffin was at Droghallow, lovingly penned by a mother who missed her son and lived each day with the guilt of sending him away.
Dom wasn't sure if his father had been aware of Griffin's true parentage. He rather doubted the old man would have cared. Griffin was all the son that Dom could never be: strong and hale, equally adept with both sword and wit. If he had not died so unexpectedly, Robert of Droghallow might have been tempted to take steps to entrust Griffin with his properties instead of Dom. Just thinking on that likely prospect was enough to cause Dom's blood to boil anew.
The way Dom saw it, Griffin had robbed him of his father's affection. If not for his arrival, the earl might have been able to eventually find room in his heart for the weakling son of his first wife. He might have been able to take some measure of pride in him, might have been able to love him just a little. By design or nay, Griffin had stolen Dom's place in his own household, and for too long, Dom had been seeking repairs for that offense.
He had gained some satisfaction toward that end by reading every letter Griffin's mother had written. It had taken hours to wade through them all and when he was finished, Dom burned them that very same day, knowingly denying Griffin the information, confident that he would find a use for it one day on his own.
And so he had, the day he learned of Prince John's want to stop a certain noble marriage.
This last task--the kidnap of the Montborne bride--would have all but evened the score. Indeed, when Dom had first heard about the pending union, and Prince John's want to thwart it, he could not have offered his services fast enough. Griffin was his natural choice--his only choice--for the mission.
“You have my word,” Dom told the prince now, breaking out of his reflection to meet the cold gray stare of John Plantagenet. “Griffin and the woman will be apprehended. There is no one who is more determined to see this deed through to fruition than myself.”
Not even you, he amended silently as he bowed before his royal conspirator and was granted his leave.
Chapter 20
Isabel remained asleep--mercifully unconscious--for the time it took Griffin to find them feasible shelter so he could look after her wound. The only asylum to be had was in the woods outside Derbyshire, a deep cavern notched between two massive slabs of lichen-covered granite. Adequate at best, but well hidden. Griff dismounted to make a quick check of the place, then, satisfied with its state of total vacancy, he went back to his waiting mount to fetch Isabel.
Carrying her in his arms, his horse's lead in one hand, Griff ventured into the cave. A flat expanse of dry rock would have to serve as Isabel's pallet as he tended her. Griff set her down as gently as he could, positioning her where there was the best light. This far back in the cavern, sunlight was a meager, fleeting thing. It squeezed in through the cave's narrow mouth, stretching in like a hag's finger, a milky nimbus that would be all but vanished in a matter of an hour.
Griff made haste to use his time to best advantage, bringing together what few tools he had to work with and returning to kneel at Isabel's side.
Even in the dim light of the cavern, he could see the grim evidence of the bolt's damage. Isabel's blood stained the deep blue wool of her mantle where the torn fabric pressed against her injured arm, a thickening patch of wet blackness that set a knot of fear in Griffin's throat. With care not to disturb her, he lifted the edge of the cloak away, then grasped the sleeve of Isabel's gown as gingerly as he could and rent it at the shoulder seams.
His breath hissed out of him when he saw the ravaged patch of skin laid bare.
It seemed such a heinous violation, so incongruous, that terrible, ragged ugliness marring the pale perfection of her skin. At least the arrow had only grazed her. Had she leaped any farther into its path, the bolt would have impaled her upper arm, a grim thought Griff refused to ponder for long. Steeling himself to what must be done, he reached over to retrieve his saddle pack from the floor beside him.
He pulled a wineskin from within the pouch, cursing when he realized it could contain no more than a couple of swallows. Better than none at all, he decided, but he still needed a length of cloth with which to bind her arm once it was cleaned. He grabbed up the hem of her rumpled mantle then threw it aside in frustration. Wool would only breed festering; the best bandage would be of breathable fabric.
Griff's gaze slid back to the fine silk gown Isabel wore. The voluminous skirts were soiled and torn from her fall, but beneath the mantle clasped together at her throat, the bodice of the dress was still a pristine white. It would have to suffice. Griff knelt down and untied the laces that bound the garment's neckline together above Isabel's breasts, then paused. There would be no easy way to get her out of the gown without jostling her and he was loathe to add to her discomfort. Left no other choice, he drew a dagger from a sheath on his belt, slipped the blade beneath the thin fabric and efficiently sliced the bliaut open from neck to hem.
How different it was to look upon her nudity now, he thought. Now the sight of her naked body inspired an ache in him that went deeper than lust or wanting. What he felt when he looked upon her in that moment was nothing short of a burning, heartsick brand of guilt. A profound humility. Raw emotions, so foreign to him that he found it hard to keep from turning away from her. But he forced himself to remain unflinching as he reached out and lifted her arm out to the side where he could better work on her wound.
He uncorked his wineskin and poured a small portion of the claret over the worst part of the gash. Isabel jerked the instant the wine touched her skin. She gave an incoherent whimper, her eyes fluttering behind her closed lids. Griff knew the pain he was inflicting on her; he had tended his own battle injuries often enough to know the fiery kiss of wine on an open wound. But it was a necessary measure, and he could only pray that Isabel's senses would remain mercifully dulled for a while longer as he finished.
Waiting for her fretful stirring to subside, he grasped her wrist to steady her arm as he applied a second dose to the cut. This time Isabel cried out in earnest.
Her eyes flew open, wide with fright and glossy with disorientation. “Please . . . nooo,” she moaned. Her wounded arm went tight in Griffin's grasp, her out flung hand fisted, her fingernails sinking into the fleshy pinkness of her palm. The wiry tendons in her wrist strained beneath her skin as she struggled against Griffin's firm hold.
“Shh,” he whispered, placing his free hand gently against her brow when her head began to thrash from side to side. “'Tis all right, Isabel, I promise.”
“It hurts,” she hissed through a grimace of agony.
“I know it does, but I'm almost done.” He swept aside a lock of damp hair that fell onto her brow, wishing he could as easily sweep aside her pain. “Close your eyes,” he told her gently. “Try to sleep, angel.”
Griff was unsure where the endearment came from--he had never been the sort of man to bother with sweet words or meaningless courtly gestures--but hearing it seemed to soothe Isabel, and so he said it again, repeating his soft command and stroking her hair until her eyelids finally drooped closed once more. He finished dressing her arm as quickly as he could, completing the process with a strip of clean silk taken from her bodice and wrapped around the cut to bind it and staunch the bleeding. He tied off the ends of the bandage and sat back on his heels, his spine pressed against the stone wall of the cavern, watching as she fell into an exhausted slumber.
For what seemed the thousandth time, Griffin relived the moment Isabel had delivered herself into the arrow's path. Too late, he had seen it heading straight for him, a speeding blur of hard wood and razor-sharp steel--certain death. And then Isabel had suddenly cut into the line of fire, a deliberate act that placed herself between him and the bowman's bolt.
Griff still could hardly believe it. He had never seen such courage in all his days . . . .
Not true, his conscience chided. There had been a time,
once before, when he had witnessed the sort of courage and honor that Isabel displayed. And he had destroyed it.
At Hexford, when he told Isabel about the reeve's daughter and what Dom had done to her, he had been careful to leave out the events that came next, some few short months later, after Sir Robert was dead and Dom had been made earl. He didn't tell her about the day Dominic found out about his father's gesture of kindness to the woman and her new husband. He didn't tell her how irate Dom had been to learn that some of Droghallow's money--now his money--was being used to support a couple of commoners.
Griffin didn't tell Isabel that as captain of the garrison, he was enlisted to accompany his lord to the village when Dom decided to eject the couple from their cottage and burn it down in spite. Nor did he tell her that when Dom attempted to seize the woman bodily, and her husband stepped in to protect her, it was he, Griffin, who was obligated to draw his weapon in defense of his lord. It was he who stood between the man and Dom, he who held him off when the cottar drew a knife and lunged for his wife's assailant.
And it was he, Griffin, who slayed that good man, killing for the first time. He had been physically sick with the act, knowing that he had just murdered a man whose only crime was acting out of courage and honor to come to the aid of someone he loved. The sacrifice had been such a waste; it had not spared his wife from Dom in the end.
So often Griff wished that he had turned his blade on Dom instead. But he hadn't, and he spent the rest of his years at Droghallow regretting that failure. Because of his pledge to Sir Robert, he stayed at Droghallow, carrying out his tasks as head of the guard in a state of emotional numbness, an apathy that had thoroughly consumed him . . . until the day he was reunited with Isabel. She made him feel again. She made him hope. Being with her made him better somehow.