Lords of Conquest Boxed Set

by Patricia Ryan

  “You can help me,” he said, holding the curtain aside again and motioning her into his living chamber. He dragged the armchair close to, and facing, the bed.

  “What do I have to do?” The bird weighed her arm down so heavily that she had to use her right hand to support her left. She realized how strong Thorne must be to be able to hold them for hours while he and Godfrey hunted.

  He collected some items from the worktable and tossed them and his gauntlet on the bed. “Just sit in that chair.” She did. He draped a clean linen cloth across her lap and then gently took hold of Azura and placed her on the cloth with her back up and her tail toward the bed. Next, he laid a square of dark wool over her head to keep her calm, he explained. Taking a strip of leather from his worktable, he tied his hair back, then sat on the bed opposite Martine, one long leg on either side of her chair.

  She could not get used to this physical closeness that he seemed to take for granted. Although they were not touching, she felt surrounded by him, penned between his thighs in a most intimate way. She could feel the heat from his body, smell the Castile soap with which he had bathed that morning. Azura flinched, and she realized she had been gripping the bird too hard.

  “Just hold her lightly,” he said. “So she knows you’re there.” First he took a small sheet of parchment and slid it under the damaged feather. Then he reached into a little wooden box and withdrew a gray feather the exact color of Azura’s tail.

  “I save them when they molt,” he said. Using a small knife, he clipped the new feather to the proper length and trimmed the end of the old one. From another box he took a tiny needle, which he threaded with silk. Then he began sewing the feathers together.

  Martine had never seen a man sew. Needlework was the domain of women, and the sole creative pursuit of most noble ladies, although Martine had absolutely no patience for it herself. He hunched over the bird, frowning in concentration as he worked the little needle in and out of the feather’s shaft with his long fingers. His big hands were surprisingly precise in their movements; his stitches were small and neat.

  Martine said, “How did you come to learn about falcons?”

  “How did you come not to?” he answered, still intent upon his work. “I’ve never known a lady of your rank to be so unfamiliar with them.”

  She stared at the top of his head. His questions were becoming more direct. With this bird on her lap, she couldn’t just get up and leave, much as she would have liked to. Had he planned it this way?

  The silence grew heavy. Thorne paused to look up at Martine, his expression thoughtful.

  As he resumed sewing, he said, “I’ve kept birds of prey since I was a child. One afternoon when I was shooting small game, my arrow accidentally brought down a sparrow hawk. So I climbed the tree where she’d been nesting and took her young and raised them. After that, I trained other sparrow hawks, then goshawks and kestrels. ‘Twasn’t till I entered Lord Godfrey’s service that I was able to work with falcons.”

  “They say you’re an accomplished bowman. Is that because you grew up hunting?” If she asked the questions, she wouldn’t be the one obliged to answer them.

  He said, “If you do something often enough, you get good at it. When I was young, I hunted and chopped wood, and little else. We were poor, and I was the only surviving son.” He glanced at her, smiling. “I chop wood very skillfully as well, but it impresses no one.”

  She couldn’t help smiling back. “Were there any sisters?”

  He took two stitches before answering. “One. Louise.”

  “Do you ever see her anymore?”

  Two more stitches. “Every time I look at Ailith.” Leaning over, he bit the silk thread and tied it off, his warm hands brushing hers.

  “No, I mean—”

  “There.” He pulled on his gauntlet, lifted Azura, and took her on his fist. Pointing at the bruised teeth marks on Martine’s hand, he said, “I should lend you that gauntlet the next time you propose to give her little ladyship a bath.” His changing the subject, as if she had been asking things that were none of her business, rankled in light of his own prying questions.

  “She won’t bite me next time,” Martine said.

  As he walked Azura through the leather-curtained doorway, he said, “Where did an only child like yourself learn to handle children so well?”

  An only child? That was surely no slip of the tongue. She waited until he had reappeared, and said, “I have two brothers.”

  Thorne hung the gauntlet back on its hook. “But they’re much older, are they not? And you spent seven years in a convent. It must have been rather like being an only child.”

  She removed her gauntlet and handed it to him. With icy restraint she said, “You know I have two brothers. You know perfectly well I’m not an only child.”

  He looked at her searchingly, and took his time answering. When he did, his words were measured, as if he were choosing them carefully. “My lady, I know almost nothing about you. Only that Rainulf calls you his half-sister, and that you panic when questioned about your family. ‘Twas I who recommended you to the baron as a suitable bride for his son. Your betrothal will be finalized tomorrow. Do you blame me for trying to find out before then whether I’ve misled him somehow?”

  He had been laying a trap for her. Prying into her secrets under the guise of pleasant conversation. Why, if he intended to unearth the truth about her, had he saved her last night from Estrude’s nosy interrogation? The answer came to her in his own words. It was he who had recommended her as a suitable bride for Edmond, presumably for his own advancement. It would serve him ill for her to be found out by everyone before he had the chance to do so himself. He could then, of course, decide whether to expose her or keep her secret, and he would undoubtedly do whatever best served his purposes.

  Suddenly she mistrusted him intensely. If she was not as she seemed, neither was he.

  Walking toward the door, she said, “Rainulf thinks you’ve arranged my marriage out of friendship. I told him it was out of ambition, but he doesn’t believe me. He likes to think that everyone is as good as he is.”

  “I don’t deny or apologize for my ambition. I’ll do whatever it takes to rise above the circumstances of my birth. If I should someday have children, I don’t ever want them to suffer the cruelties of poverty that your kind thinks nothing of imposing on mine. Your marriage does serve my ambition, but it also serves my friendship with your brother, which means more to me than you’ll ever know.”

  “‘Tis a very touching speech,” Martine said, standing in the doorway. “You’ve obviously given a great deal of thought to how my marriage serves your purposes. I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you to consider whether it serves mine.”

  She slammed the door and walked back to the keep.

  * * *

  Sausage pie and peas with bacon water constituted the midday meal. Lord Godfrey, Sir Thorne, and Albin were absent from the table. They were flying the falcons, and had taken their dinner with them to eat as they hunted. Lady Geneva, Ailith’s mother, chose not to dine with them, either, but no one offered an explanation for this.

  Martine passed the afternoon exploring the lower levels of the keep with Ailith.

  The first floor was the guardroom, nearly as large as the great hall, but with arrow slits instead of windows, and no place for a fire. There had been no attempt to make this room comfortable or attractive. The wooden floor was bare of rushes, and the walls displayed not hunting trophies, but a dizzying array of weaponry: gleaming broadswords and axes on one wall, and on another, rows of slender spears, javelins, and lances. There were dozens of graceful longbows and even a few of the outlawed crossbows, as well as thousands of arrows and bolts bound into bundles like kindling. To Martine’s way of thinking, the most menacing objects there were the brutally simple maces and throwing clubs, whose destructive power depended on mass and weight rather than finesse.

  She and Ailith descended with a brass lantern to the cella
r, a cold, fetid cavern with walls of weeping rock and a floor of beaten earth, in the middle of which had been dug a well. Piled up around the perimeter were pyramids of barrels and stacks of crates.

  Ailith looked around excitedly. “Auntie Felda says there’s a secret passageway down here! If I’m good, she’ll show me where it is someday!” She ran to a barred iron door streaked with rust. “This is where the bad people stay. If I can’t stop bothering Mama, she’s going to have me locked in here.”

  Martine followed her to the door and jimmied aside the plate covering the little peephole, which stuck halfway.

  “Lift me so I can look!” Ailith begged. Martine held her up, and they pressed their heads together to peer into the dark compartment. The lantern didn’t help much, but Martine could make out the wet granite walls. The cell was no larger than a privy chamber, and just as rank, stinking of stale urine and rotten straw. She heard a faint rustling as something scrabbled beneath the straw. There would be a horrible little room much like this one in Lord Olivier’s keep. The bandits who murdered Anseau and Aiglentine would be there, waiting for the noose between sessions of unspeakable tortures.

  An occasional drip of water rang through the silence; otherwise the cellar was as quiet as a crypt.

  Shivering, Martine carried the child to the stairwell. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll go find my brother. Then perhaps you can take us up to your mama’s chamber and introduce us to her. The more I hear about her, the more eager I am to meet her.”

  * * *

  “Leave me be,” groaned Ailith’s mother. “I don’t want any more headache powders.”

  Rainulf took the little cup from his sister, thinking that it was often those most in need of help who resisted it most strenuously. “‘Tisn’t a headache powder, my lady,” he said, tilting the cup so that she could see the amber liquid within.

  Martine said, “‘Tis a tonic for melancholia. An infusion of valerian, skullcap, and mistletoe. Quite effective.”

  Geneva, Countess of Kirkley, took the cup, tipped it over, and poured its contents into the rushes. She handed the empty cup back to Rainulf, pulled her woolen blanket up to her chest, and turned her dark, listless eyes upon Martine.

  She reclined in bed amid a mountain of feather pillows, wearing a soiled sleeping shift. Streaks of gray dulled her lank black hair. Her face had the color and texture of candle wax. Rainulf knew that Martine did not consider Lady Geneva to be ill at all, just lazy. His sister understood incapacity of the body, but not of the soul.

  “Melancholia?” Geneva said. She pointed a finger at her daughter, half-hidden behind Martine’s skirt. “Ailith! Did you say anything about melancholia to—”

  “Nay! I said you had a headache! I did, I—”

  “I surmised it,” Martine said, reaching behind to pat Ailith comfortingly. “They say you never leave your chamber, and I know that you’ve been... that you no longer—”

  “That I’ve been cast aside? I think melancholy is a perfectly natural response when one has been tossed away like kitchen scraps to the dogs, don’t you? I hardly think it requires a tonic, since it’s what any rational person would feel under the circumstances.”

  From down in the bailey Rainulf heard Thorne and Lord Godfrey returning from their afternoon of hunting, and he waved to them from the window as they entered the keep. Martine stiffened at the sound of Thorne’s voice. For a woman of such intellect and perception, she could be exasperatingly wrong about people.

  “You should have taken the tonic,” Martine told Geneva. “You should get out of bed and get dressed and get on with things.”

  Rainulf shook his head. “Martine

  Of course she barreled on, ignoring him. “Your melancholy may be natural, but ‘tis nonetheless ruinous. Not only for you, but for your daughter. She needs you. Not just your horrid threats about locking her downstairs in that cell, but you. A proper mother. And if you really knew what was best for you, you’d realize that you need Ailith, too.”

  “Need Ailith?” Geneva sat forward, quivering with indignation. “Why do you think I’m here?” She balled her hands into fists and screamed, “She ruined my life!”

  Ailith cowered behind Martine. Rainulf went to her, picked her up, and left the room, only to find Lady Estrude and Clare listening in the gallery, their hands over their mouths to stifle their giggles. Geneva screamed louder than ever. Ailith clapped her hands over her ears and pressed her face into his shoulder.

  “If she’d been a son, like she was supposed to be, I’d still be mistress of Kirkley, instead of that harlot my husband’s taken to his bed! Need Ailith? I wish to God she’d never been born!”

  A hunting horn sounded in the distance. Estrude and her maid stopped giggling. Clare bit her lip and looked toward the sound with her sad, shining little eyes, but her mistress bore an expression of weary resignation. Geneva ceased her screaming. Martine stepped into the hallway and looked toward Rainulf as the horn sounded again.

  “Oh, good,” Estrude drawled, her voice hard. “The boys are home.”

  Soon came the distant yowling of the dogs and the whoops and halloos of the hunters. Martine wondered which voice was that of her betrothed. For the third time since arriving in England, she felt her stomach tighten in anticipation of seeing him.

  Felda appeared and took Ailith from Rainulf. “You’ve met the hawks, Father,” she said. “Now come the dogs.”

  Martine followed Rainulf down the winding staircase from the third level to the first. Even through the thick stone walls of the keep, they could hear the party approach, like rolling thunder barreling closer and closer. By the time they reached the guardroom, the men were already there. To Martine’s astonishment, they were still on horseback, having ridden their mounts right up the stairs and into the keep. Not only that, but it seemed the hunt had yet to conclude.

  They had run a wounded deer into the keep ahead of them, a magnificent stag with a spread of branched antlers to rival those on display in the great hall.

  Martine, at the foot of the stairs next to her brother, stood paralyzed with disbelief at the pandemonium before her: six or eight mounted men, a dozen or more deerhounds, and the stag, all galloping, leaping, howling, and screaming in a nightmarish whirlwind. The hunters mainly kept to the perimeter of the guardroom, where they rode in overlapping circles around the dogs and their terrified prey.

  The animal ran wild, crazed with panic and pain. Five arrows protruded from its shoulders, haunches, and neck, but apparently these had not been mortal wounds. Martine wondered how a party of experienced hunters could fail to bring down a deer in so many shots, and then realized, with a wave of revulsion, that they weren’t trying to kill it at all. They were tormenting it for sport, much as they might bait a tethered bear.

  The cry of a baby rose above the din, quite perplexing until Martine realized it was the stag, bleating in terror. Blood ran from its wounds and foaming spittle flew from its mouth as it thrashed to and fro, struggling to remain upright. Martine looked into its eyes, which were swollen in agony.

  “Stop this!” she screamed, but her words were swallowed up in the cacophony that filled the guardroom. Something had to be done. This had to stop. She looked toward Rainulf, thinking he would know what to do. He met her eyes and shook his head, grim-faced, as if to say the situation was out of their control. Rainulf was a man of no small wisdom. He knew all about this compulsion to inflict pain; he knew when it could be stopped and when it couldn’t. It horrified Martine to feel so helpless in the face of such cruelty.

  Which one was Edmond? Was he part of this? The horsemen were a blur of whirling capes and drumming hooves; she couldn’t hope to make out one from the rest.

  No, that was wrong. There was one. One who sat motionless on a flaxen-maned sorrel stallion before a wall radiant with row after row of steel broadswords. The one to whom the others looked from time to time, the one who pointed out directions and spoke commands.

  He wasn’t Edmond. He was too old,
in his mid-thirties at least. He had straight hair, black as ink, and a gray-flecked beard trimmed close. His tunic was the color of amethyst, his cloak of black lambskin. Around his neck, on a silken cord, hung an ivory hunting horn chased with gold and onyx. His eyes, small and dark, glinted as he watched the stag careen and snort and stamp its hooves. He was smiling, but it was a dead smile, a smile of the lips but not of the eyes. Alone amid the turmoil, he seemed eerily calm.

  This was Bernard. As she realized this, she saw him notice her for the first time, standing in the stairwell watching him. He nodded, still smiling that lifeless smile. When Martine did not respond, the smile left, and his eyes, hard and black as a reptile’s, studied her slowly from head to toe. Then the smile returned, but it was different now, more of a smirk. He returned his attention to the deer, and so did Martine.

  Much of the animal’s fur had become soaked with blood. At one point its legs buckled and it gored one of the deerhounds in the hindquarters with the tines of its antlers. The dog collapsed, yelping, then rose unsteadily and began limping away. Bernard dismounted, and his men slowed their horses so as not to trample him underfoot. He grabbed a mace and kicked the dog to the floor. Then, with a single downward blow, he crushed its skull. Tossing the weapon aside, he lifted the lifeless animal by a hind leg and flung it out the door.

  The stag still blundered about convulsively, crashing into the rack of crossbows. As if this had given Bernard an idea, he pointed to the rack and called out, “Boyce! Over here!” One of his men—big and burly with a long, wiry red beard—dismounted and tossed him a crossbow and bolt. The crossbow was an instrument of ungodly power that could speed a bolt clear through the finest armor. For that reason the Church had forbidden its use against Christians, but not, it seemed, against deer.

  The men reined in their mounts to watch Bernard load and cock the weapon. His target now lurched uncontrollably, its hooves skidding on its own blood and feces.

  “Shoot it in the nose!” someone hollered.

  “Aye! The nose!”