He didn’t know how he was to go on with her so near to him. She stood in this chapel, all but offering herself to be his lover. Never would he have looked so high above him, even had he succumbed to flirtation, but it was she who chose.
He closed his fist around the hasp of the door. "These are foolish matters," he said abruptly. "The night comes on too swift."
"And what if I made you a greater man? I have lands escheated to me, with yet no lord. I’ll make you a present of them."
She stung his pride with that. "I am lord in my own lands, my lady, and my father before me. I need no whore-toll."
Her swift look made him instantly regret that he had said so much. She said mildly, "What lands are these?"
He held the door wide. "If my lady does please to pass?"
"Whence hails you?" she demanded, without moving.
Ruck stood silently, angry at himself. He felt her study penetrate him.
"You speak the north in every syllable."
"Aye, a rude and rough northeron I am, lady. Will you come then, before I cast you over my saddle and ravish you off to the wilderness, for to take my will like a wild man?"
She laughed aloud. "No, not while all is upside-down." She came to him, a sweep of cloak and warmth out of the shadow, taking hold of both his arms. "I’ll take you captive, and have my will here and now, for I can’t cast you upon a horse to ravish you away, and we’re in wilderness already."
She leaned up and kissed him, all softness and glee, so that he was powerless, captive in truth. He was instantly beyond thinking of spells and enchantment: what she willed, he willed. He held his arm under her back and lifted her against him, hungry for her body against his, despairing that his armor screened all sensation of it.
"My lady," he mumbled on her cheek, when her indrawn gasp for breath broke the kiss. "It is a church."
"Then release me, monkish man, and I’ll lead you astray outside."
He relaxed his arm. She slipped down, laughing still, and he followed her like a mongrel dog would follow a kind-hearted village girl in hopes of a scrap of bread, dragging the door closed behind him.
She turned and met him, another stand on tiptoe—he could not feel her, but he could not even think of her body, her breasts, without his member going full and stiff. He pressed his gloved palms wide under her arms, taking her up against him again. He leaned back hard on the door of the chapel, drawing her whole weight on himself so that he had some crude sense of her through his plated armor.
Her lips met his, so sweet that he knew it was a magic that could kill him and make him glad to die. He felt her slip and try to keep her place. Without lifting his mouth from hers he slid his back down the church door and sat upon the step, holding her between his legs.
She stood on her knees, cupping his face in her hands, smiling down at him. He came a little to his senses.
"I have a wife," he said to the white soft skin below her ear. "I can’t do this."
"It’s none of your doing. You’re seized and cruelly assaulted." Her breath caressed the corner of his mouth. "I perceive you’re a princess in disguise, Green Sire, with vast properties in unknown places. Perhaps I shall force you to marry me for your fortune."
He tipped his head against the door, evading her, breathing roughly with the effort of containing his desire. "You’d be sore disappointed in your bargain, my lady, I fear."
She sat back, catching his chin between her fingers, examining his face solemnly. "A beauteous fair damsel you’re not, in truth. But it’s a poor marriage founded on a comely countenance, so they say. I’ll have you for your riches."
He shook his head, half smiling at her in spite of himself, pulling her hands down from his face and holding them gently in his mailed gloves. "Lady, you know not how thin you draw this thread."
"Perhaps I wish it thin," she murmured. She lifted her lashes, looking into his eyes. "Perhaps I desire it broken asunder."
She was so close to him that he could see each fine black brushstroke that formed her brows and lashes. In the lengthening afternoon shadow, her skin seemed like snow under moonlight, her eyes that strange deep hue, the color of flowers that bloomed in the winter dark, more rare than any dragon or basilisk or unicorn could be rare.
He felt as if he himself must break asunder, the unbending rectitude and loneliness of thirteen impossible years razed at a stroke, consumed by the clear invitation in her words and her eyes. "I pray you, think wiser, my lady," he said roughly. "It’s this strange place and time. I’m far beneath you. Yourself said you be not certain of your desire." He curled his hands about hers. "My liege lady, my luflych, when we go back to court, your pride and your honor would be mortified, to know you kept close company with such as I am."
She was silent, her hands unresisting in his. Tiny strands of her hair had long since come free of her netted braids, floating about her cheeks and temple. Slipping her hands free, she spread her fingers over his dirty gauntlets.
"No, I would be proud," she whispered. "I would be proud, when I think of such worse as I’ve kept company with." She bit her lips with a faint sound. "Oh, your good conscience will make me weep."
He lowered his head, gazing down at her hands. "Never in my life, my lady, could I believe this much would come to pass, that I could even touch you."
She skimmed her fingertips over his hands and his arms, up to his shoulders, over mail and plate, following with her eyes. He saw tears, which amazed him. He shook his head. "No, lady—don’t; not for such a thing."
She leaned forward and kissed him. The sweetness ran down through him, unbearable. He put his arms about her and buried his face in the side of her throat to avoid her. "I beseech you, my lady," he said. "It will ruin us. It will be the ruin of us both."
She pressed her head hard against him. He could feel the silent unevenness of each indrawn breath, and her tears that trickled down below his ear and under his gorget. He sat holding her, waiting, because to say her nay again was more than he could do; he was body and soul at her will now, heedless of rank or witchery, of honor or his wife.
She set her palms against him and pushed back. He let her go, opening his arms.
"You’re mistaken," she said fiercely. "Both of us would it not ruin, no—but only you, and that I will not have. Nothing more will we say of keeping company, but as sure friends and companions. Little you may reckon it, but my friendship is worth something in the world. I’ll stand your true friend, Sir Ruck, in all that may pass."
He put his hand to her cheek and throat, resting it softly there, isolated forever from the feel of her by layers of metal and leather, by what he was, and had been, which was nothing. "I am your true servant. I’ll lay down my life for you if you ask it."
She made a teary grimace. "Well, I do not ask it! Pray keep yourself alive and well, Sir Ruck, if you don’t wish to displease me most grievously." She wiped hard at her eyes and swallowed. Then she pushed away from him and rose, holding her hands tucked close beneath her arms, her head bent. She shivered, but did not draw her cloak about her.
Ruck stood. His hands were open. He would have pulled her into his arms and warmed her. All night he would have embraced her, lain down with her and kept company with her, held her so near that she was one with him. But his fingers closed, empty.
"I could weep myself, lady," he said, "for wanting what you would give me."
She laughed, still crying. "Oh, honor and a silver tongue, too! Look what a lover I’ve lost."
"My lady—nothing is lost. I’m with you yet, and always, to serve you and say you never false. I swear it upon what I hold more precious than my life—" He reached out and touched her, laid his hand above her breast, against the soft green felt and ermine.
She raised her eyes. Even through his heavy gauntlet, he could feel her pulse.
"For my lady’s heart," he said. "My life, my troth, and my honor. For your heart I swear it, and none other."
TWELVE
Melanthe sat with her ma
ntle wrapped close about her, her back against the chapel wall, watching the frigid dusk come down. Her head felt dull with the unfamiliar aftermath of tears, her eyes heavy, but she was not melancholy.
Her knight lay across the door, his head on his arm, padded by his cloak. The steady sound of his breathing was the only noise but for the destrier cropping grass outside the open portal, and the occasional tinkle of Gryngolet’s bells. Each soft chime brought a sharper breath and a suspension from him, as if he listened for peril even in sleep—then a shift of his body, and a long deep exhalation like a sigh.
She was to wake him before full dark gathered, so that he might sit up again all through the night on watch. He’d gone to sleep with his back to her, but soon enough his movements had turned him so that she could just see his face in the last of the light. He looked exactly what he was: a weary man-at-arms, shabby and handsome, resigned to sleeping in armor on stone. The strong lines of his face were no softer in sleep: only his lips, slightly parted, and the smoothing of the stern lines about his eyes and brows made him seem younger, more like the youth who had stared at her so hotly those many seasons ago in the Pope’s palace.
He had amused her then, and flattered her—such a look, and from a boy who hadn’t even anything to gain by it. She had noticed him. And when she’d seen what mischief they were about, the bishops and priests, she had saved him, little though he appeared to know or thank her.
She had felt then a hundred years older than he, though she’d been only seventeen herself. She felt a thousand now— and yet new, in some strange way younger and more reckless than she had ever been. She felt, for the first time in her life, in love with a man.
Ligurio she had respected, loved in mind and in soul: teacher, father, companion, and lifeline. And before she had learned better, she had found friendship and a sparking attraction with the smiling Dane who had given her Gryngolet, but that memory was no peaceful one.
She gazed at the long shadowed teeth of the dragon stone, burying her cold nose in ermine. The Northman had taught her to hunt, disciplined her to the exacting task of training a wild passager trapped after its first moult, revealed to her the hours of freedom in a falcon’s courses. She hadn’t betrayed Ligurio with him, nor thought of it. It had been no more than a girl’s infatuation. It hadn’t had time to become more, before Melanthe had discovered the Northman slain in her own bed. The lady asleep with him put on a great shrieking show to find that the man beside her was murdered, just as if she hadn’t slipped in the knife herself. Melanthe had been fifteen, Prince Ligurio’s still-virgin bride, in wit as well as body. Her husband had had to explain it to her.
That was the first she had truly understood of Gian Navona’s cold lunatic passion for all that Monteverde owned. For her. Before it, she’d only known him as a courteous and clever man who sometime supped with her husband, and had once shown her a cunning hand trick of making a living flower appear in a bowl of glass.
In many ways, that was all she knew of Gian still. And yet he had made her what she was, as surely as Ligurio’s careful lessons. Prince Ligurio taught her how to swim; Gian Navona was the sea—tide and current and storm, treacherous depth and smiling surface, and creatures dwelling beneath that haunted dreams. She learned never to rest, never to float, never to cling to what appeared solid. She learned that he would not abide her to smile upon any man.
The dragon stared back at her from black eyeholes. The long line of its teeth could have been a deathly grin. She wondered if it had amused Gian, to dispatch his own mistress to end Melanthe’s innocence in seduction and blood. She wondered how far ahead he planned; if he had intended even then to sire a bastard on the woman and train him up to be another beautiful murdering viper, to castrate him and set him guard upon Melanthe, at her table and in her bed, tainting the very air she breathed with bloodshed. She wondered if he found it all some lurid jest, and sat alone in his palazzo and laughed.
Gryngolet, the Northman’s gift—the white gyrfalcon had hated Allegreto from the day he had come into Monteverde, a boy with the mind and countenance of the fallen archangel himself. Melanthe also had hated him. He had the look of his mother on him—murderess—Melanthe could see her magnificent frantic face even now, tearing her hair in her fraudulent horror.
But Ligurio had commanded Melanthe to keep Allegreto close, for her life. Her husband was failing in health, and the balance was all, the eternal balance between Navona and Riata and Monteverde. Allegreto was an assassin to keep her from assassination, a bargain Ligurio had made with Gian to protect her, taking advantage of Navona’s passion to guard her from other enemies who had less than no use for her alive. Her husband had accepted the boy, even been kind to him. Melanthe had suffered him, dreaming of the day she would be free.
Dreaming of this day, when she could put such memories behind her.
Gryngolet’s bells jingled again, and the knight adjusted his arm. He made a low sound. His mouth curved, just visible above the crook of his elbow, a trace of his uncommon smile. Melanthe rested her cheek on the soft trim of her mantle, happily besotted with him. The comeliest man on earth, the most honorable, humble, gracious, the strongest, the best-spoken, the finest warrior—she diverted herself with heaping extravagant merits upon his slumbering person.
He snorted, denying such exalted perfection in an ordinary man’s sleep, lifting his hand as if to reverse his arm beneath his head. The move seemed to expire halfway. His gauntlet wavered, balanced in mid-arc, the heavy mail and leather curl of his fingers drooping, declining slowly sideways. The back of his glove came to rest on the stone with a soft chink.
She loved the sound of him. The sound of his armor, the sound of his breathing, the sound of his voice speaking English. In truth, she loved him.
Having come to this insight, she felt that she must proceed with great care. She found herself somewhat bewildered by it; unable to reconcile such an intangible force with all of her plans and designs.
She ought to be thinking. The whole world would not die of plague; it had not the first time, nor the second, and it would not this time, either. Pestilence came now by fits and starts, killing five here, fifty there, no more than one or two in another place. She couldn’t suppose that God would elect to erase the names of Navona and Riata from the earth merely to save her trouble.
Indeed, she doubted that God had much use for her at all, in spite of her abbeys. She was unrepentant. She was pleased to look at the sleeping masculine form of her knight. She sore desired him in a most sinful and earthly way, and she was not the least sorry for it.
Her foremost care had been to arrive safely and without interference at Bowland Castle, where amid the native Englishmen, any agents sent by Gian or Riata would be easy to discern and dispatch. But she found that this ambition had now palled, replaced by an acute desire, amazing in its quaintness, to remain in the wasteland with Sir Ruck d’Somewhere, the lord—and his father before him—of imaginary places.
She smiled wryly, thinking of the quick pride with which he’d refused her offer of lands. He spoke himself well enough, like a gentle man, but she remembered his wife—a burgher’s daughter if there had ever been one—and was inclined to agree with Lancaster’s guess that the Green Sire’s splendid tournament armor hid a man baseborn. He had almost admitted as much, had he not, in refusing her?
It was a sign of her corrupted nature, she supposed, that she didn’t care a whiff for his birth. Perhaps he was misbegot of some knight too poor to provide for him, but Lancaster was overharsh in judging him a freeman—no son of villeins would be endured by the men-at-arms as their master, far less tolerated by the knights and ladies of court.
No, he had gentle manners: a quiet dignity about him, even now in his shabbiness, and a nobleman’s way with a good horse. He was a poet of sorts. He’d been brought up in a lord’s household, of that she felt certain, though in the end it made no matter. She was the Earl of Bowland’s daughter, wife to a prince, cousin of counts and kings. As well fall
in love with a monk or a merchant, or a cowherd, for that, as with this obscure and humble knight.
Ligurio had taught her many things, but inordinate tenderness and renunciation had not been among them. She wasn’t accustomed to denying herself. If she had not taken lovers, it wasn’t for virtue or self-constraint, but because of the terrible weakness such a union must create.
It was strength that she needed, not weakness. She’d meant to use him, this chivalrous, nameless warrior. She’d meant to make him love her if she could, daze and blind him, bind him without mercy to her service. She would need such as he, to protect her and act for her.
And she had done it. He had mistrusted her, accused her of witchery, reserved something of himself in spite of his sworn allegiance—but she was certain of him now. She cared nothing that he spoke of this wife of his, beyond that it proved the unlimited bounds of his loyalty once he gave his heart. She would free him of that vain covenant when the time came.
For now she was charitable as she had never been, yielding her own wish to his welfare. She would not repay his service with encumbrance, his honor with dishonor. She would not be the ruin of him, but the making. And perhaps if she was so, if she gave him the opportunity to rise that Lancaster had denied, if by her support he made a superior marriage to some lady of her choosing and gained land and a higher place, if she educated his children and sponsored them to a better elevation yet...
She gazed across the cold barren space between them, two yards and forever. If she did all that for him, then perhaps her life would not be without some worth in the end, or so vain in the years to come as it seemed now to be.
* * *
Ruck woke to the music of hunting horns. With an oath he rolled over and shoved upright. He’d been so deep in sleep that for a moment he blinked in the morning light and stared about himself, unable to recall this place.
Then he saw the princess curled in her mantle, slumbering in a drooping huddle against the wall. She hadn’t woken him.
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