Through a Dark Mist (20 page)

“But … would it not be better for me to know of this danger?”

The Wolf brushed his fingertips over the tight, damp coils of hair clinging to her temples. “I told you he and I were much alike. Just as I can see so clearly what you feel and think at times, one look, one glance into these wide blue eyes of yours and he would know you were hiding something behind them.”

“Knowing this, you would still send me to face him alone?”

“I think you are more than a match for whatever tests the Dragon may put you through. Furthermore, you will not be completely alone,” the Wolf promised, twining his hands into the wet tangle of her hair. “Nor will you be without recourse if something …
anything
happens to frighten you. The queen’s official representative at the wedding is Lord Randwulf de la Seyne Sur Mer. You can trust him. He or any of his men will provide help or sanctuary if you need it.”

His frown cleared and he smiled in an attempt to soften the bluntness of his words. “La Seyne is another blackhearted bastard you will undoubtedly take to task for his boorish manners, but he is loyal to the queen, and none too fond of anyone who shares the humour of Prince John. You
can
trust him. I do … with my life.”

Servanne’s eyes brimmed slowly with fat, shiny tears. Seeing them, seeing the uncertainty behind them, the Wolf tightened his hands and drew her forward. She tried to avoid his mouth as it came down over hers, but his hands were firm and his lips forceful. His tongue was quick and efficient at reminding her how futile any show of resistance might be, and Servanne moaned softly, helplessly. She went so far as to push against the lowering wall of muscle before her hands betrayed their true desire and crept up and around the bronzed width of his shoulders.

   At almost the same moment as Servanne de Briscourt was experiencing the greatest joy in her young life, the Dragon de Gournay was flushing with excitement.

“We believe we have found their lair, my lord,” Sir Aubrey de Vere reported. “We did not dare take the risk of creeping too close lest we betray our presence, but all signs indicate the Black Wolf has made camp in the ruins of an abbey once known as Thornfeld.”

“Thornfeld?” Wardieu’s blue eyes narrowed sharply. “Why am I not familiar with the name?”

“It is …
was
a cloister inhabited by monks who shunned all contact with the outside world. It is but a halfday’s ride from here, no more, and not five leagues from where we lost the scent of the two foresters the other night.”

“By God, right under our noses,” muttered Wardieu. “And no one thought to search this ruined abbey before now?”

De Vere frowned uncomfortably. “It was believed the brothers who lived there were followers of the Antichrist. At any rate, the abbey was put to the torch and the monks slaughtered, and for nigh on eighty years, no one has set eyes upon the ruins or dared to venture anywhere near that part of the forest.”

“No one? Not even the hounds of our fearsome Lord High Sheriff who professes to have scoured every square inch of the forest in search of the outlaw and his band?”

“It is not an easy place to find,” De Vere said. “The trees are thicker than flies on rotted meat, and the hills are pocked with caves and gorges to easily lead a man astray.”

“Surely the local villagers know of its location, especially those who poach the king’s deer with impunity.”

“Indeed, my lord, and to them this Black Wolf would be a rogue hero; they would not betray his whereabouts even if they knew it. We could only find one toothless old crone who would even admit to knowing of the place, and then only because she was an imbecile and has kept to her own foul company in the woods these past twenty years.”

“Perhaps we should make this imbecile sheriff then,” Wardieu said angrily. “Who else would think to look first on cursed grounds for a man who would like the world to think of him as a spectre who can appear and disappear at will? By God, it is just as well Onfroi de la Haye lies so near death; I would strangle him myself for all the worth he is to me.”

Nicolaa de la Haye emerged from Wardieu’s pavilion and scowled up at the sun. Light filtering through the overhanging flap gave her milk-white complexion a faintly bluish caste. Her eyes were puffed and her stance unsteady, for she had needed strong decoctions of crushed willow bark to help her sleep without dreaming too vividly.

“What is all this about strangling Onfroi?” she grumbled. “I have been entreating you to let me do so for years, but you have always stayed my hand.”

“Thornfeld Abbey,” Wardieu asked brusquely. “Do you know of it?”

“Thornfeld? Thornfeld … the name tastes familiar somehow …”

Wardieu allowed a flicker of disgust to cross his face as he regarded her unkempt, dissolute condition. Was it just the sickly blue glow from the pavilion overhang giving Nicolaa’s raven beauty a brittle edge, or was it the stirring of memories that vaguely repulsed him? She had clung to him like a leech the past two nights, and while her body had afforded its usual erotic release for his tensions, there had been no real pleasure derived from her frantic manipulations.

Wardieu turned back to De Vere. “Have the men in full armour and ready to ride in twenty minutes. Are you certain you can find the place again?”

De Vere smiled wanly. “We still have the hag and she still has possession of half her fingers and toes. Milord D’Aeth has been most persuasive in winning her cooperation thus far; I have no doubt he can continue to do so.”

“Tell him he can have more than her fingers and toes to chew on so long as she lives long enough to guide us to Thornfeld Abbey.”

   It might have been an hour, a week, or a month later when Servanne wakened from her passion-induced drowse. The air was markedly cooler where they lay twined together on the moss, although there was more than enough heat emanating from the Wolf’s body to maintain hers at a rosy flush. The edge of the pool was a few inches from where her fingers rested limply on the moss, but the slight disturbance caused by uncurling them and dipping them into the water produced a distinct change in the tempo of the heart beating beneath her ear.

Servanne sighed and raised her head with an effort. He was awake, but not much longer before her, judging by the heaviness around his eyes.

“The hour must be dreadfully late,” she said, warming self-consciously when she saw how intimately their bodies were positioned, one cradled atop the other in contrasting lengths of palest white and weathered bronze.

“You were sleeping like a kitten. I had not the heart to waken you.”

The Black Wolf of Lincoln—admitting to a heart?

Servanne smiled at the thought and looked around her in the gloom. Their clothes would undoubtedly be damp and wrinkled beyond any possible logical explanation. Biddy would know—the whole camp would know where they had been and what they had been doing for most of the afternoon. Her hair would take hours to dry and tame into a semblance of order. Her knees, back, and buttocks felt chafted raw from the sand, and she was certain, in any but the dimmest light, the whiteness of her skin would be marred by visually explicit bruises.

The gray eyes were observing her every change of expression and it was not too difficult to interpret her thoughts. An unexpected surge of protectiveness gripped him and he had to keep his hands flat by his sides to stop them from reaching out and gathering her back into his embrace.

He had not wanted this to happen, had not intended this to happen and for the very reasons that sickened and appalled him as he saw her trying very hard to shield her thoughts and emotions. The Dragon would see her guilt as if it were a beacon on a stormy night. Arrogant bastard that he was, it might not occur to him that she had allowed herself to be despoiled willingly. Hopefully his rage would remain focused where it should: on the man who had kidnapped and ravished his bride. But if the Dragon suspected for a moment there had been no force, no rape involved in Servanne de Briscourt’s submission, or if she betrayed by the slightest word or gesture that she preferred the touch of one man over the other …

Cursing inwardly, he turned away and started rummaging beneath the mist for his discarded clothing. He was shrugging his heavy shoulders into the green linsey-woolsey shirt when the touch of her hand on his scarred flesh stopped him again. It was only the tips of her fingers that gently traced the hideously misshapen weals, but it could have been a red-hot iron searing his flesh for the same impact it left on his body.

“These must have caused you a great deal of pain for a very long time,” she whispered.

“Wounds of betrayal hurt far more than any wounds of the flesh,” he said flatly and pulled the shirt down to cover the scars.

Servanne sat motionless a moment longer, chastened by his sudden anger, yet ignorant of the cause. She began sorting through the tumbled ruin of her own clothes, each small movement emphasizing the empty ache inside her. Even her hair, brushing over her bare skin, produced shivers that would never again foster innocent thoughts.

Had he been left unaffected by the passions they had unleashed together? Could a man do all that he had done to her, share all they had shared, and not be changed, altered in some way? She did not expect declarations of undying love and devotion but neither did she expect to have her clothes tossed casually across the moss as if, for him, it had been but a pleasant afternoon’s diversion.

“Might I ask another question without fear of having my head snapped off?”

“Ask it,” he said sharply. “And we shall see.”

“This black-hearted knight you would foist me upon to ease your conscience … does he know who you are and why you are here?”

“La Seyne?” Something akin to a smile glimmered in the dark eyes. “He knows.”

“Does he also know of this other …
danger
, to which you referred?”

“He knows more than he would care to have as a burden.”

“You said you could not provide proof of who you are until you are inside the castle. Is La Seyne here to back your claim when and if it becomes necessary?”

The Wolf looked at her with a grudging respect. A claim made against one of Prince John’s allies was useless and suicidal without the support of equally formidable and influential witnesses. La Seyne Sur Mer was the dowager queen’s champion; a knight regarded as being above reproach, who would be no easy man to fool or slough off with half-truths.

“You had best not show yourself to be too clever around the Dragon,” he warned softly. “He does not take kindly to minxes with sharp noses and sly tongues.”

“Another similarity with his brother. I confess I am becoming more intrigued by the moment to meet and compare qualities myself.”

The Wolf was leaning over to retrieve his deerskin leggings when the unexpected sarcasm of her words halted him. With their faces only inches apart, and the light from the mouth of the cavern at its most generous angle, Servanne again thought she saw something flicker in the guarded depths of his eyes. If she did, it was quickly hidden and her humour as effectively quashed.

“As I told you before, there are some things we do quite differently. If you doubt me, ask any one of his scores of former mistresses … or his current one: Nicolaa de la Haye.”

Hurt and confused by his unwarranted bitterness, Servanne stared down at the crumpled folds of velvet she held in her lap and wondered why it seemed to be his prime task to perplex and confound her to the verge of tears. Resolutely, she gathered her courage to ask one more important question of him, but when she looked up, her emotions as exposed as an open wound, he was not even paying her any heed. Something had drawn all of his attention to the wall of ivy, and that something was causing him to turn as still as stone.

“What—?”

His hand lashed out to cover her mouth and stifle the question against her lips. Another moment passed before she heard it too: the squeak of leather, the faint chink of metal on metal, the snap and rustle of carefully bent saplings.

There was someone in the woods nearby. Someone moving with the deadly stealth of a hunter closing in on a wolf’s lair.

14

The Wolf’s first thought was for the sentry up on the promontory; he should have seen the intruders in plenty of time to have passed an alarm to the abbey. His second thought exploded inwardly on a curse, for he had waved the sentry away when he had carried Servanne past the Silent Pool. In an even more shocking breach of his own rules, he realized he had left his bow in the courtyard, along with his sword. He had his falchion and a dull eating knife—neither of which would do much good unless he could creep unseen to within a few feet of an enemy.

Pressing a finger to his lips, he cautioned Servanne needlessly to silence and crossed to the mouth of the cavern. He was just a shadow hunched against the mist, but she saw him sink into a low crouch and melt back against the stone as a particularly loud crunch of twigs occurred within a pace or two of where the entrance lay hidden behind the ivy.

Servanne held her breath. She suffered a fleeting glimpse of men-at-arms and knights locked in mortal combat with the Wolf’s men, screaming, charging through the woods, their swords gleaming red and wet. And in the midst of it all, she would be running and screaming as well, but to which camp? To whose arms?

Servanne screamed the answer just as the Wolf sprang forward and crashed through the gap in the ivy. There were muffled sounds of grunts and scraping feet, the paunchy
thud
of a well-met fist … then silence.

She rose up onto her knees, her gown clutched over her bare breasts, her heart in her throat, her eyes stinging with fear. Another ripe scream was bubbling up from her toes just as she recognized the Wolf’s broad shoulders dragging something or someone back into the gloom of the cavern.

“Sparrow! Goddammit!” he shouted.

Servanne’s gasp relieved the pressure building in her lungs the same instant the Wolf’s hand lifted away from the elf’s mouth, releasing a string of shrilled oaths and invectives. They were choked back sharply as the Wolf thrust him hard against the wall and held him by the scruff of the neck, leaving the stubby arms and legs to flail the empty air in panic.

“Sparrow, by Christ, I warned you—!”

“We have all been out searching this past half hour for you, my lord,” Sparrow squeaked. “The Dragon’s men … they are in the woods. They are heading this way!”

The Wolf’s hand flexed open and the little man dropped into an abrupt heap on the moss.

“’tis true, my lord,” he gasped, rubbing his throat for circulation. “The Dragon’s men … two hours away, no more. With armour on their backs and blood in their eyes. They must know we are here—a loose tongue, or a careless footstep.”

“Two
sets of careless footsteps, I warrant,” the Wolf snarled. “How many men are there?”

“H-he had two score with him in camp, plus the sheriff’s men, p-plus those left from the cavalcade. Not all would have come, but enough to send Sigurd hurrying back with the alarm.”

“It was to be expected. We could not have remained here much longer without someone stumbling over us. Are we ready for them?”

Sparrow nodded hard enough to set his curls bouncing. “The men are all dispatched and await your orders. You were the only one we could not find. You and … and …”

The round cherub eyes blinked wider as he caught sight of a nervous movement through the clouds of rising steam. He blinked again and swallowed whatever he might have been tempted to say, in favour of ignoring the plenitude of naked limbs and awkward tempers.

“Well, then,” he said instead. “I have found you both.”

“And nearly won a blade in your gullet for the effort,” said the Wolf, stalking back to the far side of the pool to snatch up the rest of his clothes. A glare in Servanne’s direction was sufficient to unlock her fingers from the folds of velvet and hurry them in pulling the rumpled gown over her head. The fabric was damp and chilled her skin, but she scarcely felt it for the more foreboding chill in the air.

“Why did you not sound the horn?” the Wolf asked, threading the points of his leggings swiftly through the corresponding loops on his belt.

“We did,” Sparrow replied. “Twice. Friar began to worry you might have pushed each other over the gorge and broken your heads on the rocks below, but the sentry said you came this way, where there are no rocks or cliffs”—he glanced sidelong at Servanne—“only pitfalls.”

The Wolf stamped into his boots, straightened, and raked his hands through his hair to push it off his face. “What direction are they coming from?”

“West and north.”

“Have they sent out any advance patrols?”

“Robert and Gil have their eyes on a brace of them, half a league from here, but they were told to wait and see what you wanted done before they did it.”

“I want one of them brought to me. Alive.”

“So he shall be,” Sparrow nodded. He stole another peep at Servanne and his brow puckered into a frown. “Old Blister was frothing so loudly at the mouth, we had to borrow a stocking from Norwood the Leech to stuff in her throat. Even so, she managed to make enough noise to bring the birds squirting down on us. She wants mischief done to her if a way cannot be found to keep her silent.”

“I will calm Biddy,” Servanne said. “She will cause you no trouble.”

“Neither one of you had best cause any trouble,” the Wolf warned. “Hold your tongues and do exactly as you are told, and with luck, my lady, you will see your fondest wish realized and depart our company by nightfall. Sparrow”—he turned away from Servanne’s shocked expression—“Bring her back to the abbey when she is dressed and give her back to Mutter and Stutter for safekeeping.”

He paused at the mouth of the cavern, his hand on the webbing of ivy. He turned, at an admitted cost to his soldier’s sense of priorities, and met Servanne’s gaze through the wisping drifts of steam. Whatever he wanted to say—if he had wanted to say anything more—was gone with the next footstep that carried him out of the cavern and into the forest.

Servanne stared at the ivy until the leaves rustled to a standstill. Sparrow made an impatient sound in his throat, and she finished dressing, hardly aware of what her fingers did or how they managed to don stockings and slippers without feeling. Shame began to course hotly through veins that had so recently sung with pleasure. It was plain to see he had already dismissed their lovemaking as being of little consequence; plainer yet to see she had once again become the pawn, the expendable stakes in a game of rivalry and revenge.

   Sir Aubrey de Vere prided himself on his hunter’s instincts. It was not far from the truth to say he could have tracked an ant through a cornfield on a moonless night—he had stalked fleet-footed paynims through the desert in windstorms while on Crusade; no mean feat for a Norman born and bred of noble blood.

So it was he could not believe his ears when he heard the sigh of an arrow streaking past his mount. His companion, a knight afoot who was bending over, sniffing at the imprint of a boot freshly set into the forest floor, heeled sideways, his steel helm unseated by the thrust of the arrow punching through his skull.

De Vere whipped around, but too late. His horse jerked forward as a tremendous weight dropped onto his rump, and by the time De Vere identified the bulk of a man, his own helm had been torn off, his head twisted savagely to the side, and stretched back at an angle near the breaking point. A gap in the chain-mail armour where the hood met the hauberk was laid bare beneath his chin, wide enough for the edge of a knife to tender a threat.

“Not a sound,” a voice rasped in his ear, but De Vere’s instincts, being what they were, had already launched his two elbows back, digging into what felt like a solid wall of stone.

Robert the Welshman absorbed the paltry affront to his ribs with a grunt of disdain, but the movement caused his hand to slice inward and down with the knife. The steel carved into the strained layers of flesh, parting the sinew and muscle like a blade springing the seams of an overfull gourd. Blood spurted out and over his hand, splattering the front of De Vere’s sky-blue gypon.

“Now look what ye’ve gone and done,” Robert muttered distastefully.

De Vere raised his hands, appalled to feel the heated wetness of his own blood soaking down beneath the padding of his surcoat. “I am dead,” he gasped. “God love me, I am dead!”

“Bah! Naught but a wee cut. Ye’ll hang on a while longer to plague the world, Sir Knight, at least until my lord of Lincoln woods has a word with ye. For now, ye can drop yer sword an’ yer bow, an’ spur this nag off the path a ways.”

De Vere unbuckled his sword belt and dropped it, along with the starburst and chains that hung from holders on his saddle. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a second outlaw step out of the greenwood and bend over to retrieve the discarded weapons. This second man was tall and lean, and bore a noticeable scar down the left side of his face.

De Vere felt some of the pressure lifted from his throat and did not need Robert’s gruff advice to clamp a gloved hand over the bleeding wound. The burly giant seated behind him slid nimbly off the horse’s rump and together, he and the red-haired archer led the captured knight deeper into the musty stillness of the forest.

   Nicolaa de la Haye was growing impatient. Wardieu had halted his men less than a league from where the abandoned abbey was purported to be, although what he was waiting for was anyone’s guess.

The small army of mercenaries had been halted an hour ago by the sight of a blood-smeared shield identified as belonging to Sir Aubrey de Vere. It had been propped deliberately in their path, alongside the body of the knight who had accompanied De Vere into the woods.

Clearly they had lost the advantage of surprise, so it seemed doubly foolish to simply stand in an open clearing and wait for a hail of arrows to descend upon them.

“Lucien, for God’s sake, either order the men forward or take them back to Alford.”

“Nicolaa, my dearest patient one: Are you not the smallest part curious to hear what my brother has to say?”

“He has already said it,” Nicolaa declared, pointing at the bloody shield. “He has said he intends to kill us all.”

Wardieu sucked a tiny burst of air through his teeth and looked up, scanning the broken ceiling of greenery in an effort to determine the hour of the day. “If it was his intention to see us all dead, we would be by now. These eyes I feel on the back of my neck would be arrowheads. The voices I hear would belong to saints and angels, although”—he glanced over at Nicolaa and laughed—“in our case, perhaps not so angelic.”

“Eyes? Voices?” Nicolaa’s slanted black brow arched upward as she followed Wardieu’s gaze back into the surrounding forest. A flare of splintered light glittered over the suit of Damascan chain mail she had had fashioned expressly to mold to the contours of her body. Plates of steel had been sewn together front and back, worn over a quilted surcoat of bloodred samite. Her hair was plaited and wound into a single gleaming coil at the nape of her neck, confined within a woven circlet of gold and readily able to be concealed beneath a bascinet of steel links extending up from the mail hauberk.

She was well aware of the stares that charted her every move. Some of the knights blatantly disapproved of a woman in armour; others were wary of the cruelty and bloodlust lurking beneath her astonishing beauty, fearing her sultry orders more than those of any ten men. It had come as no surprise that she had ridden out this day at the side of the Dragon Wardieu, the jewelled collar of the Sheriff of Lincoln displayed proudly and boldly around her neck. She had acted the part of sheriff in all but name until now, and with Onfroi de la Haye clinging to life by the merest thread, it required only Wardieu’s nomination and Prince John’s approval to make the appointment official.

“There,” Wardieu said suddenly, breaking into Nicolaa’s thoughts with a start. “Something is moving.”

Immediately, from behind, came the sound of conversations cut short and swords rasped out of scabbards. Nicolaa saw nothing through the shifting shades of green and brown, but a flush of macabre excitement tightened the muscles across her belly and thighs, producing an indescribable surge of pleasure as she drew her own shortsword.

“It appears to be … Sir Aubrey, my lord!” cried Eduard. “He is in difficulty!”

Several other squires joined Eduard in rushing forward, and, moments later returned to the small clearing bearing the limp, gasping body of Sir Aubrey de Vere. They laid him gently on a cushion of half-rotted leaves, his own squire—a lad by the name of Timkin—supporting his head and shoulders.

“Sweet God in Heaven,” Nicolaa murmured dryly, peering down over Wardieu’s shoulder. “Can he have any blood left in his body?”

De Vere was breathing badly, with great difficulty. A cloth had been wrapped around his neck to staunch the flow of blood, but the effort of moving him had started the wound leaking again. His tunic looked as if it had been used to mop the floor of a charnal house. His skin was completely colourless and glistened with a sheen of cold, clammy sweat.

Wardieu lowered himself on one knee and gripped the knight’s arm. “De Vere, what happened?”

Glazed brown eyes opened tremulously. “My own fault, sire,” he gasped. “I did not see them. They were on us before we felt the wind shift … like ghosts … or devils. This—” He wavered a sodden glove toward his bandaged throat, but the explanation was shivered away on a wave of pain.