Conqueror (19 page)

Her hand went to her mouth, fear rushing through her like a raging, frothing wave of madness. The movement seemed to anger John.

“Was your night with Pagan worth so much you would barter Everoot for it?” he demanded savagely. “Why did you not mention anything of your rescuer?” His face paled. “God save us, Gwynnie. You didn’t know, did you?”

She shook her head wildly, denying it, all the while, inside, crying,
Yes, yes, I knew he was not what he seemed, and that should have been enough
.

She held her hands to her face. Her fingertips were freezing on her cheeks. She could barely concentrate on John’s face. It was weaving and slipping in and out of focus.

“I’ve no time to tell you stories, Gwyn. If you would have Everoot be yours, then it must
be yours
. Above all else. Do you understand me?” He looked at her oddly. “Did you father not even teach you so much as that?”

She reached out instinctively for John’s arm, reaching for anything stable in her wildly shifting world. Papa knew Pagan. Papa hated him. There was something unholy binding these families.

John touched her grasping hand and softened briefly, back to the gentle, companionable John she’d known for years. The one who could explain this madness to her.

Only he didn’t.

One of his men appeared at the end of the shadowy corridor and beckoned. “I must go,” John said. He turned her, gently this time, by her shoulders and led her back to the room, pausing before the door on his way out. “’Tis best this way.”

He shut the door.

Gwyn stared at the wall. The silence of the room was deafening, hurt her ears. She looked down at her hands, upturned and opened on her lap. They were the same hands as a day ago, a week, but they were not hers. She looked dumbly around the room, seeing familiar objects—a desk, cupboard, table—but now so hideously warped they seemed revolting.

Two things her father had left her, the only two things she ever treasured—Everoot and the box of letters. She’d given one to a pagan she’d loved for a day. The other would be lost if she tried to save him.

Thrusting back the chair, she ran to the door, flung it open, and plowed smack into one of Marcus’s knights. It was de Louth. Good God, she was surrounded by nightmares.

“Get…
off
…me!” she shouted, fighting the hands that were suddenly wrapped around her.

De Louth’s voice was quiet but firm as he caught her up and deposited her back in the room. “Be calm, my lady.” She thought she saw a small flicker of emotion cross his face, then it was gone. Limping, he took up a post by the only door in the windowless room, and stood with an expressionless face.

“He said you’re to stay here.”

Griffyn rode hard for London. He rode on the back paths, galloping past tree trunks and over downed logs, silent but for Noir’s thundering hooves. He was blasting past the treacherous woods near the Saxon outpost when they found him, spilling swords and fury across another moonlit night.

Ten men were too much for one, and he was dragged off in chains. In their wrath, they missed capturing his horse, Noir, who cantered away under the eaves with a small bundle tied around his saddle. Later, Hervé slipped out of the forest shadows and took the horse. He and Alex silently tracked the company to the walls of London, then rode like demons to the Gloucester port where the others waited.

Griffyn was thrown into the Tower of London, beaten daily, threatened with beheading, and lashed on his back within an inch of his life. Only Henri’s intercession, bartering him for a highborn hostage taken on their last campaign, won him his freedom six weeks later.

Throughout his imprisonment, the only thing that kept madness at bay were thoughts of Raven. Of her laugh, which was almost scent here in the filth and grime. The look in her eyes when he’d promised to find her. The thought that the world might, indeed, be filled with light, and not the darkness of his father’s awful desires and unbreakable oaths. That he could go home again. That he had a home to go to, and Gwyn was waiting for him.

The horrors of his rat-infested prison were not so vivid as these lucid dreams, and it was the hope of her that sustained him.

Then he overheard two guards talking a week before his release, when his body had been beaten too many times to count, and his dreams shattered like a million shards of ice.

Voices tinged with a Norman accent, mixed with Saxon roughness, lent a strange, rustic, lyrical quality to the rough talk of the wardens outside his cell one evening.

“Aye, well, and what do ye expect? A woman gave him up,” said one gruff voice in reply to some unheard comment, then grunted. “We ought to begin hiring wenches as spies. I’ve said it before. Men can’t keep their cods and their brains working at once, and the women is a good bit cheaper to pay into the bargain.”

This was greeted by a coarse laugh. “Aye, well, there you’re right. I wouldn’t mind a bit of spying bein’ done on me, if I had one as savory as they say this one was. But ’twasn’t a wench, Dunnar. ’Twas her ladyship.”

Griffyn dragged one swollen eye open and stared at the slit of light coming under the door.

“Aye, I heard she was tupped right well,” said the first, grunting again, “and ’twouldn’t have been given up mor’n what she already did.”

More coarse laughter.

“’Twas the lady, all right,” said the second. “Word is the king’s going to increase her lands, her bein’ the heiress ’n all.”

“Pah,” came the spat reply, “as if Everoot’s not a big enough thing for herself to manage.”

Griffyn went still.

The other laughed in reply. “And ye’re thinkin’ ye might do wi’ some’a the rewards?”

“And why not?” the Grunt retorted indignantly. “Ack, I know ’twouldn’t be right, but I do mor’n those rich earls and whatnot. Pah,” he spat again. “I’d like to compare what she done to the years of shit-hauling I been doin’ down here these past years.”

The voices started to fade away. Griffyn rolled to his knees and braced his hand against the wall. It couldn’t be.

“I could do wi’ a bit of som’in’ meself,” said the first guard with another coarse laugh, “but I’d ruther a piece of the lady than a piece of the land, iffen ye know what I mean.”

The other spat a series of curses and their voices started to fade further. A squeal of rusted iron indicated they’d reached the outer door and would soon be gone. Griffyn dragged himself as far as his chains would allow and stood, swaying on his feet. He leaned one palm against the fetid wall and bent his head, listening.

“Naw, the Countess Everoot stumbles ’cross a spy, gets rightly tupped as her first reward, then turns him over and gets an increase in the lands so’s now they reach halfway to York. Bloody nobility. Can’t trust ’em so far as ye can spit.”

Griffyn staggered backwards, his head filled with a hot, hard roar. The agony of realisation dropped him to his knees. He slid down the wet wall, his knees bending under him, the back of his head against the hard, wet stone.

Sometime over that one storm-tossed night, he had imagined, for just a moment, he had found love. Instead it was betrayal, the ever-present truth.

He banged his head backwards against the stone, fighting the almost overwhelming urge to bellow his rage and fury. Traitor, deceiver, betrayer.

Spawn.

No one ever changed. It was in the blood.

His heart was splitting and hardening all at once, so it was a splintered mass of frozen shards by the time he was ransomed seven days later.

Winter through Summer, 1153

All of England

The armies of Henri fitzEmpress marched across the parched earth of England and laid it to waste. Castle, garrison, village, homestead; everything was decimated.

King Stephen fought on, along with his combative, petulant son, Prince Eustace. Some said the king was goaded by those who feared Henri fitzEmpress’s wrath, or perhaps the obligation to tread, weary now, a path long chosen. The prince had more at stake: a kingdom.

But for most, the truth was plain to see. The civil wars would end as soon as Henri fitzEmpress was crowned king.

Still, a few loyal outposts held their castles, kept their garrisons manned. Kept their faith. They would die, of course. By sword or starvation, they would die or be subsumed.

The fitzEmpress captains went out before the main army like locusts upon a field. They ate their way through the countryside, and everything fell before them. The good and the bad, the chaff and the wheat, and no one kept count anymore.

And then, in August, the news went out: Prince Eustace, heir to the throne, was dead.

August 1153

The Nest, Northumbria, England

“It’s all gone, my lady. The entire harvest. Wheat and rye, both crops, withered.”

Gwyn looked up at her William, her balding, beloved seneschal, who sat opposite her at the table. He brushed all five strands back over the slope of his head and frowned at the parchment scroll he held aloft, the report just received from the eastern manors. He was simply repeating what he’d already said, thrice already.

Gwyn nodded wearily and looked out the window. No breeze came through the wide, fourth-story window, only hot, dry air and the small voice of a child playing some game.

“Sell the harps,” she said flatly.

“My lady! They were your mother’s!”

“Have Gilbert prepare the wagon. To Ipsile-upon-Tyne,” she said, referring to one of Everoot’s chartered towns. “Take it to Agardly the goldsmythe. His serjeantry includes providing travel for Everoot’s goods, and he knows every minstrel from the River Clyde to the Thames. They’ll fetch a middling price.”

She heard the parchment ruffle to the table. “Enough for wheat for the year,” William murmured, “if they both sell.”

She nodded. And that was it. There was nothing else to sell.

The child’s voice faded away, but Gwyn kept staring out the window, ashamed by the realisation that this worry was not the thing that assailed her heart the deepest. The deepest cut came from the knowledge that she had betrayed Pagan a year ago.

A bribe to the prison guards a week after her return to Everoot had resulted in half the money being returned in clipped coins and no news of him. “Dead,” said her messenger. “Surely dead.”

The news almost killed her. Which was as it should be, an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

Forget.

She gripped the edge of the table in front of her. God alone knew how she’d tried to banish the memories of that night almost a year ago when the world was dowered with magic and a pagan invaded her soul, but her dreams were wayward. They awakened her each morn, pulsing wet heat between her thighs and knifing pain through the centre of her heart.

Please God, give me some penance to do that will settle all these debts
.

“Or let me die,” she whispered.

William looked over. “My lady?”

She shook her head. It was all death and destruction this hot, swirling summer. Henri fitzEmpress’s armies had invaded in the winter, as Marcus predicted, and ravaged the countryside, cutting a deliberately vicious swath through the south and west, collecting submissions as they went.

South, west, and east, the world she knew was falling to bloody pieces on the sword of an army that was slowly, inexorably, moving north. Towards Everoot.

And she could do nothing. Animals had to be fed, fish had to be caught, and crops had to be tended, even though most of the hardiest men had been sent to fortify the king’s armies.

It was left to the women and young to reap the harvest, to prepare and store it for the coming winter. Which was promising to be a long one. The dog days of July had come and bitten hard. They might kill as many as the wars. Dust rose up at the mere thought of a walk, and the wheat shivered dry husks onto the heads of those trying to bring the awful harvest in.

It could be worse, she reminded herself firmly. She could be going through all this while wed to Marcus fitzMiles. Or warded to him. She’d rather sell pasties at the fair than be bound to Marcus.

But the king’s chivalrous and long-standing promise to her father had held firm a year back, despite Marcus’s awful threats. Or perhaps because of them. Pride was a powerful goad even for her gallant king.

However it came, though, Everoot was still in Guinevere’s hands, unless and until it dripped between her fingers like melting ice. The summer drought was burning through the earldom’s already-meager resources. Even Mamma’s harps would be but a bucket of water against the inferno.

“And there’s word of the Welsh matter,” William said, his dour tone even more gloomy than usual. “Another steward has gone a’missing on the Welsh manor by Ipsile.”

The estates on the Welsh Marches were infamous for running off stewards. Or killing them off. And no one knew why. Gwyn dragged her head up through the heat. “Dead?” she asked wearily.

“No. Just gone.”

She rose, pushing away the parchment rolls and wax tablets scattered across the broad table. “That’s all for now, William. I’ll find another steward…later.”

The office chamber was set deep in the castle walls, where no fresh air or light came in, but in the dog days of summer, it was cool and refreshing. Reluctantly, she pushed herself into a corridor damp with hot moisture; even the stones were sweating from the heat. Her steward hurried behind.

“Proceed with your plan to replace the fish traps on the upper river, William. You are right: they’ve been vandalised and catch nothing but reeds.”

She went limply through the heat, to the north-facing solar where her women waited for her to join them.

She chatted for awhile, then let her sewing drop to her lap and stared across what was to be a nursery, devoid of children, where she took one precious hour from each day to embroider and chat with the women. It was the only time she could spare.

Today, the murmur of their voices was laced like thin strands of silver through the hot, heavy summer air. They sat on benches, heads bent, busily chattering, their fingers darting over their sewing. Every so often a colourful veil or hair ribbon would lift—red, green, sapphire—and a pair of bright eyes would peer out to smile at some joke, before dipping down to work again.