Conqueror (40 page)

She laughed. “Hardly. Especially as most of them are not noble.”

“Ah, and we turn to another timely topic: the servants one cannot turn around but for tripping over. Why are they here?”

She paused in folding up the small square of fabric. “Their husbands have died, or their fathers and brothers, fighting for my father and the king. They have no homes, no place in the world. We need washerwomen and milk maids.”

“And almoners,” he added wryly. “I noticed our almoner is a woman.”

She smiled brightly. “She’s quite good.”

He reached for her hand. “We don’t need
eighteen
washerwomen, nor twelve dairy maids, Gwyn.”

“Of course we do,” she said placidly, and entwined her fingers in his. “You’ll see. Your linens will be cleaner than anyone’s in Northumbria.”

“Even the Archbishop’s?” he asked with mock astonishment, pulling her to her feet.

“Especially his.”

He kissed the tip of her nose. “Come, I have something for you to see.”

He walked her outside the chamber to the landing. Three slitted windows were cut deep in the six-foot rounded walls of the keep tower, which formed the landing and stairwell.

“Look,” he ordered. “Out the window.”

She walked to the northeastern window. Outside, a curl of smoke and a hub of activity bustled just inside the line of trees marking the eastern woods. She tipped her chin over her slim shoulder and smiled at him. “You’re assarting some land.”

She poked her head into the deep stone opening as far as she could. “’Tis wonderful,” she said, her voice an excited muffle. “Really, wonderful.” She pulled out, not smiling anymore. “For next year, of course. We shan’t have seed enough for the fields that are already marled and ready for planting come spring.”

He turned her by the shoulders and pointed towards the southern-facing window. She peered through. “Wagons?”

“How many?”

She looked again. “Four, five.”

“There are more coming, Gwyn. Look.”

She did. “What are they bringing?”

“What do you think?”

She leaned back and peered at him, arms crossed lightly, one eye narrowed. “Luxury or staple?”

He smiled. “Both. Something we need, but having it will make us feel rich indeed.”

She laughed and rested her cool, slim fingertips on his forearm.
“Babies.”

He laughed, slung his arm around her shoulders, and pointed out the window again. “They don’t come in wagons, Gwyn. Your mother should be ashamed. Now, what do you think is inside the wagons?”

“I haven’t the foggiest notion.” She snuggled into his chest. “You could have ordered us herbs from the Holy Lands or harps for the hall.”

“Grain.”

He felt her go still. “What?”

“Grain. For milling now, and seed for planting. Wheat, and rye, and barley.”

She was still another moment, then her shoulders began to shake. He held her tighter and pressed his cheek against the top of her head while she cried.

She woke up in the night screaming again. Griffyn held her to his chest until she calmed, then said softly, “Your father?”

She stared straight ahead, her eyes glassy and red-rimmed. “Aye.”

“Why do you dream of him so much, Gwyn? Why are they so awful?”

He didn’t think she was going to answer, but finally she said, in a rote voice, “He never forgave me.”

He ran his hand over her hair. “For what?”

“For killing my brother. And then my mother.”

He tucked the furs up around her shoulders and pulled her closer. “What happened?”

She was silent a moment, then started talking in short, monotonal sentences. “I was ten. Out riding. I shouldn’t have been. There’d been so many raids down from the north that spring. I was not allowed to leave the castle by myself. Not even to the village. I knew that. But I’d heard Mamma say she needed more elderflowers. Papa’s bones were aching in the spring damp.”

She stared across the room at the far wall. “I knew just where they were—I’d found a new cluster of them the summer before, by the river. I went to get them. I heard them. Mamma and Roger, calling me. At first, I heard them. I just didn’t want to go. I—I rode away. I found the herbs. I was kneeling on the ground, then—”

She swallowed. “Riders. A raiding party. Half a dozen
routiers,
straight down from Scotland.”

Her pace picked up, her words running together at times. “I got on Wind and tried to ride away, but they saw me. I hear them whopping and screaming, kicking their horses up behind me. I’m screaming too. Then, then—oh,
Roger
.” She was gulping and sobbing, the tears pouring out. “He and a few of his best men, galloping flat out. They’re calling to me, I’m flying on Wind straight to the centre of them, they’re closing in behind me. They’re fighting. It’s so
loud
. Godwillneverforgiveme Roger’s dead. I am alive, and Roger’s bleeding to death on the grass,” she whispered, pointing, as if he was before her now. “Oh God, please let me die.”

Great, wrenching sobs shook her body. Griffyn stopped hushing her and just held her, rocking away the relived horror that had lifted the hair on the back of his neck.

Later, much later, when she calmed, he brushed back the hair from her wet, stricken face.

“And your mother never forgave you?”

“Of course she did. Then she died. Three months later. Her heart broke one night.”

Griffyn took a deep, silent breath and let it out. “And your father, Gywn? He never forgave you?”

“No. Why should he?”

“It was an accident.”

“I knew what I was doing,” she answered in that flat, dead voice. She started shivering. “I knew I was doing wrong.”

He held her until she fell asleep, maybe an hour later. He lay awake for a long time, though, watching her. She’d thrown the furs off her body, and was a shadow of rose and silk in the flickering firelight. One satiny forearm was flung above her head, the other dangled off the edge of the bed, delicate fingers curled in sleep. Her hair streamed out as if she was underwater, all except one ebony curl which had fallen across her face and rustled gently as she breathed. The room was quiet.

With one finger, he pulled the strand of hair away from her face and ran its softness between his fingers. A flicker of self-disgust made him look away. He did not like deceiving her. But even less did he like the idea of involving Guinevere in whatever unholy mess had destroyed their fathers. She would be protected from that if it were in his power at all. The one noble act left in him.

His hand went to the keys hanging around his neck, the black iron one and the little steel one de Louth had given him.

He’d had hope, for a while. Hope he and Gwyn were touching one another. Hope that things could be different. That their marriage could be different, that
he
could be different. But she’d never returned his declarations of love, just as his father had not, and inside of Griffyn, the desire for the treasure was building.

And so, it was all to be the same, awful story again. Destiny. He could no more reject it than he could cut off his legs and keep walking. Wanting had crept in at the first crack in his resistance. Skewered in and spread out, like a cobweb over his soul. And now he dreamed at night of it, of a treasure that would lift him up. Power him. Ennoble him.

And he
knew
it to be trash. If a thing could so corrupt a man’s intentions, it was trash. Refuse. Carrion.

And still he wanted it. Not completely, not yet. But it was coming. He could see it like a great black bird, winging in from far away.

He stood in the cellars of the Nest early the next morning, a torch slammed into the cresset on the wall, angling the lighted end out into the air. In front of him was a door. An essentially hidden door, tucked here in the darkest recesses of the cellars.

He had stopped short at this crossroads in the tunnels and, half by touch, half by memory, found the door. The shadows danced in ghostly leaps, attesting to the presence of fresh, or at least moving, air that Griffyn could not detect.

He raked his fingers through his hair. “I’ve forgotten for all these years, and now I remember it so well.” He leaned forward and peered down the long, dark expanse of the tunnel running to his right. It went on and on. “That goes to a cave in the wood, if I recall,” he murmured, more to himself than Alex, who stood at his side, eyebrow lifted.

“You played down here?”

Griffyn smiled faintly. “All the time.”

Alex shuddered. “And Guinevere? She was a child here too. Did she play down here?”

“I do not know,” he murmured. The leather of his hauberk creaked in the narrow space; they’d come straight from work with the men in the practice fields at dawn. The hunt was going out this morning, but Griffyn sent Jerv at its head, claiming too much work, promising to join them the following day.

But Griffyn knew what was really happening. The infection was spreading. He was Christian Sauvage’s son. It was in the blood.

Still, he considered, Gwyn did not seem to be stricken with the sickness that had destroyed their fathers. She was different. Different from anyone he’d ever known.

“But I would like to know,” he said aloud. “I would like to know if she played down here.” It was dank, close, dark, and would have been dense with cobwebs if spiders ever dared venture down here. They didn’t, but an imaginative child certainly would. “I think she did.”

“You’re both mad, then,” Alex muttered with conviction. He pointed the tip of his short blade at the door before them. A monstrous padlock hung off it like a fang, carved in the shape of a dragon’s head. “Are you going to open it?”

“Are you going to ever start Watching?” Griffyn muttered in reply. Then he shoved the iron key around his neck into the lock. He hit a barrier. The key didn’t fit.

Alex cursed.

He tried again, pushed harder. Nothing.

“Hack it off,” Alex urged, his words swift and low.

“That’s ludicrous,” Griffyn said sharply, but in his mind it seemed more sacrilegious. “I think not.”

Alex lifted his brows. “So, what now?”

“We wait.”

Alex’s eyes snapped to his. “In God’s name, Griffyn, wait
for what
? How long can you wait?”

Griffyn drew back at the unprecedented fury. “Longer than you apparently.”

Alex’s granite gaze hardened even further. “Griffyn. I have been a Watcher for more years than you’ve been alive. I have been waiting for you my whole life. And now, all you
do
is wait. The world is at your command, if you do but reach out and take it.”

“You have no idea,” Griffyn replied in a low, barely controlled voice. “I never wanted this thing, your whole mission has been to have me reach out and take it, and now you’ve succeeded, and I want it, I am seeking it, and I hate it. So, I wait, a few days, a year: what matters that? In the end, I will be like all the others. Twisted, warped, missing from my own life.”

Alex was quiet a moment. “Not all of them, Griffyn.”

“I do not care!” he roared. The thunder bounced off the walls and kicked down the dirt tunnels. “I cannot say it any more clearly than this:
I despise it
. And now, all I can do is seek it. I leave my woman to follow the mere hint of it. I dream of it at night.”

Alex paused. “What kind of dreams?”

Griffyn dropped down on a huge block of stone, jutting out a few feet from the rest of the close-set stones, almost as a seat for someone like him, sitting and pondering how to get into the inner chamber. He put his elbows on his knees, his forehead in his hands. “Leave.”

“Griffyn, my every move has been to serve you. If—”

“Leave me.”

Alex stood a moment, then turned and strode away. The torch flame stretched and swayed in the breeze of his retreat, then grew still and steady again. Griffyn pressed his face into his palms. He could smell the cold metal of the keys on them. Again, he was here, in a cellar, while the whole world was waiting in the fresh air above him.

Inside the padlocked cellar door, Duncan stood at the ready, short sword in hand, sweat trickling down his temples, prepared to be killed in the service of his lady. Prince Eustace lay dying behind him, but this had never been about a young prince he barely knew. ’Twas always about good lady Gwyn and her radiant smile.

Truth, she’d saved him and his little sister when the rebels tried to burn all of England to the ground. Papa and Mamma had roasted like cinders, but he’d hied it straight to Everoot, tugging Alice alongside, tripping and crying under the cover of a tattered cloak, pinched from a solider too drunk to realise. Papa had mentioned good Lady Gwyn, and right he’d been. She’d taken them in without a second word, given them food and a place, from now until they died, she’d promised, and she would, too.

The sounds of muted voices drifted away, and Duncan lowered his sword, his heart hammering. He sat down next to his charge, hoping Lady Gwyn would come soon and tell him what was happening abovestairs. Truth, he’d never expected to have a long life, but not until he came to Lady Gwyn had he expected to have such an exciting one.

Griffyn came upstairs from the cellars into the great hall and was met immediately by William of York, as dour and nervous as ever. “My lord. Another messenger.”

Griffyn looked over. A middle-aged, muscular messenger sat at a table, but rose quickly at Griffyn’s arrival.

“My lord,” he said, smiling.

Griffyn returned the grin. “Ralph,” he said warmly, grasping the arm of one of Henri’s trusted messengers. Griffyn had used him himself a few times, with Henri’s leave, on the most sensitive missions.

“What news?” he asked, releasing Ralph’s arm. “Why are you two hundred miles north of Henri? Have you been fed?”

He glanced over Ralph’s head and nodded to William of York, who nodded to a servant, who hurried to the passage of screens that comprised the hallway to the kitchens. Around the hall, off-duty knights and soldiers rested or talked or played games of dice. A few women, distaffs in hand, sat near the fire in a small, bright cluster, their chatter a low, pleasant hum.