Crown of the Realm (A White Knight Adventure Book 2) (15 page)

DELICATE FINGERS GRASPED
his wrist. Drake started to come around. Hushed whisperings, most of it unintelligible, buzzed annoyingly. When he warily opened his eyes, the talking stopped.

An arresting lady with untamable auburn hair smiled
down at him. He thought she was part of a dream spawned of delirium until her shapely lips moved and words spiraled out. “Shall we go for a priest? Or do you have a positive guess as to your survival?”

He sputtered with half-hearted laughter that brought acute spasms of pain.

“He will live, I think, sad loss to the Devil but glad tidings for his loved ones, whoever and wherever they may be.”

When she shifted her position, a crowd of faces peered curiously down at him. Five in all, no six, including the lady
. Or was he seeing double, or rather triple? Three faces looked enough alike to be triplets. Brothers, he decided, each a year or two apart.

Dawn had broken hours before without
Drake noticing. The sun burned hot on his forehead. He was sodden with river water, caked in mud, and soaked in dried blood, most though not all of it his. In their eagerness to dispense comfort, the travelers had dragged him to higher ground.

The one who appeared the eldest
—near to fifty and the most sober in a troupe of otherwise fresh-faced and slightly giddy lads— spoke up. “You’ve got a nasty wound there.”

Feeling dread,
Drake ventured to ask, “What of Devon?”

“If you’re referring to our distant cousin, he lives.” One of the triplets stepped aside, revealing the squire lying supine on a blanket.

Drake crawled over to the lad and gently lifted the soiled bandaging. The dagger had not caught him in the throat but at the juncture between shoulder and neck, missing vital blood vessels but gashing bone and sinew. “Where did you learn to throw a knife like that?”

Devon spoke with effort. “
“It was a bad throw. I was aiming at his Adam’s apple.”

“Bad throw or not, you saved our lives.” He grasped the boy’s hand and looked up at the wayfarers.

The youngest triplet, who grew facial hair not yet coarse enough to shave, was agog with curiosity. He indicated the two corpses lying within smelling distance. “Were they highwaymen who sprang upon you suddenly?”

“Or perhaps,” said the slightly older youth who looked much like his peach-fuzzed brother, “you haggled over spoils purloined from innocent pilgrims? And your partners were unwilling to share?”

“Or by chance,” the oldest of the red-headed brothers put in eagerly, “they wanted everything and forced your hand?”

When he weakly sat up, the six lurched back, clearly more afraid of him than they
initially let on. He must look like a villain, an outcast, a most-foul killer who wouldn’t hesitate to hack more throats and disembowel additional guts. Not wanting to startle them further, he slowly lifted a scraped hand to his reeling head. His stomach spun nearly as fast. He suspected he appeared properly sick and of no great threat, as long as he refrained from sudden movements. “Where am I?”

“You don’t know?” said peach-fuzz.

“If I knew, I would not have asked.”

“In the Dordogne Valley.”

“I’m still in the Aquitaine? In Richard’s lands?”

“Richard? Richard Plantagenêt?” Peach-fuzz glanced at the rest. “Well
, that is a matter of interpretation.”

“Whose?”

“The side you’re on.”

“Are there sides?”

“I’d say you’re concussed. How many fingers have I?”

“Twelve,” Drake said, without looking
at the fingers or the corpses. “Are they dead?”

“Well and truly. Surely you smell them. I’m Gui d’Ussel. These are my brothers, Peire and Eble. We’re on our way to the monastery at Tulle to meet our cousin and an old friend of Gaucelm’s there.” He pointed out a man coming onto middle age. “And thence to Limoges, where a tourney is to be held in three
weeks’ time. Many knights in search of spoils and glory will assemble in Limoges, not to mention troubadours and jugglers to entertain.”

“Which was it then?” Unlike the others, Gaucelm had been standing at the periphery, his considerable girth a
fortification unto itself. “Was it a classic disagreement among associates or a noble defense of your virtue?”

Drake squinted up at the man who, by the looks of him, enjoyed his drink and his food in equal measure. “I have a notion you won’t trust either version.”

The fat man raised an eyebrow. Then he laughed like someone unaccustomed to laughter, which made everyone but Drake join him. “And I have a feeling, young friend, you’re a sagacious whoreson and as clever as they come.” In all the chatter, he hadn’t taken his sight off Drake. Chiefly, he had been watching his hands. He motioned toward four stained weapons—two damascened swords and two damascened daggers—fanned out elegantly on the ground. “They’re fine blades. Yours?”

“And my brother’s.”

Taking in the gory corpses, Gui said, “I suppose they deserve a decent burial. The more decent, the better. I shouldn’t want to be downwind of either one of them, dead or alive, but dead especially.”

“Alive, especially,” Drake said.
“You will have to take my word on this.”

“Who are you, anyway?” asked Gui, bubbly and sociable.

Deciding Gui d’Ussel of the peach-fuzz chin wasn’t as superficial as he first appeared, since he was tickling the point of a lethal dagger under Drake’s unshaven chin, Drake said, “Drake fitzAlan of Winchester.”

“Winchester? That’s in England, isn’t it? Explaining why you smell abominably and have a bent for savagery.”

Another of their party, more mature than the rest, said, “Put down, Gui. Look at the boy’s wrists. Look at the ropes there. He was their prisoner.” He cocked his head toward the corpses. “And those two were anything but provosts.”

Gui thought about it. “True enough.”
And reaching out a hand, said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Drake fitzAlan of Winchester, English though you are.

In the course of having his wounds cleaned and bandaged and his Arabian fetched; overseeing from a distance the plucking, gutting
, and roasting of an unlucky heron; and observing the slow but steady digging of two graves, the river refusing to give up the third, Drake had learned much about the six, more than they had about him.

“
Then this … child,” said Gui d’Ussel, referring to Devon though they were the same age, “who is unaccountably bleeding on my horse’s blanket, is not your brother but your squire.” He took the wineskin from Drake’s hand and imbibed a satisfying mouthful before handing it back. “And your brother, who now travels without his priceless Poitiers steel, where is he?”

“It’s difficult to explain.”

“Meaning, private. But those poor bastards,” he said, indicating the rancid corpses, “had something to do with it?”

“You have it.”

Gaucelm turned out to be Gaucelm Faidit, the famed troubadour, a man of landed nobility who spent his years touring the vast Limousin with others of his kind, including the renowned Bernart de Ventadorn.

The elder
Guiraut de Bornelh, also a troubadour hailing from Limoges, was the plain-spoken, plain-dressed, and soberest member of the group. Though of low birth and holding neither title nor property, he had spent a lifetime in the courts of Aragón and Castile. Guiraut spoke in several languages but wrote songs in only one: the
lenga d’oc
of Aquitaine.

The lady was called Alamanda. From Estancs in Gascony, she was both unmarried and unescorted by others of her gender. Drake, being a man of free thought, drew the obvious conclusion
: that she was a wandering minstrel like the others and probably traded her feminine wares for extra coin, provided the
gentil-homme
didn’t smell abominably and applied a gentle hand. 

Gui studied the ground. “Are you feeling hale
r?”

The brothers had gone about burying the Brabançons, singing gaily at their task while drinking
generous quantities of wine and babbling like parrots. Drake found a comfortable spot propped against the same oak Devon had once been lashed to, while Devon lay silently nearby, his eyes sealed with fatigue and pain. Feeding an increasingly giddy head, Drake tried to keep up with the brothers drink for drink, a daunting task but one in which he was inclined. The wine wasn’t doing his head damnably much good, but neither did he care damnably much.

“You don’t look like you’re feeling hale
r, but you probably don’t mind as much.”

“Truer words were never said,” Drake said, lifting his cup.

Gui was not much older than sixteen and his brothers Eble and Peire both under twenty. Following the tourneys, they were due to meet in two days’ time with their cousin Elias in Tulle, one of the reasons Guiraut de Bornelh, Gaucelm Faidit, and their particular friend Alamanda d’Estancs were traveling with them.

“The tourney in Limoges is to be a great event, and long ov
erdue after so many years of drought, war, and famine. Aimery, the vicomte of Limoges, has finally opened up his purse and his castle. Do you know him, Aimery of Limoges, the half-brother of Comte Ademar of Angoulême? But no, I shouldn’t expect you would. You don’t look like the sort to have the particular acquaintance of comtes or vicomtes.”

Eble said, “I fear that Gaucelm, Alamanda
, and Guiraut are sorry they joined us. Their heads are always spinning, either with wine or Gui’s voice.”

“True enough,” said Guiraut, his eyes glassy. “I haven’t composed a single line of verse.”

“But you have been well fed.”

The brothers along with their
absent cousin Elias had been brought up in the Château d’Ussel as privileged nobility, much like Drake and Stephen had been nurtured at Itchendel. But unlike the fitzAlans, though perhaps not so unlike Stephen, the brothers d’Ussel were doing their best to reject their heritage and the attendant burdens. The elder d’Ussel had given up on his sons and told them so regularly, going so far as to write a note of condolence to his brother, the father of Elias, on the premature passing of his son, even while the mother of his red-headed boys cried inconsolably into her pillow. None of it stopped the brothers and their cousin from dipping into the family coffers when funds ran low, which was monthly. During the colder weather, when the tourneys weren’t running, father and mother invariably welcomed their sons back to hearth and castle, where they were fed, pampered, and lectured. Come spring, they returned to their travels, living as vagabonds with no means of support except to subsist off the dole of the elder d’Ussel and, when luck ran their way, the occasional winnings gleaned from the tournaments. For two years they had been getting by in this way.

Drake
more than admired their independence, something he could never consider since William fitzAlan would sooner lock him in a dungeon for the rest of his natural-born days than have him wandering around the countryside getting into mischief.   

Gui said, “They think we will soon grow out of the notion.”

“That remains to be seen,” Peire put in.

“My point exactly,” responded the effervescent Gui, who had taken a break from the digging. As long as his brothers didn’t
complain, he was in no hurry to cut short his respite, and interspersed his comments to Drake with pointers to Eble and Peire on how to better wield their shovels and how not to litter the campsite with dirt. His brothers grumbled but went on digging, not once enjoining Gui to take a turn.

Wiping his mouth of a fresh taste of wine, Gui asked, “Do you know the name Guillaume Maréchal?”

“William Marshall? Not only do I know the name, I know the man.”

“Truly? Perhaps you
are
the kind of man to associate with comtes and vicomtes. We all aspire to the greatness of Maréchal.”

“And will all fail miserably.”

A ruddy eyebrow lifted. “Ought I rethink my future then? Being a troubadour is a noble occupation, is it not Alamanda? Others are obliged to feed and house you, and you can roam the countryside to a ripe old age without a care in the world. I’ve heard that the duke of Aquitaine, in his gentler moments, plays the lute and composes songs.”

“Uncommonly well.”

The other ruddy eyebrow lifted. “Drake fitzAlan of Winchester, there is much you are not telling us.”

“But why?” the discerning Gaucelm asked later, after the tasty heron had been devoured to the bone. “Why
did they take your brother hostage?”

Favoring his wounded arm, Drake peered out from beneath his hair. “I don’t remember saying such.”

“Behold the evidence. Matched sets of swords and daggers, and only one brother at hand, your gentle squire notwithstanding.”

“Not having been around many troubadours,” Drake said, “except to enjoy their
music, I suppose they have unnaturally inquiring minds?”

Gaucelm shrugged. “What else is poetry but a travelogue of men’s lives
?”

“Other men’s lives,” Guiraut added, “as ours are usually dull.”