Fairest Of Them All (3 page)

She had fled to the parapet to escape the excited chatter of the ladies-in-waiting her papa had summoned to attend her at tomorrow’s tournament The former haven of her chamber now swarmed with a half dozen well-meaning aunts and a bevy of Tewksbury cousins, all flinching beneath the direction of Brother Nathanael at his most caustic.

The spring wind was balmy, but the wintry pearl of a moon suspended in the north sky better reflected her mood. Pale stars frosted the canopy of the sky, their radiance dimmed by the greedy glow of the campfires scattered around the castle walls.

The hillside was awash in a sea of colorful tents and fluttering pennons. Tomorrow at dawn, the drawbridge of Castle Tewksbury would be lowered, the portcullis raised, and the gates thrown wide to welcome all challengers, including the man who would claim her for both his prize and his bride before the day was done.

Holly shivered as the wind carried a snatch of song and drunken revelry to her ears. She knew little more of men than she had a year ago when they’d began to woo her. Other than her suitors, her father had kept her cut off from masculine company, refusing to expose her to the smitten stares of scullion and groom. Her suitors showed her only their prettiest faces, but she had glimpsed the hunger lurking beneath their masques of courtesy when they thought she was paying them no heed—a sideways glance, a lowered gaze, a wetting of the lips as if in anticipation of sating their appetites at some dark and mysterious feast.

She gripped the rough, familiar stone of the parapet to steady her hands. Tonight she’d only been cast from her chamber. Tomorrow she was to be exiled from the castle itself. She wished for the dubious comfort of blaming her father, but found she could not Most marriages were arranged by ambitious fathers when their daughters were only babes. Her papa had given her ample opportunity to choose a husband, yet she had failed them both.

The scattered fires winked at her, mocking her swelling panic. A distant rumble of masculine laughter sent a chill of despair shooting down her spine. Tomorrow she would be forever bound before God and man to a stranger. Tonight might be her last precious taste of freedom.

Casting the candlelit window of her chamber a furtive glance, she drew up the hood of her cloak to shield her face and melted into the shadows of the outer stairs.

“Oof. You’re standing in my ear.”

“Sorry,” Austyn said, bracing his booted foot against Carey’s sleek head. “If you’d stop squirming, I might be able to get some purchase on the rope.”

“You’d squirm, too,” Carey gritted out between clenched teeth, “if you had a full-grown ox standing on your shoulders. And it wasn’t you who took that nasty plunge off the raft and into the moat.” He wrinkled his nose at his own pungent scent “I’ve little doubt now what the earl’s guards have been using it for. I found it far more offensive than defensive.”

Austyn grunted in triumph as the far end of the rope sailed from his hands to hook itself over one of the sturdy stone teeth crowning the inner bailey wall. When he’d judged it competent to bear his weight, he began to shimmy up its length, leaving Carey to sink to his knees in the damp grass, panting for breath. The pale face and hair bequeathed to him a century ago by some rapacious Norse invader gleamed up at Austyn from the shadows.

“This is madness, you know,” he offered earnestly when Austyn paused at the first slim arrow loop to assure himself that the raucous cacophony of drunken celebration and petty squabbling from the hillside encampment had muffled their trespass.

A high-pitched giggle, unmistakably feminine, wafted to his ears. The Englishmen were wenching as if each of them were to take a wife on the morrow, Austyn thought. A full-fledged siege would have probably escaped their lecherous attentions. Remembering Carey’s supplicant posture just in time, he resisted the urge to spit in disgust

“Madness it may be,” he called down softly, “but I must judge this lady with mine own eyes.”

“And if she is as fair as they say?”

Austyn had no answer for that but to continue climbing.

Carey scrambled to his feet, cupping a hand around his mouth to muffle his shout. “If you’re caught looming over the fair maiden’s bed without benefit of a priest’s blessing, youll be hanged, you know.”

Austyn swung one leg over the wall before gathering the end of the rope to drop it down the other side. “Then you may help yourself to my armor, my arms, and that sprightly little mare you’ve had your eye on for so long.”

Carey clasped a hand over his heart. “Sir, in truth, your ill estimation of my devotion wounds me sorely!”

“Then consider yourself fortunate.” Austyn’s crooked grin belied the gravity of his words. “We Gavenmores usually kill those we love.”

Leaving his friend with a jaunty salute, he swung away from the wall and dropped into nothingness.

Holly eased back the folds of her hood as she slipped into the walled sanctuary of her mother’s garden. The budding canopy of elm and oak muted the masculine clamor of voices from outside the castle walls. Even though her heart was heavy, the magical iridescence of the air possessed the power to lighten her step. Her throat tingled as she drank in a nourishing breath of it

Moonlight silvered the tender shoots prodding their way through the rich, black soil, demanding birth. Beads of dew trembled on the unfurling petals of sweet violet and primrose. Holly paused to bathe her finger in one of the plump droplets, tracing the curling edge of a leaf impatiently awaiting the kiss of dawn.

A wistful sigh escaped her. She had been forbidden the pleasures of sunlight for fear it would mar her creamy complexion, but here in this garden, she became a creature of moonlight Here she found the solitude denied her by the flock of chattering magpies her papa had appointed as ladies-in-waiting.

As a little girl, she had skipped and jumped along the winding paths as any child would, trusting that the soft loam would cushion her knees without betraying her folly should she stumble.

She wished she could recapture the delicious glee of scampering through the garden, the sense of freedom gained from being rid of prying eyes and expectations. Realizing with a pang of loss that this was the last time she would know such freedom, she sank into the broad wooden saddle of the swing dangling from the branch of a young elm.

Dragging her bare toes in the grass, she began to hum a melancholy tune. Here she could sing, not the elaborate rounds taught by Brother Nathanael and favored by her papa to entertain her suitors, but modest melodies such as the ballad she’d overheard a Welsh scullion maid singing yestereve.

She warbled into song, defiantly savoring the simple pleasure of singing with no one to please but herself.

Austyn swiped a low hanging bough out of his face, swearing beneath his breath. He’d gained his way into the inner bailey only to find himself trapped in an enclosed garden with nary a door in sight Vines thick with fresh blooms crept up weathered stone walls and dangled from overhanging limbs. A narrow path wended its way through a thicket choked with buds. He followed it, ducking to avoid a thorny arch drenched in shiny, julep-scented leaves.

The garden bore little resemblance to the tidy herb beds he could remember his mother tending, but instead seemed caught in the grip of some enchanted anarchy. He prided himself on scorning the superstitions that plagued most of his Welsh kin, but wouldn’t have been overly startled to see a mischievous Booka scamper out from beneath a toadstool to cast a curse on him. Twas a pity he was already cursed.

“Asinine rubbish,” he muttered, but took the precaution of signing a cross on his surcoat.

He was to be thankful for such prudence when the first mournful notes of the melody wafted to his ears.

At first he thought he must have imagined it He stopped, cocking his head to listen. An icy finger of memory caressed the base of his spine, lifting his hackles. Without realizing it, he rested a hand on his sword hilt

He knew the words of the ballad by heart Had learned them when his mother had, in her rich contralto, sung him to sleep. Twas a rather grim lullaby about a lady coaxing her lover to rest his head on her breast and sleep. Not for a night but for all eternity, because sharing death would be preferable to one of them betraying the other should they live. A keen blade of grief sliced Austyn’s heart but its bleeding was staunched by a tattered bandage of rage.

“Rhiannon,” he whispered.

Twas surely not the shade of his mother who mocked him, but that treacherous Welsh faerie. He would have died before confessing it to Carey or any other man, but he had felt her presence before, when walking his horse through a mist-shrouded glade at twilight or skirting the weed-choked boundaries of his mother’s grave. She was all spirit and no substance—a brief cooling of the air, a flick of gossamer hair across his face, the taunting whisper of a lover’s breath against his nape.

Perhaps he should have heeded Carey’s warning, for this was madness indeed.

Leaving the path behind, he plunged through the thicket, determined to find the witch who worked such dark magic. She sang not in a husky contralto, but in a lilting soprano tuned to flawless pitch. He froze, holding his breath, as the final note of the song trembled in the air, mocking him.

An eerie creak sounded to his left.

He drew his short sword, forgetting that it was he who had intruded upon this haunted glade. “Who goes there?”

His hoarse demand was answered by a faint squeak and a rustle of undergrowth. Hacking away at the slender branches of a rowan, he charged forward only to find himself alone in a moon-dappled clearing sheltered by a single elm. An abandoned swing turned this way and that, as if prodded by the vagaries of the wind.

A triumphant smile curved Austyn’s lips. The high wall surrounding the garden blocked the wind. Other than those he’d disturbed, not even a leaf trembled. He touched his hand to the wooden seat of the swing. Faint warmth emanated to his callused palm. He straightened, pleased to have proved his prey was not faerie or ghost, but mortal.

Just how mortal was proved in the next moment when a frantic rustle of blooms was followed by a delicate sneeze. Sheathing his sword, he strode over to part the greenery. The blooms still quivered, but whoever had sought their asylum had fled, darting once more out of his reach. His smile faded. His quarry was proving to be more fleet of foot than he. He was the sort of hunter who preferred the roaring challenge of a charging boar to the subtleties of tracking a doe through the forest. The crack of a twig betrayed movement at the edge of the glade. Already savoring his impending victory, Austyn moved to investigate. The creak of the swing behind him warned him an instant too late. He whipped around to discover the contraption rushing toward him with dizzying speed, a darkly bewinged creature mounted on its back. Its feet slammed into his chest, knocking him backward. He would have been knocked to the loam, bruising only his pride, had his head not struck the edge of a marble bench. Tendrils of lightning shot through his bewildered brain.

As consciousness sifted from his mind, he would have almost sworn he heard the mocking notes of a woman’s laughter drifting on the windless air.

Slipping from the swing, Holly gazed down at the giant she had felled, her heart thudding wildly in her throat. He sprawled in a puddle of moonlight, bearing more resemblance to some shaggy beast than a man. A fearsome beard shaded his jaw, climbing to mate with a dark froth of unkempt hair. She doubted she could have spanned his tendon-corded throat with both hands—although at the moment she would have liked to try.

She was torn between the desire to rest her foot triumphantly on his surcoat and scream for her father’s guards or flee and pretend she had never left the haven of her chamber. She cast the stairs a longing glance.

The knight s utter absence of movement drew her gaze back to him. With his mighty arms flung outward in supplication and his thick, stubby lashes resting flush against his pallid cheeks, he looked as vulnerable as a sleeping babe. Or a sleeping bear, she amended. Clammy fingers of dread stifled her thundering pulse.

Suppose she had killed him?

The wretch deserved no less, she thought, for daring to invade her sanctuary and scaring her half out of her wits. She tried to pull herself away, but found she could not abandon him without assuring herself she had not caused him mortal injury. Propping gingerly to her knees beside his still form, she forced herself to splay a trembling hand over his surcoat, noting that the coral oval of one of her fingernails had been torn to the quick.

“Nathanael will have my head,” she muttered.

Her dismay was tempered with relief as her hand rose and fell in rhythm with the giant’s steady breathing. She frowned, suddenly bewildered. The jarring impact of her feet striking his chest had convinced her the knight was wearing chain mail, yet she felt no betraying links beneath the faded linen of his surcoat Casting a furtive glance over her shoulder as if expecting Brother Nathanael to spring out of the budding heliotropes, she slipped a shy hand inside both surcoat and tunic to discover a chest armored not with the cold artifice of steel, but with an extravagant expanse of warm muscle. Crisp whorls of hair tickled her questing fingertips.

She snatched her hand back, disturbed by the urge to explore further. Jerking up her hood, she prepared to flee, but a heartrending groan stopped her. Trapped in a vise of indecision, Holly wanted to groan, too. So the man wasn’t dead. But what if he were dying? Did she dare leave him at the mercy of the cold damp seeping into his bones? Perhaps if she revived him, she could convince herself to flee before he came fully to his senses and decided to pursue whatever sinister purpose had brought him to the garden.

She leaned over him. Her hair brushed his nose, making it twitch. “Sir?” she whispered. “Oh, sir? I pray, sir, can you hear me?”

His lips parted in a gentle snore, as if he would be content to slumber forever, deaf to her pleas.

There was no help for it, Holly thought. She was going to have to touch him again.