In the Shadow of Midnight (3 page)

Ariel crouched lower in the bushes and hoped the slight motion of the branches lacing back together would not be detected. A woman caught out in the open, unescorted, unprotected,
was fair game to any or all who might need a lusty appetite assuaged. A
beautiful
woman come upon in the sylvan isolation of a sun-drenched glade would stand little chance of escaping untouched—or of escaping at all if a like-minded knight took it into his head to throw her over his saddle and keep her for amusement.

She stared down at the sharp glint of the shortsword she gripped and acknowledged it to be a paltry defense against armoured knights with double-edged broadswords. She would have speed on her side if they dismounted, for a man burdened by layers of bullhide and chain mail moved like a lumbering ox. On horseback, however, a knight reigned supreme. In battle he could easily down ten, twelve, even a score of foot soldiers. In the forest or on an open plain, a mounted knight could run aground and prance merry circles around any man, beast … or woman.

Ariel tilted her face up to the clear patch of blue that showed through the gap in the otherwise unbroken latticework of soaring treetops. She had left the castle around noon and ridden without haste to the glade, stopping here and there to gather the last of the wild currants she had seen growing along the way. Bathing had taken another leisurely hour at least, for she had enjoyed the delicious privacy of floating naked in the sparkling sunlight.

“What hour do ye make it?” a gruff voice asked, startling Ariel’s attention back to the edge of the pond.

One of the English knights reached up and unbuckled the leather strap under his chin, easing the conical steel helm off his head with a sigh.

“What hour?” he asked. He pushed back the mail hood and snug woolen cap he wore, revealing a damp tousle of dark reddish-blond hair, flattened and glued to his scalp from the heat and sweat. “The eleventh, I fear, with the minutes passing faster than a man could care to guess.”

The Welshmen exchanged a wry glance. They bore identical pairs of ebony eyes in faces so alike, despite the bearding, there could be no doubt they were brothers. The grin on
one mouth turned into a slight scowl when he saw the blond knight making preparations to dismount.

“Surely we must be close to the castle,” he said. “I have been smelling the sea since we entered this part of the forest.”

“Aye well, as close as we may be,” the Norman retorted, “we are not close enough. Any further delay and you will smell naught but the foul mess in my chausses.”

The men laughed good-naturedly and Ariel rolled her eyes skyward.

“The next time, Lord Henry,” the burliest of the group advised, “mayhap ye’ll not be so quick to sample a cotter’s pies.”

“There was nothing amiss with the pie.” The unmounted knight, distracted momentarily in a search for a suitable place to squat, removed his leather gloves and set them on the decaying stump of a tree. “It was the effort of trying to swallow the king’s intentions along with the pork lard that has soured my gut.”

“Likewise has it caused you to drag your steps slower and slower with each league that passes?”

“If I do drag my steps, it is because I know the reaction our news will bring. I know it and I dread it and …
merde!”
—he groaned with relief, not a moment too soon after loosening his chausses and angling his bared rump over the log— “and I would sooner face a hoard of Infidels alone and unarmed.”

“Come now, my lord,” chuckled the older of the two brothers. He scratched intently in his beard, then, as an afterthought, stuck the tip of his little finger in his ear and dug ferociously after an itch. “It cannot be as bad as all that. I for one, would risk those same Infidels just to have a roof over my head and bedding that does not rustle and stir beneath me the blessed night long.”

“And a wench,” the heavyset knight grunted wistfully. “I would settle for a wench with stout thighs and a hearty need to clamp them around me. Nor would I care if she had fleas or not,” he added sincerely.

The Welshman arched his brow, bemused by the Norman’s
criteria. “Just so long as she does not bleat and kick too often with her hooves? Indeed, you have mellowed over the weeks, Sedrick.”

The swarthy Sedrick bristled and curled his lips back over his teeth. “At least I know what to do with a wench when I do find one beneath me. And when they bleat, they do not bleat with laughter.”

“More likely with pain,” the younger brother chided. “You crushed the last three whores you straddled, did you not?”

Sedrick grinned slowly. “In truth, it was the last five; the fourth and fifth being yer mother and sister.”

The brothers stiffened and sent their hands to the hilts of their swords.

“For the love of Christ,” Henry muttered from his perch on the log. “Can the three of you not pass a single hour without drawing insults? Lord Rhys …? Lord Dafydd …? My belly aches enough without having to constantly run a course with your Welsh humour.”

“Neither Dafydd nor myself is smiling,” the older of the pair answered blithely. “In fact, the very notion of either our mother or our sister showing such poor taste as to choose this barrel-brained Norman for a bedmate causes even the hint of mirth to vacate our heads.”

“Mmmm. Perhaps not Gwladus,” Dafydd objected mildly. He leaned forward to see past his brother’s armoured chest and cast a slow, critical eye along Sedrick’s form. “She has been known to admire any manner of long, thick objects when her husband is absent from home. Mother, however—” He leaned back with a creak of saddle leather. “Aye. I suppose I might be prompted to slit a throat or two in her defense.”

The squatting knight started to respond, but a swift, cool slash of steel came out of the bushes beside him, the deadly edge of the falchion pressing a painful threat into the stretched underside of his chin.

“The only throat that will be slit here today, my lords,” Ariel announced, “is the one resting over the edge of my blade.”

Gold-flecked hazel eyes darted upward and widened when they saw who wielded the sword that teased his throat. The unfortunate knight opened his mouth to speak, but the blade nudged higher, forcing him to crane his neck to the limit to avoid having skin and sinews severed.

The other three men had whirled around at the sound of Ariel’s voice, their weapons half out of their sheaths before her shout stopped them.

“I would not want to be the cause of so brave and illustrious a knight losing his head in such an ignoble position,” she warned.

The Welshmen kept their fists curled around their hilts, but they made no further move to draw. Their faces hardened into angry masks; all traces of humour—mocking or real—vanished. Only the bearlike Sedrick remained stolidly impassive, although a close observer might have seen the grimace of disgust he directed at his blond, compromised companion.

“You seem to have us at a disadvantage, my lady,” said the one called Rhys. His anger waned somewhat as he took a long and insolently frank perusal of the slender wood nymph’s body. With her long red hair flaming around her shoulders and her tunic still clinging damply to shapely breasts and thighs, she made an intriguing impression on eyes unaccustomed to such delicacy—delicacy with the added pique of a sword in her hand. “Might I inquire as to how we might serve you?”

Ariel was not listening. Her gaze had fallen to the limp, flaccid body of the fawn draped carelessly over the back of Lord Rhys’s saddle. She recognized the small white diamond on the snout and knew it was
her
fawn, the timid, trusting creature who had begun to answer to her whistle, and for whom she had brought the fragrant sprigs of dried parsley today. A large wound in the pale brown neck was proof of the skill with which the knight wielded the enormous longbow he wore slung across his shoulder.

The surge of cold rage that shivered down her arm caused the edge of the falchion to slice into the taut surface of her captive’s neck. A curse brought his hand shooting up at once and he knocked the blade aside. His fingers grasped Ariel’s
wrist and he wrenched her forward with enough force to fling her onto her back in a crush of ferns, and moss, and thrashing white limbs.

The Welsh brothers laughed and wheeled their big war-horses around. Sedrick scratched at his chin and shook his head, but did nothing more than lean an arm over the front of his saddle and observe.

The hotly flushed Norman jumped to his feet and fumbled to refasten his chausses. He dabbed at the cut on his neck, cursing anew as he saw the streaky threads of blood on his fingertips.

“By all the heavenly martyrs—! What manner of game is this? And what the devil are you doing here”—he glanced around as if searching the fringe of woods for more unexpected surprises—“
alone!”

“What matter does it make?” Lord Rhys asked with a slow smile. “She is not alone now.”

Ariel saw where his black eyes were roving and scrambled to cover her bared limbs. She stood and brushed furiously at the clods of earth that clung to her tunic, and when she finished, she planted her hands on her waist and ignored the leering Welshman in favour of the knight who still tugged and yanked at his clothing.

“A more worthy question might be: Where the devil have you come from and why are you strayed so far off the main road?”

The knight glared at her. “We thought to avoid any travellers who might announce our arrival in Pembroke.”

“Why? What manner of heinous crimes have you committed that cause you to skulk from one shadow to the next like … like …” She glanced at the dead fawn and the man who had slain it. “Like the lying, thieving, cowardly vermin who infest the nether regions of Wales?”

The piercing hazel eyes narrowed. “You have a bold tongue in front of strangers, wench. Happens one day it might be pulled from your head if you do not take a care.”

She gave a derisive snort and bent over to retrieve her falchion. “I should not give warnings of anything being pulled
from anywhere, my dear Lord Henry. Not if I had just been caught with my jewels hanging over the edge of a tree stump.”

The Welshmen showed surprise. “You know each other?”

Lord Sedrick chuckled—a deep, rumbling sound that brought to mind giant boulders rubbing together. “Ma lords … ye have the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Lady Ariel de Clare, Lord Henry’s fair sister.”

“Sister?” Lord Rhys whistled under his breath. “He mentioned he had one, but not that she was as delectable a morsel as what I see before me.”

“Take heed not to say such things too loudly to be overheard,” Sedrick warned amiably. “The Lady Ariel takes poorly to compliments, regardless of who delivers them.”

“Perhaps she will accept a gift then,” the Welsh lord announced in bolder tones. “As an offering of peace for having obviously intruded on her solitude.”

He reached around and grasped the dead fawn by the slender forelegs, lifting it from the horse’s rump and dangling the soft, lifeless body for Ariel to admire. “A single arrow at two hundred paces,” he boasted. “It should provide a tender meal for a maiden of such … tender abilities.”

If the gentle mockery was meant to flatter her prowess with the ambush, it fell well short of the mark. Ariel’s gaze grew even colder and harder and she forced herself to turn away from the arrogant Welshman before she gave way to the temptation to slash his grin to bloody ribbons.

She waited for Henry to retrieve his gloves before she trusted herself to speak. “Did I hear you say you brought news from the king?”

He looked up sharply and stared at her for a moment. “I, ah … Aye. Aye, I do have news.”

“Well?”

“Well …” Henry’s stomach responded with an audible and prolonged gurgle. “Better it should wait until we reach Pembroke. Is Lady Isabella there, or has she left for Cavenham?”

“She is still here … why?” Ariel grabbed Henry’s arm
and blanched a shade. “Is it Uncle Will? Have you brought news of Uncle Will? He is not—? He has not been—?”

“The lord marshal is fine,” Henry assured her quickly. “At least he was the last time I heard.”

Ariel’s shoulders rounded briefly with relief, then squared again with a return of impatience. “Then what is it? What has you squirting over logs and travelling in the company of … of
outlaws?”

Henry glanced over his sister’s head, but the two Welshmen had either not heard the hissed insult, or, because they were indeed outlaws and deserving of the appellation, decided to ignore it.

“At home, Ariel,” he insisted grimly. “It will be best if I tell you at home.”

T
he original keep of Pembroke Castle had been built thirty years after the Norman conquest of England, when the death of the great Welsh king Rhys ap Tewdwr had cleared the way for a further invasion into Wales. Initially a single square keep standing on the edge of a promontory of land, successive generations of prudent—and wealthy—lords had added towers and baileys, tall crenellated battlements and barbicans. William of Pembroke’s father-in-law, the immensely powerful warlord known as Strongbow, had used this castle stronghold as his base for the successful invasion of Ireland. Upon his death and the subsequent marriage of his daughter and heir Isabella to William, work had begun on the enormous eighty-foot-tall circular tower that commanded not only the view, but the respect of several square miles of land and sea surrounding the inlet of Milford Haven. Within a hard day’s ride of Pembroke there were other castles that had been raised to defend and hold this important thumb of Wales— Haverford, Tenby, Lewhaden, Stackpole, Narbeth, Martin. But none were as impressive, as important, or as impregnable as Pembroke.