Knights and Kink Romance Boxed Set (52 page)

She rode alone. Though it was a great risk for any
woman to travel across the English countryside alone, it was an
even greater risk for a noblewoman. Add in the fact that Lady
Sabina of Angwyld was a Saxon noblewoman—one of only a handful of
Saxons left in the whole of England who still enjoyed lands and
rank—and her journey was doubly perilous. Many of the lower Norman
nobility raped and killed Saxons for sport, or at best forced them
into rude, backbreaking peasant work on their lands. Although
Sabina’s late mother had been half Norman and had made a point to
teach Sabina to speak French and imitate Norman manners and dress
as a matter of personal survival, Sabina had never taken well to
doing so. Sabina was an English-speaking, heath-loving,
blonde-haired, blue-eyed Saxon who loved England and everything
about it with all her heart and soul—the rolling green hills, the
rainy gray weather, the acres and acres of grazing sheep, and the
rugged forests and meadowlands of her West Country home most of
all. She’d made a middling attempt to disguise herself for her
journey and wore a Norman-style travel mantle and cloak. But her
simple square-toed shoes, her mother’s ancient Celtic jewels that
she carried in a gold-inlaid box as a gift for the abbess at
Glastonbury—not to mention her fair hair and eyes and her heavy
West Country accent—would be more than enough to give her away to
any passing Norman marauder.

Sabina had sent a messenger off on horseback to the
abbey at Glastonbury three days ago. She’d given the messenger—a
pageboy from her father’s stable staff—a gold brooch from the cache
of jewels she’d inherited from her mother to buy his cooperation
and silence, along with a sealed scroll in Latin for the abbess
explaining why she had no choice but to take the veil. Sabina had
thrown in a promise of more of her mother’s jewels in her letter in
the hopes that the abbess wouldn’t reveal Sabina’s whereabouts to
either Sabina’s father—or even worse, the King—once she was safely
inside its cloistered walls. If all went as planned, the abbess
would be waiting for her, habit and wimple in hand, when she
arrived.

Sabina planned to take her vows immediately upon
crossing the threshold of the abbey. Lord Reginald might be a
filthy Norman, but he was still a good Catholic (or at least, he
pretended to be), and Sabina knew that he would never violate a
sworn woman of the cloth, betrothal or no betrothal.

Lady Sabina of Angwyld was a proud Saxon noblewoman
in a land infested with Saxon-hating, murderous Normans. At only
twenty years old, she’d known nothing but Norman rule—William the
Conqueror had already been king for almost twenty years on the day
she was born. Her very existence had always been perilous. Only the
combination of her mother’s half-Norman blood and her father’s
political cunning had kept both the Angwyld lands and the Angwyld
family and title safe from Norman peril. But now William the
Conqueror’s docile son William II was dead, and his younger brother
the ruthless, conniving, and vengeful King Henry ruled in his
stead—having just stolen the crown from his brother Richard, who
was away on the Crusades. King Henry had vowed to wipe the last of
the Saxons from the land, and Sabina’s father, the Duke of
Angwyld—one of the very last Saxon nobles still standing—had his
back up against the wall. In a last-ditch effort to save the
Angwyld land and title, her father had promised his eldest daughter
in marriage to another powerful, ruthless Norman—Lord Reginald de
Guillaume.

Sabina was the eldest daughter in question. And
she’d frankly rather spend the rest of her life in a stone
cloister, whipping herself raw with a metal-studded penitence whip
while she prayed in Latin and wove rough cloth by hand for her
meager clothes than give herself in marriage to a filthy, old,
humpbacked—not to mention evil and murderous—Norman who didn’t even
speak a single word of English. She loved her father and the
Angwyld lands dearly, but there were some sacrifices she just
wasn’t prepared to make. Not for Angwyld, not for her father, not
for anyone.

A miserable and lonely life in the abbey was better
than an even more miserable and lonely life as the wife of a
Norman.

Sabina kicked Arthur with the silver spurs she’d
stolen from her father’s personal stables. She’d stolen the fine
leather saddle she rode upon from him, too. The knowledge that
she’d betrayed her father on so many levels made her head ache,
even made her sick to her stomach with guilt. She would send her
father a letter apologizing for all that she had done once she was
safely inside the abbey walls. Then she would ask the abbey priest
for absolution, and request the most severe penitence possible for
her lies, theft, and disobedience. Then she would ask every nun in
the cloister to pray for her mortal soul.

And she would ask them to pray for her father, too.
For Sabina knew that it wouldn’t just be herself who would suffer
from her decision. Her father would suffer too. Her father, her
sisters, all their servants and vassals, all the peasants who
worked the Angwyld lands—they would all finally be crushed under
the iron fists of Norman rule.

For almost thirty years, Angwyld has escaped the
fate of the rest of Norman England. But now its time of relative
peace and prosperity was over. Once she stepped inside the abbey
walls, Angwyld would become hell on earth. And it would be nobody’s
fault but her own.

Lady Sabina of Angwyld blinked back tears as she
spurred Arthur to canter even faster. Her fate awaited her at
Glastonbury, if only she could make it there alive. But a tiny part
of her wondered if she and everyone she loved might just be better
off dead.

Chapter
2

Angwyld Castle, later the same day.

“WHERE IS SHE?” boomed the Duke. “WHERE
IS MY DAUGHTER?!”

“Calmly, Your Grace,” soothed Sir Egbert, the Duke
of Angwyld’s lead vassal. “’Tis no use to become so upset.”

The Duke stomped his armored boot against the stone
floor, then swept his plate and goblet off the table. Wine pooled
at his feet, and the hounds pounced upon the untouched remains of
his midday meal. “’Tis
every
use, Sir Egbert! My eldest
daughter is missing from the castle! My eldest daughter who is
bound to marry Lord Reginald in less than forty-eight hours, no
less! Lord Reginald will have my head—and
your
head, and
everyone in Angwyld’s heads—on a silver platter if he and my
daughter do not wed!”

Sir Egbert sighed. “Please don’t misunderstand me,
Your Grace. I of all your vassals understand the gravity of the
situation. I am merely reminding Your Grace that you—ahem—have a
tendency not to think clearly when you are overwrought. And this
situation calls for clear thinking, Your Grace. The clearest
thinking of all.”

The Duke took a long, slow, deep breath. “Of course
you are right, Sir Egbert. At times I wonder if you know me too
well.”

“’Tis my bound honor and duty, Your Grace.”

The Duke motioned for his servants to leave the
room. The guards and pages all turned on their heels in perfect
unison and left, bolting the heavy plank doors behind them. Once
they were safely alone, the Duke turned to his most trusted vassal.
“Please, Sir Egbert, sit down with me by the fire.”

The Duke of Angwyld—a massive, grizzled tree trunk
of a man who always wore a chainmail tunic, armored shoulder and
leg plates, and metal gauntlets for protection, even while
sleeping—placed a heavy hand on his sworn lieutenant’s shoulder and
guided him towards one of the heavy carved-oak chairs that sat
before the stone fireplace. Sir Egbert sat down first, then the
Duke sat opposite him, his heavy mail rattling against the ancient,
smokestained wood. “We must make a plan to find my daughter and
bring her home,” he finally said. “And I’m afraid that plan must
include Lord Reginald.”

Sir Egbert blanched. “Are you sure that’s a good
idea, Your Grace?”

The Duke sighed heavily and wrung his gauntleted
hands. “I’m afraid it’s better than the alternative.”

“And pray, what would the alternative be, Your
Grace?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Now it was Sir Egbert’s turn to wring his hands. “I
hope it would not be as bad as what befell Lords Aethelwulf and
Elrod when they refused Lord Reginald’s terms.”

“No, it would be worse.”

Sir Egbert went white as lambswool. “Truly, Your
Grace?” Neither man spoke aloud of what had happened to those two
men, but it was common knowledge that Aethelwulf and Elrod’s
estates had been burned to the ground, their lands poisoned with
lime and salt, and their women and children beheaded, strung from
oak trees, and set afire. Nobody knew for sure what had happened to
Aethelwulf and Elrod themselves, but there were rumors upon the
land that Lord Reginald had had them both roasted on spits and then
fed their carcasses to his peasants. “What, pray tell, could be
worse than that?”

“If there’s a way in Christendom to do worse, Lord
Reginald would know,” the Duke sighed. “Lord Reginald spent some
time in the Holy Lands during the first Crusade, and lived among
the Saracens for a time as a prisoner. The heathens taught him all
manner of ungodly evil and mayhem, and once he returned to France,
and then England, he learned to use the evil of the Saracens
against us. He serves his Norman masters well in that regard.”

“Indeed, Your Grace. And I daresay Lord Reginald is
by far the most brutal of all the brutal Normans. I wonder how he
never became their King himself.”

The Duke scoffed. “Those prettyfaced Normans would
never disgrace themselves with a humpbacked, blacktoothed King.
They value their looks far too highly. Prissy milquetoasts, all of
them.”

“And yet they managed to conquer us, Your
Grace.”

The Duke spat into the fire. “Only because their
soldiers fought on horseback. It wasn’t a fair fight. Put a Norman
in straight hand-to-hand combat with a Saxon, the Saxon wins every
time.”

“And yet, a wise Saxon such as yourself still knows
how to fight on horseback,” Sir Egbert remarked.

“Aye, ‘tis the only thing that has kept these lands
safe all these years. My father tried for years to convince King
Edward, and then his worthless son Harald to create a cavalry
division in the royal army, but neither of them would hear a word
of it. And then Harald paid the price with his own head.”

“Far more than his own head, Your Grace,” Sir Egbert
observed. “The whole of England paid that price for him.”

“
There is no man so blind as he who will not
see
,” the Duke remarked. “So said Sophocles of Oedipus.”

Sir Egbert was bewildered. “Oedipus, Your
Grace?”

The Duke laughed awkwardly. “Never you mind, Sir
Egbert. Just some book nonsense that I know you footsoldiers can’t
be bothered with. You really should learn to read. It’s never too
late, you know.”

Sir Egbert blushed. “I can read English, Your Grace.
Enough to get by, anyway.”

“Ah, but yet you have no Latin, no Greek. No man is
truly educated without both.” The Duke rubbed his hands together.
“But that’s for another time, another place. We must get a message
to Lord Reginald as soon as possible. Know you where he might be at
present?”

“My scouts reported that he left his lands at Essex
six days ago, and if he continued on his usual route, that would
put him somewhere in South Somerset at present.”

“Good. I shall dispatch a message in my own hand for
your two best scouts to deliver by horseback to South Somerset.
Stick to the high road, and likely you’ll meet him and his travel
guard upon it. We shall inform him that my daughter is missing, and
request that he use his own personal army to locate her and
guarantee her safe return in time for their marriage. That way,
we’re making it clear in both word and deed that Lord Reginald
already has the upper hand where my daughter is concerned. I have
already drafted the scroll.” He took the sealed roll of vellum from
inside his doublet. “I entrust this matter to you, Sir Egbert. You
and no one else. Complete the task as you see fit using whatever
men from your garrison you choose, but for your sake and mine, it
must be done exactly as I say.”

Sir Egbert nodded. “It shall be done, Your Grace.
And if I may say so, Your Grace, giving Lord Reginald the upper
hand in this matter is a most prudent decision on your part.”

“It’s the only possible decision I could make,
Egbert, that would keep both you and me alive,” the Duke growled.
“Not to mention poor Sabina.”

Chapter
3

Base camp of Lord Reginald de Guillaume’s traveling
garrison, on the road from Somerset to Angwyld, the next day.

Lord Reginald Guillaume sat sipping warm sheep’s
milk in his private field pavilion. A torrential English downpour
hammered the already-soaked oilcloth ceiling overhead, and a
brutally cold English wind threatened to tip over the whole flimsy
structure. Rain dripped through the old, worn fabric onto his
wrinkled bald head and soaked all of his provisions.It was a
typical early-spring storm in the West Country that coated
everything with cold, misery, and damp.

Lord Reginald had been in England for more than
thirty years, but he was still unaccustomed to English weather. It
reminded him of a whore with long-unwashed underclothes. His
humpback ached and throbbed even more than normal during a cold
rain, which now that he was in his sixth decade he could always
feel deep down in the meat of his weak, gnarled bones. The horrid
English weather was the main reason he’d never bothered to learn
the language. That, and the fact that if the Normans had their way,
English would be as dead a language as Old Latin and Ancient Greek
were within another fifty years.