Lord of a Thousand Nights (6 page)

As the cauldron approached, he eyed its contents suspiciously. The spoonfuls of glop that landed on his plate looked depressingly familiar. He dipped some bread and tasted. The bland flavor killed his appetite at once.

Andrew, the keep's steward, moved about the hall, and Ian called him over. “Who prepared this?”

“The cook.”

“Your cook or my cook?”

“Our cook, but your cook supervised. Nothing went into that pot that he did not see. You can eat it with complete confidence.”

Andrew spoke in reassuring tones. The man was in his late fifties, rather short and small-framed, with meticulously groomed gray hair and beard. He bore a courtly, restrained manner marked by an elegant impassivity.

“Why wouldn't I have confidence in it?”

Lady Margery leaned close. “Under the circumstances, you would not want to eat just anything here, would you? I certainly would not,” she said.

“What are you suggesting, my lady?”

“Well, consider that Robert was poisoned, and that Alice the cook has always been practically a mother to Reyna, and came with her from the Grahams. Reyna sometimes helps Alice, and personally prepared her husband's food those last days—” Margery raised her eyebrows meaningfully. “My husband always demanded that a man watch the food preparation after we came. No substance entered the food served in this hall that was not recognized by the watcher.”

Ian stared down at his plate. If his own cook supervised now, that meant that no herbs, fruits, roots, or anything else that imparted flavor would find its way into the pot.

“I assumed that you would want to continue the practice,” the steward said coolly. “Seeing as how you are the enemy.”

Ian dismissed Andrew and decided to give Lady Margery more attention. “What do you mean, Sir Robert was poisoned?”

“He was hale and fit one day, and vomiting and in pain the next. Three days later he was dead.”

“He was over sixty, I have heard. Old men die.”

“Aye, and at first most were inclined to think thus, except a few of us who wondered from the start. After all, Reyna nursed him, and had often cooked for him in the evenings if he came in late from the demesne. It is a quaint interest of hers. Not becoming to a lady, but then neither are those books and letters. The servants report that she fed him potions while sick that seemed to make
it worse, too. But what really pointed the finger was the bishop's letter.”

Despite himself, she had his interest. “What of this letter?”

“Soon after Maccus sent my husband here, a letter came for Robert from the bishop in Glasgow. It seems that Robert had written to him on a matter of great importance seeking his advice. The letter referred to this matter, and said that the bishop would investigate the proper disposition of the matter, but could not visit himself until summer's end.”

“What matter was this?”

“The letter did not say, but it is clear, is it not? Robert planned to put Reyna aside, and sought the bishop's advice on how to proceed. Maccus enfiefed these lands to Robert and his descendants, but there are no heirs. They had been married twelve years and she is barren. As you said, Robert's time was limited.”

“And so it is thought that the lady, knowing her husband planned this, killed him?” He put more sarcasm into his voice than he truly felt. Husbands had been disposed of for less. “Not much proof.”

“Along with her attempt to escape judgment by helping you last night, the proof seems very clear to me.”

Ian almost explained that Lady Reyna had not come to him to betray her people but to save them, and had tried to kill him in the process. Even as the words formed, he bit them back. Reyna had not given any story about last night in her defense, and now he understood why. Her attempted murder of him would only support this other accusation against her.

Had she done it? He bore a cut in his arm that proved her capable of such things. She had planned to run away, a usual sign of guilt, and had tried to negotiate her departure
even as the tower fell. And yet, while he had learned a healthy skepticism regarding the honesty and constancy of women, he hadn't sensed evil in this one. Quite the opposite.

With the intimacy of gossip now binding them, Lady Margery chattered on through the meal. Ian didn't pay much attention to her tales of the old feud between the Armstrongs and Reyna's family, the Grahams, which in Margery's opinion only supported Reyna's guilt. He didn't bother to point out that Sir Robert had not been an Armstrong, because his fealty to Maccus had essentially made him one.

The whole time he kept his eyes on the various entrances to the hall, looking for Reyna. This tower's five levels were connected by two sets of stairs, not to mention the secret ones he had discovered in the walls. That made it difficult to keep track of anyone who did not want to be found.

He gazed around the hall which filled the second level and took a rough measurement. He mentally compared it with his memory of the building's exterior. The walls must be almost fifteen feet thick. They would need to be at the base to support the weight, but up above, some of those walls had probably been hollowed out for chambers.

Lady Reyna could probably live to old age here without his ever seeing her again.

“Lady Reyna has not attended the meals,” he observed to Margery, interrupting an unfortunate turn in the conversation where she probed about his past. He wondered what had given women the notion that men liked to talk about such things.

“She never does. At least not since Thomas and I arrived. She eats in the kitchen with Alice. A few others do too.”

Ian pushed away from the table. He had not visited the kitchens yet. This seemed a good time.

As he descended the stone stairs, sounds of conversation and laughter drifted to him. So did the aroma of very good food.

All talk ceased when he appeared in the threshold. Two plank tables seating twenty-five people cramped the center of the chamber, and a servant girl stirred a pot hanging in the large hearth. Andrew Armstrong ate here, and some serving women and two men he recognized as grooms. An old, thickset woman he guessed was Alice sat between two boys about ten and eight years old. Other children peered around their mothers and fathers at him. He didn't see Reyna.

At the far end of one table he spied Morvan's man, Gregory, and he walked to him with fifty eyes watching his progress. Gregory grinned up sheepishly. “I happened to walk by, and it seemed a merry group,” he explained.

Ian looked down at Gregory's plate. A moist slice of duck and a colorful mix of roots lay in a pool of brown sauce. The scent made his mouth water. Evidently Alice the cook did her duty for the diners in the hall, and then practiced her art for this little group.

He broke off a piece of Gregory's bread and dipped it in the sauce. It had almost reached his mouth when a wooden spoon flashed by his face like a catapult. It smashed into his hand, and the morsel flew across the room onto the floor.

“Don't you dare, you English whoreson,” a familiar voice warned.

He turned in surprise to the servant girl who had been stirring at the hearth, only it wasn't a servant but Lady
Reyna, dressed in a loose, simple gown with a kerchief tied around her head.

She shook the spoon at him. “Not one bite, you devil. If you get sick, I'll not have people pointing at Alice or myself.” She took her place on the bench. “Besides, there isn't enough for you, and because of your damn siege this is the first fowl or meat these women and children have had in over a month.”

Ian made a mental reminder to speak with the lady sometime about her cursing. “Was the tower so badly provisioned as that? There should have been dried fish and meat to last this long.”

From the other end of the table Andrew Armstrong coughed for attention. “Sir Thomas ordered only the men to have such things. They might have had to fight, and there was no telling how long the siege would last. It is customary, of course.”

Aye, it was customary, and Ian had seen and caused it before, but he felt an unusual guilt all the same.

“Who cooked this food?” he asked, taking more bread, dipping it, and popping it into his mouth before Reyna could attack. Delicious.

“Alice and myself,” Reyna said, eyeing his throat, daring him to swallow.

These then were the castle folk who did not think her a poisoner. Very deliberately, he dipped again, popped, and chewed at length.

“You all will no longer eat here, but join the others in the hall,” he ordered. “Alice, cook as you see fit, with such assistance as you choose. No one will watch. Gregory, organize some hunts so there is plenty of fresh meat.” He turned to Reyna. “You, my lady, will attend all meals. When the food is brought in, you will eat first.”

The kerchief, dipping low over her brow and tied behind her neck, completely hid her bound hair. He thought that she looked fresh and charming all the same. He wondered if he had passed her numerous times today and simply not recognized her.

Her sensual lips pursed. “What makes you so sure that I will not kill myself to get the chance to do away with you and this army?”

“You might if it were just you, but you will not risk your people, that much I know,” Ian said as he retreated to the stairs. “Besides, my lady, if you knew a recipe for poison, you would be dead already.”

L
ater that afternoon, Andrew Armstrong approached while Ian directed the walling up of the postern tunnel. The steward looked unruffled and courtly in the heat despite his wool pourpoint. Ian himself was sweating like a plow horse.

“There is a small problem, sir,” Andrew said mildly.

“What kind of problem?”

“It is the well. It seems to have run dry. It was fine this morning, but just now some servants went to draw water and— nothing.” Andrew spread his hands and smiled blandly.

Ian sighed at Andrew's mastery of understatement. The well running dry was hardly a small problem. “Show me.”

He trailed Andrew up the forty steps to the keep's only entrance off the hall, and down the forty steps to the kitchen. Damn border tower houses. In one day he had grown to hate the eternal stairs.

In a small cellar chamber off the kitchen, Andrew presented the errant well with a small flourish. Ian lifted the bucket and let it drop on its rope until he heard a thump
instead of a splash. He brought it back up even though he knew it would be empty. “Has this ever happened before?”

“I have been here over twenty years, since Maccus took the lands. Once before, during a drought, it happened.”

“It has been hotter and drier than normal, but not a drought.”

“Well, with water, one can never tell, can one?”

Ian began pacing off the chamber in methodical rows. “Did Robert Kelso hold these lands all those years?”

“Not until his marriage to Lady Reyna. It was an arrangement to end a blood feud between the Armstrongs and the Grahams that had started eight years earlier. Maccus had no unmarried sons or nephews to represent the Armstrongs, and everyone in these parts knew his knight Sir Robert to be an honorable man. Even Duncan Graham respected him. When the match was made, Sir Robert received these lands. He held them through Maccus, but it was understood that they formed a buffer between the Armstrongs to the north and south and the Grahams to the east. A neutral area, so to speak.”

Ian fingered the joints in the rock wall. “The lady must have been very young at this marriage. A child.”

“She was twelve. The church permits it at that age.” Ian found some loose mortar and pulled out his dagger and probed. “Presumably Sir Robert waited to take her to his bed.”

“I wouldn't know.”

Aye, he would. He was the sort of steward who knew everything. Ian pulled at the stones he had been probing. They didn't budge. Once more he began a careful pacing of the floor. “What sort of a man was Sir Robert?”

“He was a good man. A brave knight, highly honorable, and something of a scholar.”

“Do you think she killed him?”

Andrew deliberated before responding. “She came here a frightened mouse. There had been no love in her home, and much strife. Robert gave her freedom, wings, care. Nay, I do not think she killed him.”

Ian turned his attention back to the well. “You know, of course, that it is not dry.”

“Really?”

“The bucket did not hit mud, or even dry dirt. It came up as clean as it went down. Someone has covered the water with something. A door or plank. How do you think she did it?”

“She? I'm sure that I don't understand you, Sir Ian.”

“Lady Reyna. I see her hand in this. How did she get down there? I can find no hidden doors in the floors or walls.”

Andrew shrugged. Ian knew that, short of torture, he would not get the man to speak. “Well, steward, what do you suggest?”

Andrew appeared to ponder the matter. Ian wasn't fooled in the least. “We will have to do as your army did. There is the river for bathing, and a spring near it has good water for cooking. The latter could be carted in every day and the women sent to the river as needed with laundry. Under guard, if you prefer.”

Ian had been wondering about the point of this sabotage, but Andrew's solution provided the explanation. In order to provision the tower with water, in order to bathe in this summer heat, the gate would have to be opened frequently. The tower would become significantly more vulnerable.

He glared at the well that had suddenly made his work here much more difficult.

He should have let Reyna take a horse and run away to hell itself if she wanted.

T
hat evening, the hall filled for supper. Lady Margery sat to Ian's right again, but he saw to it that the place on his left remained empty for Reyna. The only other spot available at the high table was near the end amidst six of his knights.

Venison in a savory sauce had been prepared. The castle folk knew that Alice and Reyna had cooked it un-supervised, and they munched only on bread in a dejected way. The aroma from the plates permeated the hall and one could hear stomachs growl. Finally, Ian's men bravely picked at their portions and a few others dared to follow.

Reyna suddenly appeared on the steps, and every eye turned to her. She wore a pretty blue cote-hardie that hung more loosely than it should. Her blond hair was bound into a thick plait that dangled down her back. With a determined expression, she strode across the hall to the high table. She moved up behind Ian, and he waited for her to take the place beside him.