Lord of Vengeance (11 page)

Gunnar's gaze swept the room in quick assessment and he let out the breath that until now, he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

A cool wash of moonlight filtered in through open shutters on the window of the far wall and with it came a lazy night breeze. He breathed in, shallowly, surprised to find the air carried no smells of death or fire, only the fragrant perfume of summer.

In the pale moon glow, Gunnar could see that the rough-hewn, plank floor had been cleared of old rushes, all evidence of the destruction that had visited here thirteen years ago seemingly scrubbed clean.

His father's armor coffin was gone; his mother's distaff and spindles, too. The stone walls of the chamber, which had once been warmed with colorful tapestries and the Rutledge banner were now barren. The brazier was emptied of its ashes and long unused, home now to an industrious spider that had laced the hollowed opening in the far wall with an intricate web. The large bed in which his parents had slept was the only furniture yet remaining in the room, though stripped of its bolsters and straw mattress, it was now little more than a dust-covered, wooden frame, too cumbersome to have been removed from the keep.

But the room did not seem looted. Someone who must have cared for his parents had removed all traces of d'Bussy's desecration. And Gunnar was fairly certain he knew who it had been.

Turning to regard Raina over his shoulder, he beckoned her forward with a curl of his hand. She stepped out of the darkness and to his side without argument, evidently preferring even his dubious companionship to being left on her own in the corridor. They entered the room together, Raina so close behind him he could nearly feel the press of her breasts at his back, her breath coming rapid and shallow against his skin.

He heard her footsteps halt near the center of the room as he made his way to the open window and peered out over the courtyard below. The men had already started a fire and were gathered around it, drinking from their flasks and chewing on chunks of dark bread.

“Are you hungry?” he asked idly of Raina.

“Nay.”

That quick, firm denial was belied by a tiny growl of her stomach. Gunnar turned from the window and started slowly toward her. She stood unmoving, staring at him expectantly, fearfully, and clutching the rolled-up blanket to her like a shield. Despite the balminess of the summer air, she was shivering.

Gunnar passed in front of her and drew his blade to clear away the cobwebs from the fireplace. “You can make your bed here, by the hearth,” he directed. “Perhaps while I'm out I will find some kindling to make a fire.”

“You're leaving me here? Alone?” This last word she fairly gasped, in what sounded to him like utter disbelief.

“Aye,” he replied, sheathing his weapon. “But don't think you'll be able to slip away while I'm gone. I shall be sending one of my men along to watch this door in my absence.”

“Please.” She clutched his fingers with desperate tightness. “Don't leave me here.” She took a small breath, her voice naught but a whisper behind him. “I'm frightened.”

That naked admission shocked him almost as thoroughly as the feel of their hands, so incongruously entwined together. Where was the hellion who had claimed she'd rather die as soon as look at him? What had happened to the virago who had put herself between her father and Gunnar's blade without so much as batting an eye?

He whirled on her, heated and ready to pose those very questions to her himself.

Looking into her close, upturned face was a mistake he realized too late. Even in the darkness he could see her rosy lips, parted slightly and trembling, looking too damned soft for his peace of mind. Her eyes met his, wide and beseeching under the delicate wing of her brows.

Inexplicably, he longed to trace his hand over the smoothness of her cheek, the graceful line of her throat. Longed to touch her hair, sift the silky tresses through his fingers and feel her body pressed to him in a soothing embrace.

And for a moment he was tempted to stay.

But what he had to offer her wasn't comfort and it had nothing to do with allaying her fears.

“God's wounds,” he muttered, his anger directed more at himself than her. With gruff aggravation, he extracted his hand and scowled at her through the darkness. “Stay put and no harm will come to you.”

With that, he pivoted on his heel and quit the room, slamming the door behind him in his haste to be away from her before he changed his mind about leaving.

* * *

Raina regretted her words the moment they left her lips and Rutledge's irritated response only furthered her humiliation. Why she thought his odious presence would be a comfort to her, she didn't know.

If she truly felt even half the loathing for him she'd attested to in the woods, she would have welcomed his absence. She certainly would not be listening to his departing footsteps, nor positioning herself in the window that she might watch as he crossed the bailey to his group of men and called for one named Cedric to post guard outside her door. Raina scowled, staring after his retreating form as if to bore holes in his broad, arrogant back as he mounted his destrier and rode out of the bailey and into the night.

With him gone and nothing left at which to direct her ire, Raina reluctantly returned her attention back to her temporary sleeping quarters. Mercy, but it was a dark and depressing cell, devoid of life and not much better than the rest of this ruined and forgotten keep.

'Tis your father's doing.

Rutledge's words as they had arrived came back to her like a splash of cold water: startling, confusing. Chilling.

She had no misconceptions that her father--like any baron of his day--was at times forced to wage war and seize fiefs in the name of his liege. But this keep had seen more than war. This place, with its mass of destruction and absence of life had been more than conquered. It had been obliterated. Why?

Weathering a chill that spread from her limbs to her heart, Raina came away from the window and moved farther into the room, searching fruitlessly for something with which to light a fire in the brazier. The room was suddenly too cold, too dark.

Raina hated the dark.

It made her think of her mother; made her relive endless days as a little girl spent outside her parents' bedchamber, listening as her mother wept, alone in that large cold room, door bolted, shutters closed, heavy curtains drawn around the bed, refusing food, refusing comfort. Refusing to admit anyone into her bouts of private despair, including her only child.

Darkness, to Raina, meant an early autumn day in her fifth year, when she had been trying on her mother's jewelry and heard her parents returning home early from a tourney. She'd scurried into the garderobe and closed the door, standing silently in the cool, dark compartment. She'd heard their voices, filled with anger and growing louder as they ascended the stairs to their chamber. She'd heard the door slam, heard the hatred in her mother's seething accusation: “I am no fool, Luther. I know what you've done. For pity's sake, he was an innocent man!”

Her father's voice was desperate, pleading. “Margareth, my love, don't you understand? If I am guilty of anything, 'tis only of loving you too dearly.”

A clatter of pottery hitting the floor punctuated her mother's hitching sob. “Don't touch me! You're a monster, Luther. A blackhearted, jealous monster and I despise you more now than I ever did.”

Raina could still hear the loud crack of a hand striking a cheek and the deafening silence that followed, though to this day, she wasn't sure who had delivered nor who had received the blow. That evening, after declining supper and retiring to her chamber with a pot of honeyed mead, her mother had taken ill.

By morning she was gone, and her father, enraged and distraught, rode out that very day with his army in tow.

The argument she had overheard never did make much sense to Raina, and fearful to admit she had been eavesdropping, she'd never had the nerve to question her father on what was clearly a painful, private matter.

And now, she had to face the very real possibility that she might lose him, too. Weary and full of dread, Raina curled up in Rutledge's proffered blanket and gave in to the impulse to cry. Sometime later, in the hours that passed during his absence, she drifted off to sleep.

* * *

Seated at a trestle table inside a musty waddle-and-daub hut, Gunnar drank from a cup of wine and stared into the flames of a now-glowing brazier positioned at the center of the single-room living space. The warm, orange light illuminated the lined and aged face of the man sitting across from him, infusing fiery color into the healer's long white mane of hair and chest-length beard.

“I know this is not the first time you've been here,” Merrick said, filling Gunnar's empty cup for the fourth or fifth time in half as many hours.

“Oh?” Gunnar prompted mildly, the wine having mellowed him into a comfortable lethargy that even this surprising admission could not rattle.

“Aye,” Merrick nodded. “I saw you once in the woods several years ago, and again, this past spring.”

“You didn't approach me.”

“Nay...I could see from the look in your eyes as you stared up at the keep that you had no wish to be seen.” Merrick drained his cup then let out a wheezy sigh. “And, as well, I knew one day you'd come to me, when you'd had time enough to work out your hatred and begin living again.”

Gunnar pursed his lips and looked deep into his cup, preferring not to meet the old man's wizened gaze and suddenly glad he hadn't divulged his real purpose for stopping at Wynbrooke for the night. Merrick, a God-fearing, gentle man, hadn't understood Gunnar's unquenchable need for vengeance then; he certainly wouldn't understand it now.

“And,” Merrick continued, pushing himself up from his seat to lumber across the room, “because I knew you'd return, I saved this for you.”

As the old man reached for a simple pottery container and emptied an object into his palm, something inside Gunnar suddenly clenched tight as a bowstring. His chest felt constricted, heart thudding heavily beneath the crush of wary anticipation as Merrick returned to the table and began to unfold a small square of fabric.

“You had this near you when I found you that day.” He held a thick band of gold that embraced in its center a bold, blood-red ruby.

Staring at his father's signet ring, Gunnar felt the color drain from his face. Palms sweating, he clenched his cup so tightly it should have crumbled in his fist.

Damnation, how many times had he cursed himself over that ring? First, for having been given it by his mother, for her thinking him worthy, for entrusting it to his care...and then, for his losing it as a result of his failure.

His cowardice.

“Take it, lad,” Merrick prompted when Gunnar could only stare at it mutely. “I reckon I should have given it to you all those years ago, after you'd healed well enough and I sent you north to live with my brother at Penthurst.” He shook his head slowly, frowning in pensive reflection. “But you were so full of anger then, so consumed with thoughts of revenge, I feared this ring might only add fat to the fire. I had hoped the rigors of farm life would give you a means of working out your rage, but nothing seemed enough to cool your hatred.

“My brother thought me crazed for sending you to live with him,” Merrick continued. “A demon, he called you: black-hearted, drinking to excess, seeking out new fights before the bruises and scrapes from your last had healed. I waited to hear that you had died, certain you would meet your end in violence, but that news never came. Then, some seven years ago now I reckon, my brother sent word that you had left Penthurst, sobered up and simply walked away. 'Twas the last I heard of you until you came through these woods a few years past, and now here you are before me again. Seeing the man you are today makes me glad I kept this ring for you. Take it now, my lord. It belongs to you.”

Gunnar wanted to pitch the ring across the room, forget he'd ever seen it.

More than anything, he wanted to cast away the obligation that accepting the ring again as a man carried with it. Instead he took the precious memento from Merrick's outstretched hand and curled his fist around its weight.

I will avenge you
, he silently vowed.
I will make you proud.

“It shames me to admit it now,” Merrick said, “but often I wondered if I had made a grave error in coming to your aid that day. If perhaps my brother was right, that you might have been better off...” He cleared his throat suddenly. “Bah. Foolish talk from a foolish old man, eh?”

He chuckled, but Gunnar knew there was more truth than jest to Merrick's statement. He had been a danger to everyone around him then. Perhaps he still was. But something
had
sobered him that year he left Penthurst, something that made him realize with sudden, potent clarity the folly of blind anger and unrestrained violence.

He had been drunk, brawling in a tavern with another man over some nameless, faceless woman he'd just met. In fact, the woman had little to do with Gunnar's desire to fight. Something in the way the man looked at him--the way he carried himself--reminded Gunnar of d'Bussy and left him with an instant, overwhelming urge to tear the knight to bits, with or without cause. The man had the poor judgment to wink at the whore on Gunnar's lap and it was all the excuse Gunnar needed. He flew into action.

He was so caught up in his misplaced rage that he didn't hear the tavern fall into a hush a few moments later as a nobleman entered with his entourage. Nor did he hear the wager placed against him while this nobleman enjoyed his meal just a few paces from the brawl.

It wasn't until the knight lay beneath him, bloodied and begging quarter, that Gunnar was able to still his punishing hands and quell his anger. He heard the jingle of a purse full of coins hitting a table, the scrape of a bench, the slam of the tavern door.