Sword of Justice (White Knight Series) (32 page)

Still choking on the dregs of river water, he said to Aveline, “At least … you were the one … to revive me. I feared … just for a moment there … it was Rand.”

“It was,” she said simply. Randall agreed with a nod, his smile crafty and his eyebrows jutting upward. Becoming aware of their unseemly embrace, Aveline pushed herself away and fidgeted self-consciously. She knew not where to put her hands or her eyes. In the end, she hugged her arms as if chilled.

Drake crawled over to Stephen. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, his eyes fluttering and his lungs gasping for breath. “Don’t go anywhere, little brother.” Stephen nodded weakly as Randall retied a tourniquet around his shoulder.

From under dripping hair, Drake gazed up at the sheriff. “Managed to free yourself, did you?”

“From Tilda’s undercroft? Aye. And just in time, too, to hear Baldric’s confession. Lucky for you.” He compared the two brothers, the one fading fast, the other sodden, and addressed the healthier. “Drake fitzAlan, I presume, recently arrived from …?”

“Chinon.”

Rand rubbed a swollen chin. “Ah, Chinon. I trust the weather has been fair?”

“More than adequate.” Stephen rolled his eyes and moaned, but not from pain.

Aveline was standing over the hulk that had once been Baldric la Forêt: knight, murderer, and mercenary. She said a silent prayer and crossed herself, at once fragile and indomitable. Feeling Drake’s penetrating stare, she kneeled and touched his arm. Prickly shocks, the kind that comes on a cold winter’s day beneath a fine woolen coverlet, penetrated him to the core. Her caress was feathery, as if he might break into a thousand fragments there on the floor beside his brother, whose pain had become his own.

He tore his eyesight away from her and glanced up at Rand. “From what I saw ere the river took me, there looks to be a treasure hidden beneath the floorboards.”

“Do tell,” Rand said.

Aveline helped Drake to his feet. His legs were unsteady. She encircled his waist with her arm, as she had on another occasion, and smiled up at him. “Not yet.” She meant that he could swoon later.

“Sorry to disappoint, Acting Sheriff,” Drake said, “but there won’t be anyone left alive to arrest.”

“I can always find an excuse for you.”

* * *

Stephen lay supine on his reclaimed bed at the alehouse. The sputtering candles bringing to light a cold and clammy sweat, he shivered uncontrollably. In that single powerful stroke, Baldric’s sword had cut to the bone. Aveline fed him monkshood to help deaden the pain and poppy juice to ease him into sleep.

“Something I have to tell you …” Fighting the shock and the enfeebling loss of blood, Stephen clutched his brother’s hand. “Something I heard in town.”

“It can bide.”

Despite his best efforts, Stephen’s eyes fluttered closed. “Something …” He descended into a restless slumber, mumbling disjointed words.

Drake held him fast as Aveline washed out the wound with boiling water, poured good drinking wine over that, and stitched the wound with her finest silk thread. Like an old married couple, they talked about what to do next, and again next, Stephen groaning, whining, screaming, and swearing at befitting intervals, and finally succumbing to the effects of the soporific.

“That people cannot see the difference between you two is a mystery to me.” She lifted her head and studied him with that deep gaze that could strike a man dead or drive him mad with desire.

“To no one else, then.”

She flushed and lowered her eyes to his insensible brother. “Best if the wound is left open to the air.” He helped her bind Stephen’s arm across his waist. The poppy juice had fully taken hold, wrapping him within a sound sleep. She was packing up her sewing basket when he noticed the blue-black bruises ringing her wrists. At first flinching from his probing touch, she gradually relaxed into his gentle grasp. Recalling the terrifying hours, she said with a tremulous voice, “Is it well and truly over?”

“Aye. Mystery solved, and the murderer entrusted to the Devil.”

“But Jenna … he said he didn’t …”

“He lied.” He raised her hand to his lips and kissed the inside of her wrist.

Mad as a jay, she yanked her hand away.

“The lady is afraid? Afraid I will give my love but for a half night, never to glance back?”

“And will you not?” Her eyes burned with hurt inflicted by another, likely another of his own family.

“You have the wrong fitzAlan.” She turned away. Skipping around her, he grabbed her arms and held her firmly in place. “And if I did, would you cease to go on?”

“I would ….” She paused, sadness touching her face along with a measure of pride. “… loathe you for the rest of my days.”

“Nay, you would adore me forever.”

She placed her cool palm on his warm cheek and slid it smoothly to the back of his neck. “And what of Jenna?”

“I will always love the lass I met on a day in May. But Jenna is dead and buried. Along with …” His voice hitched on the rest. “… the tokens of my love.”

Their heads drew together. Their mouths opened expectantly. But when Stephen moved in his sleep and groaned, self-consciousness closed in quicker than lips. They divided.

“You’re a sight,” she said.

He followed her gaze and looked down at his clothes, soaked and streaked with the drying blood of a dead knight. He eyed her from beneath lowered lids. “You don’t look much better.”

She fanned out the skirt of her kirtle, likewise stained with Stephen’s blood. “Only one solution for it.”

“Be damned.”

In the kitchen, he studied her elegant spine as she filled the tub with a final cauldron of boiling water. Her hands were unflinching as she reached down to undo the laces of his chainse. It came naturally to her, undressing him the way she must have undressed her younger brothers over the years, bossing them around as was her wont. It did not come naturally to him.

He rose from the trestle board and trapped her hands within his. “I can do this.” It was one thing to let a woman bathe him when he was unconscious, hurt, exhausted, or drunk. It was quite another when he was standing without need of assistance. It was worse yet when he wanted her, especially when his body ached with want.

She took a quick intake of breath, held it, and stepped back. Saying not another word, she wheeled around and left him to it.

A respectable amount of time later, she was waiting with an outspread towel as he stepped out of the tub. She folded the absorbent cloth around him, her eyes washing over his face.

“Your turn.” Like a coward, he escaped, leaving Aveline to her private ablutions.

He sat with Stephen—not that Stephen needed a caretaker, him being submerged in an opiate slumber—but to keep him from other actions that would further besmirch the reputation of the daughter of an alewife. In time, Aveline called for him to come down. A meal awaited, hot and delicious. They ate in silence. The skirt of a newly donned gown swung over her bare feet as she traveled from trestle to hearth, stilled briefly while she partook of her trencher, then briskly swirled around her legs once more as she cleaned up.

A yawn escaped Drake with a shudder. It was late, close to midnight by his reckoning. The rest of the house had long since settled down. She must be exhausted. He was. “Shall we go to bed?”

His question had the desired effect. She stopped what she was doing, and said, “Stephen has his chamber and his bed back.”

“So he does. Now I have none.”

“There are no other bedchambers to let.” Her eyes slanted sideways. “A half night a throw or otherwise.”

“Brotherly love goes only so far when it comes to my own comforts. Moreover, I possess an atrocious bedside manner, if it’s all the same to you.”

She had a suggestion that seemed altogether distasteful to her but sounded reasonable to him.

Aveline rolled out the trundle stored beneath her bed, then brought out pillows and counterpanes while Drake measured the cot with a keen eye. A tad small for his lanky frame, it accommodated long limbs only when knees were tucked into chin. In contrast, he noted with an equally keen eye, Aveline’s bed was large enough for a family of four, which went toward explaining the half-night-a-throw rumors.

They left the door ajar for one of them to check on Stephen from time to time without waking the other. He settled down in the wicker basket fully dressed. She climbed up onto her luxurious feather mattresses and blew out the candle.

His thumping heartbeat kept him fitfully awake. She nodded off almost at once, her breathing soft and steady, the exhale more forceful than the inhale. In time, the hotness of the night brought on restlessness, compelling her to throw the counterpane aside. She stirred. Moaned lightly. Turned over. Licked her lips.

Quiet as a dormouse, he arose and gathered his bed linens.

Instantly she sat up, startled. “Who goes there?”

“Best if I make up my bed in the livery.”

Her bare feet hit the floor and her wisp-o’-the-will physique blocked his exit. She cocked her head, amused. “Is that what knights do, sleep with their horses?”

“Oh, lady.” He wasn’t agitated by what she said, though on further consideration, he was. But he was more agitated by what she was wearing … or not wearing … a chemise of the scantiest material revealing … well … it didn’t leave much for the imagination … especially the imagination of a randy knight.

“And here I thought knights slept with each other,” she baited further.

She was getting personal. So, too, would he. “Is it your habit to wear nothing to bed but tissue and whimsy?”

“Only when inviting irresistible knights into my bedchamber.”

He stepped forward and swept his arm around her supple waist. “What you’re saying,
ma demoiselle,
is that
you wore that on my account.”

“What kind of lass do you take me for?”

“I beg you, don’t tempt me.”

The impulse was too great. He swept her hair away from her face and pressed his mouth against hers. Her body went slack inside his embrace. After a stimulating interlude, he dragged his lips back. “Milady, your eyes are open.”

Her feet descending back to floor level, she examined him like a bird eyes the doomed worm. “
Sieur
. So are yours.”

“Shall we try again?”

“As you please.”

He swung his other arm around her back and gave her the best kiss he had ever given any woman. The pleasurable moan escaping her throat convinced him of her sincerity. After a time, he opened one eye. Both of hers were glaring up at him. Drake broke away. “This isn’t working.”

She mused for a while, a longer while than he liked. “’Twas pleasant enough.”

“Oh, I see the way of it.”

“Nay, you don’t see at all.”

She closed the door on a whisper. He watched with fascination as she returned to him. Her fingers trembling with impatience, she undressed him as she had once before, this time with a different purpose in mind. Drake heroically submitted, lifting this arm and that, that leg and this, his eyes wide with wonderment as she denuded him.

Stepping back, she threw off the chemise that held no useful purpose except to drive knights mad with desire. The golden flocks nestled in her armpits were more than he could stand and still breathe in and out. The tissue folded into a heap at her feet. A sculpture in alabaster, how the ancient artists imagined woman in the guise of goddess, posed before him, effortlessly graceful. She slithered forward, reached behind his neck, and removed the thong holding back his hair. Her fingers laced through the unfettered locks while her bronze irises roamed his face, subtly agitating at each small detail of discovery. Her hands drifted downward and skimmed the flanks of his torso, eventually settling around his hips. The swaying tresses of her hair tickled his bare arms. A secret smile rose on her lips.

“Lady, I beg of you. Be kind.”

“Not a chance.” It was her turn to sweep him into her arms. And when she pressed his mouth open and slipped her tongue between his teeth, it was his turn to go slack within her embrace.

~ Stalemate ~

A draw where one player has no legal move on the entire board but its king is not in check.

Friday, the 8
^th
of September, in the Year of Grace 1189

Chapter 30
              
 

THRASHING FROM COCKCROW TO MID-MORNING
, Stephen awoke from his drugged-induced sleep. Standing on either side of the bed, Aveline and Drake were staring down at him. He shifted involuntarily, experienced sharp pain, and lay still. Something in their expressions must have sent off unmistakable signals. He swung his eyes between the two until Aveline glanced guiltily away.

Drake broke the silence. “How do you feel?”

“Like the Devil’s been playing with me.” Stephen reached out his good hand.