The Intended (4 page)

And this morning, Jaime had done her best not
to allow him a moment alone with her. She knew the questions he
would ask—questions to which she had no answers. Jaime knew inside
that she was partly responsible for Edward’s attentions. And
somehow, perhaps through her actions or her words, he had come to
assume she was ready for a more intimate encounter. He was wrong,
but she didn’t know how to tell him without destroying all that
might lie in store for them.

The castle was no less forbidding up close,
and as they passed through the thick walls and the huge gates,
Jaime suddenly found herself faced with an appalling number of men,
women, and children who seemed to be living in the courtyard. A
dozen soldiers roughly cleared the way for them, and Edward led the
group up the wooden steps of the keep.

Jaime held back. It was the faces. She
couldn’t tear her eyes away from the thin, drawn faces of the
children who gawked at her fine dress. Their sad, round eyes bore
through the small openings between the row of soldiers—their
starved expressions piercing her heart. She wrenched her attention
away as she heard Edward retracing his steps, his eyes locked on
her. She thought she glimpsed a spark of annoyance in his gray eyes
before he glanced at those in the yard.

“Who are those unfortunates?” she whispered
as he took her arm.

“Mostly the king’s enemies,” he said quietly.
“Though some of them are county criminals.”

Leading them up the winding torchlit stone
stairwell, Edward came to a stop at the next landing. Ducking under
the low round arch of the doorway, he stepped into a very large
room—into what had at one time been the Great Hall of the
castle.

Jaime looked at the hundred or so men huddled
in groups or lying in the filthy straw that covered the wood floor.
The stench of the place struck her, sickening her, but she clenched
her teeth and moved into the hall.

“Perhaps this was a mistake to bring you
here,” he said mockingly. “To expose such a delicate flower to the
unpleasantness of the real world.”

Jaime shot him a hard look and stepped past
him. Through the sharp odor of men and their waste, the smell of
burned porridge reached her senses. At one end of the hall, a loud
and greasy-looking man was ladling mush out of an iron cauldron
onto thick crusts of what Jaime was sure must be week-old bread.
And as she watched, a boy nearby poured water out of a huge skin
bag into a stone horse trough. A steady line of filthy, ragged men
made their way past, every now and then one of them casting a
furtive glance their way. She turned to Edward.

“Why do you keep all these prisoners?” she
asked, her voice hushed.

“Well, we serve the king.” He peered through
the murky light. “Some of these men may have trespassed against my
father in some way, but most are foreigners, and interrogating them
takes time.”

“And once you’ve questioned them, you keep
them here...forever?”

“Nay! That would hardly be worth our while
now, would it?” Edward’s face was grim, his eyes the color of
flint. “Few survive their sessions with Reed, the jailer. He is a
brutal but necessary man. Using those in his employ, he has become
my eyes and ears all along the coast. He knows all, and what he
doesn’t know...he extracts.”

Jaime cast her eyes about her, but all she
could see was the sordid suffering that surrounded them. “This is a
foul place, Edward,” she whispered raggedly.

“Aye, Jaime. There is a foul side to the most
glorious business. And war is no exception.” He took her by the
arm. “But it is important for one to see the refuse to fully
appreciate the splendor.”

“Show me what you brought me here to see,”
she whispered under her breath.

With a nod, Edward looked into the center of
the hall. Following his eyes, Jaime saw a group of five or six men
half sitting and lying down. They had to be the ones, Jaime
thought. His prisoners. Her challenge.

“M’lord!” A burly, round-faced man carrying a
stout club approached them, and Edward turned irritably toward
him.

“What is it, Reed?” he snapped.

“Well, m’lord, this ‘ere Spaniard in yon
corner may be done fer. I thought—since ye happened by this
morning, ye’d like to talk to ‘im. All of the sudden, seeing his
end ‘afore ‘im, ‘e appears to ‘ave a bushel full to pass on. Some
of it ye might just find to yer liking, m’lord.”

“Very well.” Edward turned to Jaime and
glanced over his shoulder at the officers who had ridden in with
them. Taking her by the hand, he said, “Wait for me right here.
This should only take a moment.”

Jaime watched him follow the jailer into a
dark corner and down a few steps where they pushed aside a ragged
piece of cloth that did little to conceal the murky, torchlit
antechamber beyond. As they passed into the small room, she could
see a man hunched against a wall. Dark patches spotted the wall
above the man. She wondered if it was the Spaniard’s blood. If not
his, she thought, then whose? Looking back at the group Edward had
indicated before, she paused. Two of them, standing in conversation
over another, were wearing clothes of the French nobility. She
threw a glance at Edward, and then at his officers.

This was, indeed, why he had brought her
here. Aye, he meant to test her loyalty, but perhaps he also wanted
to see if she might be able to identify these men, perhaps to give
him a sense of their true worth? The thought of him bringing her
into such a sordid business repulsed her all the more. But, she
argued inwardly, how else could he be assured that her years of
study in France or the Scottish blood that he thought ran in her
veins would not divide her loyalties.

The crack of a whip tore through the air,
followed by the shrill scream of a man. Her hands instinctively
rose to her mouth to stop her own shocked cry. She turned toward
the antechamber. Edward was bent over the cringing heap that she
knew to be the Spaniard. She shut her eyes tightly as Edward
stepped back, giving Reed room to strike again at the dying man.
She backed away in an unconscious attempt to put more distance
between herself and the horrifying sight.

Jaime stumbled slightly as she tripped over
the outstretched foot of a prisoner sitting nearby. The man’s
vacant eyes looked up at her, but they didn’t seem to comprehend
what he was seeing. And then he began to cough—it was a painful,
consumptive fit—and Jaime found herself edging away in the
direction of the French prisoners.

More cries emanated from the corner room and
again the crack of the whip—again and again the lash fell. She
looked about—the officers, the coughing man at her feet—she could
see Edward speaking to someone just inside the antechamber. But no
one seemed to hear the man’s cries. Everyone but Jaime herself
seemed deaf to the sounds of the torture. The coughing man vomited
a sizable amount of blood. She took another step back while trying
to swallow the bile in her throat. These men were dying before her
eyes.

As she continued to move off, she heard a few
words of French and realized she was almost on top of the new
prisoners
. Northerner
...
late
... With an anxious look
at Edward, still in the corner room, she slowly approached them,
but they backed away in silence as she neared them.

There was a man lying in the straw before
her. With a start Jaime bent over him—he was an elderly man wearing
the red and gray tartan of the MacGregor’s. A Scot, she thought.
Edward had never mentioned that he had taken Scots in his victory.
A bloody cloth covered the man’s eyes, and his face and beard were
caked with dried blood. Before she even knelt, she knew that the
man was dead. She placed her hand on the man’s cold, stiff fingers
and said a silent prayer for his soul. Then she stood up and tried
to step back.

But she couldn’t. The hem of her skirt was
caught, and she couldn’t move anywhere. She looked down in shock,
thinking wildly that the dead MacGregor had come back to life, but
instead she saw another large and bloody hand holding her gown. In
spite of the flash of panic, she couldn’t call out for help. These
men had suffered enough. She would not bring more misery into their
wretched lives. She would handle this.

Following the outstretched arm, she turned
slowly to the side and saw the man who lay propped up on a bundle
of rags in the straw. The man’s face was turned, his tangled hair
bloody and matted, and blood soaked his traveling cloak, as well.
Her eyes immediately took in the fine boots that covered the man’s
long legs to his knees. He had to be another one of the French
nobles captured by Edward. She looked furtively about her, making
sure she was bringing no attention to herself, nor to this dying
prisoner. Edward still occupied himself with the Spaniard, and his
officers stood a few paces away, involved in an increasingly
animated argument. One of the officers, though, returned Jaime’s
glance. She just gave him an indifferent nod and pretended that she
was preoccupied with the study of the hall’s structure. The man’s
attention returned to his friends. Jaime tugged at her skirt again,
but the man’s grip on her skirt’s hem was strong.

The flat of a sword blade slapping on flesh
and a cry of pain jolted Jaime as she caught a glimpse of one of
Edward's officers using it on a prisoner’s hand that had reached
out to touch his boots. Turning away, she squatted at once and took
a hold of her skirt, trying to wrench it free from the man’s hand.
He wouldn’t release her. With both of her hands now at work, she
touched his hand—but with the speed of lightning, the prisoner’s
fingers clamped onto her wrist.

She summoned all her courage and swallowed
her urge to scream. Panic raced through her as the prisoner raised
his face, pulling her closer to him. Beneath the tangle of hair,
she saw his jaw move.

“Jaime!” the man whispered.

Her blood froze at the sound. She didn’t have
to see his face to recognize the man. She had heard his voice call
out to her a thousand times in her dreams. Malcolm.

As he weakly shook back the mass of hair, a
tumult of thoughts and emotions surged through her. How could it be
that he—of all people—should be here?

“Jaime,” he whispered her name again. “I
thought it a dream, but ‘tis you!”

In an instant, shock gave way to confusion
and hate as an icy shiver ran down her back. Here he was, the man
whom she had loved—the man who had rejected her so callously. She
gazed on him, bloody and pale. She heard a cry and glanced quickly
in the direction of the antechamber.

“Draw no attention to us,” Malcolm ordered,
bringing her attention back to him.

“You’re wounded,” she whispered, trying to
keep her voice flat and calm. “I’ll have someone look at your
injuries.” She took a sharp breath as the pressure of his hand
nearly snapped the bones of her wrist.

“Nay,” he commanded. The pressure eased on
her wrist. “Say nothing. You don’t know me.”

“You could die.”

“Then let me die,” he whispered hoarsely.
“I’ll gladly take death before giving these blackguards any
knowledge of who I am.”

As surely as she was kneeling there, she felt
the tearing in her chest as she looked on him. A flood of molten
liquid poured into her heart, and a pain engulfed her, smothering
her attempt to speak.

“Jaime, I won’t let them ransom me. I won’t
let them steal my honor. Go, lass. Just walk away and forget you
saw me. But...later...let my kin know what happened to me. If you
ever cared for me, do this. ‘Tis little I am asking of you.”

Jaime pulled her hand slowly out of his grip,
and he let her go. She stared into his dark eyes. They were
pleading with her, so unlike the eyes of the Malcolm she
remembered. She stood up slowly and took a step back. Edward's
voice stopped her, swinging her around.

“I see you’ve found the bagatelle I’ve
brought home.”

“Your treasures, you mean?” she asked,
matter-of-factly.

Edward's eyebrows shot up in interest. Jaime
pointed at Malcolm, her eyes defiantly matching the wounded
Highlander’s glare as Edward’s arm encircled her waist.

“That one! The one dressed in French attire.
He is Malcolm MacLeod, the chief of the powerful MacLeod clan.
Aside from the Earl of Argyll, he has the greatest fortune in the
Western Isles.”

Jaime turned her gaze back to Edward's face.
His eyes sparkled, even in the murky light of the prison.

“That one man—alive—” she continued, “will
bring you a king’s ransom.”

“BETRAYER!” Malcolm gasped with a vehemence
that came from his soul. “Vile, treacherous whore!”

Havoc broke loose around her as the
Highlander forced himself to his feet with surprising quickness and
lunged at her. Jaime stood her ground, prepared to take his fury
full on.

“Damn you to hell!” Malcolm screamed
hoarsely, his fingers reaching for her throat as Reed’s club
connected squarely with the side of his head. The Highlander
dropped to his knees, and as the burly jailer lifted his weapon to
strike the falling prisoner again, Edward stepped forward, sending
Malcolm sprawling with a vicious kick.

Jaime looked on—her silent screams ripping at
her insides—but her exterior showed nothing but cold
indifference.

“You...deceiver...foul, demon witch!” He
tried to raise himself up to his knees. Jaime saw Reed’s hand go
up, ready to crush Malcolm’s skull with the weighted club.

“Hold, Reed. I want him alive.” The jailer
shot a surprised look at Edward, but without a word lowered his
weapon.

Malcolm raised himself to one knee. Jaime
could see the toll that the action took. He moved as if his body
were made of lead. His head wobbled slightly, fresh blood soaking
into the dark crimson stains of his torn shirt. Jaime clenched her
hands at her sides; Malcolm’s eyes cleared somewhat and fixed with
fury upon her face. She could not tear her eyes away from his
gaze.