Masques of Gold (48 page)

Justin caught her hands, leaving her naked to the waist. “It becomes you very well,” he said, “but I will have to take it back to Goscelin and tell him to lengthen the chain and hook at the back. I have a great desire to see these little rosebuds”—he bent forward and nipped her once more—“peeping through the bars of a golden prison.”

“You never would!” The words were garbled with laughter. “How would you explain so strange a request to Goscelin?”

“I would tell him the truth.” Justin burst out laughing too at Lissa's expression of dismay, then pushed the table out of his way and got to his feet, pressing her against him so that her naked breasts were hidden and the wide sleeves of his robe covered and warmed her bare back. “Why not?” he asked huskily, his mouth against her ear.

His warm breath made Lissa's knees feel soft, and she used her arms to cling to Justin rather than attempt to cover herself. She willed him to speak again, not caring what he said; the words themselves were nearly meaningless, but the movement of his lips and the tickling breath were somehow reflected in her loins, giving her a thrilling pleasure. Still, when he did speak, the words added to her joy.

“Goscelin would envy me the sweet game of kissing such prisoners through such bars,” Justin murmured. “But I will deny myself if you forbid me, for I am worse than a prisoner. I am a lifelong slave.”

Lissa's diversion was very successful in the sense that Justin thought of nothing else at all while it lasted. But when he woke with a start and a pounding heart some hours later, he felt a flicker of resentment because it was the nature of the diversion to be temporary. Then he smiled into the dark and called himself a fool. Coupling was like fighting. No one could live at that pitch of excitement for long. And he had slept, which was more than he would have done if Lissa had not strung out her diversion, teasing him and holding back her own pleasure so that he was forced to restrain his own, until he was utterly exhausted. He had no idea how long he had been asleep, but it was not yet full morning, he thought. It was too quiet and there was not enough light, but it might be near dawn. Justin pushed back the bed curtain to see if any light was showing in the cracks of the shutters.

Just as he did so, he heard a knock on the door below, muffled and dulled by the closed shutters. He cursed under his breath and glanced at Lissa, but she had not stirred. She had exhausted herself too; it was a bad night for her to be wakened to mix up a potion for a child who would die anyway. And then a quality in the sound made him swing his legs out of bed, drop the curtain, and hurry to the shuttered window to peer through a crack. There was a saddled horse tied near the door, so he had been right. The sound was not a bare fist pounding on the door but metal against wood—a sword hilt, no doubt—and the summons was almost certainly for him. No neighbor coming to Lissa for help would ride a horse.

Justin pulled on his chausses and shirt by the light of the night-candle but did not stop to tie his laces. He rushed out, bootless, to run down to let in Halsig—or whoever else had come to summon him—so that the knocking would not wake Lissa. His arming tunic was in the solar anyway, so he closed the bedchamber door behind him, but when he stepped out on the stair landing, about to go down, he saw a gleam of light as the door of the workroom opened. Paul was coming to the door, so Justin went inside and pulled on his gambeson. He heard Paul call out and the bar of the door creak as it was lifted, and he stepped out on the landing to ask what the trouble was.

His surprise when the light of Paul's candle showed the bloody bandage and stained tunic of the man who entered kept him silent just long enough for the man to close the door behind him and strike Paul down with a powerful blow from the hilt of the sword he was carrying. Justin uttered a strangled cry of protest, and the man, who seemed about to stab down with the sword, looked up, clawing with his free hand at the bandage, which was apparently blocking his vision. He started forward then, but Justin had already stepped back into the solar to seize and draw his own sword. The action was instinctive—Justin's body told him that a blow had been dealt and a blow must be returned, even while he was still bewilderedly trying to understand why one of his men should want to kill Paul.

The puzzle did not interfere with Justin's physical response. Sword in his right hand, scabbard in his left, since his shield was in the stable with Noir, he stepped out on the landing again. The man, he saw, was not at all weakened by his injuries; he had apparently run across the shop and was more than halfway up the stairs.

“Drop your sword!” Justin bellowed, hoping that the man-at-arms's long training in obedience to a voice of command would control him despite the confusion Justin assumed must be caused by his head injury.

For half a minute Justin thought it would work. No expression could be read behind the swathing of bloody cloth, but the man cried, “No! God, no! Not you!” and the blade, which he had lifted as Justin appeared, wavered. In the next instant, however, an even worse attack of the madness seemed to seize the victim, and he screamed hoarsely and leapt up the remaining steps, slashing wildly at Justin.

Hubert's slow mind could not cope with the two absolutely contradictory orders—that he must bring Bowles's daughter to his master before Lauds and that he must not for any reason offer any threat to Sir Justin. All he knew was that FitzWalter would listen to no more excuses and that, by rushing at him with a bared sword, he had already “threatened” Sir Justin. Thus he had failed to obey one order, and unless he could pass Sir Justin, he could not seize Bowles's daughter and would fail to obey both his master's commands.

In that instant of utter terror and desperation, Hubert realized that dead men make no complaints. He sprang upward again, shouting to immobilize his victim with fright and launching a powerful blow at the still figure. Although he could see only straight ahead, Hubert did not pause to tear off the bandage. He was filled with confidence and a rushing joy. He would not be punished because his master would never know he had killed Justin. All he need do was silence the servants so they could not tell, then come back after he had taken the girl to Baynard's Castle and hide Justin's body.

Warned by the shout and his own knowledge that those with broken heads were always unreliable and sometimes dangerous, Justin twisted away from the powerful but poorly directed blow and struck sharply at Hubert's wrist with his scabbard. He did not use his own sword or strike at his attacker's head because he hoped to disarm the “poor man” without injuring him anymore. Considering the amount of blood on his clothes, Justin believed the man must soon collapse.

The bellow of rage that followed Justin's blow gave no support to that theory, nor did the answering strike, which showed no uncertainty in grip or failure in power. In fact, the parry forced on Justin sent a shock up his arm and drew a grunt of surprise from him. He remembered then tales of inhuman strength granted for a short time to dying men, and it flashed through his mind that it would be a shame for him to be injured by one in his death throes when he could end the life swiftly and be safe. But he could not do it; the man was mad, but he might not be dying.

“I am not the enemy,” Justin said, trying to sound calm and sure while making his voice loud enough to bind attention. “Lay down your sword. I will do you no harm.”

Cracked, crazy laughter was drawn from Hubert by the words. He did not fear that without his troop Justin could do him harm; from Justin's behavior, he believed the great thief taker was too frightened of him to fight back at all. In any case, Hubert knew himself to be too strong to fear a single puny creature like Justin. It was only his master he feared, only FitzWalter, who could send ten, a hundred, a thousand men to catch him and chain him and torment and maim him if he did not obey.

A light drew Hubert's eyes behind Justin. He was so contemptuous of his opponent that he dared lift his head, allowing the bandage to block his sight of the weapon Justin brandished so ineffectually. The candle lit the terrified face of the woman who was his rightful prey. She gasped and backed away, and Hubert bellowed wildly again with rage. If she barricaded herself inside her bedchamber—Hubert had heard of the bar she used as protection against her father—he would never get her out before Lauds. He thrust upward violently, not only with his sword but with his whole body, intending to pin Justin against the door and disembowel him.

Because Hubert had twisted his head to watch the waning of the candlelight as Lissa retreated, he gasped with surprise when a blow struck his sword arm down. Indifferent and infuriated, he struck back, expecting to push Justin's blade aside and simultaneously flinging himself forward again, reaching with his bare hand for Justin's throat. Hubert felt his sword catch against what he thought was another blade, and he heard Justin cry, “Man, beware!” He believed Justin cried out in fear because his sword was trapped, and he blessed himself for it because the light was coming back, the woman responding to her lover's voice. And Hubert laughed aloud again, just as a huge pain burst in his belly.

For one instant Justin was paralyzed, hardly believing that even a madman could spit himself deliberately. In that instant, a rod came past his hip and struck the dying man in the side, toppling him off the stair. Long years of practice made Justin's hand lock with extra strength on his sword hilt when he had dealt a fatal stroke. The victim always pulled away hard, either falling down in death or trying to escape. Justin's body was prepared for the jerk even when his mind was not, so the sword, dripping blood on the stair, stayed in his hand when Hubert fell.

The poker Lissa had wielded dropped with a clatter and she cried, “Justin, are you hurt?”

“No, not at all,” he said, peering down in the dim light. The man was silent, unmoving, and Justin saw that his head was twisted queerly. He felt relieved that the man's neck was broken, for death from a belly wound could be slow and painful. “Poor creature.”

“Poor creature!” Lissa echoed. “He was trying to kill you.”

“No, his brains were addled.” Justin started down the stairs and Lissa followed, only pausing to pick up the poker, which she fully intended to use on the “poor creature” if it so much as quivered. “See how his head is bandaged,” Justin went on. “Yet he could not have seemed crazed when the hurt was dealt him because he was sent, or came of himself, to tell me of the trouble—” He uttered an obscenity, then added, “He is dead. Now how am I to know where I am needed?”

“I am sorry, Justin,” Lissa said, although she really was not sorry at all. “I could not know he would break his neck when he fell.”

But Justin did not appear to have heard her. He stood staring down at the corpse and then said suddenly, “Something stinks here. I have been half asleep and too busy to think, but how could
any
man know where to find me? Only Halsig and possibly Dick Miller's son know I spend my nights with you, and if there were trouble, one of them would come here himself to get me, not send a badly wounded man, who might never arrive.”

“The rumors—” Lissa offered tentatively.

“I doubt it. Those travel around among our own kind. In any case, what good would I be alone in a fight that dealt such wounds? It is custom to report to my house if the guard must be summoned out, whether I am home or not. Hmmm. It is too bad you have such a knack with pokers, but it is more my fault than yours. Once he had run himself onto my sword, he was dead already. And I should have known he was not what he seemed as soon as I saw him strike down Paul—”

“Paul!”

Lissa, who had been acting and speaking in a kind of frozen dream that protected her from feeling anything, was shocked back to reality. She looked wildly around, lifting up her candle and moving quickly to the huddled form on the floor near the door. She knelt beside Paul, but was afraid to touch him in so poor a light and went to the counter to light more candles, carrying two in holders back with her. She hardly noticed Justin take a third and begin to pull the bandage off the head of the corpse. Not until she had satisfied herself that Paul's head had not been crushed, and he had started to stir and groan under her gentle examination, did Lissa look over at Justin. To her surprise, he had not only removed the bandage but slit open the man's tunic; however, she was not interested in the dead man. She wanted to get Paul moved to his bed, and gave Justin no chance to speak, asking him to carry the journeyman into the other room.

She spent some time calming Oliva and showing her how to place cool cloths gently on Paul's bruised head. Beyond that, Lissa explained, all they could do was pray that Paul would come to his senses. Once he did, Oliva must keep him perfectly quiet, no matter what he said, and the more he wished to get up and claimed he was well, the stronger measures Oliva must take, if necessary, to keep him abed. If he complained of headache, she was not to worry, only keep him quiet until the worst of the headache was gone and not, under any circumstances, allow him to take any medicine to cure the pain without Lissa's express permission.

The boys were already sitting up, wide-eyed with curiosity. When they saw her turn to leave, both called that they were awake and would be glad to be useful in any way. Lissa realized she must be recovering from the shock when she felt amused instead of furious at their ghoulishness, but Ninias, and particularly Witta, had had enough corpses recently. She said the way they could help her most, since they would need to mind the shop the next day, was by going to sleep again, and shut the door firmly behind her.

Justin lifted his head as she came in and gestured for her to come near. He had cleaned his sword and was squatting on his heels beside the body with the gleaming blade across his knees.

“Look,” he insisted, nodding at the body.

Lissa restrained a shudder and lowered her eyes distastefully, only to gasp aloud, “Hubert!”

“Yes, Hubert,” he said in that soft voice that sent a chill through her blood. “Hubert, perfectly whole except for the broken neck and the wound my sword dealt him, but all bandaged and blood-smeared so that he would be let into the house of a kindly apothecary who is known not to turn away an injured person, no matter the time of day or night. Tell me, my love, could Hubert, by himself, think of such a scheme for getting at me?”

Lissa's first reaction when she recognized the corpse had been intense relief, but Justin's question reminded her that Hubert was FitzWalter's servant. Her voice trembled as she said faintly, “No. My father called him hands and feet without a head. Do you think FitzWalter ordered—” She could not force out the rest of the sentence and fell silent.

“No, I do not,” Justin replied calmly. “It was the first thought in my mind too, but there are too many reasons why I must believe him innocent. First, I did not tell FitzWalter I was not in my bed when Hervi attacked, so he must have believed I was. Second, I do not believe he knows we are lovers, so he would be most unlikely to send Hubert here to kill me. Third, it is my business to read men, and I will swear that FitzWalter was surprised and angry when I told him that Hubert had incited Hervi to kill me. Fourth, and most important, there is no reason for FitzWalter to want me dead. I have given considerable thought to it, and I can think of many ways for him to make use of me alive and not one benefit he would gain from my death.”