A Knight's Vow (37 page)

“Nothing yet, the baby is too young to be moving within
you,” answered Guillelm, deliberately misunderstanding her.
He caught Alyson against him, both of them kneeling, and
rocked her.

“Peace, peace,” he whispered, as she remained stiff. “There
will be time enough. Our child will spend three seasons
within you-you will love each other by then”

With Guillelm’s dream-acknowledgment of the child as
his, some of the fear and numbness ran out of Alyson. “Are
you glad?”

Guillelm nodded, laying his bright head against her shoulder. For a time all was quiet, their dream-world still, then
Alyson felt him start against her. “Listen, the first lamb born!”

Alyson heard the fragile, bleating cry for herself and something woke within her-soon that would be her child, Guillelm’s child. She sprang to her feet. “Who shall we tell?” she
cried. “Who first?”

She woke on her own question, already knowing the answer.

She felt guilty, stealing away from the convent during the
silent predawn hours, before the first service. Without parchment, she had no means of writing a note to the abbess to
explain or apologize for her absence and she dare not wake
her sibling; she was certain Sister Ursula would raise an
alarm to prevent her going.

Walking barefoot from her cell Alyson had several nervejangling moments. The tiny creak of her door as she eased it
open seemed as loud as a horn blast. The broken snore of a
sleeper in one of the other cells convinced her that she was
discovered, until the steady, heavy drone began afresh. Another few steps and she froze, spotting a moving shadow,
which turned out to be nothing more than the abbess’s pet
tabby cat, Nero, stalking the corridor. The painted eyes of a
statue of the Madonna reproached her as she passed the
statue’s narrow window niche but now no others saw her.

So far, the abbess’s instruction that she, Gytha and Eva be
housed not in the more lavish comfort of the guest house but
with the novices and nuns in the general dormitory had worked
to her advantage-no one expected her to take flight from here,
in the midst of so many other sleepers. Alyson grimaced afresh at the thought but kept on. Unbarring the final door and closing
it slowly and softly behind her, she stepped outside into the
pinky-gray morning.

In the clammy, dew-laden air she took several steadying
breaths and laced on her shoes. Careful to walk all the way
around the courtyard, keeping close to the walls in case any
should spot her crossing the cobbles that she herself had swept
only the evening before, she made for the small stable block.

In the straw-scented barn she knew she would not find
Jezebel-Guillelm had taken the mare back with him when he
left but she hoped to find some mount she could use. There
her luck failed. Aside from the abbess’s gray palfrey-which
Alyson dare not borrow-there was only a drab mule, which
she sensed would bray loudly if approached. Smiling grimly at
the recollection of her sister’s accusation of Guillelm “braying,”
she retreated rapidly, hurrying from the convent on foot by way
of a small eastern gate. Blinking into the yellow glimmer of the
rising sun, she turned southwest, toward the distant church
tower of Saint Michael. After Saint Michael’s would come Saint
Jude’s and after that she would truly be on the road to Hardspen,
on the road home.

She walked until she was certain she would be out of
earshot of the convent and then ran, anxious to put as much
distance as she could between herself and the nuns.

Fixing her eyes on the tower of Saint Michael, she began
by cutting across country, blundering once through a patch of
thistles that tore at her gown. Behind her, faintly, there were
voices shouting and fading; her departure from the convent
may have been discovered. Ignoring that, Alyson ran on-she
was running more slowly now, making for the track she knew
was at the other side of the upcoming wooded valley, pacing
herself so that she could breathe but not think. The early sun
flashed in her eyes, its heat already as humid as a summer afternoon. There was a rumble in her ears like thunder, but it
was her own pounding heartbeat, urging her to greater speed.

Alyson sprinted off the balls of her feet. Her hair broke free
of its plait. She flew down the dry stream bed of a water
course, her toes scarcely rocking the round yellow pebbles,
and her feet bit into mud as she entered the green twilight of
the wooded valley. There her speed was checked by the thick
undergrowth of hazel and her own weariness.

She slowed to a walk. The bed of the stream grew sloppier,
soothing her burning feet. Deeper in the wood she heard the
trickling sound of water; a spring welled out from a bank and
ran over the grass to the stream bed. Alyson cupped her fingers and drank.

Suddenly she was weeping into her wet hands. What was
she doing? Sneaking away from her hosts, deceiving nuns,
rushing off with no coherent idea other than to see Guillelm
again. Would he be pleased to see her? Please let him be
pleased, she thought, while a darker voice in her head added,
IfI am with child, please let us both survive.

She stretched her hand across her stomach. Be safe, she
pleaded to the tiny, fragile life within, another soul, the fruit
of her and Guillelm’s love.

Did he love her?

“Enough!” Alyson said aloud, mopping the last of her tears
away from her cheeks with her fingers. Even where she did
not keep to the winding road, as now, she would have a long,
exhausting trek today. “Save your energies for the journey. Do
not talk. Do not think. Walk.”

Alyson walked on through the woods. She was glad to be
taking a shortcut through here had she kept to the turf-andstone track that snaked up and down beside this wood, she
would have added another mile or so onto her trip-but this was no carefully maintained royal forest. In this wood, there were no
ditches to keep deer in or out, or woodmen coppicing oaks and
limes; it was in truth a long, narrow strip of straggly trees, some
old and rotting, others hung about with lichen. It smelt of musty
rooms and the only birdsong she heard was the frequent, scolding alarm call of the blackbird.

She moved quickly, wary of disturbing animals either the
two-or four-footed kind. No boar grazed here, Alyson noted
with relief, seeing no characteristic score marks on the tree
trunks, but she noticed badger hair on a stump and fox tracks
near to a small muddy pool in the middle of the wood. From
there she could also clearly see the farther edge of the wood and
now she quickened her steps, keen to be out in the fresher air
again and back on the road.

Then she heard it. A whistle that was not a birdcall, answered by another. Ducking under the low branches of a
chestnut, Alyson pelted for deeper cover, a stand of hollies
where she could hide until the men had gone. Had they seen
her? Worse, were they tracking her? Whoever they were,
Guillelm was not part of their number; he would have
shouted, made himself known. Had they seen her?

Risking a look back, Alyson recognized an emerging shadow
and instantly flattened herself onto the damp earth, praying the
man had not spotted her. He was still on horseback, jabbing and
slashing at the undergrowth with his sword, a boyish, childish
gesture except that his face was taut and red with anger.

It was Fulk.

Where was she? Fulk had watched her leave the convent and
from the instant his men had brought word of her movements
he had followed her sneaking progress. No doubt she was heading for Hardspen, but to him it no longer mattered. She was
outside the convent, having deliberately left sanctuary. She had put herself outside the protection of the holy place. She was
his now.

Fulk tightened his grip on the reins, angry that the search
was taking so long. Everything had been clear until she entered the wood. He should never have hung back, but then, he
had expected her to keep to the road, where a single lone
female could be easily ridden down. He had planned to seize
her a mile away from the convent, out of sight of anyone, but
by fleeing into the trees the cunning witch had escaped. Not
for long, though. Once captured, she would be blindfolded,
taken to a more private spot and then—

He closed his eyes, sending a prayer of thanks to God. Sir
Michael, that great Templar knight, had been right. His advice
had been timely.

“If you wish to recover your lord’s good graces, then I
would suggest you strike camp close to the convent, and
wait,” Sir Michael had told him as they had shaken hands in
parting. “Those women will betray themselves: One or all of
them will flee sanctuary and when they do, you will know
who is guilty. It is a proof your lord will not be able to ignore.
A witch cannot bear to stay by a holy place.”

Fulk opened his eyes, catching a flash of blue-purple off to
his left, shimmering against the browns and greens of the
trees and earth like the brilliant plumage of a kingfisher. As
two of his men hauled her out of a mess of holly branches and
dry leaves, Fulk permitted himself a grin Alyson had been
found by her own female vanity, by a scrap of veil, fluttering
in the breeze.

Blindfolded and gagged, her hands tied by a thin cord that
cut so badly into her wrists that she could feel a trickle of
blood on the sleeves of her gown, Alyson was flung facedown
across the back of a horse. A nightmare ride followed, where
every step of the horse’s hooves jolted up through her body
like the punch of a hammer. She could do nothing to protect
herself from the searing pain in her breasts and stomach, and
each time she shifted slightly on the plunging horse, trying to
ease the agony of her ride, a heavy mailed hand slammed into
her back or brutally thrust her head down again. She rode with
her face thrust against the flanks and neck of her mount, waves
of sickness rising in her gorge, her teeth aching as she bit desperately into a filthy rag Fulk had forced into her mouth. Her
only relief now was pride, that she would not scream. Dizzy
with the relentless, thunderous motion, clammy with dread
that she would fall or be pitched forward into the rushing void,
she vowed to herself that when they stopped, wherever they
stopped, she would fight. Whatever happened, Fulk would not
make her scream. He would not make her beg.

Some long time later, when her muscles felt flayed and her
arms gone numb in their sockets, a gobbet of dirt struck her in the face as whoever was riding the horse above her reined
in with savage force. She was hauled off the sweating charger
with as little ceremony or concern as if she was a bale of cloth
and dropped onto the ground.

Despite Alyson’s best efforts, her legs were shaking so
badly that they buckled and she sprawled forward. While she
was prone, a man grabbed her arm and she curled inward, instinctively shielding her belly from kicks or blows, but instead her bounds were efficiently cut, her blindfold tugged off
and her gag removed.

“Thank you,” she tried to say, but the soldier, who was a
stranger to her, shrugged and put a finger to his lips and
stepped back. He had a young-old face, lined by exposure to
strong sun and a bush of russet hair, that curled in a way
Petronilla would have envied.

“Eustace does not understand you. He speaks only French”
Fulk stood before her, hands on hips. He wore gloves of mail
and she wondered if she had been put across his horse, an
almost unendurable thought.

“Where are we?” she asked quickly, if only to spare herself
his gloating smile.

“These men with me are all loyal to me,” Fulk continued, as
if she had not spoken. He watched her struggling to sit up
amidst the dry grass and ferns with the same cool patience a
spider uses to watch a fly. There was no pity or care in his look.

“May I have some water?” Alyson asked. She loathed the
thought of having to deal with Fulk, but deal she must. She
forced herself not to touch her stomach; there was no way she
could check on the babe within, if there was a babe. Would a
child survive such a ride? What if she should miscarry? What
if the child was harmed in some way, deformed? Her mind
flashed to a terrifying image of Guillelm, his face warped in
disgust, repudiating both her and her baby.

“Water,” she croaked, close to tears, repeating her request in Latin as she tried to remember the same word in French.
“Please?”

Fulk merely stared at her. The strange soldier, Eustace,
who had cut her bonds, touched his hand to his own water
flask and then turned his back.

Alyson almost howled with despair. She glanced past Fulk
and her possible ally, who was now striding away, shouting
something in French over his shoulder about making water,
and she looked to the rest. She knew there were others; at least
three men had wrestled with her when they had caught her.

Five men circled her, tall and implacable as standing
stones, in gray armor and plain brown mantles. None wore
any insignia, she noticed, no device to show which lord they
served. Three wore helms and she could not see their faces.
The other two were unknown to her. She might have seen
them at Hardspen, but she could not swear to it.

The red-haired stranger knight, the only one who had
shown her any gentleness, had vanished into a stand of trees.

“Where are we?” she repeated.

This time Fulk deigned to answer. “Somewhere you should
recognize.”

It was a place she did not know. A roughly circular clearing
in a stretch of forest. About them were massive beeches and
oaks, and beyond the clearing the understory enclosed them
like living curtains, the hazel and elderberry bushes heavy with
growing nuts and berries that shone in the sunlight. Within
the clearing itself there were orchids flowering amidst old tree
roots and stumps, their bright glossy petals flickering like
dragon tongues amidst the sandy, grassy base of the woods.