Conqueror (20 page)

Her entourage had grown rather alarmingly over the past six months, but what could she do? When the daughters of valued vassals and southern nobles needed a safe place to flee to, was she to turn them away?

Nay, ’twas only in the far north, on Everoot lands, that a safe refuge existed. The word had gone out: Guinevere de l’Ami was one of the faithful.

But it was not only the noble-bred who required a safe haven, she discovered as the famine-month of July began claiming its victims last month—more than usual with the men away at war. Girls of the village needed a haven too, their need no less for their humble station. And what was she to do with them? Let them die?

Most assuredly not. It was not all sacrifice, she reflected, casting a hopeful, anxious eye on the bright tunics and shining plaits of hair. The girls brightened her days and in these troubled times, no price was too high for that.

She rubbed her slick neck, then leaned against the backing of her chair and closed her eyes. Despite the draining heat, she let the light from the open window drift across her thighs. The sounds of chattering faded to a golden background buzz.

“Milady?”

She dragged one lid open. Her small page, Duncan, another refugee from the wars, was standing in the doorway. Looming behind him was a dark shape, unrecognisable. She opened both eyes.

Duncan stepped aside, revealing a dust-ridden, grim-faced messenger who moved into the archway and filled it with somber leather and dirt. He swung a wary glance around the room. When all he encountered was bright colours and soft, feminine laughter, an almost hungry glance passed over his face. He turned back. “My lady?”

She rose, her sewing slipping unheeded to the ground. “Sir?”

“I would speak with you.”

A jagged chill, odd in the summer heat, trickled over the knobs of her spine. “Girls,” she said without looking away from him, “’tis time for your afternoon walk.”

A chorus of groans and gripes met this, but they rose obediently and streamed out through a far door. When they were gone, a silence stretched out for a few precious seconds.

“My lady, I have news.”

“You are come from King Stephen,” Gwyn said, her voice flat and toneless.

When he nodded, she couldn’t deny the rush of tears that swelled in her eyes. God’s truth, what could he say that could hurt her now?

“The king will lose the war.”

She shook her head. Denial, weariness, she did not know which. All these years of war and wanting and waste, for what? “Cannot we send more troops?” she asked in rote, like a lesson learned. “More men, more money?”

“What money?” He smiled grimly and moved further into the sunlit room, a dark, weather-beaten figure strapped in leather and despair. “What men? What troops? All are turning to the fitzEmpress. They think their plight will be better in his hands than our lord king’s.”

“They are fools,” she spat, running the back of her hand along her trembling lips.

“’Tis said the king’s son is dead.”

She took an involuntary step back and dropped into her chair.

“I’ve something for you.” He covered the ground between them in two strides and dropped to his knees in front of her. Digging under his tunic, he caught at something, then brought out his fisted hand, which he held before her nose.

“What is it?”

His hand fell open, and on the calloused, dirt-stained palm lay a scattering of dried rose petals, their crimson colour still bright, even in death. Gwyn’s mouth fell open, her words hushed. “’Tis my bloom. The Conqueror.” She gingerly touched one of the dried petals.

“Aye. And His Grace now asks that you recall your vow to him, as he has recalled it to you.”

“’Twas ever to be his at need,” she murmured, staring at the broken flower. She recalled the councils in London, her meeting with the king overshadowed by her heartbroken tryst with Pagan. How long ago had that been? A hundred years? How much had she aged? A thousand?

“The need is great, my lady, and the time is now.”

She dragged her gaze back up. “What would he have of me?”

“Safekeeping for the prince.”

“You said—you said he was dead.”

“I said some say that. But ’tis not so. Not yet.”

“Yet?”

“He is ill, mayhap deathly so. He needs tending, else he’ll surely die.”

“God in Heaven, where is he?”

“Here.”

She leapt to her feet, almost knocking the kneeling herald over. “Perdition, you have the prince
here
?”

He straightened and smiled faintly, a ghostly gesture on his somber visage. But the deep lines of laughter that readily absorbed this smile implied a past filled with happier times, when perhaps such expressions of joy were not so unfamiliar. Gwyn had a fleeting wonder about whom he’d shared such laughter with, and where that woman was now.

“I recall your father well, my lady. He was ever loyal to the king, and just now, you reminded me of him.”

“Just now, I would have him here more than all the ginger in Jerusalem,” she said solemnly. “Where is the prince?”

“Wrapped in a shroud and thrown over the back of my horse as if a sack of wheat.”

“How many are you?” she asked swiftly, walking towards the door. The messenger was fast behind, reaching above to hold the door open for her, then stepping through into the cool, shadowy hall. They hurried down the winding stairs, speaking in whispers as they went.

“Just three. The lord prince, my attendant, and myself.”

“And you are?”

“Adam of Gloucester.”

She hurried around the final twist in the stairs. “Who else knows of this?”

“None but I. And you.”

They reached the bottom. The great hall stretched out beyond. Servants were at various tasks, passing in and out. She could hear the faint giggles of a gaggle of girls from a distant room; the women had not made it out of the castle yet. Two off-duty knights sat playing a game of chess at a table. A group of young squires sat whittling at another table, released for the moment from their unending tasks as aspiring knights. Everywhere she looked were people, sweat-stained and half-dizzy, who had retreated into the cool castle air to escape the sweltering heat of mid-day. Only those who had to be outside were.

“No one knows but you, Adam?”

“And you,” he reminded in a low voice, his gaze following hers over the pockets of people, people with eyes and ears. And tongues.

“Come.” She grabbed his sleeve and tugged him back into the shadows.

They hurried through a long passageway that ran past the kitchens. Someone’s high-pitched voice rang out, saying something about wishing for a harp. They must be in one of the offices where she’d stored the beautiful, be-stringed things the harpers used to play at the wondrous feasts once held at the Nest. None were held now, and Gwyn told herself selling the harps was a negligible loss.

Some said the times were too grim and uncertain for such revelry, but it hadn’t been the uncertain times; it had been the uncertain money that brought silence to the hall. Dinners and suppers were now punctuated by knives and scattered, short-lived laughter, and the long, soundless nights were disrupted only by dried grasses rustling in faint breezes and women wailing for their lost men.

“This way.”

She pointed to a doorway that led out to the detached kitchens and they emerged into the greedy summer heat. Sun burned hot on Gwyn’s head, as if she’d stuck it into the fire grate. She was soaked in sweat within two steps. She could feel it trickling down the back of her neck and sliding between her breasts. It was hard to breathe.

They moved doggedly through the wall of heat to the base of the keep, where stood a pair of horses, their back hooves cocked sleepily, and a wiry man with bristly hair stood glaring suspiciously about him.

“William, ’tis my lady Guinevere,” Adam announced quietly.

The wiry man with a thatch of grimy, curling grey-brown hair bowed his head briefly. “We’ve ridden hard to reach you, my lady.” He glanced at his captain. “Does she know?”

Adam nodded, ignoring the man’s rudeness. Gwyn did too; her eyes kept slipping to the shape bundled at the back of the saddle on one of the horses.

“Well, he’s fading fast in this heat,” Adam’s attendant said bluntly. “He needs someplace cool, and a lot o’ tending, my lady.”

She wrenched her gaze back to them.

“And privacy. Above all,” Adam finished, watching her intently.

“I could put him in my chambers, but…” she began.

“But?”

All she could muster was a weak grin, and the labour it took to recognise the pale shadow of humour was not worth the effort in this heat. Neither man responded to it. “People are in and out of there like ’tis the hall itself, and ordering it off-limits will raise a few eyebrows.”

“And mayhap loose a few tongues. Where else?” prompted the knight.

“The storage rooms?” his attendant suggested.

Gwyn started. “My lord prince, in the
cellars
?”

“’Tis as safe a place as any, I’ll warrant. Unless you’ve got a few of Henri’s men already stowed down there in chains and whatnot?” He ran his tongue along his chipped teeth and stared at her. She turned helplessly to Adam.

“The cellars,” he said firmly.

She looked at the grey-shrouded lump hanging off the horse. “The cellars, then. And may my lord king have mercy on me.”

“He’ll have mercy well enough if the prince lives, my lady,” quipped the attendant. “If he dies, well…” He cocked a brow as they led the horses away from the main entrance to the keep. “You could have set him about anywheres and ’twouldn’t be enough to still the king’s fury.”

She guided them to a little-used entrance on the northern, least-used side of the castle. There were no outbuildings, no gardens or exercise yards, and little reason for anyone to wander back here. There were only the cool shadows that edged out from the base of the buttressed tower they now stood beneath, and Gwyn hoped to God anyone seeking shade would be more inclined to the great hall than this barely-used bit of turf.

A thick wall of ivy hung down over the castle walls. She wrestled a swath of it aside to reveal a short, hidden series of steps leading down to a small covered entryway and a huge oak door at the bottom, strapped with iron hinges. Fumbling with the ring of keys tied to the girdle around her waist, she took up a mottled iron one and thrust it into the lock.

The door pulled open noiselessly, emitting a billowing cloud of darkness and a faint stench. She pinched her nose while Adam propped open the door with three rocks. She stood aside as the two men hauled their princely cargo from the horse and struggled him inside.

Once they disappeared into the darkness, she heaved the rocks away, ripped one of her nails to the quick in the process, cursed to rival a seaman, and let the door slam shut behind her.

It was dark. A full, eye-taunting darkness that brought another curse, this one fainter, to her lips. Echoes bounced down the corridor in mocking whispers.

“Do you know where we are?” Adam enquired, his voice drifting from out of the darkness to her left.

She nibbled on the edge of her finger, gathering her bearings. They must be at the far end of a disused passageway that snaked past cells and small chambers, rooms once used for storing siege supplies, wine and foods and an arsenal of weapons. Now the entire place was empty, save for small animal scuttlings and a slow drip that could be heard in the distance.

“Come.”

She tiptoed sightless down the rank, damp corridor, heart in her throat. She kept her hand on the tunnel wall, trailing her fingertips across foul pockets of slime and sludge, but if she removed her hand from the wall, she’d walk smack into it. She could see nothing; the pitch of the darkness was so black it practically oozed.

Every so often the stone dropped away and her fingers would suddenly trail over empty space, an opening of some sort. A cold draft would sweep by her face, coming from some dark, untold depths deep in the castle bowels. Gwyn hurried past the openings, hastening the men with raspy whispers and a beckoning hand that they couldn’t possibly see.

“Slower, my lady,” came a soft command from behind. She had a hard time complying; the walls were starting to close in around her. All the imaginary beasts from her youth came rushing back, winging about her head with ghostly growls.

Good heavens, how had she ever
played
down here, sneaking about with Jerv and the others? Were they crazed? Papa never wanted her down here, and now she knew why. ’Twas haunted.

They were approaching a sort of subterranean crossroads, where several passageways met up. From up ahead came some faint illumination; just ahead lay the regular storage rooms beneath the castle.

She turned and hushed them. The men stopped where they were. She could see the ghostly grey burden thrown over Adam of Gloucester’s shoulder. Glimmering eyes peered back at her, almost the only light in this dark, fathomless place.

The tunnel they had travelled through ended abruptly and met up with another one, running straight to her left. The sound of the river running was louder here; an underground river ran below the cellars here, then dipped away beside it to flow towards some unknown end.

Ahead lay a low archway which came out into a corridor with the storage chambers. Staples such as grain, wines, and armour were usually collected in the rooms here. But now most were empty. She’d not sent a servant down here for many weeks. Whyfore? To guard the empty armoury? Perhaps to fetch an unfilled barrel of wine?

But even so, not one of these empty, unused chambers was safe for the prince. They had no doors, no protection. If a
dog
came by, it would all be over.

Only one other option remained.

Gwyn grabbed a lantern off a shelf in the corridor to the storage rooms and turned to her right.

Down a short hallway, so short it looked more like a small recess in the stone, with a cutout stone bench nearby, stood a door. A huge door. Almost invisible at the end of this dark, go-nowhere cubby, it looked like it was meant to be hidden. And it was guarded by a padlock the size of her fist, the shape of a dragon’s head.