Conqueror (5 page)

She plunked herself on the ground and wrenched it off. Accursed thing. What good was a pair of shoes if they couldn’t stand up to a night of combat? Her dress was torn from collar to waist, and she clutched feebly at the shreds of silk, trying to pull them tighter, feeling colder and more alone than she ever had in her life.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

The question came from above. She craned her neck back and stared into the pewter eyes of her saviour. He sat astride his raw-boned horse with an easy grace, and against the backdrop of night sky and blowing tree limbs, appeared even more the mysterious presence he’d been when he stepped out of the shadows and saved her life.

She lifted the slipper into the air. “My shoes are wet.”

The grimness in his face shaded with something else. “What are you doing?” he asked again, his words a deep rumble of masculinity.

“I’m going north.” Hot tears pushed against her nose.

He nodded, then paused. “That’s a very general area.”

She tried looking fierce. He appeared undeterred, kept staring at her with those unfathomable eyes. She began again with frigid dignity, her only defence against the panic and tears welling up inside her. “I wish only to go north and am beset with people who wish otherwise. May I not simply walk along the king’s highway—”

“No.”

Angry tears pricked harder.

A dark gaze slid down her cloak and up again. “You are not safe on the highway, and certainly not alone.”

She could feel the tears coming, poking hotly at her nose. “That is unfortunate, because that is what and where I am. And it comforts me. Being alone is a common state. Whereas sitting in the mud is not.”

He shifted on the horse and when he spoke this time, it was softer. “So come with me.”

“I don’t know where you’re going.”

He laughed, a low, pleasing sound that smoothed the edges of her fear. “You don’t know where
I
am going, mistress? I am going to warmth and a bed. Whereas you are going into certain danger, if you continue on alone.”

“I am well used to being alone. What I am not used to is my feet hurting as they do, or my dress sticking to me as it does, and…
Perdition
!”

She stared glumly across the highway. Wind rustled the reeds and grasses along the side, making a soft hissing sound. Dark clouds were rolling in, blotting out the stars. She glanced up to find him, of all things, smiling. She frowned darkly “Think you ’tis amusing?”

“Nay.” He shook his head back and forth, a swipe of enigmatic darkness against the blackening skies. “I just…did not expect such…candor from a maiden.”

“Oh,
that
. Well, I’ve had much exposure to many of the things men do so well.”

He arched a brow.

“Poor governing and rich cursing,” she responded to the silent enquiry with an airy nonchalance. Mud pressed against her buttocks.

“Rich cursing,” he mused, his gaze travelling over her hunched figure. “And poor governance. What else, I wonder?”

“Being witless when it comes to direction and a distinct desire to not ask for help,” she said in a warning tone.

It did not seem to deter him. His slate-grey eyes were warmer now, almost blue, and fairly danced with mirth. “But I am not lost, mistress.”

“I am.”

“Thank heavens you are with me, then.”

She snorted in a very unladylike way. It was sinful really, Gwyn decided glumly, getting to her feet. Such handsome amusement in the face of her plight.

She glanced back down the road and caught sight of a hand peeking out of the bushes. Small and white, it could have been anything at this distance. But she knew it was a hand. A dead man’s hand.

It was too much. She squeezed her eyes shut as her belly rolled over. Her head lolled to the side and she stumbled sideways a step.

He slid off his horse and was at her side, steadying her.

“I am sure I can make my way if I could but find my horse,” she said weakly. His hand rested on her back, his hip pressed up against hers. He pursed his lips as if about to speak, but said nothing.

She started disentangling herself; the heat from his body was too unsettling. As she pulled away, her hair tugged as it caught on the innumerable and exposed metal rings of his mail hauberk. They stared at one another through the webbed strands of dark hair, then, with a faint sigh, he bent to disentangle her. She waited patiently while he unlaced each curl and set it free.

“You could lash goods on a ship with this kind of netting,” he muttered at one particularly stubborn knot.

A trickle of soothing heat ran around the edges of her heart again and she sighed. Startlingly long-lashed eyes lifted and peered through her hair. “You are fine, mistress?”

The pain in the back of her skull started travelling forward. “Absolutely fine.”

He loosed the last curl and arranged it around her face in soft, knotted waves. “You might have just flown away.” His breath floated past her ear as he spoke.

“W-what?”

“You could have simply flown away to escape. Your hair is as soft as a bird’s feather and as black as a raven’s.”

She blinked vapidly. “Raven?”

“The bird?”

“Oh,
ra
vens.” A wave of nausea rolled through her. Her head whipped with a new surge of pain, and she moaned softly. “My head hurts.”

“Be gentle with it.”

She pressed her hands against her temples. Watery mucus flooded in her mouth. “By all the saints, I am a fool,” she muttered.

“We’ve all been the fool one time or another, myself more so than the rest.”

She couldn’t respond. Her stomach was roiling and rolling, its contents burbling and burping and demanding to be freed. St. Jude, not in the middle of the king’s highway!

“Oh God,” she moaned softly, her head lolling to the side.

He lowered her gently to her knees. Palms splayed out in front of her, she knelt on the ground like a dog and rocked back and forth, filling the air with soft moans.

“Go ahead,” he murmured, lifting the hair that had fallen in front of her face. He tucked it behind her ear, but when the curls slipped out, he swept them up and kept them in his hand.

“Oh, I can’t,” she cried, then did.

After, he led her to a hollowed tree trunk filled with fresh rain water and cleaned her up. He helped her wash her face and hands, cooled her head, and made her laugh twice, which was really more than she could have expected, given the circumstances.

“Well then,” she said in a shaky voice, after it all was over. “I suppose we can see to the defence of the bridge now.”

He stared a moment, his jaw opened slightly, revealing even, white teeth, then he started laughing. Rumbling, self-assured masculine laughter. “They wouldn’t have a chance against us, Green-eyes.”

She laughed weakly. “None a’tall.” Then she passed out.

When she came to, she was sitting on something soft.
Moss
. She ran her fingers over it, then realised she was propped against the crunchy bark of a tree. She sat up. Her saviour was crouched on the balls of his feet, watching her.

“How long?” she murmured in a broken whisper.

One of his shoulders lifted and fell. “A moment. Two.”

“Good heavens.” She pushed herself straight. “My apologies.”

He rose and brushed his hands across his thighs. “Not required. You’ve had a fright, a fight, a serious knock to the head, and almost got married. ’Tis enough to send any maiden swooning.”

“I didn’t
swoon
,” she retorted, stumbling to her feet. “I fainted, which I have ne’er done before.”

“Mmmm.”

She looked at him glumly. “What now?”

He clucked to the black behemoth of a horse standing a few paces away. The fur-knotted beast came and her saviour mounted with a graceful swing of his body. He leaned over and extended a broad, calloused hand. “You do not think too highly of men, Green-eyes, but your choices are limited. I will not take you against your will—”

“Then—”

“But I will not leave you.”

Nothing could have stopped it. Tears began pouring from her eyes en masse, like passengers fleeing a sinking ship. She lowered her head and the tears dripped down her cheeks and off her chin. She heard a muffled curse, then felt herself being lifted into the air, slid against the warm fur of a horse, and deposited on an even warmer lap of hard muscle. She started mumbling through the cascade of tears.

“I have to g-get home.”

“Where is home?”

She snuffled. “Saint Alban’s.”

There was the briefest pause. “You, a monk? I wouldn’t have believed it.”

She smiled just a little.

“Well, ’tis too far away with a storm coming and Endshire’s men on the highway,” he murmured. “And I have places to be. I’ll take you somewhere safe and warm and dry.”

“But—”

“And later, I will ensure you get to Saint Alban’s.”

“Your word, sirrah?” she pressed. “You’ve no idea how I need to be home. Have I your
most solemn word
?”

“My most solemn word, lady. I know all about needing to be home.”

“I can never repay you.”

“You never have to.”

Fear and exhaustion corded together and pushed her over the cliff of decency and common sense. She had dim memories of gripping the only ballast available, his torn tunic, and burrowing into the granite-hewn structure that lay beneath. Through a fog she recalled pressing herself into the warm hardness of his body, unmindful of the iron rings digging into her skin. One hand went up around the strong column of his neck to steady herself, and her face rolled into his chest, where it lodged for a good two minutes. All in all, a less-than-comfortable ride. Or it
should
have been.

It was not. Although his thighs were as hard-packed with muscle as the arms that surrounded her, his lap was as welcoming and warm as a fur-laden bed. She wanted to snuggle in deeper, and only the dim knowledge of a morning to come kept her from following the impulse.

His arms wrapped on either side of her loosely as he held the reins low on Noir’s withers. He clucked every so often, sometimes to her, sometimes to the horse. Noir responded by quickening his pace, she by nestling further into his body, purposefully forgetting about the dawn.

And she talked to him. She talked because the night was dark and a storm was rolling in. She talked because panic was nipping at her heels and if she stopped, she’d slip into insanity. Reason enough, but still a weak excuse to tell him all the mundane details of her life.

In fact, she realised in a dim corner of her mind, she was pouring out information like a water spout, just as if he cared. Perhaps, she reflected later, he had asked some small, leading question to still her panic, but that was a poor excuse to chatter nonstop until the man’s ears were numb and his mind mush. She talked about big things and small, about how she hated dealing with merchants and how she loved marinated mushrooms.

When his replies came in the form of nods and “ummm’s”—which could denote disinterest but, to judge by the look in his slate-grey eyes whenever he dropped them to her, was tolerance—she spoke haltingly of how she missed her mother, how she was sometimes irritable when she meant to be kind to her friends, her father, who was now dead too, and how she was coming to accept the fact that she was terribly, crushingly alone.

She talked herself back into a calm, then bounced atop his muscled thighs in silence. After a moment, she pushed back her hair and angled a careful glance up.

He was staring at the sky. She looked up too, but clouds scuttling across the sky were of little interest, so she looked back at him, her gaze travelling over a face that was turning out to have fine, noble lines and a most disconcerting handsomeness. Not that she cared, of course. Still, one could not help but notice, for goodness sake.

Without warning he dropped his gaze. “What is your name, mistress?”

She stiffened. The unguarded Countess d’Everoot had already proven to be a mighty temptation. Sooth, just six months ago the Duchess of Aquitaine had to flee from
three
matrimonial-minded abduction attempts on her travels home following her divorce from the King of France.

Still, Gwyn decided, angling her saviour a sideways glance, this one had rescued her, at serious risk to himself. He did not look the kidnapper, and while he felt dangerous, it was of a different sort than any she had a name for. Certainly no danger to her life or limb.

“Guinevere,” she finally said.

If he noted the absence of any identifying tags, such as her home or parentage, he did not show it. “Pleased to meet you.”

She laughed. “Yes, rather. And yours?”

It was his turn to pause. “I’m known as Pagan.”

She looked at him a moment, but he didn’t say anything more. So she lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “If God chose to answer my prayer with a pagan, so be it. Who am I to argue?”

He glanced down, smiling. “I think you would argue with God Himself, did it suit you, mistress.”

The smile, though, not his words, captured Gwyn’s attention. The faint sign of amusement deepened the curved lines beside his mouth, making him even more handsome and slightly less imposing, which, truly, was difficult to do in any other way. His body was encased in mail from shoulders to knees. Moonlight glinted off his close-cropped black hair whenever the tree cover opened for a moment. His face was fixed in rigid tightness, but the tension did not detract a whit from bloodlines that had crafted a noble face, its handsomeness almost taunting. Only a scar that lashed from temple to jaw marred the surface, that and a day’s growth of beard.

Yes, it would be difficult to describe him as anything but ‘imposing.’ And kind. And sacrificing. And heart-stoppingly handsome.

She ripped her gaze away.

After that, she didn’t remember much for the rest of their ride. When she tried to recall it later, it was too fuzzy, too laden with emotion. She had only dim memories.

Griffyn’s were rather more vivid.

If she’d been expected, he could have protected himself.

He’d been riding to the most important meeting of his entire sojourn in England, thoughts lost in dreary dreams of the future, when he’d heard the sounds of arguing. A woman’s voice, sing-song with fright, but the words were defiant. Brave and hopeless. The spirit that prompted them was worthy of a battle she could never give, and so he’d ridden out. He must have been bored. Or out of his mind.