Defiant (15 page)

She shifted on the ground. One knee came up, dragging the hem of her skirt up behind, so one long, white leg was momentarily exposed. She crossed her legs, the skirt fell back into place, and she looked up, the corner of her mouth curved up into one of those minute, somehow stunning smiles. “I will sing for you, Jamie, if you release me.”

Madness, the way his body sped up, churned inside. He passed her a cool look. “I shall have to forgo the pleasure.”

She deflated. “Oh, ’twould not have been a pleasure, Jamie. I sing terribly.”

He felt yet another grin tug at his lips. “You said ’twas a talent of yours.”

“I said I can sing a
merry
tune. Not a good one.”

“I would like to know what else you do well, Eva.”

She arched one of her little ink-swipe eyebrows. He liked when she did that across the fire. It shifted the way the light and shadows fell across her face. “Oh, yes, I am certain this is so. Men are always curious about what women
do so well.
”

It was ridiculous, how her throaty innuendo, chiding the overweening carnal desires of men, activated overweening carnal desire in him.

She sighed resignedly. “I patch clothes, carry wash, grow garlic, and poke a knife in someone, these things I do well.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “You do not mention that you charm ship captains and play ninepins with your body.”
And make my body ignite when you do but look at me.

She laughed, one of those pretty, secret laughs that she’d given him in the alley. “Alas, Jamie, you have discovered all my secrets. But come, why do we speak so much of me?”

“We are ascertaining if you can be truthful.” But he was not doing that, of course. Not anymore.

“Pah.” She reached up to rub her head with her bound hands. It pushed her dark hair forward, over her shoulder. “My innards are as riveting as dirt. We shall speak of you, knight, while we sit by this fire, and see if you are
worth
telling the truth to.”

“Shall we?” He leaned against the log behind him. “Well,
I
have a fairly good memory.”

She nodded encouragingly.

“And I recall, quite clearly, you did not bite when I kissed you before.”

Pale, bent at the knuckles, her fingers froze in combing through her hair. Her nails, painted with those erotic swirling lines, pushed through the tresses like barrettes, curling up out of the richness of her hair as she stared into his eyes.

“Now, Eva, listen close. For all your chatter, you have not yet given me anything of value.”

She sat up straight. “I gave you Mouldin.”

He smiled. “No. Roger did. And I would have figured that out soon enough, the moment I came upon him.”

She looked taken aback. “Surely it helps to know what sort of evil man you are hunting?”

“I hardly expected a kind one.”

She made an impatient gesture with her hand. “You hardly expected me either, yet here I am.”

“Aye, there you are,” he agreed, his words a slow drawl. This occasioned another blush slipping across her cheekbones.

They looked at each other for a long moment, then he slid his gaze down her body, over the long trails of hair flowing over her shoulders, down her belly to her bent knees before making the lazy trip back up again.

“In any event, I am seeking something significantly better than names, Eva.”

Something happened to her then, a small quiver that shivered her hair and made her release a slow breath. He could not resist looking down at her lips as they formed her next, softly spoken words.

“I know where Father Peter’s documents are.”

His gaze made the slow climb back to her eyes. “You what?”

“These documents and sketches that every man with a sword in England wants? I know where they are. I can get them for you.”

From across the firelight, her eyes were all reflected firelight in dark, shadowy pools. “That would indeed be a good trade, Eva,” he agreed slowly. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I care naught for the politics of England.”

He smiled faintly. “That is not good enough.”

“It is all I have. You have your sword, I have this little truth.”

Silence.

“So, Jamie Knight, have we a deal?”

He smiled at her in the sudden brightness as the entire stick was engulfed in flames. “It appears so. I refrain from tying you to a tree, and you spill your innards.”

H
e shifted so his boots were planted on the ground, his knees bent, and slung his forearms over them, loosely linking his fingers. “Tell me a story, Eva. About Roger and you and Father Peter.”

She stared into the fire for long minutes, and when she spoke again, she surprised him entirely. “I once saw a wolf at night.”

He picked up another stick.

“The moon was out, I was climbing a hill. There was no color in the night, just wind and the white moon and sad brown grasses. That is when I saw him. He was gray, his fur rippled by the wind, like a sea. He looked like moon water. I knew I should be scared, but I was not.” She glanced at him. “Nor was I foolish. I put Gog up on my shoulders.”

“Pardon?”

She gave a ghost of a smile. “He was but six.”

“And you were?”

She shrugged, as if it did not signify. “This wolf, he was so . . .” She shook her head impatiently. “His fur was so thick and lush, clearly he had eaten many fat little sheep and must have had many enemies among the villagers. But there was something about him. His eyes were”—she glanced at Jamie—“blue. Pale. Like little coins. He was significant, like a field
of battle unto himself. He saw me. I assume he considered ripping out my throat.” She glanced at him again. “You must know this urge.”

He smiled faintly. “It passes.”

She pressed her elbows onto her knees and stared into the low flames. “He put his muzzle into the air and loosed this great, howling cry. And out there, somewhere, another picked it up. There was another wolf out there, crying with him.”

She shivered. “Then he looked at me again, as if to say, ‘Oh, yes, I see you, little girl, and I will eat a sheep instead, this time.’ Then he turned and trotted down the hill, and I knew with certainty this one would be hunted to death. They are all dead now, here in England, the wolves?”

“Nigh on.”

A breeze puffed over their low fire. The coals burned in waves of hot orange and red.

“Gog and I, we have no need to howl to each other across hills.”

He nodded. She held out her hand. He mimicked the move, eyebrows up.

She pointed to her palm. “Gog.” She flipped her hand over and touched the back. “Eva.”

He could see the long, fragile bones running from her fingers to her wrist, where they disappeared under the dark blue of her tunic sleeve. Her fingernails were painted with those swirling, vaguely erotic lines.

She closed her hand into a fist.

He looked up. “You keep Roger safe.” He paused. “This is why you left England.” She nodded. “You know you will not be able to keep him safe like that”—he nodded toward her white-knuckled fist—“for much longer.”

The fire spat, sending a spray of tiny orange embers into the cold air.

“This I know very well, Jamie Knight. It is why we must leave England. King John is a very ambitious fisherman, and with a very big net, no? He sweeps up everyone in it, all the people he is frightened by for no very big reasons.”

“Or for very big reasons indeed.”

She nodded. “This is true. He is not overly discriminating.”

“No, he is not.” A vast, chasm-filled understatement.

“And he is easy to anger.”

“Did your parents anger him?”

She stared into the air above his shoulder with a small, inscrutable smile. “My mother did.”

My
mother, not
our
mother, he noted silently.

The fire was burning down to a hot, orange bed of glowing coals. Drafts of wind pressed against them and blew them hotter, the bright red-orange glow undulating from one side of the fire pit to the other like a burning sea. Like her wolf pelt.

“And?” he asked, softer now, but still intent on his mission, because that was how you fished for truths with
faeries.

“And so we left England,” she finally said. “Roger and I.”

They looked at each other. “Truly?” he asked softly. He was starting to feel bad, all this crushing of her pitiable lies.

But then, she said she did not care if it was obvious that she lied. What mattered was that no one ever knew the truth.

“
’Twas
Gog and I,” she insisted.

It had the ring of truth. It likely
was
the truth. It was simply not the whole truth. “And?” he pressed. They’d been children. Who had escorted them?

She held his gaze in silence, her chin pressed into little dimpled impressions, and by this, she revealed more than all her words thus far. For in it, Jamie could hear, like a murmuring brook, a thousand words rumbling to pour forth into the quarry his
And?
had dug. She was answering him, inside her
head, and her silence fairly shouted of awful things and nevermores.

He had a silence like this inside him as well. But his chin did not dimple. His eyes did not widen, his heart never broke. He revealed nothing. He was a pit.

Eva was equally broken—like knows like—but not as practiced as he. She had the feel of something grown fierce by dint of need, not nature. But then, such things could be fierce indeed.

“There is no
and
for this,” she finally said. “For almost a year, ’twas just Gog and I, alone in these woods. You can see how this would have been a cold endeavor, as I cannot so much as make a fire.” She lowered her eyes.

“But I do not understand—”

Abruptly, Eva turned and reached into her little satchel, awkwardly due to her bound hands, and pulled something out. “
Regardez,
Jamie Knight. These are beautiful, no? They are from the
curé
to me.”

She handed him a parcel with a wooden cover, painted with a profusion of yellow flowers. Inside, it was filled with thick, scratchy parchment pages. He bent to examine them. Indeed, beautiful. If possible, more magnificent than the illuminated manuscripts for which Father Peter was renowned. Brilliantly colored drawings crowded the margins of the pages. This took time and attention. This could not be dashed off. These were not idle sketches. It appeared Peter of London had taken more effort with these miniature scenes and letters than he had with some of his greatest works, in abbeys stretching from Westminster to the Yorkminster.

For Eva.

His eyes skimmed the words briefly. Back at the inn, he’d cared only for weapons; missives were a second-run search, and they hadn’t had the time.

He scanned through the spidery Latin of one of the great thinkers and artists of their time, seeing nothing of note beyond scattered mentions of the barons’ charter brewing in England, and Peter’s thoughts on some of the clauses and their importance. The ones mentioned had all sent King John’s eyelid twitching. He suppressed a smile. Peter of London could not resist teaching. Or instigating.

Other than this, there was nothing noteworthy. Perhaps in the extravagance of using ink and paper and a messenger to tell someone of such small nothings, but elsewise, it was filled with insignificant things, the sort of words an uncle would say to a beloved niece, marking the passage of seasons, asking after the growth of Roger, scolding softly for not using some money he’d sent to buy new shoes.

And in its prosaic nothingness, it told a volume of tales.

“We are not always together now, so Father Peter writes those to me,” she said. Tendrils of hair unraveled down past her shoulder, small knobbly ladders of silk as she leaned forward to look with him. He imagined the waves of heat pushing against her chest.

“I read his words, enjoy the little pictures he draws in the margins. I try to mimic his great talent.” She gestured toward the hut. “I have none myself.”

He disagreed. The door looked as if someone had cast a spell with ink lines. Smooth, dark, precise, burgeoning into fat, curving lines, slimming into cat’s-claw precision, she’d drawn a beautiful faerie spell.

“He is special to you,” he said, handing the volume back.

“He was my foster father.” Mayhap it was the shimmering heat waves from the glowing coals, but her voice had an otherworldly tone. “My lifesaver. My raison d’être, after Gog. He is the only thing good in my world, and if need be, I will give my life to save his. Or Roger’s.”

She reached for the volume and he covered her fingers with his. He heard her take a quick, small breath. “But why, Eva? Why is this needful? Why do you do it?”

She slid her hand free, with the book. “It is what I do,” she said with one of her small shrugs. “If not Roger, I would tend orphans or horses. It is nothing of note.”

Her gaze flickered away, and as with all things Eva, he knew she would not speak the truth, but even so, he could not follow the lie. There were no straight lines with Eva; she was an ocean of currents, and while you might know you were not sailing south, you had no notion where you
were
being taken.

But then, he did not need her compass anymore. He knew exactly where this was headed.

His mind cast itself back in time, swept aside the bright, vivid horrors of his own childhood, to recall the tales that had passed through England ten years ago, about what became known as the Everoot Massacre. From castle to castle on the tongues of minstrels, from piss-reeking alley to alley on the tongues of commoners, the rumors had spread of how the king had murdered one of his greatest barons in a fit of foaming fury.