For My Lady's Heart (10 page)

He fell sideways over the lodged sword, his exclamation of agony audible
above the noise as he hit the ground on his injured side. He rolled onto his
back.

The Green Sire stood above his liege, sword point at his throat.
Lancaster lay weaponless, injured, felled—and still made no surrender. The
crowd held its breath so still that the panting of the two knights seemed
the loudest sound.

Her champion looked up at her, holding the sword steady. The blood on his
face and hair was darkening, gathering dust; he looked like a devil risen
from some pit, imploring her to save him.

“My lady!” The words were an exhalation of despair.

Melanthe lifted her plume and fanned herself. She laughed aloud, in the
silence, so they could all hear.

“Yes, thou mayest have pity upon him,” she said, with a mocking bow of
her head.

Her knight pulled his sword from the duke’s throat and flung it half
across the list. As Lancaster sat up, the Green Sire fell on his knees
before his prince, head bowed. He pressed his gauntleted hands over his
eyes. Slowly, like a tree falling, he leaned lower and lower, until his
hands and forehead touched the ground.

“Pax, my dread lord.” His muffled voice was agonized. “Peace unto you.”

Painfully Lancaster hauled himself to his feet, standing against the
support of one of his attendants. Still in his helmet, he seemed to overlook
the man in the dirt at his feet. He searched out Melanthe on the
escafaut,
and then turned his back to her, walking unsteadily out of
the lists with his attendants clustering about him.

Melanthe rose and descended the steps. As she walked toward the gate,
youths and men-at-arms and onlookers parted, gazing at her. She moved to the
center of the dusty lists, where the green knight still knelt with his face
to the ground, blood matting his hair and staining his neck.

“Green Sire,” she said mildly.

He sat back, staring for a long moment at the hem of her gown. Then he
wiped his gauntlet across his eyes, smearing blood with rust. He turned his
face up to her.

All light of worship and chivalry was gone from his look. He was still
breathing hard, his teem pressed together to contain it.

She knelt and reached for his right arm, tying the jesses about the
vambrace and mail. The heat of his body radiated from metal armor.
Gryngolet’s varvels made a silvery plink against his arm, the precious
stones casting tiny sprays of light that played over steel, coalescing green
and white as the rings came to rest.

On a level with him, she looked up from her task into his eyes. She could
not have said what she saw there—hatred or misery or bewilderment—but it was
surely not love that stared back at her from under his begrimed black
lashes.

From the persistent tickle of recollection, memory sprang sudden and full
blown into her mind.

Once, long ago, for a whim, she had pulled a thorn from this lion’s paw.
She remembered him, she remembered when and where, an image stirred more by
his height and bearing and the baffled agony in his face than by his
features. Just so he had submitted, disarmed of all defense, as they took
away his wife and money from him.

He repaid her today, then, for that emerald on his helm. Whatever
precarious place he had striven to gain in Lancaster’s heart, with his
fighting skills and command of men and vow to find glory, was vanished now.
He knelt before her like a man dazed.

Apology sprang to her lips, regret for his maimed honor, his lost prince.
It hovered on her tongue.

“Thou art a fool,” she murmured instead, “to think a man can serve two
masters.” She lifted a varvel and let it fall against his armor, smiling. “A
splendid fool. Come into my service to stay, be it thy desire.”

He stared at her. A sound like a sob escaped him, a deeper breath, harsh
through his teeth.

Melanthe rose. She extended her hand, touching his shoulder to make a
gesture for the crowd. “Rise.”

His squire brought the destrier forward. Melanthe took the silver lead.
They smelled of sweat and dust and hot steel, the knight and his mount,
perfumed with blood and combat. When he had mounted, she looked up at him.

“If thou art vassal unto me,” she said, “I shall love and value thee as
Lancaster never could.” And with that snare set, she turned before he
answered, leaving his hunchbacked squire to lead him from the lists.

“Away, away!” Melanthe held Gryngolet on her wrist, urging the flustered
falconers of Ombriere to haste. “I will away!”

She turned her palfrey in the castle’s empty courtyard, watched only by
her own retinue and a few dumbstruck servants. Outside the walls the sound
of the tournament was a distant rise and fall of temper, the tensions
between soldiers and squires and townsmen flaring. Melanthe cared nothing
for that—it was the duke’s difficulty if he could not control his people—she
only wanted escape from the tumult, releasing her own tensions in a flying
gallop over the countryside with Gryngolet aloft before her.

Allegreto stood sullenly under the arched entrance to the hall, waiting
for a horse, one of his eyes turning black from his morning in the town
stocks. He had not had a difficult time of it; no taunting of a foreign
stranger could equal the excitement of a tournament, but he glared at
Melanthe all the same.

Her greyhound strained against its leash as Melanthe felt her heart
strain for the open country. She had seen herons and ducks by the river;
yesterday Lancaster had given her his leave to take what she could—and if he
regretted it now, she was beyond having to care. The falconers, two
underlings left behind to mind the mews, finally secured their drum and
swung up double onto a thin poorly horse, carrying a trussed chicken in a
bag in case the hunt should have no success.

Melanthe reined her palfrey toward the gate. Across the bridge and
through the barbican—and she could turn away from tournaments and courts and
crowds and pretend she was alone with the open sky. Alone, as Gryngolet
flew, but for the escort of hunters and falconers that chased the bird’s
wild courses.

Melanthe, too, was followed. Allegreto and Cara and a Riata rode behind
her; Lancaster and Gian Navona and the ghost of Ligurio hounded her; and
another hunted her now— the image of a man in green armor, bending slowly to
the ground with his hands covering his eyes.

All of them her constant companions, ever in pursuit, never lost to
sight. Spur her horse as she might, she was only free as the falcon flew
free—until she killed, or was called back again to the brilliant jewels and
feathers of her lure.

A witch, she was.

Ruck stood beside one of the shadowed columns in the cathedral, staring
blindly at the scaffolding beneath a newly installed stained glass window.

He felt robbed. He felt utterly pillaged.

Where was his lady, his bright unblemished lady, lovelokkest of all, who
made the blood and boredom and solitary days worth bearing? He hadn’t asked
that she be with him. He had never thought he was that worthy, but he had
held himself to her standard—when they laughed at him, when he hurt for a
woman’s body to the point of despair, he cleaved to the impossible measure
that she set by her own perfection.

He had dreamed about her in his bed or on the cold ground; he saw her
beside the Virgin in the churches. He even imagined her with Isabelle in the
nunnery, praying for his soul, both of them together, both of them the same,
fair blue eyes and fair blond tresses and a face too lovely for any woman on
earth ...

He turned his head and rested his bandaged temple against the pillar. The
cut across his skull burned. His cheek stung and throbbed in spite of
Pierre’s salve.

The reality of Princess Melanthe had been like a bucket of ice-cold water
thrown in his face. He was angry at himself, but he reserved his deepest
fury and disgust for her—the witch—she probably
had
ensorcelled
him. How else could he have managed to forget what she was?

The Arch-Fiend’s whore, that was what she was, curling like a silken
tiger on the bed with her Satan’s cub caressing her. He could not even find
the image of fairness anymore. It had vanished from his soul, blasted by the
sight of sable hair and eyes the color of unearthly twilight, the deep
strange inner hue of hellish flowers. He recognized them now—but he had not
remembered them so vivid-dark, or her coldness so numbing.

She had laughed. He could hear it still, like an echo in the empty cold
air of the cathedral, floating above the endless murmur of the priests’
chantries. The sound was branded on him. He had stood with swordpoint to the
throat of his gallant liege, who had fought on wounded, unbowed, with no
thought of submission—and she had laughed.

The windows glowed with the last faint light of day, spreading colored
radiance over the floors and columns, subtle warmth in the soaring
blackness. Beyond the cathedral walls he could hear faint sounds of
celebration. A few knights came and went in the nave, kneeling to cleanse
themselves with prayer, and one youth had been keeping solitary vigil in the
Lady Chapel for hours. Ruck stayed to himself, using the pillar for a prop
when his cushion grew too uncomfortable for his knees.

Outside of duty and the exercise yard, he spent most of his waking hours
in chapels or cathedrals or churches of one sort or another. At first it had
been the hardest effort of his knighthood—tedious to the point of screaming
agony—but after thirteen years he had come to peace with the cold stone
spaces and the fact that his knees could not support hours on the cushion.
He stood now more than he knelt, sparing his frame for the field and
fighting, sparing his soul with a regular confession of this small sin. He
never even got a real penance, the priests being sympathetic in the matter.

He seldom prayed during his hours in church. Isabelle, he’d thought,
would be doing that for him better than he could for himself. He’d often
imagined her at it, her face alight and the tears flowing, the other holy
women ranged behind her. He felt closer to her in the churches and chapels,
where he could banish the faint fear that she never thought about him at
all. Sometimes he envisioned her in nun’s robes; more often in a sparkling
gown of green and silver—and the lonelier the road, the bloodier the combat,
the more beautifully and brilliantly she glowed, almost as real as if she
stood in the shadows holding her falcon.

It came as a sickening jolt to him now to realize just how often he had
confused them in that way. His wife and his nameless liege lady—they had
somehow across the years, within the stark isolation of his heart, melded
together into a single female image—and he had spent his adult life in rigid
devotion to her, celibate, devout, courteous, refusing to stoop to dishonor
and bribes of money to win the favor of his prince.

Never had he been invited into his lord’s inner chamber— yet he had
waited patiently for God to send his chance. He had risen slowly in
Lancaster’s service, earning his place in spite of the half-concealed
amusement. He would lead men-at-arms and archers against the French, he
would play at unicorn if he must; dragons he would hunt when his liege
commanded. He knew the other knights preferred him safely away from court on
such commissions. He was mad in action, so they claimed, dangerous,
unreliable. By which they meant that he gave no quarter, demanding surrender
when surrender galled them—the only way he had been taught to fight. But he
had never lost the certainty that he would find a means of proving himself
and winning his lord’s boon.

The stained glass panel above him was a lancet, blue and rose, glowing
with a painting of the Virgin and Child. Ruck gazed at the Blessed Mother’s
pensive face as she looked down at the baby Jesus. He ached with grief and
anger.

It appalled him to realize what he had done, how the years had gone by,
how he had deluded himself and confused
her
with his pure sweet
wife. Tainting his memory, his only connection to Isabelle, who even now
must be devoting herself to solitary worship. Alone, as he was. He was sure
that she must have taken vows of seclusion and silence in the convent, for
even though he sent money and tender greetings every year to Saint Cloud,
she never wrote him back. He only received an acknowledgment of his gift
from the abbess, with no word from Isabelle even by proxy.

Her loss seemed a fresh wound now, stinging as sharp as the cuts on his
cheek and head. He missed her—and he could hardly recall her face. All he
saw clearly were purple hell-flower eyes and a white flash of skin; all he
felt plainly were wrath and anguish and the degrading burn of his body’s
appetite in spite of everything. He struggled to remember Isabelle, to
rededicate himself to the purer image, and could not. She was lost now, by
his own folly, as lost as the bright illusion that had sustained him.

Outside the bell rang to signal curfew. Ruck leaned down and retrieved
his cushion, scowling at the worn white threads of the embroidered falcon
that adorned it. He thought of having it ripped out and replaced with the
azure ground and black wolf of Wolfscar, but to take up his own true arms
now, in disillusionment instead of honor, seemed the final defilement of his
dreams.

He left the falcon be. He left all of his green-and-silver vestiture as
it was, determined to wear it as a constant reminder to himself of how a
woman—
this
woman—could twist a man’s mind into the Fiend’s knots.

As he pushed out the great wooden door onto the stone porch, his head
aching, a hard hand cuffed his shoulder. Three guards in Lancaster’s livery
stood just beside him. They offered silent sketches of bows, and one nodded
toward the outer entrance.

Pierre hung back in a corner of the porch, looking terrified. Ruck
glanced at him and at the guards.

“Ye alone are summoned, my lord,” one of them said. His tone was curt,
but not hostile.

Ruck nodded. The door opened to the last of twilight spilling over the
city roofs. The streets were already deep in shadow, but sparked with
torches and wandering groups of revelers. They showed no sign of
extinguishing their fires and going to lodgings in answer to the curfew. It
was often so on tournament days, and armed guards usually much in
evidence—but this evening every man they passed was armed, common soldiers
mixing with the city watch. Colorful retainers of the tourneying knights
roamed drunkenly with their swords still at their hips.

“God’s love,” Ruck muttered, “this is ripe to go ill.”

The guard at his side grunted an assent. But he did nothing to urge
anyone to go home, only lengthened his stride, grabbing Ruck’s elbow to
direct him into an alley. As they came out on the other end, a hoarse voice
yelled, “Hark ye!” An English soldier came weaving drunkenly toward them.
“Our lord!”

His companions followed, their wayward steps enlivened by this new goal.
Suddenly Ruck and his escort were surrounded by ungoverned men-at-arms, all
of them familiar faces to Ruck, scowling and sullen with drink.

“Unhand our liege, dog!” A soldier tried to pull Lancaster’s guard away
from Ruck. “Nill ye not take him!”

The guards’ hands went instantly to their weapons, but Ruck shoved the
soldier back. “I am no liege of thine!” he snapped. “Watch thy tongue, fool.
‘Tis stupid with ale.”

“He will not have you, my lord,” a man shouted from the back, “nor
throwen you in prison for his pride!”

Ruck glared. “Get ye gone to your places! The curfew tolled a quarter
hour since.”

“He will not arrest you!” There were other men accumulating now,
attracted to the shouts, crowding nearer. “He goes through us first!”

“Haf ye ran mad?” Ruck exclaimed. “Disperse! I order it!”

Some of the ones nearest him made attempts to turn, as if to obey, but
the growing wall of men behind them blocked their way. Lancaster’s guards
stood with their swords at ready, a tense triangle around him.

“Disperse!” Ruck bellowed. “I am summoned by the duke! Out of my way,
whoreson!” He shoved viciously at the soldier nearest. The man lurched
backward, creating a momentary opening. Roaring his displeasure and
intention, Ruck knocked another one aside. The path begun by force began to
open of its own accord. Lancaster’s guards came with him, but he stayed in
front of them to show that he was not in duress.

The way cleared before him. Though he didn’t look, he was aware that the
men did not scatter, but only fell back, following close at his escort’s
heels. He cursed them silently, deliberately taking a route down narrow
alleys and close streets to spread them out into a weaker force.

But outside the bannered lodgings of the highest nobles, the curfew was
no more in force than in the lower streets, though it was full dark now.
Knights and valets reeled in and out of the bright doorways, young squires
singing war songs and scuffling. Ruck strode past, his eyes straight ahead,
but his luck did not hold. A youth in blue-and-white reached out and grabbed
his cloak. He jerked it free, but not before he’d been recognized. Shouts
erupted, and as the men-at-arms issued from the narrow passage behind, they
began to run, pressing up around Ruck, elbowing the noble retainers back.
More men began to pour out of the doorways, filling the street with shouting
shadows, with torches and the glint of steel.

Ruck seized a fagot and jumped atop an upended barrel. He lifted it high,
waving it, so that sparks flared.

“What folly is this?” he roared. “
Silence
!”

For an instant his voice caught their attention.

“Who are ye?” he shouted. “The duke’s soldiers. The duke’s knights and
their squires. I am the duke’s man! He calls me to him. Will you forestall
me? Fight among yourseluen, if ye be great fools enow—but hinder me in
obeying him, and I’ll see every villain of you with your guts strung on the
city walls!”

The silence held, a sullen acknowledgment. Threat or no, there was
nothing that they wanted better than a reason to brawl, drunk as they were,
commoners and gentles alike. He did not stay to see them come to that
inevitable conclusion, but tossed the torch into a watering trough below
him. It gave him a moment while they were still dazzled blind—he jumped down
and slid between the crowd and a building’s wall, using the shadows for
cover to get away.

* * *

The Duke of Lancaster had his arm in a sling. In his capacity as
Lieutenant of Aquitaine, he sat sprawled on a throne, the walls and floor of
the chamber draped in cloth woven with the arms of England and France. The
flood of richly colored squares obscured the shape of the room, so that it
seemed to Ruck that he and the men he faced floated in a bowl of gilded
red-and-blue. At the duke’s side stood his brother the Earl of Cambridge.
Ruck recognized their councillors—Sir Robert Knolleys, Thomas Felton, and
the Earl of Bohun—men of military craft, veterans of all the savage
campaigns of France and Spain.

“Get up, knight,” Lancaster said with a deep sigh.

Ruck stood, sliding a secret look toward him. The duke appeared wakeful,
but he had a sleepiness about his eyes that Ruck had seen before in men hit
upon the head. His councillors had barely glanced at Ruck as he entered, but
kept their close attention on Lancaster. Sir Robert scowled, standing by a
table set with wine and food.

The duke stared at Ruck for a long time, his eyes half-lidded. “It was,”
he said slowly, “a good fight.”

A great wave of relief fountained through Ruck. He wanted to go down on
his knees again and beg forgiveness, but he kept his feet, only saying, “For
the honor of the Princess, my dread lord.”

Lancaster laid his head back and laughed. His eyes focused from their
drift with a sharper look at Ruck. “She has made fools of us both, has she
not? Hell-born bitch.”

“My lord’s grace—” Sir Robert said warningly.

“Ah, but my sentiment will not leave this chamber, if this green fellow
hopes to avoid my most grievous displeasure, and such jeopardy for him as
that may entail.”

“My life is at my lord’s pleasure,” Ruck said.

Lancaster sat up, leaning forward on his good arm, his mouth tightened
against the pain of the movement. “See that thou dost not forget it. What is
thy judgment of the temper outside?”

Ruck hesitated. Then he said, “Uneasy, my lord.”

“Clear the streets, sire,” Felton said.

Lancaster turned a sneer on the constable. “With what? Your men-at-arms?
They’re the ones
in
the streets, making mischief in the name of
this green nobody.”