For My Lady's Heart (24 page)

Her lips met his, so sweet that he knew it was a magic that could kill
him and make him glad to die. He felt her slip and try to keep her place.
Without lifting his mouth from hers he slid his back down the church door
and sat upon the step, holding her between his legs.

She stood on her knees, cupping his face in her hands, smiling down at
him. He came a little to his senses.

“I have a wife,” he said to the white soft skin below her ear. “I ne
cannought do this.”

“It is none of thy doing. Thou art seized and cruelly assaulted.” Her
breath caressed the corner of his mouth. “I perceive thou art a princess in
disguise, Green Sire, with vast properties in unknown places. Haps I shall
force thee to marry me for thy fortune.”

He tipped his head against the door, evading her, breathing roughly with
the effort of containing his desire. “Would be sore disappointed in your
bargain, my lady, I fear.”

She sat back, catching his chin between her fingers, examining his face
solemnly. “A beauteous fair damsel thou art not, forsooth. But ‘tis a poor
marriage founded on a comely countenance, so they sayen. I’ll have thee for
thy riches.”

He shook his head, half smiling at her in spite of himself, pulling her
hands down from his face and holding them gently in his mailed gloves.
“Lady, ye knows nought how thin you draw this thread.”

“By hap I wish it thin,” she murmured. She lifted her lashes, looking
into his eyes. “Haps I desire it broken asunder.”

She was so close to him that he could see each fine black brushstroke
that formed her brows and lashes. In the lengthening afternoon shadow, her
skin seemed like snow under moonlight, her eyes that strange deep hue, the
color of flowers that bloomed in the winter dark, more rare than any dragon
or basilisk or unicorn could be rare.

He felt as if he himself must break asunder, the unbending rectitude and
loneliness of thirteen impossible years razed at a stroke, consumed by the
clear invitation in her words and her eyes. “I pray you, think wiser, my
lady,” he said roughly. “It is this strange place and time. I am far beneath
you. Yourseluen said ye be nought certain of your desire.” He curled his
hands about hers. “My liege lady, my luflych, when we wend us back to court,
your pride and your honor were mortified, to know you kept close company
with such as I am.”

She was silent, her hands unresisting in his. Tiny strands of her hair
had long since come free of her netted braids, floating about her cheeks and
temple. Slipping her hands free, she spread her fingers over his dirty
gauntlets.

“Nay, I would be proud,” she whispered. “I would be proud, when I think
of such worse as I have kept company with.” She bit her lips with a faint
sound. “Oh, thy good conscience will make me weep.”

He lowered his head, gazing down at her hands. “Ne’er in my life, my
lady, could I believe this much would come to pass, that I could e’en touch
you.”

She skimmed her fingertips over his hands and his arms, up to his
shoulders, over mail and plate, following with her eyes. He saw tears, which
amazed him. He shook his head. “No, lady—do nought; nought for such a
thing.”

She leaned forward and kissed him. The sweetness ran down through him,
unbearable. He put his arms about her and buried his face in the side of her
throat to avoid her. “I beseech you, my lady,” he said. “It will ruin us. It
will be the ruin of us both.”

She pressed her head hard against him. He could feel the silent
unevenness of each indrawn breath, and her tears that trickled down below
his ear and under his gorget. He sat holding her, waiting, because to say
her nay again was more than he could do; he was body and soul at her will
now, heedless of rank or witchery, of honor or his wife.

She set her palms against him and pushed back. He let her go, opening his
arms.

“Thou art mistaken,” she said fiercely. “Both of us would it not ruin,
no—but only thee, and that I ne will not have. Naught will we say more of
keeping company, but as sure friends and companions. Little thou may reckon
it, but my friendship is worth something in the world. I will stand thy true
friend, Sir Ruck, in all that may pass.”

He put his hand to her cheek and throat, resting it softly there,
isolated forever from the feel of her by layers of metal and leather, by
what he was, and had been, which was nothing. “I am your true servaunt. I
will lay down my life for you if you ask it.”

She made a teary grimace. “Well, ne do I not ask it! Pray keep thyself
alive and well, Sir Ruck, if thou dost not wish to displease me most
grievously.” She wiped hard at her eyes and swallowed. Then she pushed away
from him and rose, holding her hands tucked close beneath her arms, her head
bent. She shivered, but did not draw her cloak about her.

Ruck stood. His hands were open. He would have pulled her into his arms
and warmed her. All night he would have embraced her, lain down with her and
kept company with her, held her so near that she was one with him. But his
fingers closed, empty.

“I could weep myseluen, lady,” he said, “for wanting what you would give
me.”

She laughed, still crying. “Oh, honor and a silver tongue, too! Look what
a lover I have lost.”

“My lady—naught is lost. I am with you yet, and always, to serve you and
sayen you ne’er false. I swear it upon what I hold more precious than my
life—” He reached out and touched her, laid his hand above her breast,
against the soft green felt and ermine.

She raised her eyes. Even through his heavy gauntlet, he could feel her
pulse.

“For my lady’s heart,” he said. “My life, my troth, and my honor. For
your heart I swear it, and none other.”

Melanthe sat with her mantle wrapped close about her, her back against
the chapel wall, watching the frigid dusk come down. Her head felt dull with
the unfamiliar aftermath of tears, her eyes heavy, but she was not
melancholy.

Her knight lay across the door, his head on his arm, padded by his cloak.
The steady sound of his breathing was the only noise but for the destrier
cropping grass outside the open portal, and the occasional tinkle of
Gryngolet’s bells. Each soft chime brought a sharper breath and a suspension
from him, as if he listened for peril even in sleep—then a shift of his
body, and a long deep exhalation like a sigh.

She was to wake him before full dark gathered, so that he might sit up
again all through the night on watch. He had gone to sleep with his back to
her, but soon enough his movements had turned him so that she could just see
his face in the last of the light. He looked exactly what he was: a weary
man-at-arms, shabby and handsome, resigned to sleeping in armor on stone.
The strong lines of his face were no softer in sleep: only his lips,
slightly parted, and the smoothing of the stern lines about his eyes and
brows made him seem younger, more like to the youth who had stared at her so
hotly those many seasons ago in the Pope’s palace.

He had amused her then, and flattered her—such a look, and from a boy who
had not even anything to gain by it. She had noticed him. And when she had
seen what mischief they were about, the bishops and priests, she had saved
him, little though he appeared to know or thank her.

She had felt then a hundred years older than he, though she’d been only
seventeen herself. She felt a thousand now— and yet new, in some strange way
younger and more reckless than she had ever been. She felt, for the first
time in her life, in love with a man.

Ligurio she had respected, loved in mind and in soul: teacher, father,
companion, and lifeline. And before she had learned better, she had found
friendship and a sparking attraction with the smiling Dane who had given her
Gryngolet, but that memory was no peaceful one.

She gazed at the long shadowed teeth of the dragon stone, burying her
cold nose in ermine. The Northman had taught her to hunt, disciplined her to
the exacting task of training a wild
passager
trapped after its
first moult, revealed to her the hours of freedom in a falcon’s courses. She
had not betrayed Ligurio with him, nor thought of it. It had not been more
than a girl’s infatuation. It had not had time to become more, before
Melanthe had discovered the Northman slain in her own bed. The lady asleep
with him put on a great shrieking show to find that the man beside her was
murdered, just as if she had not slipped in the knife herself. Melanthe had
been fifteen, Prince Ligurio’s still-virgin bride, in wit as well as body.
Her husband had had to explain it to her.

That was the first she had truly understood of Gian Navona’s cold lunatic
passion for all that Monteverde owned. For her. Before it, she had only
known him as a courteous and clever man who sometime supped with her
husband, and had once shown her a cunning hand trick of making a living
flower appear in a bowl of glass.

In many ways, that was all she knew of Gian still. And yet he had made
her what she was, as surely as Ligurio’s careful lessons. Prince Ligurio
taught her how to swim; Gian Navona was the sea—tide and current and storm,
treacherous depth and smiling surface, and creatures dwelling beneath that
haunted dreams. She learned never to rest, never to float, never to cling to
what appeared solid. She learned that he would not abide her to smile upon
any man.

The dragon stared back at her from black eyeholes. The long line of its
teeth could have been a deathly grin. She wondered if it had amused Gian, to
dispatch his own mistress to end Melanthe’s innocence in seduction and
blood. She wondered how far ahead he planned; if he had intended even then
to sire a bastard on the woman and train him up to be another beautiful
murdering viper, to castrate him and set him guard upon Melanthe, at her
table and in her bed, tainting the very air she breathed with bloodshed. She
wondered if he found it all some lurid jest, and sat alone in his palazzo
and laughed.

Gryngolet, the Northman’s gift—the white gyrfalcon had hated Allegreto
from the day he had come into Monteverde, a boy with the mind and
countenance of the fallen archangel himself. Melanthe also had hated him. He
had the look of his mother on him—murderess—Melanthe could see her
magnificent frantic face even now, tearing her hair in her fraudulent
horror.

But Ligurio had commanded Melanthe to keep Allegreto close, for her life.
Her husband was failing in health, and the balance was all, the eternal
balance between Navona and Riata and Monteverde. Allegreto was an assassin
to keep her from assassination, a bargain Ligurio had made with Gian to
protect her, taking advantage of Navona’s passion to guard her from other
enemies who had less than no use for her alive. Her husband had accepted the
boy, even been kind to him. Melanthe had suffered him, dreaming of the day
she would be free.

Dreaming of this day, when she could put such memories behind her.

Gryngolet’s bells jingled again, and the knight adjusted his arm. He made
a low sound. His mouth curved, just visible above the crook of his elbow, a
trace of his uncommon smile. Melanthe rested her cheek on the soft trim of
her mantle, happily assorted with him. The comlokkest man on earth, the most
honorable, humble, gracious, the strongest, the best-spoken, the finest
warrior—she diverted herself with heaping extravagant merits upon his
slumbering person.

He snorted, denying such exalted perfection in an ordinary man’s sleep,
lifting his hand as if to reverse his arm beneath his head. The move seemed
to expire halfway. His gauntlet wavered, balanced in mid-arc, the heavy mail
and leather curl of his fingers drooping, declining slowly sideways. The
back of his glove came to rest on the stone with a soft chink.

She loved the sound of him. The sound of his armor, the sound of his
breathing, the sound of his voice speaking English. Forsooth, she loved him.

Having come to this insight, she felt that she must proceed with great
care. She found herself somewhat bewildered by it; unable to reconcile such
an intangible force with all of her plans and designs.

She ought to be thinking. The whole world would not die of plague; it had
not the first time, nor the second, and it would not this time, either.
Pestilence came now by fits and starts, killing five here, fifty there, no
more than one or two in another place. She could not suppose that God would
elect to erase the names of Navona and Riata from the earth merely to save
her trouble.

Iwysse, she doubted that God had much use for her at all, in spite of her
abbeys. She was unrepentant. She was pleased to look at the sleeping
masculine form of her knight. She sore desired him in a most sinful and
earthly way, and she was not the least sorry for it.

Her foremost care had been to arrive safely and without interference at
Bowland Castle, where amid the native Englishmen, any agents sent by Gian or
Riata would be easy to discern and dispatch. But she found that this
ambition had now palled, replaced by an acute desire, amazing in its
quaintness, to remain in the wasteland with Sir Ruck d’Somewhere, the
lord—and his father before him—of imaginary places.

She smiled wryly, thinking of the quick pride with which he’d refused her
offer of lands. He spoke himself well enough, like a gentle man, but she
remembered his wife—a burgher’s daughter if there had ever been one—and was
inclined to agree with Lancaster’s guess that the Green Sire’s splendid
tournament armor hid a man baseborn. He had almost admitted as much, had he
not, in refusing her?

It was a sign of her corrupted nature, she supposed, that she did not
care a whiff for his birth. Haps he was misbegot of some knight too poor to
provide for him, but Lancaster was overharsh in judging him a freeman—no son
of villeins would be endured by the men-at-arms as their master, far less
tolerated by the knights and ladies of court.

Nay, he had gentle manners: a quiet dignity about him, even now in his
shabbiness, and a nobleman’s way with a good horse. He was a poet of sorts.
He had been brought up in a lord’s household, of that she felt certain,
though in the end it made no matter. She was the Earl of Bowland’s daughter,
wife to a prince, cousin of counts and kings. As well fall in love with a
monk or a merchant, or a cowherd, for that, as with this obscure and humble
knight.

Ligurio had taught her many things, but inordinate tenderness and
renunciation had not been among them. She was not accustomed to denying
herself any worldly richness or temporal pleasure, unless it be in sure
disfavor to her own interests. If she had not taken lovers, it was not for
virtue or self-constraint, or even concern for the skins of the many men who
had offered themselves, but because of the terrible weakness such a union
must create.

It was strength that she needed, not weakness. She had meant to use him,
this chivalrous, nameless warrior. She had meant to make him love her if she
could, daze and blind him, bind him without mercy to her service. She would
need such as he, to protect her and act for her.

And she had done it. He had mistrusted her, accused her of witchery,
reserved something of himself in spite of his sworn allegiance—but she was
certain of him now. She cared nothing that he spoke of this wife of his,
beyond that it proved the unlimited bounds of his loyalty once he gave his
heart. She would free him of that vain covenant when the time came.

For now she was charitable as she had never been, yielding her own wish
to his welfare. She would not repay his service with encumbrance, his honor
with dishonor. She would not be the ruin of him, but the making. And haps if
she was so, if she gave him the opportunity to rise that Lancaster had
denied, if by her support he made a superior marriage to some lady of her
choosing and gained land and a higher place, if she educated his children
and sponsored them to a better elevation yet...

She gazed across the cold barren space between them, two yards and
forever. If she did all that for him, then haps her life would not be
without some worth in the end, or so vain in the years to come as it seemed
now to be.

Ruck woke to the music of hunting horns. With an oath he rolled over and
shoved upright. He’d been so deep in sleep that for a moment he blinked in
the morning light and stared about himself, unable to recall this place.

Then he saw the princess curled in her mantle, slumbering in a drooping
huddle against the wall. She had not woken him.

“Christ’s love!” He staggered to his feet. He’d slept the night through
like a dead man.

A horn called again, a mote and a rechase—and he realized that the sound
had been reverberating in his dreams since before he’d come awake. Another
followed: relays, he thought, with the quarry sighted. Two motes more, to
call the berner with the hounds, and a distant
yut yut yut
in
answer.

He stared unseeing out the door, listening for the direction that they
took. All was silence for long moments—and then the sudden bell of a rache,
far off, farther than the last relay. Another hound joined in, and the pack
took up their song. Two horns blew the chase, acknowledged by a
hou hou
hooouuu
—more distant yet—and the whole hunt was laid out like a map in
his mind.

“We! Lady!” He wasted no time in formalities, but shook her by the
shoulder, all but dragging her to her feet.

She gave him one wild look, as if she, too, could not find her
bearings—and then her expression relaxed, focusing on him.

He was already gathering up their gear. “A hunt,” he said. “Get ye and
the falcon to horse, all speed, and chaunce we will meet them in the chase.”

“Meet them?” She stood as if bewildered. “But pestilence—”

“Sick men do nought hunt. The falcon, lady. Hood her, so that we may hie
us in haste.” He tossed the hawking-bag to her. “A lord it will be, haps
even the king’s men, to hunt here with hounds. Good hostel we’ll plead, on
your behalf. Freshly now, my lady, ere we lose the horns.”

Already they grew fainter, the song of the raches almost vanished. As she
took up her bird, he forced the buckle of his sword belt closed. He grabbed
his helm, not taking time to put it on, and jostled her out the door before
him.

Melanthe rode astride behind Sir Ruck, for she could not have balanced
Gryngolet on her fist and held to his waist on the pillion. They came upon a
straggler first, a sullen vewterer swinging the loose leashes of his hounds,
walking as if he had no urgent desire to catch up with his dogs even though
the horns had already blown the death. She peered over Sir Ruck’s shoulder
as he reined the horse to a walk.

The vewterer had not even turned to look at them when the destrier broke
out from the heavy underbrush behind him, but only moved aside from the
path, making way.

“
Ave
, good sir,” her knight said in English, bringing them up
beside him.

The huntsman turned, as if the address startled him. He ducked into a
bow, kneeling with his face down.

“Rise.” Sir Ruck gave a flick of his hand. “What quarry?”

“M’lord, the great hart, m’lord.” He got to his feet, his eyes still
downcast.

“Hart!” Sir Ruck exclaimed. “But ‘tis fermysoun time!”

The vewterer cast up a quick, keen glance, and then dropped his gaze to
the ground again. He shrugged. “My master would have the hart even in
forbidden season, good sir, nor be not induced from it, though we had the
tracks and bed of a singular boar.”

“Avoi,” Sir Ruck said with a soft note of distaste. The source of the
man’s brooding aspect came clear. No proper huntsman would be proud of his
lord for taking a male red deer out of season.