Knights (18 page)

She lowered her head. “Surely it was the wine,” she said, “and nothing more.”

“Look at me,” he commanded.

Gloriana’s will failed her; she raised her eyes to meet his. “I cannot explain,” she said despondently. “For I myself do not understand. I was here, and then I was—I was still in this room, but in another part of time, I think. There were people, but their clothes were odd—”

Kenbrook was plainly dissatisfied with her answer. His stare, full of wonder and confusion, made her feel like some sort of peculiar specimen found on the underside
of a moldy leaf. His voice was raspy. “Has this ever happened before?”

“Once,” Gloriana confessed, barely able to force the word past her lips. “When I was a little girl.”

“Tell me?”

She clasped her hands across her middle and bent slightly forward, not sick, but unable to sit still. She didn’t want to tell, could hardly bear to remember. “I was with a group of other children, from Briarwood School. I’d been left there, at the school, I mean, because my mother and father didn’t want me. We—we came to see the village, and the castle, and there was a gate—”

Dane drew Gloriana out of her chair and onto his lap. His arms made a circle of safety around her. “Edwenna, not want you?” he scoffed in the tenderest way. Moved by her distress, he smoothed her hair with his hands. “Utter nonsense. She adored you—everyone knew she lived to indulge your every wish.”

Gloriana supped her arms around Kenbrook’s neck. “Edwenna,” she whispered, as though to bring that good woman back by magic. She turned her head and looked deep into her husband’s troubled and bewildered eyes. “Edwenna wasn’t truly my mother.”

“You were a foundling,” Dane said quietly. “I remember that now.”

“This is a snarl, and I am caught,” Gloriana whispered. “I wish to tell the truth to at least one living person, my lord, but I am so afraid.”

“What could be so terrible that you would not tell your husband?” Dane’s voice was low and thoughtful, almost coaxing. In attempting to calm her, he had plainly soothed himself as well.

“A husband who wishes to send me to a nunnery that he might marry someone else,” Gloriana reminded
him. Her heart was thudding so hard she feared she would swoon from it, so fast did her blood rush through her veins.

“I started to explain that earlier, before Gareth’s treated wine had its effect. Something has changed for me—I would preserve this marriage. Tell me your dark secret, Gloriana.”

She gnawed at her lower lip for a few moments. “You won’t believe me,” she said. “Not in the beginning, at least. But I can prove some of what I am about to say, once we’re free again.”

Kenbrook leaned back in the chair, watching her face, and simply waited for her to go on.

Gloriana plunged her fingers into her hair. “But when I show you evidence of my claim, you will name me witch—”

“I could already do that,” Dane interrupted reasonably, lowering her hands, holding them between his own “After all, I saw you vanish into the ether just a few moments past.”

She stared at him. “You know what they would do, and I am not evil—I swear I am not!”

“No one is going to hurt you,” Kenbrook insisted. “Besides, I have no plans to tell the world what happened here—if for no more admirable reason than that I do not wish to put my own sanity in question.”

It was true that Kenbrook would be thought demented if he told her secret to anyone. He might even be accused along with Gloriana of working the devil’s will. She must tell him now, she knew that, and yet she could not think how to frame the words of her confession. She turned her thoughts within, engaging them in the problem, and Kenbrook was uncommonly patient and did not prod her.

A long time had passed when she spoke, and even
then, she faltered. “Things are not so simple as they seem, and it would appear, too, that time is not a matter of moment following moment, year following year. Creation is—it has many layers, I think, rather like an onion, or the rings inside a tree trunk. Each is separate, in its way, yet still part of the whole.”

Kenbrook frowned slightly and nodded for her to continue.

“You and I come from different parts of the tree.”

He chuckled and shook his head. “You’ll have to make it clearer than that, milady. I am a soldier, not a scholar.”

“Imagine history as the trunk of a great oak, with many, many rings,” Gloriana said, after a moment or two of hard thought. “Each ring represents a different year.”

“Go on.”

“I was born in a very distant age,” Gloriana said all in a rush, squeezing her eyes shut. “One that has not yet dawned.”

“You are saying that you’ve come to us from some later time.” Dane spoke matter-of-factly, without judgment but also without affirmation.

Gloriana stared at him, amazed that he had spoken so calmly, so reasonably. “Yes.”

“What year?”

“I was a small child at the time,” Gloriana said, watching his face, trying to work out whether he believed her or not. He was clearly fascinated. “I don’t remember the year. Maybe I never knew in the first place.” She couldn’t bear the suspense another moment. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

Kenbrook considered her at length. “I am inclined to think you speak the truth,” he said at last. “If you can disappear—and I trust the testimony of my eyes
and my brain, for I am not a fanciful man—it seems possible that you might also travel through time. Surely, one feat is no stranger than the other.”

Gloriana was so relieved that she sagged against him, resting her head upon his shoulder and drawing deep, tremulous breaths. “Thank you,” she said.

He stroked her hair. “We will speak of this again, and I shall wish to see this proof you spoke of earlier.” His lips brushed her forehead. “I could not stand it if you were lost to me,” he said so softly that her heart heard the words more clearly than her ears.

She sat upright again to look into Dane’s fierce blue eyes. “It would not be honorable,” she reminded him, “to swear your devotion only because you are held captive in a tower and want a pleasant diversion.”

“You are my wife,” he said. “I would claim you.”

A hot flush suffused Gloriana from toes to scalp. “Now?”

“Only if that is your wish.”

She bounded off his lap. It was her wish that their marriage should be real, and that meant consummation. She could not doubt that the experience would be more than pleasant, given the sweetly wicked things he had taught her in the night. So why was she hesitating? Why was her heart pounding, fit to burst through her chest wall?

Dane stood, and the faintest shadow of a smile rested upon his lips. “Perhaps you need time, after all, to accustom yourself to the idea.”

Gloriana was pacing, hands clasped, fingers interlocked. “The sun is high,” she said, in a whisper. “Besides, someone might be listening at the door.” A truly horrid thought struck her. “Or looking through the keyhole!”

After retrieving his trunks from the floor next to
the bathtub, Dane crossed the room to the great double doors and hung the garment over the latch, easily obscuring the view. He returned to the table, keeping the width of its surface between them, and purloined a honeycake from the basket. “As for the other part,” he said, after taking a bite and relishing it in a way that roused still other unseemly memories of the night before, “you’ll simply have to be quiet.”

Gloriana raised the fingertips of her right hand to her temple. Things were happening too fast; only minutes ago, some secret veil had been parted, and she had slipped through into another tune. She had uttered a truth so long and so well hidden that she’d almost forgotten it herself. Now Kenbrook, who had wanted, just yesterday, to put her aside and take another woman for his wife, wished to bed her after all.

She could not stand still, but moved from one part of the tower room to another in her agitation. Dane watched her, in amused silence, until she wore herself out and slumped down onto a wooden chest.

Kenbrook went to the harp, which stood on the opposite side of the chamber, and strummed the strings, making brief, chaotic music.

“What are you afraid of, Gloriana?” he asked.

She wet her lips nervously. “I fear being used, my lord,” she said truthfully, “and then cast aside. I fear that you merely wish to spend the shock of what I have told you—what you have seen—”

He strummed the harp strings again, perfectly composed and patently unhurried. “There is plenty of time for both of us to get used to the idea,” he replied. “Gareth, damn his eyes, has seen to that.”

Having thus spoken, he found trunks and woolen hose among the garments that had been provided for his captivity and finished dressing. When he came back
to the table in the center of the room, he carried a board and chess pieces, also left by their benign jailers.

Gloriana watched from her perch on the chest, feeling silly and incredibly shy and very shaken. “How can you be so calm,” she demanded as he prepared the board for play, “when you saw a woman vanish before your eyes?”

“I have seen other strange sights,” Kenbrook replied, without bothering to look up. She had suspected her husband would not be an easy man to surprise, but to witness such a spectacle and be virtually unmoved was incredible. No wonder Dane had a reputation for keeping his head in all manner of situations. “Shades and specters, for instance.”

Gloriana gasped, then lowered her voice to a hushed whisper. “You are baiting me, my lord,” she accused. “You cannot have seen such things!”

He smiled. “There are more ghosts in this pile of stones,” he said, drawing back a chair and inviting her to take it with a grand gesture of one hand, “than all of London. Hadleigh Castle has its share, too.”

“There are always shadows and strange sounds in such old places,” Gloriana said. She rose, however, and walked slowly toward Kenbrook to take the offered chair. He had given her the jade chess pieces, and she turned the board so as to have the ivory ones.

Kenbrook sat across from her, regarded his inanimate troops, and sighed. “After you,” he said.

“Edward used to claim there were Roman soldiers marching these halls,” Gloriana told him, advancing a pawn. “He only wanted to scare me, as I suspect you are trying to do.”

Her husband moved a corresponding pawn, but only after great deliberation, and she nursed a hope that he might be a passable player. Gareth had never
beaten her at the game, nor Edward, nor Cradoc, for all his influence in the spheres of heaven. Eigg, the Scot, had put her king in checkmate once, but that had been five years ago, and he had not managed to best her again.

“If I wanted to frighten you,” Dane said reasonably, watching her move with the intensity of a general assessing the strategy of an enemy, “I would wait until nightfall to tell tales of ghosts and goblins. That way, you might seek safety in my arms.”

Gloriana made another quick, seemingly impetuous move, but she was well aware of the position and potential use of every piece on the board. “There is much to settle between us, Lord Kenbrook.”

He quelled the grin that curved his mouth, but not quickly enough to hide it from Gloriana’s sharp gaze. “I disagree, milady. We have made too much of our differences. It is time we considered our common interests.”

“Which are?”

“Chess, for one,” Kenbrook said, pondering the small, checkered field of battle. He nodded toward the manuscripts stacked on one of the tables, pages enough to provide a year’s reading for both of them. “Poetry and history.” He raised his eyes, at last, to meet hers. She saw laughter in them and a tender acceptance that pinched her heart. “And pleasure,” he finished.

Gloriana dropped her gaze to the board. “I cannot deny what you say,” she allowed, taking his bishop. “I am very fond of chess.”

Kenbrook laughed. Then, in three moves, he put her king in checkmate.

“Do you love me, Gloriana?” he asked when she
was still gasping in disbelief over this swift and utterly unprecedented defeat.

She looked at him steadily. “Yes,” she said.

“Do you wish to be my wife, truly, and bear my children?”

“Yes,” she said again.

“To do those things, you must lie down with me.”

Gloriana regarded him for several moments before answering. “Suppose you find me wanting?”

One side of Kenbrook’s impudent mouth tipped upward, in what was almost but not quite a grin. “I have already found you most satisfactory,” he said, and held out one hand to her. “You cannot but please me, milady. The question is, shall I please you?”

Gloriana laid her palm across his, felt his fingers close around the fragile bones, and shut her eyes for a breathless moment as he brought her to her feet.

He did not lead her immediately to the bed, as she had both hoped and feared he would do, but instead drew her into his arms and kissed her. It was the sweetest and most tender of contacts, and Gloriana’s fears fled as the beginnings of ecstasy spread, rootlike, through her veins.

In the end, it was Gloriana who brought Dane to the marriage bed, wooing him there with her kisses, caressing and leading him with light, fluttering motions of her hands. He removed her gown and chemise, and then his own garments, before laying her down on the mattress.

“So incredibly beautiful,” he whispered, and then lay beside her and roused her, with his hands and his mouth and his wicked promises, to a state of fiery, desperate wanting. It was not sudden, this culmination of their desires, for the courting process had begun long since, when first they had kissed in Gloriana’s
courtyard, and was only now coming to fruition. When he mounted her, she was already writhing in the flames of the desire he had ignited. “This first time—”

She touched his mouth with her fingertips. “I don’t care,” she told him.

Kenbrook’s self-control, so unassailable the night before, suddenly snapped. With a groan from deep in his chest, he entered her in a single unbroken thrust, breaching her maidenhead.

Gloriana felt a brief, powerful sting, but her passion, like Dane’s, was all-encompassing. She flung herself upward, welcoming him, and her response was his undoing. He made a guttural, growl-like sound and took her in earnest, quickening his pace, delving deep.