Medieval Master Warlords (66 page)

Allaston rose from her chair, her expression full of sorrow and foreboding. “What do you mean?” she asked, fear in her tone. “What do you mean to do with me?”

Bretton could feel her question like a dagger to the heart. He knew what he had to do and he turned around, looking at her with an expression of utter grief.

“I am going to send you home.”

Allaston exploded. “Nay!” she hissed. “I am
not
going home. You asked for my hand in marriage and I agreed. I am staying here with you! You cannot send me home!”

She was furious. He was cowering. Bretton tried to reason with her. “Allaston, listen to me,” he said. “You deserve an excellent match, something I cannot provide you. You deserve to have a husband who is good and pure, and who does not have a driven hatred against your father. Don’t you see? No matter how much I love you, my sense of revenge against your father is what will drive us apart. I must kill him and I cannot stomach the grief and hatred in your eyes when I do. It will destroy me.”

Allaston was beginning to weep, stricken with anguish. “You do not have to kill him,” she sobbed. “I have begged you not to, I have pleaded with you, and I have even offered myself in marriage to you if you will only forget your vengeance. Whatever you have inside of you, this hatred you hold, is killing you. It will destroy you. You must understand that I would not have made the offer of marriage to you unless I loved you, too. I did not want to tell you for fear it would make no difference to you whether I did or not, but I will tell you now that I love you, Bretton de Llion. I love you and I will be your wife, and you will
not
send me home!”

She was sobbing loudly by the time she was finished. Bretton stood there, watching her, his heart breaking. He found that there was a lump in his throat, something very unfamiliar to him. The last time he had felt such a thing had been a long time ago. As he watched Allaston weep, all of his defenses crumbled. Everything he held strong and fast was laid to waste, dissolved by her tears.

“I am a broken man,” he replied tightly, trying to make her understand. “I was five years old when I was sold to a merchant who raped me repeatedly. He tore me up inside, not only of the body, but of the mind. Things still… still do not work right at times. When I left him, I served an Irish mercenary for a time who not only taught me his craft, but beat me bloody in the meanwhile. When I was old enough, I left him, too, to seek my fortune, but I discovered that one needed money in order to build a fortune or pursue one’s dreams. I therefore prostituted myself as a young man until I had saved enough money to buy weaponry and a horse, and then I hired myself out as a soldier of fortune. It took me years to amass the army you see now, years to find myself in the place I am this night, and all of it was possibly only because of the hatred I had for your father. It drove me, it molded me, and it has made me what I am. I cannot let go of it, Allaston, and I cannot let you marry a man who is purely filth and rancor. It would pull you into my world and I cannot let you live there.”

Allaston was still weeping even though the hysterical sobbing had faded somewhat. She was listening to his horrible story, one that had seen the man survive some of the most terrible times imaginable. She felt such pity for him, such incredible pity. She wiped her face as she made her way over to him, sinking to her knees before him. When he tried to turn away, she threw her arms around his legs and refused to let him go.

“I understand your world is a terrible one,” she cried, relishing the feel of his warmth in her arms. “I know you have had unspeakable things happen to you, but instead of seeing filth and rancor before me, I see a survivor. I see a man who was so strong that nothing could stop him. I see a man who had a goal, even if was a brutal goal, and he fought to achieve it. He did everything he could to fund that dream and here you are, the head of your own mighty army.”

Her body against his legs was causing him physical pain. Bretton put his hands down, trying to pry her away from him, but she held fast. Tears popped to his eyes because he couldn’t stand the contact between them. It was sweet beyond words, horrible beyond imagining. The tears in his eyes began to run down his face.

“Let me go,” he commanded hoarsely. “Allaston, release me.”

Allaston only held on tighter. “I will not,” she whispered. “Not until you hear me out. You are a survivor, Bretton, a brilliant man of great determination. You have lived in a world that has been trying to kill you since you were five years old and when you came to Alberbury, it was because God, who knew he had ignored you for your entire life, directed you to come to me. He directed me to go to you. Don’t you see, Bretton? God has given me to you as a reward for your terrible life. With me, you will find peace and love and happiness. I am your reward for a life gone wrong.”

It made utter and complete sense to Bretton, but he refused to believe it. He couldn’t. “God has never done anything for me,” he muttered, wiping at the tears on his face. “I find it hard to believe he has taken an interest in me now.”

“He has,” Allaston assured him. Her cheek was against his armored thighs and she turned her head, kissing his legs tenderly. “You must also understand something. I will never have the opportunity for a respectable marriage given the fact that my father is Ajax de Velt. What family in their right mind would marry their son to a daughter of The Dark Lord? So your assertion that I should find a good and true man to marry is invalid. I cannot. Furthermore, the moment you abducted me, you announced to the world that I was your property. No one will want me after I have been in your custody. Therefore, if you do not want me, then I will have no choice but to return to the cloister. I am meant for you and no other, Bretton.”

She was absolutely right on both accounts and it fueled his confusion even more. He tried to move away from her but she wouldn’t let him go, and he ended up dragging her across the floor.

“Let me go,” he told her again. “Allaston, release me. I demand it.”

Allaston shook her head, holding his right leg tighter than she ever had. “I will not,” she declared. “Please, Bretton, do not tell me you love me and then abandon me. I cannot stomach living my life without you.”

He ended up stumbling, falling against the wall and sinking to the floor as Allaston maintained her grip on him. As he fell, she released his leg and pounced on him, her arms around his neck. Bretton, slumped against the wall, sat on his hands to keep from holding her. He knew if he did, all would be lost.

“Listen to me,” he hissed. “Allaston, listen. It is true that I love you and, God knows how honored and touched I am that you would love me as well. Hearing those words from you has somehow made my life worthwhile. I have lived my whole life to hear it. But it does not change what I must do… it does not change the fact that my vengeance against your father must be exercised. It does not change that I must kill him.”

Allaston didn’t say anything for a moment. After a lengthy, brittle pause, she released her grip around Bretton’s neck and sat back, pulling away from him. He watched her, distraught, as she sat back on her heels, eyeing him, seemingly confused or lost in thought. In either case, it was evident that there was a good deal on her mind. She was at the end of her wits and pure instinct took over. She appeared pale and disoriented as she stumbled over to the chair she had once sat in, near the hearth, and plopped down on it. As Bretton began to push himself up from the floor, Allaston spoke.

“I understand that my love cannot stop your revenge against my father,” she said, her voice dull and hollow. “But hear me now. The day you kill him is the day I take my own life. I cannot live knowing the man I love would choose vengeance over my love. Life would not be worth living. There would be nothing left for me.”

Bretton felt as if he’d been hit in the gut. He rose to his feet, slowly, and went to stand before her. His expression, as he looked down on her, was a mixture of horror and sorrow.

“Nay, Allaston,” he beseeched. “You must not say that. You must not….”

“Why not?” she looked up at him, cutting him off. “If my father’s life is not of value, then surely mine is not of value. I am a de Velt, after all. What difference does it make if one or more of us dies?”

His jaw ticked. “It matters to me,” he said, his voice hoarse. “It makes all the difference in the world to me because I love you.”

“You do not love me more than you love your vengeance against my father.”

He growled, frustrated and grief-stricken. “Can you not understand that this is something I must do?” he begged. “It is a part of me, it is who I have become. Why must you threaten to kill yourself unless I give up this one thing that has kept me alive all these years?”

Allaston was shattered, cold, alone, and empty. She looked away from Bretton, devastated that her love was not enough to deter him from his revenge. She was not enough. Therefore, it didn’t matter what became of her. At the moment, she didn’t care one way or the other.

“Go away, Bretton,” she told him, a lone tear trickling down her cheek. “I do not wish to speak with you any longer. Go and do what you must do. I will do the same.”

He felt as if he couldn’t breathe. “Please do not do this, Allaston,” he begged softly. “Do not leave me with this horror.”

She wouldn’t answer him and Bretton had never felt so broken or hollow. Allaston’s head was turned away from him and it took all of his strength not to reach out and stroke that dark, lovely head. He couldn’t stand it and his control broke. A big hand extended, the dirty fingers barely touching the dark strands, like the brush of butterfly wings. Allaston felt the touch, gentle and faint, and she broke down into gut-busting sobs. She wanted to grab his hand, to kiss it and touch it, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The hands meant to touch his ended up covering her face.

Bretton fled the room before he started weeping, too.

℘

It was dawn.

Allaston hadn’t slept the entire night. She’d been up thinking about Bretton, about their life that was never to be. It was odd, truly. Thinking back to the moment she met him as Alberbury burned around them, she would have never imagined falling for a killer. Aye, he was a killer. She had always acknowledged that. But Bretton de Llion was a complex creature. He was intelligent and skilled, driven by something that happened to him in childhood, something that had both fed and destroyed his soul.

She wondered what he would have been like had Jax de Velt never killed his father. He would have probably grown up with love, fostering in the best homes, and emerging a stellar knight with a bright future. Instead, Bretton had been forced to scratch and claw and fight for everything he had. It was all he knew. And now, she was asking him to change that way of thinking. Perhaps she had been wrong all along. Perhaps it was unfair of her to ask him to become something he wasn’t. That very question had been tearing at her all night.

Shades of sunrise were beginning to color the eastern horizon. Allaston could see it clearly as she sat in the oriel window that faced over the eastern portion of the castle and a section of the bailey. She could see men moving around down below, going about their tasks, and she could smell the scent of baking bread. It would grow strong when the winds changed after sunrise.

Thinking that perhaps she should go down to the kitchen and help Uldward, she slid off the bench seat of the window and headed over to the wardrobe against the northern wall, the one that held the clothing she had borrowed from Lady Miette, garments Grayton had brought her so long ago. She hadn’t seen Grayton for quite some time and was told he had remained at Comen Castle. Not that she cared. The man had been against her ever since the day she hit Bretton with the poker. In fact, she sensed that all of Bretton’s men were against her to varying degrees. But none of that mattered now.

Bretton.
She hadn’t seen him since he fled her chamber the night before, and it was probably best that she hadn’t. They were both too emotional about the situation and needed time to gather their wits. As Allaston changed into the yellow garment that Bretton had torn down the front during his fit of passion, the mending of which was now covered up with the bib of a white apron she had stitched on, Allaston knew without a doubt that she would never leave the man. He could try to send her back to her parents but she wouldn’t go. She was determined to remain with him, to convince him that they belonged together, because she knew once she left him that her life would be a lonely and desolate thing. She didn’t want to leave the only man she had ever loved.

So she cinched up the surcoat, tightening it over the linen shift, and pulled on her boots, boots she had borrowed from Lady Miette. She combed her hair thoroughly and braided it, pulling a kerchief around her head to keep loose strands out of her face and out of any food she would work with. On the table was a small polished mirror she had found in Lady Miette’s possessions and she held it up, inspecting her face, seeing a woman of determination gazing back at her.

She seemed to have aged over the past several weeks. When Bretton had first abducted her, she had been a somewhat naïve girl. Now, she felt as if she had done enough growing to spread over a lifetime. She had seen much, and experienced much, and the love she felt for Bretton was engrained in her very fabric. Nay, she would not leave him, not even if he tried to force her. The only thing that was going to separate them was death.