Sword of Justice (White Knight Series) (5 page)

Drake mocked his brother. “You waved?”

“Aye, I waved.” Stephen flourished his hand, the garnet ring gleaming in the candlelight. “Like this.”

“And did he wave back?”

Hair falling over his eyes, Stephen bent his head to the chessboard. “He nodded. Regally.”

“Which …”

Stephen kicked his brother in the shin.

Drake finished the insult. “… is what you should have done. Nodded regally.”

“He never would have seen me in the crowd.”

“And what of John? Did you wave at him also?”

“I did, but you know John. His thoughts were elsewhere.”

“Oh aye. In all the excitement, I forgot. The king’s brother is to wed the glorious Isabelle of Gloucester. ’Tis a match made in heaven. She gets John to warm her bed and he gets a peerless wife in possession of monies, land, and title.”

Sniggering, Stephen said, “And if rumors serve, as ugly as they come.”

“Does the king know Drake fitzAlan has been outlawed from civilized society?”

“William spoke to him.”

“And?”

“Richard granted permission for you to stay at Chinon, but that is all. Justice, he says, must prevail. The law of the land must stand on its own merits. He cannot intervene.”

“And so I’m to be held prisoner inside a gold-gilt cage. In which case, I’ll have to make do with wine, women, and song.” Drake drank and dreamed. “Ah, to plunge my sword into the verdant valley between the grass-laden meadows of a virginal spring.” 

The bells of Winchester Cathedral rang compline. “You’re the devil in disguise, Drake, truly.”

“Truly, I am your brother, though at times it’s hard to fathom how we could have come from the same womb.”

“Fathom it, you must, every time you look into my face and see yourself reflected there.”

“It’s a grating reality.” Drake touched white king’s bishop. Stephen tracked his brother’s hand with piercing eyes. “Worse, everyone claims you look more like me than I do.”

“Explaining why William mistakes us every other day.”

Drake withdrew his hand and lifted his tankard. “I’m coming to think it’s the mole. Mine is on the left side of my mouth whilst yours is on the right, and since William is cack-handed, it confuses him to no end.”

Chin in palm, Stephen peered at his brother. “Do you think I could be you? And you, me?”

“That we were switched in the nursery?”

“Making me the elder and you the younger?”

Drake pondered the implications. “If so, I would have to start calling you Drake.”

“And I,” said Stephen, “would have to call you Stephen.”

“Likely William would go on confusing us.”

“Probably so.”

The walls carried the echo of their laughter. Stephen resumed his round-shouldered study of the chessboard. Drake stretched onto his side, clamping callused fingers into tangled hair. “Oh, to straddle our legs on either side of a greased saddle and ride the sun-kissed palfrey from moonrise to sunrise.” Drake reached over and used his last-standing white knight to take black’s castle.

Tipping his black king over, Stephen groaned defeat. He flipped onto his back. Drake followed suit with tankard balanced on belly. Together they stared up at the ceiling. This had been their third game. Drake had won two. They were both sloshed to the gills.

“Do you think this is the bed where Nelda and William … well … where they …?”

“None other.” Drake shivered at the thought.

“As for me,” Stephen said, “I admire the rounded hillocks, the color of a glorious sunset in late summer, along with the gentle ravine that separates the two.”

“You’re a bosom man.”

“I am.”

Drake drank and passed the tankard to Stephen. “’Tis the lower grasslands and the central massifs, which slide gracefully into extended rills, that I crave.”

“You’re a leg man.”

Stretching onto their sides and mirroring each other down to the crooked right and left legs, they cleared the board and set it up for another game.

“When we go on crusade …” Stephen hesitated. “Neither of us has been tested on a real battlefield.”

Immediately after his coronation, Richard planned to raise money, fleet, and men for a long sojourn to the Holy Land where Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and leader of the Saracens, had overrun Jerusalem nearly two years ago. Upon receiving news of the invasion more than a hundred days after the event, Richard took the cross in Tours, as did Drake and Stephen.

“I, for one, can hardly wait.”

“Whereas I,” said Stephen, understanding the true nature of war, “can.”

Drake studied his brother’s profile. “Aye, but consider the alternative. You would make a poor monk.”

Stephen looked up and said without regret, “Not uncommon for a second son, even a second son by three breaths, to dedicate his life to the Church.”

Drake said nothing, mostly because he believed in neither Heaven nor Hell, mortifying his brother to no end.

“William could find a position for me as canon,” Stephen went on. “In ten years, maybe as little as five, you would have to call me Bishop fitzAlan.”

“Not likely.” Drake lined up his chessmen. “Pious, you may be, but in addition to praying before God’s altar, you also pray before Aphrodite’s.”

“My first religion.”

“Then I see you as neither canon nor monk.” Drake grunted his irritation. “Do you really believe William would let you stay behind in England?”

Organizing a crusade was no small undertaking, and in the intervening months, Richard had waged war on his father King Henry. Nearly a year and a half had gone by since Richard vowed to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel Muslims and return it to Christendom, and another year might easily pass before he embarked on the holiest of pilgrimages.

Stephen shrugged. “We can make a wager.”

“How much?”

“Our first pay?” Stephen ventured.

“Done. In two years’ time … less … your skin will burn under the hot Jerusalem sun.”

“I’ll take that bet.”

Drake opened with white queen’s pawn. “Making you the fool.”

“Provided mine is on the same side of the wager.” Stephen countered Drake’s move.

“Leaving no payoff for either?”

“I suppose I can serve God just as well at Solomon’s Temple as Winchester Cathedral. A knight I am destined to be. To stand beside my king. To slaughter the infidel. And to defend God’s dominion.”

Drake stared at his brother. Stephen was waiting for him to make his next move. When he didn’t, he glanced up.

Unfolding a grin that did not erase the suspicion amassing in his brother’s eyes, Drake said, “I offer a proposition.”

“Is there something about my face that attracts all your damnable propositions?”

“Aye. It rather looks like mine.”

They didn’t finish the fourth game.

Hours later, when Stephen climbed back through the window, Drake was sitting up in bed, an empty tankard clutched to his chest and a single candle licking shadows across his bruised face. Drake’s twin swayed unsteadily. A grin swept from cheek to cheek. The flame flickered and highlighted his countenance, bruised as badly as his brother’s. A nasty cut at the hairline had swelled into a lump. His ear was mashed. His nose oozed blood. His chin was discolored. His cheek was scraped. And his jaw appeared disjointed, though it worked well enough when he pulled a tankard out from his tunic, tipped it back, and drank thirstily.

“Is that how I look?” Drake said.

The empty tankard clanked onto the floor. Stephen put a finger to his lips and shushed himself before saying, “Aye, dear brother.”

Drake caught him before he fainted dead away. Clutching his brother, he laughed himself silly while trying not to rouse the rest of the household.

“As you see, I would do anything for my brother.” Drake’s proposition to Stephen earlier that evening had been to pick a fight with anyone but himself. Stephen gripped his side and moaned. “Now what?”

“You get into bed.”

“Is that all? Expected it would be more dire than that.”

Drake relieved him of his belt and scabbard and the bundle he clutched firmly in his hand. “Who did you pick the fight with?”

“Who else? Drogo Atwell. Something I have to tell you.”

“It can bide.” Drake used a damp cloth to wipe away the blood.

“You should know …”

“Stop talking. You’re spitting blood onto Nelda’s counterpane.”

Swallowing their laughter, they shushed each other until a wave of nausea gripped Stephen. Drake propped him over the basin. When he finished, Stephen collapsed against the pillows.

“I know you were the fifth man,” Drake said simply.

Stephen’s eyes fluttered open.

“You gave yourself away when you told William the odds were five-to-one.”

“I did, didn’t I, dolt that I am.” He saw the humor and laughed despite spasms and twinges. “I deserved this beating. My punishment. Your revenge. And you didn’t have to lift a finger.” He chortled again through groans of pain. “Am I forgiven?”

“Not until you tell me everything.”

Stephen didn’t know any more than Drake. Trapped with enraged men out for blood, he dared not come to his brother’s rescue. Had he, he likely would have received the same thrashing. “So after everybody went above stairs to drink themselves into oblivion, I talked them into bringing you out when it was dark and hanging you in the woods.”

“That was thoughtful.”

“Please, Drake. I feel bad enough.”

Whenever they got into fights, Drake was the one to hold a grudge and Stephen the one to beg for forgiveness. He needed it now. It would have to wait. “Go on.”

“I … I didn’t believe they’d really hang you. It was just the drink talking. But I convinced them they wouldn’t want to leave any evidence behind for others to find.”

“Eminently logical.” Of the two, Drake was the rash brother who reacted without thinking whereas Stephen was the rational brother who always thought ahead, sometimes with frustrating observance.

“And I …” Stephen faltered. “I was thinking of father. I could have gone for him, but I was afraid of what he might do. To storm Twyford Castle would have brought vengeance upon the fitzAlans. You know the Twyford clan. They would have stopped at nothing to eradicate every fitzAlan in the county, and damn the consequences. And I …” He faltered once more. “… was worried what father would think of me. What
you
would think of me. I wanted to bring you out myself. To … to make up for my cowardice,” he said at last. As to the fates of Seward and Rufus, he knew only what Drake knew. “You wouldn’t have done that to them. Or to Maynard.”

“How generous of you.”

“Drake,” he said on a hiccup. “You know I didn’t mean.”

“Then it must have been Graham.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

Graham had been Drake’s closest friend since boyhood. They shared wine, women, and song; practical jokes and playful pranks; innermost desires and deep-seated hatreds. Graham didn’t have the meanness in him to castrate anyone.

“I’ve been trying to track him down,” Stephen said, his voice fading. “He’s disappeared. No one has seen him since that day. Dead or alive. Whole or in pieces.” His eyes drifted closed; his head lolled to the side.

Drake shook him awake. “What about the giant of the efficient seaman knots?”

In a sleepy monotone, he said, “Baldric, I think his name was.”

“He must be the one who killed Maynard and Rufus and left Seward for dead.”

“Might have, but he wasn’t carrying your sword.” Like his twin, Stephen could be foolish, but also like his twin, he wasn’t a dolt. He observed what Drake had observed: the killing sword did not have a dragon etched on the blade.

“Are you going to make it?”

Stephen jerked at the sound of his brother’s voice and brushed sweat-soaked hair from his eyes. “All I need is some sleep.”

“You won’t get it. You’re leaving after prime.”

“Nay,
you’re
leaving after prime.” Stephen chortled with a spurt of mirth cut off by a twitch in his side and an accompanying moan. “Anything for my brother.”

Drake took hold of his Stephen’s hand. The almandine cabochon—a twin to the ring stolen from Drake in the Twyford Castle dungeon—was missing.

“Oh, that.” He let the hand drop to his side. “I lost it … misplaced it.”

“Lost it gambling, you mean.”

“Never could lie to you.”

Drake gathered up the sword and bundle Stephen brought back with him. “It’ll be all over Winchester by morn that Stephen fitzAlan lost his pretty face in a drunken brawl with the town bully.”

“And that he received his just desserts for being a fitzAlan.” Stephen laughed half-heartedly. Just as Drake reached the window, Stephen roused himself. “Wait. You promised.”

“You’re forgiven,” Drake called out in a whisper and escaped from Nelda’s chamber the same way Stephen had reentered.