The King's Daughter (27 page)

“In hell,” the man growled.

She gasped. “You’ve killed him?”

“Not I. Never saw the codger in my life.” He spoke casually, busily eyeing her from head to foot.

“But … this girl knows his name, and—”

“Well you’re blabbing it everywhere, ain’t you?” the girl said, a sneer replacing her former friendliness.

Isabel tasted the bitterness of self-disgust. She’d been so easily gulled. With a pang of panic she looked up and down the corridor. It was utterly empty. Everyone who could walk was at the wedding feast.

The man turned his head and called, “Albert.”

A huge, filthy man with a curly black beard stepped out of the shadows. The man with the feather jerked his head toward Isabel in a silent command to this giant. Isabel hesitated for a heartbeat, then spun around to run. The giant, Albert, snatched her arm. He wrenched her backward and pinned her arm behind her. Pain like fire shot through her shoulder. She screamed for help. His grimy hand clamped over her mouth. She sucked desperate breaths through her nose.

“I won’t be spoke to like that,” the girl sniffed at the other man, still peeved. “Not when I brung her. Not when I do the job while he does nothing and still gets half,” she said with a jerk of her chin toward the silent youth.

The man with the feather smiled. “Now, now, there’s no need to fuss, Nan. You know he only shares what’s mine. And you’ve done good, you have. You’re a good girl.”

The girl folded her arms across her chest and belligerently declared, “I want her boots.”

“And you shall have them, Nan,” the man with the feather said. Then his tone became steely. “But the purse and the finery’s for me. Albert,” he commanded.

Albert’s grip on Isabel tightened. The man with the feather—clearly the leader—yanked off her cloak, balled it up, and set it aside. He pulled a long knife from a sheath in his sleeve, sliced the strings that held the purse at her waist, and stuffed the purse into his breeches. Then he reached for her necklace.

“The boots,” the girl insisted.

“All right!” the leader snapped. He nodded to Albert. Albert pushed Isabel to the floor on her back. She kicked and struggled and again she screamed for help. He stomped a boot on her chest to silence her. She gasped at the pain. As he rested more of his weight on his foot, grinding her down, her ribs seemed to crack. Every feeble breath was torture. She could make no sound.

The girl tugged off Isabel’s ankle boots, then yanked down her stockings. The leader was at work trying to unfasten Isabel’s necklace, cursing its stubborn clasp. He tried to pry it away with the tip of his knife, but it was an unwieldy tool for such small work and he nicked her skin several times. Finally, he prised the clasp free. He stood, smiling, and turned to the silent youth. Passing the knife to him to free his hands, he lovingly draped the necklace around the youth’s throat.

The girl was shoving her foot into a boot and squealing with delight at the fit. The leader crouched and began to twist the ring off Isabel’s finger. Though Albert’s foot still incapacitated her she wrenched back her hand and squirmed. Annoyed, the leader sat back on his heels. “You’ll lie still,” he told her simply, “or you’ll lie dead. Choice is yours.”

Isabel lay still.

Once the ring was off, the leader fingered her skirt thoughtfully. “You know, Nan, this is fine stuff. No call to waste it.” He looked up at the youth and said, “Fetch the satchel for all this gear, there’s a good lad.” The young man turned and left. The leader said, “Albert, move aside.”

The giant’s foot lifted. The leader began to unlace Isabel’s bodice. But now she was free to fight him. She clawed his face. He recoiled, touching the red welts she’d made on his cheek, and looked at her as if offended. Then, stiffening his hand, he struck her face. The force of the blow knocked her head to one side. She blinked at the stinging pain. Again, he started to unlace her. She grabbed his wrist and dug her teeth into his hand. He yowled. He struck her again, more viciously. She tasted blood and saw purple fire behind her eyes. But her hands flailed at him, though blindly. “Enough larking about,” the leader growled. “Albert, turn her off.”

Isabel felt the giant’s huge hands clamp around her throat. The thick thumbs pressed her windpipe. She choked with pain, with terror. Her vision darkened. She was going to die. She kicked wildly and clawed at the massive forearms, but she knew she was going to die.

She heard a scrape of metal. “Stand away,” a man’s voice said.

The choking grip lifted from Isabel’s throat and she gasped air. Tears of pain still blurred her vision but she knew that the man’s form standing behind her tormentors was the mercenary. And the glinting metal in his hand was his sword. “Let her up,” he said.

Albert and the leader and the girl shuffled back a few steps, their hands raised defensively before the sword. Isabel stumbled to her feet, her bruised chest still heaving with gasps. She lifted her head just in time to see the youth come up behind the mercenary, the long knife between his raised hands. The knife plunged. Isabel cried, “Behind you!”

The mercenary spun around. The plunging knife, meant for his back, slashed across his left shoulder, gashing through his coat. But the wound did not stop his turn—one fluid motion that ended in a lunge. His sword rammed into the youth’s chest with a dull crunch. The mercenary yanked back the blade. The youth clutched his chest, his eyes wide. Blood seeped through his fingers. He collapsed.

The leader screamed. He dashed toward the youth, all fear blocked out, his feathered cap slipping sideways with his sudden movement. The mercenary swung up his bloody sword, ready to strike again, but the leader stumbled past him and dropped to his knees to cradle the youth’s head. The mercenary backed up toward Isabel. He felt behind him and grabbed her wrist, his outstretched sword still threatening the giant, Albert. But Albert stood still, apparently unable to move without a command, which the leader was too lost in grief to give. The girl only stared. The mercenary yanked Isabel in the direction of the taproom.

“No,” she said, resisting. She pointed in the opposite direction. “That way! The door I came in by!”

“It is near?”

“Yes!”

He let go her wrist and nodded. At his shoulder she saw blood weeping through the gash in his coat.

She ran back toward the beggars’ ward, pain still searing her chest as though knives were stuck between her ribs. The mercenary pounded after her, looking back now and then, his sword at the ready. But no one was pursuing them. They reached the ward and scrambled over the prostrate bodies. Isabel, barefoot, stumbled over a man’s chain, and in regaining her balance she splashed into the sewer. Its icy sludge reached to her ankle. Its bottom was furred with slime. She groaned with revulsion and ran on, the mercenary behind her. They hurried up the narrow stairs and reached the door to the storeroom. It was closed. Isabel wrenched its handle. It was locked. The mercenary tried to force the handle. It would not budge. Isabel clutched her sides, catching painful breaths, as the mercenary threw his sword shoulder against the door with all his weight. But it was barred fast. He swung around, abandoning the door. “Go back,” he said.

Down the stairs again they went to the beggars’ ward. And stopped. The leader was there with the girl. They were on the far side, looking among the prisoners, craning into nooks, poking around bodies. They knew the storeroom was locked, Isabel realized, so they assumed she and the mercenary were hiding in the ward. The leader turned and saw them. His face was hard with hatred and he had retrieved his long knife. Isabel and the mercenary bolted toward the far corridor again. But the girl, Nan, was nimbly hopping around the sprawled bodies, and the leader was making his own way forward, viciously kicking prisoners’ arms and legs to clear a path. Isabel and the mercenary had almost reached the corridor when the leader cried out, “A crown for anyone who catches them!”

The bodies at Isabel’s feet sprang to life. A prisoner grappled her waist with both arms. The mercenary’s sword slashed his back. The prisoner yelped and clawed behind him like a man scratching, setting Isabel free. She and the mercenary bolted out into the corridor.

They ran toward the taproom so fast that Isabel hardly felt the rough stone floor scraping her bare feet. They reached the intersection where the young man lay dead, Isabel’s necklace glinting on his throat. The mercenary quickly dragged the body out as an obstacle in their wake. Isabel only had time to snatch up her balled cloak before they ran on. By the time they reached the taproom she was panting.

It was an L-shaped room cluttered with small tables, benches, stools and kegs, and cut up with nooks and crannies, and they had to stop to get their bearings. A few candles guttered on tables. Though the place appeared deserted, Isabel heard dull scuffling and low groans from a nook. She and the mercenary swung around together toward the sound. He strode closer to it, his sword extended. Isabel hurried tohis side. Was some drunkard flopped down beside a way out, perhaps? But she saw only a dark, narrow space and the shadowy forms of a half dozen couples on the floor. They were copulating. Lying in varying states of undress, they were oblivious in their rutting. Isabel caught sight of the green-velveted back of the man she’d seen at the wedding, his buttocks bare below his fine doublet. She turned away. The nook appeared to lead nowhere and she was desperate to find a way out.

She saw one across the room—an open doorway leading into a brick-lined passage. She heard the pounding feet and the shouts of their pursuers coming from the beggars’ ward. It sounded as though enough beggars had been recruited to form a small mob. The prospect terrified Isabel. She started toward the bricked passage, but the mercenary stopped her. He pointed farther down the L-shaped room and said, “That way. It is how I came in.” They started around the corner and Isabel saw the corridor that he was heading for. The way out! Together they ran toward it.

And stopped. Down the corridor stood Albert the giant. He had somehow circumvented the taproom and he was now flanked by two other men. One held a loop of heavy chain. And Albert had found a cudgel. Catching sight of his prey, he hoisted his weapon. He started toward the taproom slowly, stalking. His two recruits moved with him.

Isabel and the mercenary backed up around the corner. They stood still in the middle of the taproom. They knew there were only three ways out. In the one to their left, the small mob from the beggars’ ward was closing in. In the one around the corner, Albert and his helpers were approaching. That left the third, the brick-lined passage in the middle. But neither Isabel nor the mercenary knew where it led. It looked very dark, as if unused. It might take them only to another bolted door. And then their pursuers would fall on them. And there was little doubt that the feathered-hatted leader, mad for vengeance, would butcher them. They glanced at one another. They were trapped.

Even the mercenary stood still. Isabel looked at her hands holding her balled cloak and saw that they were shaking.

She heard a crash. The mercenary had exploded into action. He was kicking over benches, smashing crockery, rolling barrels, apparently trying to put as many obstacles as possible between them and their pursuers. Above all the noise he called to Isabel to do as he was doing. Hopeless though it seemed to her, it was better than standing and waiting for death. Dropping her cloak, she threw over a stool, swept mugs off tables, overturned a large crock of ale. The room was darkening. Isabel looked around and saw why: the mercenary was slashing at candles with his sword, lopping off the tops to extinguish the flames. In the increasing dimness she saw the leader with the feather bolt in from the corridor … she saw a bare-chested man emerge from the nook with a startled face … she saw Albert and his friends turn the corner. Then, the room went black. Isabel stood still, but her muscles continued to tremble as she listened to the pursuers at both ends crashing into the overturned litter and shouting:

“Where are they?”

“Can’t see!”

“Albert, fetch a torch!”

“Where from?”

“The tuppenny ward!”

“Right!”

“And hurry!”

A deep male voice at the nook’s entrance said, “What in hell is going on?”

“Only a brawl, lover,” a woman said in a drunken slur. “They won’t bother us. C’mon back.”

Someone grabbed Isabel tightly around the waist. Before she could even gasp, a large hand clamped over her mouth. She was half-lifted, half-pulled several yards backward. A bristly chin brushed her ear and a voice whispered harshly, “Lie on your back, spread your legs, and do not make a sound!”

Isabel understood. With muscles still quivering with fear, she did as she was told, even hiking up her skirt, though only to her knees. Near her, the couples on the floor were rustling around in the dark. The deep-voiced man muttered an indignant oath, but the other couples only snuffled drunken laughter and carelessly resumed their lovemaking as the thudding and cursing continued beyond the nook.

Isabel lay motionless on the stone floor. One stubborn candle far across the room sparked maddeningly back to life, destroying the shield of darkness. Its light made it just possible for Isabel to see the dusky form of the mercenary’s head and shoulders looming over her. He was unbuckling his sword. He knelt down by her, merging into the floor’s darkness, and she heard a faint scrape as he set down his weapon by her head. Then he quietly wrenched his arms out of his sheepskin coat. She smelled its pungent leather waft over her as he dropped it to hide his sword. His weight came down on top of her. His breath was warm on her cheek, and quickened like a lover’s. They lay together, still and silent, their heartbeats thudding as one.

“Forget the torch!” a man in the room cried. “Grab that candle!”

“But which way did they go?”

“Not past us!”

“Not our way either!”

“They must have bolted down the passage to the kitchens,” the girl, Nan, said.

The kitchens!
Isabel ground her teeth at the agony of knowing she and the mercenary had rejected that chance to flee.