Through a Dark Mist (37 page)

On each successive pass the crowd cheered louder. Each crash of horseflesh, steel, and raw power sent ribbons of silk waving madly over heads and pale, trembling hands clutching over hearts. The Wolf warded off devastating blows to his chest and shoulders; the Dragon shook off crushing thrusts to ribs, shoulders, and thighs. Neither rode as straight or as steady as they had during the first run, but neither showed signs of conceding. They were tiring, however, and weakening. Even their horses were taking longer strides to turn and recoup for the next charge.

Three … five …
seven
passes! Unbelievable! The crowd was on its feet, stunned by the display of courage and strength.

The horses converged again, their mouths flecked with foam and blood, their eyes round and wild with fighting madness. When the clash came, the lances locked again and the knights were driven together, neither one willing to give ground, not even when the animals beneath them reared and thrashed and pounded the dividing palisade into a heap of split kindling. Shields hammered into one another and the two knights abandoned their saddles, eager to bring the fight to closer contact.

Into the choking dust and flying debris was added the deadly glitter of longswords. Within a grinding maelstrom of screaming, pawing horses, their blades hacked and slashed at vulnerable areas of back, neck, shoulder, arm, and thigh. Links were shattered and rivets torn apart; plates of armour were dented, loosened and sliced away by the fury of killing thrusts. Splashes of sweat and blood began to spatter the ground; a thigh was sliced, an arm cut, shields were thrown away and swords gripped in both hands as an end drew inevitably nearer.

The Dragon took a staggering blow to the side of his helm and felt himself reel sideways into a shifting mass of horseflesh. The Wolf pursued and was on him in the next instant, throwing the full brunt of his weight into the effort needed to bring his adversary to the ground. With the roar of the crowd’s bloodlust in his ears, he succeeded. He heard the Dragon’s breath wrenched from his lungs on a curse of agony as the two landed solidly on the torn earth, then a further curse of outraged disbelief as the Wolf drove the point of his sword into the narrow gap between the Dragon’s helm and gorget.

His chest heaving and his lungs scalded from lack of air, the Wolf exerted enough pressure on his sword to convince his brother to freeze where he lay. His wounds stung and his muscles screamed in pain; the scarred flesh of his shoulder, back, and ribs demanded vengeance, swift and sure. Etienne’s visor had been jolted loose in the fall, and the wild, pale blue eyes that stared up at him in disbelieving terror were the same cold blue eyes that had once stared down in triumph at the broken and bleeding body he had left to rot in the desert sun.

“Why?” Lucien demanded. “Just tell me why you did it, Etienne!”

The Dragon’s mouth opened, closed, and opened again. “Forgive me, Lucien. I beg you, forgive me.”

“What?
What did you say?”

The Dragon gasped, braced for death. “Forgive me. The truth is … I am relieved to finally be free of the guilt I have carried with me all these years. Carried it, hated it, loathed the envy and jealousy that drove me to commit such a heinous act. You were my brother, Lucien, and I killed you. I do not blame you for doing this—”

“Blame me?” the Wolf snarled.
“Blame
me? I will die a happy man knowing you do not
blame
me, you soulless bastard!”

The sword moved forward and Etienne sucked a last breath through his teeth. Their eyes were locked together, blue merging with gray, gray with blue until each became a part of the other. Memories, unbidden and unwanted, struck with the swiftness of a second blade—memories of a lifetime ago, of happy times and shared laughter. For one unsettling moment, the Wolf suffered an image of the two of them practicing at a quintain, their youthful arms barely strong enough to lift a lance let alone aim it at the centre of the fixed target.

“You were my brother and I loved you!” the Wolf cried. “I would have shared it all willingly with you!”

“All but the name, Lucien,” the Dragon whispered. “Mine would always have been bastard.”

The Wolf’s fists trembled, but they could not push the blade of his sword the extra fraction of an inch needed to thrust steel and chain and windpipe into a crush of bloodied tissue and bone. A curse, given on a roar of anguish, saw him lift the sword away and heave it across the shattered wall of the list, a bright, cartwheeling glitter of pitted steel and hollow revenge.

“Before God, I cannot kill you,” he said hoarsely. “I cannot forgive you, but I cannot kill you either. It will be enough to have the truth come out at last.”

Etienne raised himself on his elbow, then onto his knees. His one hand massaged the bruised flesh of his throat, his other shuffled through the dust beside him and grasped the hilt of his sword. Drawing on every last ounce of avarice and hatred he possessed, the Dragon brought the sword up over his head, and, with the Wolf already turned to walk away, he brought the heavy blade down solidly across the base of Lucien’s skull.

The Wolf pitched forward, his senses erupting in a blinding sheet of pain. His body went completely numb and would not respond to any command, not even when he felt the presence of Etienne looming over him.

“I did not think you could kill a man who begged your forgiveness” he sneered, “regardless of his crime. Coward! Weakling! You do not belong here anymore. Bloodmoor is mine, and I will not share it with a ghost, however noble he might be.”

He lowered the point of his sword, resting the tip just over the steel lip of the Wolf’s visor. A brief thrust, a surge of sweet vengeance and it would be over … but too quick!
Too quick
, Etienne told himself. There was still the promise he made Servanne de Briscourt to repay her deceit and treachery. It
would
please him to see them die together. To hear their screams. To feel their blood run hot and slick over his hands.

A thrill, carnally delicious in intensity, swept through Etienne and he straightened, raising his voice with the triumph of a conqueror.

“Guards! Seize this man! He is a coward and murderer and has come to Bloodmoor under false pretenses!”

“False pretenses?” Prince John was quick to leap to his feet and feign outrage over De Gournay’s actions. “What manner of false pretenses could justify the arrest of Sir Randwulf de la Seyne Sur Mer?”

“This man”—the Dragon pointed a contemptuous finger at the dazed, semiconscious knight at his feet—“has committed crimes against the crown—crimes which include the ambush and murder of honest men, and the kidnapping of my own bride. All in the name of
the Black Wolf of Lincoln?’

A roar of disbelief swept through the spectators, rumbling down to an angry murmur as the Dragon again held up his hand for silence.

“Further, there is proof he intended harm not only to myself, but to you, my liege!” The piercing blue eyes sought out the prince and demanded corroboration. “I have reason to believe he was sent to England to raise his hand against the very crown itself!”

John gasped, finding it difficult not to applaud the Dragon’s performance. “You say you have proof of these charges, Lord Wardieu—where is it?”

“It begins here.” With a boldly dramatic flourish, the Dragon leaned over and removed the Wolf’s black helm. The crowd gasped, their shock hanging in the air as they recognized the obvious deceit verified by the unscarred, unblemished face that was angled roughly toward them for inspection.

When the silence threatened to linger too long, Nicolaa de la Haye jumped to her feet beside Prince John. She had to lean on the rail for support, for she was experiencing the same erotic throes of pleasure she could see glazing Etienne’s features. Her limbs trembled and her belly spasmed. The gratification shivered down her thighs as she raised her fist and incited the crowd to join her screams of: “Treason! Dog! Arrest him!”

Prince John was given no choice but to nod his head in complete agreement. “Arrest him. We shall get to the bottom of this treachery … one way or another.”

The wall of guards surged forward and swarmed over the fallen knight. Still reeling from the blow to his head, the Wolf was dragged from the enclosure and taken away in chains to the castle donjon.

   Friar sat in stunned silence, unable to move, hardly able to believe what he had just seen and heard. There had been no time, no chance to react to Etienne Wardieu’s charade, and to a man, the Wolf’s knights had stood helplessly by and watched their leader carried from the field in chains. Prince John was already embellishing the lies by speculating over political motivations. Alaric only half-listened; to pay full heed might have been temptation enough to assassinate the gloating regent himself.

He was more concerned over the whereabouts of Gil, Sparrow, and the others. Sparrow had appeared briefly in front of the Wolf’s pavilion, but had successfully vanished in the crowd. Robert the Welshman, normally visible by virtue of his height and bulk alone, had melted back into the ring of spectators and either taken cover in the nearby stables, or had been caught doing something reckless—like attempting to rescue the Wolf singlehandedly—and lay dead somewhere with his good intentions spilling out onto the cobblestones.

Friar was no less reassured to see a detachment of guards sent at once to reinforce the sentries on the main gates. Was the Dragon assuming his brother had had the foresight to ensure the presence of a few friendly faces in the crowd? Or was he just taking normal precautions against the sympathy of the general rabble? La Seyne Sur Mer, as the dowager’s champion, had been the favorite of the commoners. The Black Wolf of Lincoln, brave, bold, and daring in his exploits against the tyranny of De Gournay and the regent’s tax collectors, was more simply put, their hero. To have the two legendary rogues revealed as being one and the same man, had brought upwards of two hundred angry, rebellious bodies crushing against the bars of the iron portcullis gates.

Fear they might break in was ludicrous, therefore it must mean the Dragon was wary of anyone else breaking out.

The guests began to disperse from the field. The ladies departed on cushioned litters, returning to the main keep by the same method they had been carried forth. Some of the nobles rode as well—horses or litters—and took away their flocks of servants and retainers in the process. Prince John was among the first group to leave the dais, but delayed his return to the keep long enough to stop at the Dragon’s pavilion and offer his congratulations. There, the castle chirurgeon was busy sewing and bandaging the lord’s wounds, plucking out pieces of iron link that had become embedded in cut flesh, clucking and frowning over bruises that had turned the underlying pads of muscle into mush. Most of the injuries were slight; only one caused a flurry of clacking tongues and fingers, and a suggestion to attach leeches to drain off any possible threat of infection.

Friar was one of the last to leave the covered dais. He started to walk toward the rows of pavilions and stared, as he did so, at the empty field, now strewn with garbage, debris from the broken palisades, and clods of uprooted grass and dirt from the horses’ churning hooves. He tried to think, tried to place himself inside the Wolf’s head to devise a plan for rescuing the captured knight, but nothing crystalized. They were vastly outnumbered. They had been outmaneuvered once and would be again, for without the Wolf’s knowledge of the castle grounds, they could search for a week without ever discovering the donjon where he was being held.

And a week was too long by any man’s guess.

“My lord bishop—a word with you?”

Friar’s attention was startled away from the field by the sound of a man’s gruff voice over his shoulder. He turned and could not completely quell a chill of foreboding as he came face-to-face with an armed knight and three brawny guardsmen. The knight looked vaguely familiar with his long, thin nose, deep-set eyes, and coarsely unpleasant features, but for the moment, his blazon of scarlet and yellow eluded identity. As casually as he could, Friar clasped his hands together within the voluminous cuffs of his bishop’s robes and nodded a formal greeting.

“Do I know you, sir knight?”

“You might. If you were in the forest a sennight ago and part of a band of rogues who ambushed innocent travelers … you might know me.”

Friar’s right hand inched toward the dagger he had strapped to the inside of his other wrist. The act was concealed by his sleeves, yet the knight detected the movement and grasped a hand around Friar’s wrist, knife and all, effectively spoiling the intent.

“I would have a word with you in private, my lord bishop,” said the knight again, his voice a low rumble of authority. “You have nothing to fear from me, unless of course, Mistress Bidwell has been duped out of her senses— which I suspect she has—and has asked me to seek help from the wrong quarter.”

“Mistress Bidwell? …
Biddy?”

The knight scowled and squeezed Friar’s wrist to the point of making the hand swell and turn bright red before he released it. “I gave her my word to seek you out, and seek you out I have. Now, by God, you will come with me or you will die here by your own misfortune.”

Friar glanced past the knight’s shoulder and shook his head quickly at someone who had stepped out from behind a small, straw-filled cart. The knight, sensing the threat, whirled around, as did the three guards, only to find themselves staring down the shaft of a slender ashwood arrow. The “monk” holding the bow was tall and slim; his cowl had slipped back to reveal a shock of bright copper curls and an even more shocking scar down the left side of his face.

The three guards reached instinctively for the hilts of their swords, but a harsh command from the knight stopped them.

“You,” he snarled, staring into Gil Golden’s amber eyes. “I know you, by God. You were the one who did this—” Sir Roger de Chesnai smacked his thigh just above the bulge of padding that distorted the fit of his hose. His expression grew blacker as he swept his gaze along the length of Gil’s robes. “Aye, ’tis well you hid yourself behind the church’s cowl, for I would have scarred the other half of your head for you by now.”