White Lion's Lady (21 page)

“Then prepare to meet Him.” Towering over the panic-stricken clergyman, Griff withdrew his dagger.

Eyes bulging, Father Aldon let out a shriek of terror. When he tried to scrabble away, Griffin placed his boot firmly on the edge of his robes, pinning him to the spot. “P-please, sir!” Aldon sputtered. “Have mercy—I beg you!”

Griff fisted his hand in the old man’s vestments and wrenched him to his feet. The dagger’s slim blade rested flat against the father’s jaw. He swallowed hard, his knobby throat scraping the edge of the knife. One flick of his wrist, Griff thought, and the treacherous priest would join Isabel’s other assailants. Aldon had earned his death, to be sure.

“Please,” Father Aldon sobbed. “Please. Have mercy.” He was shaking now, voice robbed by fear, mouthing the word “please” over and over again.

Griffin stared at him in disgust, this weak man with a heart so vile, so corrupt, he could turn it against an innocent woman for his own selfish gain. It struck him that the same could have easily been said of him. The thought sickened him. Sobered him.

Who was he to judge this man? Who was he to judge anyone? Isabel’s blood was on his hands just as much as it was on Father Aldon’s. Perhaps more so.

Griffin let out a sigh and relaxed his hold, letting the dagger slowly fall away from Aldon’s neck. “Be gone.”

“M-my lord?”

“Get out of my sight, priest,” Griff ordered coolly. “Tell
Lackland you failed him in this. Ask
him
for mercy and see how far it will take you.”

The priest stumbled back a pace, but his eyes remained wide and fearful, his panic only seeming to deepen as Griffin’s offer sunk in. He no doubt knew that being granted his freedom now was merely another sort of death sentence. One to be meted out by Prince John’s own order if the father was fool enough to return to Derbyshire without his prize. Griffin doubted the cagey old priest would be so naïve about the prospect of his own welfare. Either way, he was certain this would be the last he would see of Father Aldon.

Griff hardly noticed when the priest turned and ran. His thoughts focused entirely on Isabel, he swung back onto his horse and hastened to her side, praying for the best and dreading what he might find.

She had not moved in the slightest, but was still in the place where she had fallen, looking so small and fragile. So lifeless. Griff jumped off his mount and rushed to where she lay, dropping to his knees in the grass beside her and gingerly turning her over. His hand came away sticky and crimson red.

“My lady,” he whispered. “Ah, God.”

So much blood. It covered most of her left arm and spread in a deep, ugly stain across the front of her creamy white gown. He lifted the edge of her mantle and carefully laid the fabric aside. Isabel moaned as he gathered her up to inspect the damage wrought by the crossbow bolt, the faint sound and weak breath she drew into her lungs flooding Griffin with profound relief.

She was alive, at least. Thank God for that.

Lying in his arms, Isabel began to stir. She sucked in a broken breath of air, her eyelids fluttering open weakly. “Griffin,” she gasped, then said his name again, her voice thready, urgent.

“Shh, my lady,” he said softly, taking her hand in his when she reached out for him. “I am here.”

“Did they … hurt …” She swallowed, blinked slowly, and tried with obvious effort to force the breath out of her lungs once more. “Tried to … save you.”

“I know.” Griff shook his head, humbled as he gazed down at her. “I know what you did, brave little fool.”

“I’m very tired,” she said in a small voice, her eyelids drifting closed. “I’m just … so … very tired.”

Shock was descending on her quickly. Griff knew he had to act with haste. He had to get her wound cleaned and bound and get her warm. “Don’t worry,” he told her softly. “Don’t worry, Isabel. I’m going to take care of you. I promise.”

Scooping her up into his arms, Griffin got to his feet and carried Isabel to his waiting mount. She hardly roused as he shifted her weight to one arm and stepped into the stirrup, settling her onto his lap atop the roan’s broad back. Holding her limp body against him, he smoothed a damp tendril of hair from her brow and placed his lips to her cool skin. “You’re going to be all right, Isabel,” he whispered, his voice rough and fierce with raw emotion. He had to clear his throat to dislodge the lump of pain that threatened to choke him.

“Please, God,” he begged of the heavens above him. “Let her be all right.”

“I thought you said he was your puppet, Droghallow.”

John Plantagenet leaned back in his wide, ornately carved and cushioned chair at the high table of his residence in Derby and eyed Dom over his short, steepled fingers. “Your puppet, you said, and yet your foster brother seems to be the one pulling all the strings in this recent debacle of yours.”

Dom weathered the criticism with a look of polite, if unfazed, confidence. He was none too pleased to have been summoned to a royal scolding with the prince, particularly when it called him away from the rousing bedsport he had been enjoying with Felice at Droghallow. “He has eluded capture thus far,” he admitted, “but we will find him, Your Grace. My men are searching every corner of the realm as we speak. He won’t get far.”

Lackland looked less than convinced. “Would that I had not allowed you to persuade me to let you choose the man for this job,” he complained, his dark wiry brows furrowing into a scowl. “I warned you that he was too arrogant, too brash to be entrusted with a matter of this importance. I warrant you have let your hatred for him cloud your judgment, Droghallow.”

Mayhap he had, Dom reflected as he stared at the king’s brother. Although John Plantagenet surely knew what it was like to despise his own kin, Dom doubted anyone would understand the seething contempt he harbored for
Griffin, the orphaned nobody who had been found at Droghallow’s gates when Dom was just five years old. He was golden even then—a brawny, smiling babe with sparkling green eyes and a crown of bright curls.

Dom had hated him on sight.

He could still remember his outrage when his stepmother brought the swaddled infant into the castle early one summer morn. Dom had been pleading unsuccessfully with his father to take him on the day’s hunt when Alys and two of her maids burst into the solar, full of giggling female excitement. At the sight of his beloved new bride, Robert of Droghallow all but ignored his son, eagerly turning his attention to the three chattering women and the strange little bundle that Alys carried in her arms. Dom had glanced up with sullen irritation, not at all interested in what new wonder might have had his young stepmother so lit up.

Until he saw a plump pink fist thrust upward from the loosened wrappings.

“A baby, my lord!” Alys had told her husband in breathless awe. “I found him lying just outside the gates when I went to deliver alms to the village. I think he’s been abandoned, poor dearling. Is he not the most precious thing you’ve ever seen?”

Dom thought he was probably just a peasant’s castoff, a commoner’s leavings, not so unlike the mangy runt pup he had tried to take in that spring past, only to be refused by his father who worried that the mongrel would bring his disease and filth into Droghallow. Instead of gaining a boy’s first pet, Dom had been made to toss the pup in a grain sack filled with stones and drown it in the river. He had not dared disobey his father’s cruel orders, no matter how it destroyed him to have to carry them out. For months afterward—in truth, at times, even still—Dominic heard those helpless, muffled whimpers in his dreams.

“How sad to think this little angel might be without a home,” Alys had said in her gentle, compassionate voice.

Dom saw the hope in her eyes, sensed with budding alarm the direction of her thinking. “He’s likely just lost,” he interjected, scowling furiously when the babe gurgled and cooed in Alys’s arms. “Someone might be looking for him. He must belong somewhere.”

Alys’s understanding smile only angered him further. She looked to her husband then, something warm and unreadable in her gaze. “Perhaps we should keep him here, my lord,” she suggested, “until we can be sure.”

Standing in the sunlit center of his father’s solar, Dom had waited for Robert of Droghallow to refuse Alys’s plea, to toss out her rescued whelp with equal impassivity. He waited to see the stern scowl he knew so well turned for once on his pretty stepmother. He waited to hear the hard impatience in his father’s tone as he told his wife to take the child and its likely troubles away from his castle.

Dom had waited, but Robert of Droghallow’s refusal did not come. Instead, he lovingly reached out and cupped his bride’s face in his palm. He kissed her brow, then looked down to inspect her squirming bundle, his mouth beginning to quirk into a slight, rare grin.

Then, to Dom’s complete and utter fury, Robert of Droghallow nodded his head.

“If it pleases you, my lady,” he had said to Alys in a tender voice, “it pleases me.”

“No! You can’t! This isn’t fair!” Dom had actually shouted his disbelief, the first time he had ever raised his voice in his father’s presence. His outburst shocked himself as much as it shocked everyone else in the room. And it had earned him a severe cuff aside his head when his father whirled on him in that next moment.

“Enough, Dominic,” Robert of Droghallow growled, jabbing a hard finger at him. “No son of mine will whine and wail before me like a little girl.”

“Robert, please,” Alys had chided softly when Dom’s tears welled and began to fall. “He’s just a boy. He can’t
help how he feels. Give him time, my lord, he’ll understand.”

But Dom did not understand. Resenting his foster brother from the start, he prayed the boy’s kin would come and take him back. He prayed he would simply vanish from Droghallow, and when the weeks he stayed turned into years, Dom did everything he could to destroy Griffin, beginning with the subtle yet unrelenting sabotage of his relationship with Lord Robert, a sabotage that did not end until the earl was dead of a failed heart at the age of forty-two.

Robert of Droghallow had been hunting with Griffin earlier that day, enjoying a brisk autumn excursion while Dom nursed a head cold in his chamber. His father had come back laughing, but pale and exhausted, complaining of indigestion as he took to his bed to rest a while.

Alys had been worried. While Griffin was stabling the horses and delivering the day’s bounty to Droghallow’s butcher, Alys ran to fetch Dom. “Your father is not well,” she told him. “Come quickly.”

Dom had raced to the lord’s chamber where Robert of Droghallow lay, fully clothed and unmoving atop the fur coverlet of his large bed. He looked strangely small in that moment, Dom recalled, a pallid shadow of the boisterous, masculine giant his son had long feared and revered. Dom went to his side and clasped his hand around his father’s big sun-browned fingers.

“He’s so cold,” Dom had said to Alys, who stood at his back, her jaw quivering, gentle eyes filling with tears. “We must do something!”

“I’ll go get the priest,” she whispered brokenly, then hastened out of the chamber, leaving the two men alone.

Dom had nearly jumped out of his skin when he turned back and heard his father rasp out a single, incomprehensible word from between his white lips. “Shh, Father,” he said, squeezing the limp hand he held so tightly in his own. “Rest easy now.”

The earl’s eyelids fluttered slightly as a small spasm seized him. “Griffin,” he breathed, and Dom’s blood seemed to freeze to ice in his veins. “Griffin … is that you, my boy?”

“It’s me, Father,” Dom whispered, pained beyond measure. “It’s me, your son.”

But Robert of Droghallow likely did not hear him, for in that next instant, he sucked in a shallow breath and his entire body went rigid. A moment later, that thready gasp of breath and all the air that yet remained inside of his lungs leaked out on a queer, prolonged rattle that marked the ebb of the man’s life.

Just like that, he was gone.

Alys and the chaplain arrived not long after, Griffin racing in but a few steps behind them. Dom released his father’s dead hand as his stepmother threw herself over her husband’s body, weeping with sorrow. The priest crossed himself and murmured a prayer for Robert’s soul. Griffin stood in the doorway, his sandy hair still wind-tousled, his cheeks still ruddy from the day spent outdoors. His eyes were as sad as any grief-stricken son’s, his strong jaw clamped tight, a sixteen-year-old man too proud to cry.

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” he said, shaking his head as Dom approached him. “He seemed well enough all morn—robust as ever I’ve seen him, jesting about a dozen different things. There was no hint at all that he was ill.” Dom felt his hatred coil a little tighter when he pictured his father riding beside Griffin, clapping him on the shoulder, making jokes, bonding as he never had with his own flesh-and-blood son. “Would that I had known,” Griffin was saying. “Would that I had been here. Did he say anything to you, Dom? Anything at all before he passed?”

Dominic had met Griffin’s searching gaze and held it, choosing his words with cool deliberation. “Yes, actually. He did say something,” he replied evenly. “He said that he was glad I was at his side. He said he was proud to have
me—
his son
—beside him in his final moments on this earth.”

Dom did not understand Griffin’s quiet acceptance of the lie. He did not understand why he chose to stay on at Droghallow after Dom became earl, a position that allowed him to lord over his foster brother and the rest of the folk as he had always dreamed, ruling with a demanding, unforgiving nature that would have—perhaps, at last—made his father proud.

Dom easily could have turned Griffin out of the keep and never thought twice about it. Alys would have protested, surely, but he could have ignored her, and soon enough she was dead anyway, perished of ague the winter after her husband’s death. Dom instead had decided it would be more amusing to keep Griffin on at Droghallow, to have the idealistic golden boy serve him as captain of the guard. Dom had worked hard to corrupt him, charging him with the most unpleasant of tasks and watching with private glee as slowly, day by day, year by year, Griffin’s damnable sense of honor lost more and more of its luster.