Winter Siege (38 page)

He let her go, pressing the heel of his hands to his eyes in despair. He needed to think. She should be
here
; she
must
be. When Kenniford surrendered
she
had to be as close to Maud as possible because only the lady of Kenniford could ensure their safe passage out of here. Anyone left behind would be hanged.

With a gesture to Alan, he dismissed himself from the company and made his way back up the staircase.

She was in here,
had
to be; after all, they had been fighting only feet from the entrance; even in all the chaos somebody, surely, would have noticed if either she or the boy had tried to slip out. Besides, he consoled himself, even Penda wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave the safety of the keep, brave little bugger though she was. No, she was in here somewhere and he would find her.

‘Penda!’ he called, but each time his voice echoed back to him unanswered in the darkness.

By the time he had exhausted every floor, every corner of every room, he had reached the staircase leading to the turret and his rising anxiety was making him irritable. To keep his mind from darker thoughts he had begun to compose the chiding he would give her when she turned up. Oh, she’d be in trouble all right. He’d brook no excuse for all the worry she’d caused him; instead he would take her by the shoulders, shake her – firmly – and say something along the lines of: ‘Now look here, Pen. Frighten me like that again and …’ which was when it dawned on him that those were the words of an anxious father, an irony that made him laugh out loud.

‘Didn’t bargain for that, Lord, did I? Didn’t expect to love her like my own. But You knew, didn’t you? Right from the start You knew, crafty old bugger.’ For a rare moment or two he felt the warmth of his love for her and the serendipity of God’s inimitable plan flood through him … Until something stopped him in his tracks: it was almost nothing, just a scent; but it was the faint though unmistakable odour of asafoetida, and as it reached him he turned cold and began to run.

He was panting heavily by the time he reached the top of the stairs, but what he saw when he plunged into the middle of the room knocked the remaining breath out of his lungs and made him retch, and as he reached for his sword he heard a familiar voice.

‘Well, well, Gwil,’ it said. ‘It
has
been a long time.’

Gwil turned slowly to see Penda, eyes wide with terror, head tilted back as she strained desperately away from the knife the monk was holding to her throat. With his free hand, Gwil automatically reached into his cloak and withdrew the quill case.

‘This what you’re looking for, Thancmar?’

The monk nodded, holding out his hand. But Gwil stepped away from him.

‘Not yet,’ he said quietly. ‘Let her go first. Then you can have it.’

At that moment Penda felt a sudden spasm of rage shoot through the body behind hers and the flesh around her throat pucker as the monk tightened his grip on the knife.

No, not
the
knife, it was
her
knife! She was about to have her throat slit with her own knife! The shock of discovering William, the horror in the room and the appearance of the monk, which had initially knocked the stuffing out of her, was beginning to wear off; besides, if there was a single trait running through her like a seam through a rock it was her sense of pride. After all, hadn’t Gwil admonished her about it often enough? And suddenly, the idea of being dispatched in this way seemed not only ignoble to the point of ridiculous but extremely unfair, giving her the impetus she needed to jerk herself backwards, ramming the top of her head into his chin. There was a gratifying yelp as he loosened his grip just enough to allow her to slip from his grasp and slide headlong to the floor at Gwil’s feet.

‘You all right, Pen?’ Gwil looked down, extending his hand to help her up, but as he reached out there was a sudden flash of metal and a brutal thud as the monk’s sword scythed on to his wrist. She heard Gwil cry out and saw the quill case he had been holding drop to the floor as the fingers of his injured hand unfurled like broken strings.

The quill case!

She had never understood its significance; all she knew for certain was that it was a talisman to him and that whatever power it held he would need now more than ever. The fact that the monk so desperately wanted it too made it imperative she find it first.

With one eye on Gwil as he reeled from his injury, she shuffled across the floor on her knees to where it had fallen, her hands sifting and scrabbling through the filthy rushes as she went until, at last, she felt a familiar shape beneath her fingertips. She clutched it tightly in her fist and was about to scramble to her feet when a shadow fell across her.

‘Give it to me,’ a voice hissed.

She shook her head but dared not look round; instead, her eyes screwed shut so tightly she thought they were going to burst, she began to pray: for Gwil, for William, for her own quick and painless death, for the safe deliverance of Kenniford; but even as her mouth moved around the litany she heard a sword rend the air above her …

Our Father who art in Heaven
… Concentrate … concentrate … Damn! What was it? … Oh yes,
Hallowed be Thy name
…

Any moment now the blade would fall … God! Let it be sharp! Oh, let it be swift! Any moment now … But instead of the blow she expected, the soft thud of metal on flesh, she heard Gwil’s voice summoning the monk, silence and then the clashing of swords.

By the time she had risen to her feet and got her bearings again the men were on the other side of the room where the rushlights, burned almost to nothing, flickered so dimly that the two circling, feinting figures merged almost completely into the shadows. Only the occasional gasp and the brutal beat of sword against sword broke the silence. Even William, standing beside her, his face buried in her skirts, had stopped his dreadful keening, too frightened even to breathe … Then suddenly there was a cry, the clattering of a sword as it tumbled on to the stone floor and a shriek of vicious jubilation from the monk.

Gwil!

He was unarmed now and helpless … She must
do
something! But what? Without a bow and arrow she was useless, worse than useless; she was nothing; besides, William was clinging to her so tightly she could barely move.

‘I have to go,’ she pleaded, trying to prise herself free of the small arms around her waist. ‘I have to go to Gwil!’ And as she struggled from his grasp, she pushed him towards the open door. ‘Run!’ she screamed over her shoulder as she sprinted across the room.

When she was close enough to see clearly in the gloom, she saw Gwil lying in a pool of his own blood, struggling against his failing strength and the slipperiness of the rushes to get up; the monk was hovering over him, stabbing at him viciously every time he tried to get to his feet.

‘Hey!’ Penda screamed, holding up the quill case. ‘This is what you want! This, not him!’

The monk turned.

‘See!’ she called, waggling it at him like a rattle at a baby. ‘
I’ve
got the bloody thing!’ And, raising it high above her head, she started edging slowly backwards, luring him away from the stricken man on the ground. For a moment, the tactic seemed to work and the monk teetered on the brink of following her, until, with a sudden change of heart, he wheeled back to Gwil with one last devastating thrust of his sword.

Penda heard a scream, a primordial howl of such profound grief and suffering that her hands flew to her ears to block it out; only when she tasted the blood it had scoured from her throat did she realize it was hers.

‘Gwil!’ she called, slumping to her knees. ‘Gwil!’ But he made no response, even as the monk turned again and began advancing on her.

She could only watch as the harbinger of death came gliding across the floor towards her, each footstep drawing her inexorably to the conclusion of her life, yet she felt strangely unafraid, enveloped in a peculiar numbness, as though such close proximity to her own demise had inured her against all other emotion. The last blessing of the condemned, she thought; or was it simply that, without Gwil, nothing mattered any more …?

He was close now, so close in fact that she could smell him, and grinning at her as though they were playing a game: a deadly game of cat and mouse, except that she refused to play. If these were to be her last moments on earth, she was going to spend every last damn one of them avenging Gwil; at least she’d die fighting.

He stopped within a yard of her, black, pitiless eyes boring into hers, but she glared back, steadfast, unblinking, and thought she saw, just for a moment anyway, a flicker of confusion cross his face.

The grin faded.

‘Run,’ he hissed, jutting out his chin in a feint towards her, but she stood her ground, unflinching, flexing her arm instead to throw the quill case high into the air above his head and, as his eyes flicked briefly from hers to follow its trajectory, she launched herself at him with a punch. There was a sharp exhale of breath as the surprise and force of it rocked him backwards but, just as she prepared to hit him again, he hit her back.

It was a blow heavy enough to send her flying across the room but not so devastating that she had no time to wonder – before the flagstones rose up to meet her – why he hadn’t killed her. Why, instead of running her through with his sword as he could so easily have done, he had deliberately turned his arm to clout her with the flat of the blade instead. That he intended to kill her eventually she had no doubt; yet twice now he had deliberately stopped short of it and she wondered why …

At that point, the back of her head hit the floor and the room went black.

She lay where she had fallen, drifting in and out of consciousness. When she opened her eyes everything seemed distant and confused: the room, the monk, Gwil, William were tiny, fuzzy specks on a shifting, undulating horizon; one minute there, the next not. But when she closed them it was as though she was no longer even in the room but back on the desolate fen, the beat of horses’ hooves drubbing in her ears and the ghost of the little girl, who had died and been reborn there, running through the marsh.

She remembered that child so vividly now, the terror and loneliness, but most of all the overwhelming sense of shame she had felt as she cowered helplessly beneath the monk while he raped her … And there was something else … something about her hand! She had been holding something then just as she was now! Only this time it was not the quill case but a cold, heavy object which another small hand was fervently pressing into hers.

She opened her eyes. A small shadow knelt beside her, imploring her to wake up as it tried to manipulate her fingers around the hilt of Gwil’s sword.

‘I came back,’ William whispered. ‘I got this for you.’ She took the sword from him and scrambled to her feet, then tucked it quickly into her belt behind her back.

If anything the room was even darker now; the candles and rush-lights had burned to nothing, but, as she blinked away the darkness, she could just make out the monk standing in the middle of the room, perfectly still but for his hands, which were working methodically around a knot in the belt at his waist.

So that was why he hadn’t killed her! Suddenly an instinct she had assumed long dead began to stutter and spark to life inside her like the embers of a fire after a breath of air.

‘Get out,’ she hissed at William. ‘Get out! Now!’ And saw her transformation reflected in his eyes as he flinched from her like a frightened animal. She watched him retreat towards the door out of the corner of her eye, fighting the urge to call him back, to give him one last reassuring hug, but the next moment he had vanished from the room and she turned back to face the monk.

The moon had reappeared, shining through the narrow windows on to the grotesque panorama of the room, its pale light delicately silvering the congealing pools and sprays of blood, the mutilated corpses and the now naked figure of the monk.

‘Come,’ he beckoned. She nodded in response, lowering her head meekly as she stepped over the rushes towards him.

‘Here I am,’ she said softly when she was close enough to hear the groan of pleasure as he reached towards her, his long fingers quivering like tendrils as they stretched to touch her hair.

‘Still red,’ he murmured, caressing the curls around her face with his fingertips, eyes half closed in ecstasy.

‘Doesn’t come much redder,’ she muttered, slipping her arms behind her back to grip the sword. ‘Red as blood, in fact,’ she added, as, in one deft movement, she slid the blade from her belt, swung it in front of her and plunged it into the monk’s chest.

For a moment they stood like lovers, conjoined by the blade in her hands.

‘This is for Gwil,’ she whispered, forcing the weapon deeper into his flesh, her breath caressing the side of his face. ‘And this is for me,’ she said, as she twisted the hilt and wrenched it free.

She watched dispassionately as he crumpled to the floor, and then sank to her knees in exhaustion.

A sudden movement behind her made her jump and she leaped up, turning abruptly to see Gwil swaying on unsteady legs as he peered at the monk’s body over her shoulder.

‘Bastard dead, is he?’

‘Gwil!’ she cried, throwing her arms around him.

‘You all right, Pen?’

‘I thought you were dead,’ she said as she wept into his neck. ‘Oh God, Gwil, for a moment back there, I thought you were dead.’

‘Nah, not me, Pen,’ he said, but even as he spoke his legs buckled and he collapsed.

‘Gwil!’ She knelt beside him and tenderly lifted his head on to her lap; and in the cold dawn light now seeping through the windows she saw the mortal wound in his chest.

‘Just need a little rest, is all, Gwil,’ she said, clutching him to her and rocking him like a baby. ‘Just a little rest now and then we can get out of here. You’ll be right as rain in a day or two if I know you.’

He nodded, smiling up at her, but she turned her face away to hide her tears.

‘That’s it, Pen,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘Just a little rest …’