Daughter of Fire (10 page)

“I am far different, demoiselle. He would have destroyed the village for the simple pleasure of it. I spared it for a purpose.”

“And will your men remain outside the tent?” she asked, her voice dripping with contempt.

“They will.”

“To guard me?”

“To protect you.”

“I do not want your protection.”

“Nevertheless, mistress, the guards remain.”

She angrily whirled back to the cot. At the table the flame of the candles quivered and flared brightly.

The dark warrior who had shown her kindness, stepped into the tent as Rorke left.

“He has left you to stand guard over me,” Vivian spat out angrily.

“I am to guard the duke of Normandy,” Tarek responded evenly.

“And prevent me from leaving?” she demanded.

His unusual blue gaze met hers, the color of his eyes startling in that darkly handsome face. She could sense his thoughts and emotions. He was equally as dangerous as Rorke FitzWarren, whose thoughts she could not sense.

“To keep others from entering,” he replied.

She had expected him to deny it and would have known that it was a lie. When he moved to the side of the cot to give assistance, she stopped him.

“I can do what must be done,” she assured him. “But we will need more wood for the braziers.”

That blue gaze met hers and for a moment she wondered if he sensed her deception. Then he bowed his head slightly and went to the opening of the tent to have more wood brought to the tent. The moment his attention was turned away, she removed the fur that lay over William’s injured leg.

She was grateful that the blue-eyed warrior spoke at some length with one of Rorke’s men, no doubt seeing to the details of her imprisonment. She worked quickly, covering the open wound with a poultice soaked in a simmering concoction of horsetail and comfrey. The horsetail would prevent the wound turning bad, while the comfrey would hasten the healing. Then, she gently set the leg, the shattered pieces of bone knitting together beneath the powerful energy that moved through her hands until it was solid and strong again with only the flesh over it yet to heal.

When the warrior returned, it was done.

He carried several pieces of wood and divided among the braziers set about the tent to provide warmth through the cold night. He handed her two long pieces of wood cut from tree saplings.

“You are indeed a skilled healer,” he commended her. “I have never known a bone to be so quickly set, and especially one shattered in so many pieces. Your ancient ways must be rare indeed.”

“ ’Tis no great thing,” she assured him, with a small shrug, “The bone was not as severely broken as it first seemed.”

Although she sensed his doubt, he accepted her explanation. He sat at a small stool before one of the braziers, while she wrapped the broken leg. He removed the curved sword from his belt and began sharpening it, making her wonder precisely whom he guarded against. The Bishop? For surely there was no love lost between Rorke FitzWarren and the man.

William’s squire, escorted by one of Rorke’s men, brought wine, food, and several furs. The meal was laid out, the furs spread before the braziers.

“You must eat,” Tarek told her, when she had assured herself that William rested comfortably. He passed her a trencher of meat and bread. Exhausted from the journey and the events of the day, the wine made her senses feel as if they were wrapped in fleece.

He returned to sharpening that oddly curved steel blade. It caught the light from the brazier and winked golden death.

“Who was the man with Vachel?” she asked.

“The Count de Bayeau, bishop of the Church of Rome, and Duke William’s brother.” There was no attempt to disguise the contempt in his voice.

“His brother?” Nothing she had sensed about the man had revealed it. In fact, she was able to sense little other than what she had seen by his appearance and that gleaming silver cross.

“And Vachel serves him?”

Tarek nodded, the whetstone gliding along the curve of blade with a deadly sigh. “Like the jackal serves the night.”

She set the trencher aside, with little appetite. “He sent Vachel to find me, yet he would have prevented me helping his brother.” She frowned. “I find no reason in it.”

“He has his own ambitions, and they are not entirely bound to the Church that he serves.”

He refused to say more, and Vivian was too exhausted to understand any of it, though something that had been said kept poking at her, refusing to go away—Rorke FitzWarren’s accusation that Vachel had gone to Amesbury to kill her.

She gazed into the flames of the brazier as she curled deep into the furs and lay beside the fire. The flames curled lazily over the wood, slowly consuming it, shifting and separating into spiral strands of brilliant blue, soft gold, bright yellow, and red like silken threads that wove through the darkness in the tent. As she watched, an image slowly took form among the shifting colors—that of a woman sitting before a large open frame.

The flames shifted again and she saw that the woman sat before a tapestry loom, bending over her work. She was dressed in blue, the loom was a dark void framed in gold. But she could not see who the weaver might be, for the woman was turned away from her.

The darkness of the tapestry seemed to spread, bleeding beyond the boundaries of the loom until it all but consumed the weaver. The woman slowly turned toward Vivian, but before she could see her face, the vision was gone, as illusive as smoke.

She tried to find some meaning in the vision but could not. Exhausted, she drifted into restless sleep filled with troubled dreams of war, death, and a fierce creature born in fire and blood—a creature with the features of a man who reached out to her amid the memory of two people in a forest glade, their bodies entwined in passion.

Rorke FitzWarren was the phoenix and she was the flame, and he arose reborn from the flame of their joining.

Six

T
he tent flap was thrown back, framing Tarek al Sharif in a swirl of early morning mist.

Rorke looked up as he finished strapping on padded leather chausses. His features were drawn with fatigue from having been up half the night listening to reports from his men about events in William’s camp during his absence.

His friend’s  expression was taut. Immediately wary, Rorke demanded, “Is it William? Has he worsened?”

“He rests well for a man who was near death but a few hours past,” Tarek assured him as he came into the tent. “The fever is gone and the wound no longer seeps.”

Rorke’s relief was visible in the lines that eased about his mouth. He smiled at his friend, who was always so serious and intense, like that curved blade that he carried—always sharp and eager to draw blood.

“What is it then?” he asked. “Has some new Saxon army shown itself on the ridge above and now swarms down the hillsides to overrun us?”

Tarek angled a sharp glance at Rorke’s squire. With a nod from Rorke the young man was gone, removing chain mail battle armor badly in need of repair.

When he was satisfied that none would overhear them, Tarek told him. “The
Saxon
has not overrun us, but fled.”

“Aye,” Rorke agreed, mistaking his meaning, “vanquished by William’s army not more than six days ago on this very battlefield.”

Tarek shook his head. “Hardly more than six hours ago.”

Humor slowly faded. “What are you saying?”

The Persian’s expression was grim. “The Saxon I speak of is not an army of men, but one Saxon girl, fled in the night.”

Gray eyes narrowed. “Fled?”

“Aye, the one with hair like a flame and the powers of a Jehara. She is gone.”

Rorke didn’t bother to summon his squire. Instead he hastily finished pulling on leather boots. Anger replaced the fatigue in each movement—the slap of leather, the snap of the belt, the thud of a booted foot.

“How is it possible,” Rorke demanded, his voice taut, “that a simple maid has the ability to accomplish what the finest trained mercenaries in all the Byzantine Empire could not, in slipping past you?”

Tarek answered matter-of-factly, “I would like to know that as well. If the girl is found, I have several questions I would like to ask her.”

“
When
she is found,” Rorke emphasized, “you will have your answers. As will I.”

Unshaven, his features were gaunt and filled with shadows. The expression in his eyes was cold as the morning wind.

“Have you spoken to anyone else of this?”

Tarek shook his head. “Only your men who guarded the tent. It was necessary to question if they had seen her.”

Rorke nodded as he seized a short-bladed knife and slipped it down the inside leg of his boot, then seized his leather gauntlets.

“No one else is to know she is gone.” He snapped out his orders. “I want no interference from Vachel., and see that William’s tent is well guarded.”

Tarek assured him, “It is already done.”

“The horses?”

“Saddled and waiting just beyond the camp. I have put out the word that we ride in search of Saxon rebels.”

Rorke’s lips thinned. “That is not far from the truth.”

Outside the tent, a chill wind stung the skin, whipping smoke from cook fires to sting at the eyes.

The horses sensed their mood and moved restlessly, heads tossing as they strained their tethers. Rorke seized the reins and vaulted into the saddle.

“Did anyone see her leave?” he asked, as he controlled the restless stallion.

Tarek shook his head as he mounted his Arabian mare. “But I found a set of lightly made footprints that could not be made by a soldier’s boot, several hundred yards beyond William’s tent.”

“How is it,” Rorke asked through his teeth, “that no one saw her leave and that these prints suddenly appear some distance from the tent? Would you have me believe that she sprouted wings and flew from the tent?”

“I do not know,” Tarek admitted. “You should ask her when we find her.”

Rorke swore heavily, for it was not like his friend to be uncertain in anything. Never in all the time he had known him, since they met at Antioch—two warriors willing to sell their services in a personal quest, thrown together by fate and the threat of the Turkish sultan—had he ever known the warrior to falter.

Tarek was the half-caste son of a woman of noble Persian birth and a foreign raider, a Viking whose fleet of ships had laid siege to Antioch and held the city for a fortnight before being driven back. But in that fortnight the Norsemen had laid claim to more than riches of gold and silver. They had laid claim to the daughters of several noble families, one of whom in the ensuing months gave birth to half-caste, blue-eyed Viking child.

Tarek was the result of such a union, taken from his mother at birth to hide her shame and raised by a merchant and his childless wife. But he carried the shame of his birth and hatred for the man who had sired him and left a young woman with a child in her belly and a gold Norse medallion that Tarek wore about his neck.

Out of shame, his mother had taken her own life, and Tarek had vowed revenge for her death and his own shameful birthright. Shunning the life of a merchant, he became a warrior, selling his prowess with a blade to the highest bidder. For only with gold and in the service of foreign kings might he find the father who wore the emblem of the dragon head and had abandoned his mother.

In all of Byzantium, Tarek al Sharif’s skill with a blade was well-known. He was a warrior without peer, until the day by a strange twist of fate, which he believed to be the workings of the Divine One, he found himself under a Norman blade. Spared from death by Rorke FitzWarren, he was in the dubious position of owing a debt of honor to an infidel. But fighting with Rorke FitzWarren rather than against him offered another advantage besides the gift of his life.

It offered him the opportunity to travel to the western empires, closer to the lands of the Norsemen. Then he received word that a man who carried the badge of a dragon was rumored to be in the far north of Britain and he had thrown in his lot with Rorke FitzWarren and the knights who pledged themselves to William of Normandy’s cause to take the English throne.

Knowing his friend as he did, and with a profound respect for his skills as a warrior, Rorke frowned. It was for those reasons he had left Tarek to guard William and the girl. For he was certain no one would get past him. He had not considered that the maid would be clever enough to accomplish it. Nor could he fathom how she might have done it. But he knew beyond doubt that he must find her and bring her back lest William suffer a relapse and worsen without her care.

He had no clear explanation for the healing technique she had used the night before. Whatever its origin, it had been effective. The future of England was at stake, and along with it his own future. William of Normandy must live to claim his throne.

“Which direction did she flee?” he asked.

“East toward the sun,” Tarek informed him.

Rorke frowned. “Then she has not returned to Amesbury,” he said with more than a little surprise, for he was certain that was the direction she would take.

His eyes scanned eastward and Rorke realized why she had taken that direction. He had only forbidden her to return to Amesbury or forfeit the lives of the villagers.

“Jesu!” he swore. “She has set out across the battlefield. Does she not know the danger of wandering alone through a field camp filled with soldiers?”

Rorke’s gaze narrowed as he scanned the edge of forest that rimmed the battlefield. She could easily conceal herself among the trees. She had spoken of it on the journey from Amesbury.

“What was it you called her?” he asked Tarek as they set off following those tracks in the muddied earth, with his men fanning out about them for some other signs of those same tracks. “Jehara? I do not know the word.”

“They are the enchanted ones who live between the worlds of what we can and cannot see,” Tarek explained. “It is said they have great powers, among them the ability to move between the real and spirit world.”

Rorke glanced over at his friend. “Do you believe in such things?”