Daughter of Fire (6 page)

She sensed his dangerous thoughts as clearly as if he had told her of them, and sensed, too, the humiliation that seethed within him like a festering wound. She had disgraced him before his men. It mattered little that she was protecting those she loved.

“FitzWarren is a fool to leave you unbound and unguarded.”

“Not as big a fool as some,” she countered.

He sprang at her like an animal, his hand snaking out and seizing the thickness of her hair as the blade came up in the other.

“The blade is hot. It will burn as well as cut.” His hand twisted in her hair, pulling her closer until it was wound tightly about his fist.

“Before I am through, mistress, you will cry mercy.” His foul breath made her skin crawl as if she’d been touched by something evil. Bile rose in her throat. Pain throbbed where his hand knotted in her hair, but she refused to cry out. Like an animal, she knew fear would only make him bolder.

“I will tame you,” he vowed as he brought the blade up beside her face. “And then I will force that stubborn Saxon pride from you as you lie beneath me.”

“You will die before you will ever know that victory,” Vivian vowed, ”and you will burn for what you have done to my people.”

Rorke heard the painful cry like that of a wounded animal, and swore as he crossed the encampment. He shouldn’t have left her alone.

In the light of the campfire, he saw Vachel at the edge of the clearing, standing a few feet away from the healer who lay sprawled at the ground. His hand closed over the handle of the short blade at his belt.

Several of his men and Vachel’s followed close behind, their hands also at their weapons. His hand went still at his own blade as he realized it was not the healer who had cried out. Vachel screamed in agony as he clutched one hand in the other.  His sword hand was reddened with raised with angry welts as if he had laid it to the fire.

“The Saxon whore attacked me!” he screamed. “See what she’s done. She burned me! ” And then on a snarl, “I will have the bitch’s head on a pike!”

“Cease!” Rorke ordered.

“I
will
have justice for this,” Vachel spun back around and held his hand aloft for all to see. “Either that or she will be subject to William’s justice for attacking one of his knights!”

“I see two people before me,” Rorke said, his gaze traveling from Vachel to where Vivian lay in the dirt before the fire. “A knight fully trained and armed, and a young girl with only a pouch of herbs and powders.”

“You doubt what I say?” Vachel demanded.

“I do not doubt that you have suffered some injury,” Rorke told him, “but I will also hear the cause of it from the girl.”

Vivian slowly lifted her head and gazed at the circle of Norman knights that surrounded her. On the faces of Vachel’s men she saw an animal lust for blood. Rorke’s men seemed less certain. The strangely dressed, blue-eyed warrior watched her with quiet curiosity.

Norman justice, she thought. The same justice that William had seized the crown of England?

“He burned himself with a blade at the fire,” she answered, telling the simple truth.

“She lies!” Vachel accused. “She burned me, with a stick! She has it in her hand.”

Rorke extended his hand to her. She placed her empty hand in his.

“Your other hand as well, demoiselle.”

She looked up at him with eyes as brilliant as blue flame. If he thought to discover either malice or deception there, he saw neither.

“You do not believe me?”

“I do not disbelieve you.”

Anger leapt into her eyes. She extended her other hand to his.

A vibrant strength coursed beneath the warm satiny skin, pulsing strong and sure at the slender curve of wrist where tendons joined bone. That same hand had calmed his warhorse and brought ease of suffering to the sick and wounded of Amesbury. He could almost feel an energy like that of the sun in the flesh, muscle, and bone cradled in his hand. With something very near reluctance he released her hand and turned to Vachel.

“There is no weapon.”

Fury twisted his features as Vachel stalked past him to his own men.

“She attacked me,” he insisted, knowing they would believe whatever he told them. “She has hidden the weapon to keep blame from herself. The Saxon is dangerous and should be punished.”

“Perhaps this is the weapon you speak of,” Tarek al Sharif suggested as he rose from where he had crouched before the fire. He handed a knife to Rorke FitzWarren.

Rorke turned it over in his hands, a distinctive blade with a boar’s head handle. “I believe this belongs to you, Vachel,” he suggested, holding the weapon out to him.

Vachel’s gaze narrowed as he stared at the blade. “It must have fallen when she attacked me.”

As he reached for the knife to take it back, Rorke seized him by the arm. With a powerful grip, he dug his fingers in between tendon and muscle at Vachel’s wrist forcing his hand open.

“You claim she burned you with a stick from the fire.”

“I have said it is so! It is there for anyone to see.” Vachel flung back at him. He swore an oath and struggled, but could not free himself.

What was there for all to see in the light from the campfire was the long, slender, burn mark like a brand across Vachel’s palm, much as he would hold a blade, and identical in shape to the one he claimed to have lost.

“As all can surely see,” Rorke shoved Vachel away from him. Once again, he’d been humiliated before his men.

“Return to your campfires,” Rorke told them. “There are many hours before dawn and we have a long ride ahead of us.”

They slowly turned and retreated, until only Vachel remained. With a barely controlled violence, he resheathed the knife at his belt, then turned and stalked away, slipping into the darkness beyond the campfire.

As she watched him, Vivian was seized again by the foreboding of something that lay in the future, something that seemed to have followed them from Amesbury but which she could not see. It lay shrouded in darkness like a pervasive evil and she shivered as if taken with a sudden chill in spite of the warmth from the fire. It was Tarek al Sharif who spoke her thoughts aloud as if he had read them.

“It will end in blood.”

“If he so chooses,” Rorke replied.

They saw no more of Vachel that night, but it made Vivian feel no easier. She knew he was out there, like the darkness, waiting just beyond the edge of the campfire.

Tarek al Sharif slipped into the woods and later brought back two partridges which were set to roasting over the fire. Across the clearing other cook fires burned, the aroma of roasting meat mingling with thick woodsmoke. At others, men murmured amongst themselves as they sat bundled in thick furs against the cold that hovered at the edges of the campfires.

Vivian hadn’t realized how hungry she was, her stomach grumbling noisily as the blue-eyed warrior nimbly carved a leg portion from the roast partridge and handed it to her. She shivered again at the precise, slicing strokes as she imagined that other curved blade in his hands. Each movement was perfectly executed with no waste, accomplishing precisely what he chose, which was to sever limbs from the carcass. She imagined that skillful blade in battle and wondered with a shudder how many Saxons this warrior had killed as the side of Rorke FitzWarren.

Still, she had no fear of him. She sensed that here was someone she could trust—someone very like herself. Although he was not a captive as she was, still he was not Norman. A stranger, far from home, yet Rorke’s men accepted him with the deference accorded a respected warrior.

Rorke laid several more pieces of wood on the fire, then retrieved several rolled furs from the edge of the clearing.

“It is late and we leave at first light.” He untied a thick roll of fur, spreading it on the ground before the fire.

“You will sleep here,” he told her, indicating the fur lined mantle.

Tarek sheathed his blade and sprang nimbly to his feet. He laid out his fur at the other side of the fire, placing himself between them and the rest of the encampment. His curved sword gleamed deadly as he laid it beside him. He drew a thick mantle over him, his hand resting on the handle of the blade.

Across the camp, conversations gradually died away as the other knights made their way to their own pallets, and fell into exhausted sleep. She remained huddled before the fire.

“I cannot take your mantle,” she told Rorke, her chin lifting slightly as she gathered her shawl more tightly about her.

He looked up from the broadsword that he carefully drew from its leather sheath. Like the others, he had removed the cumbersome chain mail tunic and chausses, still wearing the supple leather tunic and breeches. He laid the broadsword at the edge of the fur pallet as Tarek al Sharif had.

“It was not my intention that you should, demoiselle,” he said matter-of-factly. “We will share it’s warmth.”

Her startled gaze met his across the distance between them that suddenly seemed to have  narrowed to the width of the thick fur mantle that lay between them.

“There is barely enough for one,” she protested with sudden alarm, edging closer to the fire. “I am quite used to the cold.”

“I am not, demoiselle,” he said bluntly, giving the distinct impression that the matter was ended before they’d even discussed it. His voice gentled.

“The night is long and will grow much colder. If my men have no objection to sharing their warmth with one another, surely you cannot have any objection.”

She glanced across the fire to where Tarek al Sharif lay rolled alone in his fur mantle, seemingly already asleep.

“He is a very restless sleeper,” Rorke commented. “It can be dangerous to sleep too close as his side.”

She then glanced to his sword.

“I am not a restless sleeper,” he assured her, then added as if to convince her, “You are fully clothed, demoiselle, and I am not given to ravishing young maidens in their sleep.”

With the cold already seeping beneath the edges of her shawl, Vivian reluctantly accepted the fact that if they were to survive the night, it must be together. She slowly approached the fur pallet, taking only a narrow space at the edge for herself and leaving the larger portion for him.

He did not immediately join her, but instead spread the mantle over her. Then, she heard the rhythmic sound of a stone being drawn repeatedly across metal as he sharpened the blade of the broadsword.

He seemed to be giving her time to adjust to their unusual sleeping arrangements, or perhaps lingering as if he was waiting for something. Or someone?  Was it possible that he expected Vachel to return during the night?  She felt no alarm, only a certainty that if Vachel should strike, he would surely die. 

The fire warmed across her face, the heavy mantle and thick fur warmed the rest of her. Her eyes grew heavy. She ached with exhaustion, weariness seeping into her bones with a sort of liquid feeling as if she were sinking into herself. Then there was only the darkness of exhausted sleep.

Much later, Rorke joined her at the fur pallet, drawing the mantle over them both. She lay on her side, knees drawn up, feet tucked beneath the hem of her gown. She shivered slightly at the sudden intrusion of cold air as he joined her but did not waken. Instead, she curled more tightly within herself.

The fur was meant only for one person and Rorke had no intention of waking in the morning with frostbitten hands or backside. And he was certain the closeness of her body on the pallet couldn’t be any more disconcerting than sitting before him in the saddle.

Exhaustion and sleep had eased the rigid tension from her slender body. She lay pliant and completely relaxed in the deep fur, one slender hand tucked beneath her cheek, the other falling over the edge of the fur.

He reached to tuck her hand beneath the thick mantle. It was surprisingly warm and he discovered precisely what was worse than sitting astride a saddle with her slender body nestled against his mail-clad flesh—her slender body nestled against his unrestrained flesh with his hand cradling hers.

“Sweet Jesu!” he swore softly. It was going to be a very long night.

Four

T
he slopes of the hills surrounding the valley were covered by dense forest. They rode through stands of alder and red oak, leaves stained brilliant red in the setting sun and drifting to the ground.

As the slope flattened and fanned out into a valley, they passed a mournful caravan of creaking carts. A lifeless arm had fallen through the slats of one, clad in the coarse woolen tunic of a style commonly worn by Saxon thanes.

Vivian shuddered as an icy hand moved deep inside her. All the horrors she had foreseen and had come to pass, for the carts carried the bodies of Harold’s dead soldiers. Mounted behind her in the saddle, Rorke was stoically silent

A distance apart, huddled figures lined the ridge of a low ravine. They were darkly ominous shapes in the fading light and resembled those harbingers of death—black crows.  As they rode closer, Vivian saw them bend and straighten in a kind of macabre dance as they threw spadefuls of earth into the ravine. At the bottom were grotesquely twisted shapes—the bodies of soldiers and their horses—some still astride, bodies trapped beneath the crushing weight of their fallen mounts.  They were piled on top of one another as if some giant hand had swept them into the ravine. Horrified, Vivian realized they had fallen to their deaths in a downhill charge toward Harold’s army.

“They are Norman,” Rorke said, his voice low and seemingly devoid of any emotion.

Her foreknowledge of Harold’s defeat at Hastings had brought with it an overwhelming sense of loss for the countless Saxons who had died here. But those grotesquely twisted bodies reminded her that Norman soldiers—a great many of them—had died as well.

As a healer she’d seen death among before, the families at Amesbury from disease or an accident. There was an old woman whose time was at an end, an infant whose time had come too soon and could not live. But nothing in her life or her gift of foreknowledge had prepared her for what she saw now.

Instinctively, she wanted to hide from the death and destruction she saw. But she knew she could not. Her gift of inner sight would not allow it as her senses filled with an awareness of the battle now past. Though she tried to block them out, the images came at her with that prescience of vision of things past and future, that was both gift and curse. What old Meg had told her since childhood was never more true about the power of sight that she’d been born with, and her mother before her—
“The gift can bring great joy as well as great sorrow,”
she had explained.
“You must be strong enough to accept both, or it will destroy you.”