E. M. Powell (20 page)

“Not yet.” He kept going, kept her with him.

Then she saw it. Bright flames beneath a tree. The crackle of burning sticks. A plume of smoke.

A shadow skulked through the trees to their left. Then another, and another. The howls again.

With speed fed by terror, she ran with Benedict to the fire.

He yanked a stout burning branch from it and thrust it to her. “Keep it before you.” He pulled out a second for himself.

The shadows emerged from the woods, emboldened that their quarry had stopped. Four. Five. Seven. They prowled forward with low growls that reverberated in one awful sound.

“There’s so many, they keep coming.” Theodosia held out her branch and waved it from one side to another, frantic to keep count.

“Just keep the flames moving.”

The animals paused about six feet away. They continued to thread in and out amongst each other.

Quercus whinnied in terror, eyes rolling and straining at his tied reins.

The biggest wolf’s head whipped round to the source of the noise. It broke from the pack and jumped toward Quercus.

Not their horse.

Quercus spun and kicked out hard with his hind legs. With a loud
crack
, the wolf soared through the air and landed with a yelp in a shower of drifted snow. The pack grumbled loud and long, turning their snarling muzzles back to face Theodosia and Benedict.

A second, smaller wolf surged forward with a savage snarl. It leapt for Benedict as Theodosia screamed, but the knight slashed it away with a sweep of flame.

“Have it, you devil!”

The animal fell to one side and whimpered, the acrid stench of burning fur wafting in the air. The wolf retreated back to its pack, and another licked its burned face.

The others settled into a regular rhythm of passing one another, back and forth, in and out.

Transfixed with fright, Theodosia didn’t dare shift her gaze, the scene livid, hellish through her branch’s flare. “What are they doing?”

“Waiting,” came Benedict’s terse reply.

“Waiting? For what?”

“They’ve tried Quercus. Tried us. Both of us are a bit too much to handle at the moment. So they’ll wait. Wait for one of us to weaken.”

Her voice cracked. “And then?”

“Then they’ll move in for the kill.”

Gray-brown fur gleamed in the light as the wolves continued to circle. “What are we going to do?”

“We have to try and make for Quercus. Get on him and outride the beasts.”

He couldn’t mean it. “But he’s on the other side of them.” Her quick glance at his set jaw told her he could.

A sudden hiss. “Forcurse it.”

She looked again. Benedict’s flames were dying, losing their battle with the snow. He shook his torch hard, but it fizzled out.

Theodosia prayed, willed hers to keep alight, holding it out before her as Benedict grabbed at another.

“How many are left alight?”

Branches snapped from the undergrowth stopped his answer. The wolves turned as one to look.

With a terrific snarl, the burned one took off toward the source of the noise. The bushes moved in abrupt movement, then a wheezing thump ended in a whine.

The dense growth parted. The monstrous form of le Bret emerged, a dead wolf impaled on his huge broadsword, Fitzurse and de Tracy close behind.

“You look like you need our aid, Sir Palmer,” said Fitzurse.

Theodosia’s breath stalled. How?
How?

Le Bret heaved the dead wolf off his blade, and it thudded into the fallen snow and rolled over, blood seeping from its side.

The pack converged on the strangers. Their snarls and howls of rage echoed through the woods.

Le Bret swung his sword again and caught another wolf’s ear. With a yelp it scuttled backward, the others close around it.

“Forgive the delay. We won’t be long.” Fitzurse’s blue gaze locked on hers through the curtain of falling snow, worse, far worse, than the wolves’ orange eyes.

She looked to Benedict.

He wasn’t there.

“Hey!” De Tracy’s yell told her he’d found him.

She looked in the direction of his pointed sword.
Dear God, no.

Benedict ran for Quercus, the distraction of the wolves momentary but enough. He leapt into the saddle and yanked the reins free. With a shake of his head to Theodosia, he kicked hard at the horse’s sides. Quercus took off through the trees.

He’d left her to them.
She swayed on her feet, sounds blurred. She fought her faint, clinging to her branch.

“Leave him!”

She turned, stumbling, at Fitzurse’s clipped order to the knights. They stopped, watching their leader.

He raised his weapon to the leading wolf. “I’m sorry, my beauty,” he said, “but you leave me no choice.” He raised his sword in both hands and sideswiped. With a sickening crunch, he sliced through the animal’s neck and took its head clean off.

CHAPTER 14

“God’s eyes, what a strike!” De Tracy’s roar echoed out as Theodosia ducked away with a cry.

Blood sprayed from the animal’s severed neck, and its head bounced and rolled through the snow in a slash of scarlet.

Her faint increased, darkening her vision, numbing all sound.

Fitzurse advanced toward the pack with his stained sword up, boots ploughing through the lividly stained snow, as uncaring of the carnage as he had been in the cathedral. “I’m ready.” His voice was soft, measured.

Far away.

The animals turned and fled to guttural calls and hoots from the other two knights.

Theodosia gulped in deep breaths, struggled to keep hold of the branch in hands that seemed to weigh a ton.

Fitzurse turned to her. “Sister.”

She held her branch out and waved it, her last feeble defense. “Stay away from me.”

He clicked his fingers, and his companions stepped to him.

“Or what?” Fitzurse stepped toward her through the blood-soaked snow, flanked by the other two monsters. He gestured to the dense trees. “You’ll run in there? Oh, no, you can’t. You’ll get eaten.” He stepped closer.

Theodosia raised the branch.

His sword flashed out and struck it from her hands, the wood grazing her palms with the strength of his blow.

“No!” She jerked back, fighting for balance. She fell to her knees, hands grasped before her, urging a blow that would take her head from her shoulders too. Take it, and with it her secret of where her mother was. With her gaze defiantly fixed on Fitzurse, she summoned her act of contrition, ready for her end. “
Deus meus, ex toto corde p-paenitet —
”

Fitzurse’s clout to her cheek sent her sprawling into the snow.

“Shut up.”

Her skull hammered from his strike, the sight of the three knights’ boots swam before her. She struggled to draw breath, to carry on with her prayer, but a sob of pain and shock choked her.

“Get her on her feet, le Bret. De Tracy, keep an eye out for those animals.”

The huge knight’s hand grabbed her shoulder and hauled her upright.

Fitzurse regarded her with complete, icy calm. “You are shockingly uncooperative.” He stuck his sword point-first into the snowy ground. “But even you’ve got more virility than Palmer.” He removed a couple of coils of rope from his belt. “Running away, like a yellow-breeched knave, just like I accused him on the riverbank.” He gave a tight smile. “Not able to see a job through, remember?”

A job. That’s what she’d been to that coward, that renegade Benedict Palmer. It was what she was to them all, what Mama was. A job that had to be finished. She’d not help them in their foul work, any of them.

“You’d have done well to listen to me, then,” continued Fitzurse, uncoiling the rope with swift movements. “Carried on running yourself, instead of stopping the noble Hugh de Morville ending the dog.” He nodded to le Bret. “Put her hands behind her back.”

Le Bret shifted his iron grip to wrench back one of her wrists. Pain sparked up her arms as he crossed it with the other.

“Let go of me!” She struggled uselessly in his hold as Fitzurse coiled the coarse rope tight around her wrists, then bit into her skin as he secured it with firm knots.

Benedict had said Fitzurse wanted her bound before he burned her to find out what she knew. The fire behind them. Damped down by the snow but still hot. She pulled all her weight against them, tried to kick out with her feet, to sink her teeth into le Bret’s chain-mailed arm.

“You see what I mean about lack of cooperation, le Bret?” Fitzurse sounded amused as he passed the rope around her body, looping it across her chest.

She gasped in pain as he pulled it cruelly tight to knot it at the back. Her arms were now completely pinned behind her, the rope cutting into her breasts if she tried to move her hands. Still she kicked.

“De Tracy,” came Fitzurse’s clipped command. “We need another pair of hands for the sister.”

De Tracy complied, coming to stand before her as she struggled.

“Bend her over,” said Fitzurse.

De Tracy gave a wide leer. “This should warm us up.”

Her stomach lurched. Dear God, they couldn’t. Not her virginity, her chastity. “Stop it, please, stop it!”

De Tracy grabbed her by the neck and forced her down until she was bent double.

A noose went round her neck and panic overtook her. She thrashed in the knights’ grasp, screaming for someone, anyone, to help her.

Fitzurse crouched behind at her ankles and tied them as tightly together as he had her arms. Then his hands were busy at the front of her neck.

“Let her go,” he said.

The red-bearded knight stepped away as le Bret loosed her. Fitzurse stood before her.

“Stand up,” he said.

Theodosia staggered upright. The noose squeezed tight around her throat, pulled by the cord attached to her ankles, stopping her breath, her voice. Blood pounded in her face, her head. She tried to scream. None came.

Fitzurse nodded. “That will suffice.” He grasped the back of her neck and forced her over again.

The rope around her throat loosened, and she pulled in fast, frantic gasps of air.

He brought his face close to hers with blue eyes that shone with an unnatural pleasure. “You need to keep very, very still, or you will throttle yourself. Do you hear me?”

She returned Fitzurse’s gaze, though her heart seemed to want to break from her chest. “I hear you.” Her voice came thick with her own spittle. His warning had given her a tiny hope. Thrown on the fire, she’d struggle like a dervish. Fitzurse’s ropes would take her more mercifully than the burning embers; she would die without revealing Mama’s location.

Fitzurse clicked his fingers to the waiting le Bret. “Bring her back to the horses.”

The horses?

Le Bret’s enormous arm went around her waist, and he flung her over his shoulder.

The huge knight’s odious smell caught the back of her throat. Worse, he steadied his hold on her with one huge hand wedged between her thighs. But she kept completely still. Fitzurse’s hideous snare might well prove her salvation, but only if certain death was the only alternative. Horses were not fire, not death, at least not yet. The snow-covered forest floor swayed beneath her in time with le Bret’s giant strides, purest white now they’d left the blood-ravaged clearing. The hoofprints of a single horse were rapidly filling in with the relentless snow. Quercus’s tracks, from when that betrayer Benedict had fled when he could. Fled to save himself. Abandoning her, throwing her to the savage dog that was Fitzurse.

“Put her on mine.” Fitzurse again.

Le Bret swung her up and over the horse’s back. She landed smack on her stomach on the saddle, and her breath gasped out.

Fitzurse appeared next to her at his mount’s neck, one hand on the reins. “Secure her, le Bret.” Another rope was lashed across her back, tightening her as hard against the saddle as Benedict had tied their bundle of clothes.

Fitzurse raised a gauntlet-clad hand and grasped her jaw, forcing her to look at him. “I had such delightful plans for you. Thanks to that knave Palmer, they’ve been thwarted.”

“Good.” She forced the word out.

“Thwarted. Not stopped.” He tightened his grip. “When I get to Polesworth Abbey, I will have double the pleasure. Your mother first, then you.”

He knew.
She stared at him, stomach contracted. “Who betrayed us?” she whispered.

“You did, you clever girl.” He let go her jaw and tapped her playfully on the nose. “Clever and pretty, so those idiot pilgrims remembered you.”

It was her fault. Her stupid, sinful pride in her wits. She wanted to scream out as Fitzurse gathered the reins and mounted the stallion beside her.

She’d led Fitzurse to Mama, led death to Mama’s door like she’d sworn she never would.

Settling in the saddle, he crushed her ribs against the saddle horn to her right. He patted the back of her neck. “But I’m not sure just how I will dispatch you both. The Bull’s only one option, and I have many, many others. It’ll pass the time to Polesworth if I tell you about them.” He clicked to his horse, and it set off. “But I promise you, Sister. For all the trouble you have caused me, I will make sure you get something very, very special.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Palmer sat astride Quercus in a thicket of concealing evergreens, watching out for the party of knights. And Theodosia. What could be taking them so long?

He had no guarantees they’d come this way, but it was the only route through this thick-grown woodland, a rough path with the signs of few travelers on it.

He peered ahead through the darkness. Still no sign. His guess might be wrong, Fitzurse might have taken a different direction. No. This was the quickest route to Polesworth. And Polesworth would be where he was headed. Another guess, but Palmer had no other choice.

The snow had near stopped, with only a few lazy flakes drifting down. With the clouds clearing fast, weak starlight and the sliver of moon gave some light, made many times stronger by the reflection of the bright fallen snow. He cursed it quietly. The cover of darkness would’ve been better. At least it gave him an early warning on the wolves. They still patrolled the night, and their distant howls sent fear right through him. But he needed the beasts. They were his only chance to secure Theodosia’s freedom. If she was still alive. Doubt knotted his guts.