Authors: Delle Jacobs
Faerie
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2012 Delle Jacobs
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612185934
ISBN-10: 1612185932
PROLOGUE
GLOUCESTER PALACE, GLOUCESTER, ENGLAND
JULY, AD 1093
“T
HAT ONE,” SAID
the crone. One long, bony finger emerged from her dark green sleeve to point into the courtyard beyond the shadowed arcade. Tall, gaunt, old, and ashen-faced, she was everything Rufus was not.
He frowned, but quickly hid it. No one told him what to decide. He, William II, son of the Great Conqueror, was King of England.
It was an odd demand she made. Of all the king’s knights, only Philippe le Peregrine wanted no fief, no wife, no family, only to roam at the king’s will, to fight and make peace at the king’s command. In return, Rufus had given the Peregrine his word to honor the knight’s wish, and Rufus made it a point of honor to keep promises to his knights.
Still, as he studied his favorite knight from the obscuring shadows of the colonnade, he began to see the possibilities. Aye, it just might do. In fact, he could not have dreamed up a better opportunity himself.
Again he frowned, this time purposely, as if she had angered him. But his mind was spinning with thoughts on how he could use her demand. “He will not do it,” he replied.
“Oh, he will, Red King,” the crone said, her gravelly voice crackling. “He is bound to you, just as you are bound to me by your father’s oath. You know what will happen if you do not keep it.”
He rubbed the crisp curls of his red beard. Aye, he knew, and he needed her. She knew he would comply. He honored his father above all men, and that first Norman King of England had trusted this strange old woman implicitly, enough to give her free rein in the promise she exacted.
So, then: His own promise betrayed to honor a prior one of his father’s making. It would not be the first time a king had not kept his word. “So it shall be,” he replied at last. “But how to do it? It will not be easy.”
The crone laughed, but she did not smile. “You will know,” she said, and again the rough chuckle shook the bag of bones that was her body. She focused her gleaming green eyes on him, and Rufus tried to look away, only to be caught in their compelling intensity. A chill rippled down his spine. She did not possess the Evil Eye, nor was she a witch—he had met his share of evil beings and had a sense for them. But in some indefinable way, she was magical. For what she knew, Rufus would pay her price, any price, just as his father had done.
With a jerking gait that made him think of walking sticks, she passed through the pale arcs of sunlight and shadows of the colonnade to the stone wall between Rufus’s private courtyard and the palace bailey. She glanced back, then pulled the hood of her moss-colored cloak over her straw-like hair. Her cloak blended with the shadows, then faded into the morning mist.
The mist thinned and vanished. The crone was gone. Rufus tilted his head and squinted. Nothing was left. Only the wall.
For a moment he wished for her strange powers. Imagine a king who could walk through stone. Imagine a king standing in a room when no one knew he was there.
CASTLE BRODIN, YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND
AUGUST, AD 1093
T
HE FOREST HAD
always been like a friend to her. Not that Leonie minded the hot sun in the meadow, and the bright, hot weather was a boon that would bring plenty to sustain the castle and village through the coming winter. But the forest was her place, as if she had been born with an affinity for its cool shade and deep green, quiet majesty.
In fact, like all of the Faeriekind, she had a kinship to the forest, but that was the secret she dared not share with any human. Only old Ealga knew. And the old woman who had been handmaid to Leonie of Bosewood since the girl’s birth lived in constant fear that Leonie’s carelessness would someday betray her.
In the meadow that lay between the woods and Castle Brodin, the sun bore down in blistering brightness on the burned necks of the villeins harvesting the grain. But beneath the canopy of leaves, the air stirred into a cooling breeze. Leonie let her veil fall to her shoulders to cool her scalp, for no one was in the forest except her and her favorite little boy, Sigge, the curious dreamer who always wanted to know everything and do everything.
Other times of year, Leonie and her little friend might roam about the forest for other reasons. But now was the time to harvest the club moss she used to make green dye for the prized Castle Brodin wool. And it was Leonie who made the perfect green dye. But the secrets of other colors—the perfect scarlet, the brightest yellow, or a blue as bright and clear as the summer sky—eluded her.
Leonie grinned as she spotted a clump of club moss, growing like a tiny fir tree beneath the first of the year’s fallen leaves. “Sigge, come here,” she called, focusing her gaze on the clump as she knelt.
“In a minute,” the boy responded.
She frowned. The child was uncharacteristically quiet. “No, come, Sigge. You need to see what it looks like and how it hides beneath the leaves if you are going to help me.”
“Coming.”
She smirked in silence at the rustle of noise. That was more like him. She swept back the leaves, unable to contain her own exuberance any longer. “This is just right, Sigge,” she said, gently fingering the succulent branches of the moss. Her fingers worked into the dark, cool, loose soil beneath the plant, carefully dividing it so that she would leave some of the plant to regrow. Already she was imagining the rich green dye simmering in the pots over the castle hearths.
The calm air shattered with the child’s scream. “Leonie! Help! Help me!”
Terror sliced straight to her heart. She jumped to her feet and turned to see the little boy hopping on one foot, blood pouring from the other one into a spreading blotch in the dirt. His face was already paling.
She leaped up and ran. “Sit down, Sigge! I’m coming!”
“It hurts, Leonie!” The child sank to his knees just as she reached him. She plopped down, scooped him into her arms, and
turned the sole of his foot upward. Bile rose in her throat at the bright red blood gushing out.
“Aye, Sigge, I know,” she said and glanced around her. She could stop it. Just touch and let the healing flow through her hands. She knew never to do it. But.
Frowning, she pulled off her veil and dabbed at the wound. She couldn’t wipe fast enough. Her stomach sickened at the thought of her favorite little boy bleeding to death.
She fought her fears to find a calmly pleasant tone for her voice, as if nothing were seriously wrong. “What happened, Sigge?”
“A piece of metal. Ow!”
“Metal? In the forest?” Strange. Nobody discarded valuable metal. “Someone must have lost it.”
“I saw it and I thought I could dig it up. But I didn’t see the other part.”
Sigge gasped hard, and tears flowed down his cheeks. For all her calm appearance, Leonie’s heart was pounding rapidly. From her infancy she’d been taught never to show her strange skill, lest she be thought a witch. The old Celtic part of her knew what she had to do. But her Norman half screamed at the danger. Normans did not understand such Celtic things.
No one else was in the woods outside Castle Brodin. She could close the wound and no one else could. There was no choice, and she knew it.
“Leonie!” Leonie jerked her head toward the meadow beyond the wood and the sound of her cousin Claire’s voice. “Leonie, where are you? You must come now!”
Leonie gritted her teeth. Why now? Claire would be within the wood in no time. Close as they were, Claire was only an ordinary human and knew nothing of Leonie’s secret. She had to move fast, now. Just enough to stop the blood. A swift swipe of her thumb. Tricky, but if she did it right, not even Sigge would suspect.