The Warrior's Game (10 page)

“Nay,” he breathed against her mouth.

Before she had time to resist he caught her hands in his then stepped out of her embrace. Space opened up between them, cold and empty. Crying out, Ami’s eyes flew open.

Warm blue now lurked behind the dull gray of his eyes. The hard lines of his face had softened. He looked younger, less careworn.

Maud was right. This was the man who had caught her eye, and more.

He twined his fingers between hers to trap her hands.

“I am the one,” he said in harsh whisper, echoing her thought. “You will give yourself to me.”

The crudeness of his comment destroyed all Ami’s pleasure. She yanked her hands from his to cross her arms in front of her. How could she have been such an idiot? He was no different than any other man who'd tried his hand at seducing her, caring for nothing save getting her beneath him so he might brag to everyone that he’d done the impossible and futtered the unattainable Lady de la Beres.

A hurt far greater than Ami wanted to acknowledge caught her in its grasp. “In that you are wrong, mercenary,” she said in her harshest voice, her chin lifted to its most imperious angle. “You are nothing to me, and I would rather die than give myself to you. Now leave me.”

The blue faded from Michel’s eyes. Without a word, he pivoted and strode around the corner of the building. Once he was gone Ami gave way to her weakening knees and slipped down the wall to sit in the pile of her mantle, feeling as crumpled as Maud had looked in the same position a few moments ago.

Her veil band lay within arm’s reach, glinting in the afternoon sun, each spark a chide. Aye, she was a lusting tart who had tried to give herself not once, but twice to a man set on debasing her, to a commoner, a mercenary who sold himself to one employer after another.

Tears threatened to rise. She lifted her chin, her head braced against the wall behind her, refusing to let them escape her eyes. She hadn't cried since Richard's death, not since she'd learned she was to come into the king's custody. She would not cry now, not over some commoner who deserved to be torn limb from limb for misusing her.

Her eyes narrowed. Roheise would have her rebellion even if it meant Ami's own destruction.

But how could she destroy a man whose mouth tasted of barley water, the only man since Richard whose touch could set her afire?

A tear slipped from the confinement of her lashes and trailed down the curve of her cheek. She scrubbed it out of existence. Millicent was wrong. Her mother wouldn't have been proud. The woman Ami's mother had taught her to be would never have considered a man's life worthy repayment for some slight, no matter how heinous.

God help her. Four years in this stinking, selfish place had changed her into one of the manipulative, uncaring women she so despised, and she hadn't even noticed that it had happened.

Saddle leather creaking, his mail jangling, Michel slowed his mount from a trot to a walk. The horse settled into the slower pace, his breath steaming from his nostrils. It was colder than usual for November, promising a deeper winter than the last. Not that the chill affected Michel. Between his cloak, the surcoat he wore atop his mail, and the thick undergarments that protected his skin from his armor, he was more than warm enough.

Although he and his troop had been on the road for only a few hours, the sun already hung near the horizon. Slanting rays of orange and mauve reached out across the earth’s face to tint all they touched. The moon, showing only half its face, had risen hours earlier and now drifted almost directly above them in a sea of steadily darkening blue.

The men riding with Michel took advantage of their horses' rest period to trade comments and easy jests. Roger’s whistle sang out, that same tune, a ditty about a man pursuing a woman who left him with desires painfully unfulfilled.

Uncertain if his captain meant the tune to prick him, Michel bore the goad in uncomfortable silence only to call for a return to their earlier pace as swiftly as was good for their mounts. The faster movement put a blessed end to Roger’s whistling.

Although this ground-eating pace was the most efficient way to reach Amicia’s nearest property before sunset, speed wasn’t the only reason Michel chose it. He wanted as much distance as possible between him and a game that had lost all its amusement.

His fury over Amicia turning her shoulder to him still astonished him. Why had he reacted to that gesture when only moments before he'd accepted her verbal insults for the pretense they were? Moreover, unlike masculine contempt, which Michel always answered with his sword, the contempt of well-born bitches was unworthy of his reaction.

Instead, it had taken all his will not to lift his fist to her when she turned her shoulder to him. If she hadn’t spoken to him, dropping both his title and her contempt to embrace a new intimacy, he might still have been standing in the yard striving to control himself.

Even worse, as his rage dissipated it had been replaced by unfettered desire. Even if events conspired to keep him from marrying her, he would never forget the way her mouth moved on his as she gave free rein to her own passion and strove to awaken his. It had been everything he expected and more.

Even now and as furious as he was with her, heat stirred at the memory of her opening her thighs to him. Lord, but with all his soul he wanted her beneath him. Better yet, she wanted him with equal hunger.

Or rather, her body wanted him.

Michel glared at his horse’s mane. Damn that woman and her prejudice. All he asked was that she admit he was unique, different from the other men who pursued her. It was an admission that her breeding wouldn’t allow her to give him, and he’d been a fool to expect it.

As he drew another angry breath he caught the faint scent of woodsmoke. That scent brought with it the promise of walls, warmth, and food. Michel slowed his horse to a walk, looking for the bent birch that had been his landmark when he’d come this way to fetch Sir Enguerran to Winchester the previous week; then, he’d but ridden past the manor, having no legitimate reason to pry within its walls.

He found the tree he sought just as the sun's orb nestled into its bed on the horizon. Golden rays stretched high above it, as if it strained to escape its nightly sinking into the earth’s embrace. In the crisp air above him starlings massed in their twilight ritual, a twittering and writhing black cloud against a painted sky. A raven’s call rang out from a nearby copse, the caw a harsh rasping question as it returned to its aerie. An answer came from a yipping fox, starting out on its nightly hunt.

Reaching the hilltop, Michel reined in his horse to study the landscape, this time with an owner's eye. So long had the hand of Man been at work here there was no longer anything uncertain in the land's rise and fall. By God’s commandment had forests of ash and oak been swept off the earth's face, taming a tangled wilderness into placid, fertile fields.

The downward slope ended in a slight depression. It was here that the finest of Amicia’s manor houses stood, only a quarter mile from the top of this rise. It's enclosing wall embraced at least a half virgate of land. Set on a stone foundation as tall as a man, the hall reached two storeys and was topped by a roof of thick thatch. The dying day stained its walls purple while the night’s newly awakened breath sent the smoke streaming from its roof vent in Michel’s direction.

A village of a good two hundred dwellings, enough folk to support the manor and create a bit of profit for its master, lay outside the enclosing walls. There was something about the way these houses squatted into the earth, their reed roofs reaching almost to the ground, that made them look snug, capable of enduring the worst weather winter could offer.

All in all what spread out before him was the ideal reflection of the settled, fruitful future Michel had always imagined for himself. This was a place where he could forge his legacy and bring forth sons, knowing that they would carry his line forward long after he was dust.

Aye, but to have this piece of pastoral heaven he had to marry Amicia de la Beres. Michel freed a harsh breath, his hands tightening on the reins enough to make his steed shift uneasily.

“All you do is sour your stomach and guarantee you won’t sleep tonight,” Roger said, urging his horse to come abreast of Michel’s.

When Michel shot him a narrow-eyed look, Roger only smiled, the lift of his mouth decidedly cheerful. “What would you say to a distraction, a chance to vent some of what boils in you? Aye, that’s what you need. A little venting and you’ll sleep like a babe this night instead of stewing until dawn in your bitter thoughts.”

“What are you babbling about?” Michel demanded.

“That,” Roger said, pointing to the west. “The light befuddles my eye. Tell me what you think. Are they about half a mile from us or farther?”

Startled, Michel shifted in the saddle to look where Roger indicated. Silhouetted against the sunset on the opposite ridge line was a troop of mounted men, the gleam of metal on both horses and riders suggesting they were of a military nature. The troop was making their way toward the manor house.

Irritation drained from Michel. He gave thanks to Roger. This is how men lost their lives; they let thoughts of females and pleasure divert them from more important matters.

Blinking into the last bit of brilliance, Michel counted and came up with two dozen men, a force twice the size of his own. But were they a threat? As he watched the man who seemed to lead the riders called out, pointing toward Michel and his men. Whatever he said was lost in the distance but Michel didn’t need words to know the man’s intent. All the riders immediately turned their horses and set their mounts into a gallop in Michel's direction.

Horse flesh was expensive. No man drove the wealth of his stables across a night-darkening land, not when hidden burrows and jutting tree roots could ruin an animal. Unless, that man was desperate to hide something and believed he knew the landscape well enough to take the risk.

Sir Enguerran d'Oilly was just such a man.

“To arms,” Michel warned with no particular urgency in his voice.

“How many?” one of his own called from the rear of his troop. They'd not yet crested the hill and couldn't see the threat.

“Double our number,” Michel replied. “Come forward all of you, shields at the ready and align yourselves along the hilltop. We’ll make our stand right here on the lip. Our attacker must think he has cat’s eyes since he comes for us when we’ve got no more than a half hour of light left. I’m loath to lose any of you because we battle in the dark. Let’s make this a swift victory.”

Michel watched, waiting for some sign of who those who came were. He had it as the leader's horse crossed an open areas. Twilight couldn't disguise the creature’s piebald markings.

His opinion of the knight, already low, sank to new depths. The attack Michel saw forming on the plain below him was the desperate ploy of a knight incompetent in matters of war. Michel's first tactical lesson as a squire had been that defending a height was easier than forcing an assault up a slope. Thus were most castles raised upon mounds, whether natural or man-made. If Sir Enguerran was representative of the sort of knights who inhabited England then Michel knew why they’d refused to come to John’s aid in the king’s Continental war: they feared their own deaths.

“What, no suggestion we run for the manor below us?” Roger asked with a laugh, his sword already in hand and his circular shield on his opposite arm. “We’re as close to it as yon troop. We could reach its walls with ease.”

“I think not,” Michel said, the tension that always claimed his body prior to battle creeping over him. “There may be no sanctuary for us within those walls. Besides, I believe I like this distraction of yours well indeed.”

Michel straightened his helmet on his head, then took his kite-shaped shield from its saddle rest. Trained to that sound, the big gelding’s head lifted and he danced in anticipation. With his shield on his arm Michel slid his sword from its sheath, his gloved hand fitting perfectly into its well-worn grip.

Their attackers were now within a hundred yards and closing quickly. Armor rattling, Michel's men leaned forward in their saddles, ready to deliver their first strokes. Michel’s mind emptied of all thought, even that of Amicia de la Beres. He lifted his sword, ready to use the skills his grandsire had taught him, skills that one of his class wasn’t supposed to own.

Roger was right. This was the perfect diversion.

So drear was the pall cast by this dark wet day that not even the cheery crackle of the fire could banish it. Save for Lady Adelberta’s tuneless humming, something she did every time she spun, the women in Winchester’s queen's hall were swathed in a silence so deep the rain on the shutters sounded like drumming to Ami’s ears. She took another stitch in the framed cloth in front of her, resenting the project and giving thanks that it would soon be too dark to embroider.

It wasn’t just that this length of linen was another in the endless yards of embroideries she and the other wards produced; decorating the many churches the king and queen patronized was their purpose as wards. It was that the chore demanded she sit. More than anything Ami wanted to pace furiously back and forth across the hall until she carved a rut into the floor.

Michel was gone, not just from the castle but from Winchester, and no one, not even Walter and his many eyes and ears, knew where the mercenary had gone or when he might return. Even Sir Hubert, Winchester Castle’s castellan, knew no more than Michel had begged leave to tend to personal business.

Personal business. The only personal business Ami could contrive for Michel, a foreigner on England’s soil, was the stripping of wealth from her properties.

Michel?

Ami’s needle hovered over the taut surface of the linen in her frame. She stared unseeing at the pattern on the fabric. When had she started thinking of that horrid, thieving brute solely by his Christian name, the way a lover might?

Perhaps it was because they’d almost been lovers.

Shame heated her cheeks. Her wholly untoward lust for that mercenary afflicted her like some dread disease that she couldn't cure. Ami jabbed her needle into her embroidery, only to stab the point into her guiding finger at the back of the frame.

Snarling, she leaned back on her stool, the injured digit in her mouth as she sucked away the pain and blood. God help her, but she hated being in the king’s custody. And, she hated being a woman. Because of her gender she was trapped here, helpless and blind, unable to protect her home.

Sitting tailor-fashion on the floor beside Ami’s stool, Maud lifted her head from her own sewing project, a new chemise for her mistress. The maid offered her employer a concerned and questioning look.

“I pricked myself,” Ami muttered around the finger in her mouth.

Compassion filled Maud’s smile. “My poor lady. You’re as nervous as a cat today, worse even than yesterday,” she said, turning her gaze back to her own needle. “It’s a shame Lady Eleanor took the minstrels with her. You could use an hour’s dancing to settle yourself.”

Ami caught back the urge to throw her embroidery across the room and bellow in frustration. Dancing? Her world was crashing down around her ears and Maud talked of dancing as if the movement of Ami’s feet would solve every problem.

“Lady de la Beres?”

Ami swiveled on her stool to find one of Lady Roheise’s servants standing before her. The maid was swathed in a thick cloak. The garment’s hem was stained with mud and shimmered with moisture, its appearance just foul enough to suggest a day spent on the road.

Ami gnashed her teeth in disbelief. Could this day get any worse?

"Aye?" she asked, then glanced around the hall to see if anyone watched. Every one did. All eyes were aimed in her direction when the last thing Ami needed was for any of the women in this room to believe she’d aligned herself with Roheise and her cause.

“My lady has just returned to Winchester from London this day but fell ill on route,” the maid said. “Not wishing to share her ailment with her fellow wards she’s taken temporary lodging within town for the night.” Although the maid’s voice wasn’t raised the hall was so quiet that her words rang around them.

The corner of Ami’s mouth quirked against the irony. Roheise didn’t wish to share her ailment with those of her own rank, but thought nothing of infecting commoners.

“Remembering yours as a friendly face in this hall,” the maid continued, “she wonders if you would consent to serve as her chatelaine for the night?”

It was a canny message, crafted to deflect curiosity over why a baron’s widow might call a knight’s daughter to her side. Nor was there a woman in the room who could or would refuse the summons. Their world honored service above all else. Roheise’s request was a mark of distinction, so much so that Maud was already afoot and searching for Ami’s outer garments in their chest.

Only Ami knew the message’s true purpose. The noblewoman no doubt raged over Ami’s failure to deliver what she'd promised and wished to vent her anger in privacy.

“But of course I will, doing so to repay your lady her favor. I cannot tell you how grateful I was for that posset your lady gave me last week. It did much to ease my distress after my audience with our king,” Ami replied, offering listening ears an explanation for why she should receive this honor.

“My lady is nothing if not generous,” the servant agreed with what seemed an honest enough smile.

Again Ami cursed herself for a fool. She had known from the start she wouldn't likely survive a game played between nobles and kings, now it was time to pay the piper. Wanting more than anything to find a safe way to win free of Roheise, Ami rose from her stool as Maud handed her her mantle and her linen headdress.

Ami threw her outer garment on over her second best attire, a yellow sarcenet undergown and a fine green woolen overgown, then removed her silk wimple; she wasn't risking that fragile garment to the weather. She considered donning the linen veil on her own only to set it on her chair; it was far too complex to do on her own. It would have to wait until Maud was free to arrange it properly.

"The scarf as well," she told her maid, who again bent into the chest, this time seeking Ami's woolen winter scarf. For the sake of fashion Ami’s mantle had no hood, thus the scarf was needed to protect her head and headdress from the wet.

As Maud found and handed her the scarf, Ami added, "And you get your cloak as well. You're coming with me."

That brought Maud upright on her knees with a start, her eyebrows lifted at this unexpected command. Lady Roheise’s maid frowned a little. “There’s no need to bring your own maid, my lady. Trust me, between my lady and our host's household, we’ve servants aplenty already.”

Ami knew that, but she didn’t want to be alone and friendless in the enemy’s camp. “My maid has certain skills when it comes to healing.”

Aye, and certain they were. Thank heavens no one in the hall knew Maud’s healing gifts were limited to wrapping linen around wounds and making an effective mustard plaster.

Maud blinked at hearing herself described this way. A tiny crease appeared between her delicate brows as she came to her feet, closing the chest as she did. A similar worried pleat appeared on the brow of Roheise’s maid. That was the only protest either dared offer. Ami might not be a noblewoman, but no servant had the right to naysay a knight’s daughter.

Maud took the wimple. “My lady, if you’ll bow your head a little,” she said, ruching the linen headdress with its complex folds and chin strap in her hands.

Roheise’s servant shifted impatiently. “Lady Roheise hoped you might come immediately.”

Ami paused. So Roheise was worse than furious. To delay would only make matters worse.

“She’s right, Maud,” Ami said, taking her woolen scarf from her startled maid to tie it over her hair. “It takes forever to arrange that thing, and the lady needs me. The scarf will suffice for now. Get your things and lock our chest,” she finished.

With their outerwear in place, Ami and Maud followed Roheise’s maid from the hall to find a pair of de Say household soldiers waiting at the base of the hall’s stairs. All of them hunched their shoulders against a pelting rain and made their way in silence down Winchester’s sodden streets.

Hidden behind the thick gray clouds that owned the sky the sun was beginning to set, or so said the steadily darkening atmosphere. Night’s coming was the signal for all merchants to cease their labors. Up and down the lanes wood clapped against wood as shutters closed on shop fronts. Those workmen and journeymen who didn’t live with their masters shouted their good-nights, anxious to be behind their own doors and at their rest. Apprentices sprinted home after the final chore of the day.

Wafting through one cookshop’s open door came the scent of a hearty stew and the sound of male voices lifted in song. As Ami passed its entry she glanced into its interior. Caught in the friendly flicker of firelight was a group of day laborers, indulging themselves in song along with a cup of ale and bite before they retired to nests of straw in their shared and cheerless corners.

The soldiers stopped before a draper’s house, or so its placard proclaimed. Like all the other homes, the workshop's thick shutters closed, but here they were no doubt also barred to protect the man’s precious fabric from the skulking night. At three storeys tall this structure wasn’t so different in form from the goldsmith’s abode, which stood only one street over from this place, although the draper's home wasn’t quite as fine. Had Roheise chosen Michel as her sacrificial victim because she couldn’t bear an upstart knighted commoner renting what seemed Winchester’s best residence?

Roheise’s servant opened the house’s street door, dismissing their escort with a wave of her hand. The soldiers retreated into the alley at one side of the house. From there they’d seek the outbuildings in the rear courtyard where, Ami was sure, the others in Roheise’s household guard were making their beds.

Just as in the goldsmith’s house, stairs zigged and zagged up the house’s end wall. At the first storey landing, Roheise’s maid didn’t pause to see if those she led followed. She but opened the hall door, allowing the sounds of a meal in progress to cascade down the stairs, then disappeared into the big room.

As Ami started to follow Maud reached up from the step below to catch her mistress by the hand. “My lady, what are we doing here?” she whispered, the crease between her brows deepening. “Why would a noblewoman want you to be her chatelaine when she knows others among the wards far better than you?”

“I like this honor no better than you, Maud,” Ami replied, not willing to reveal she’d foolishly involved herself with a scheming noblewoman. “We’ll go in, but stay you close to the door. As soon as I can I’ll find a way to excuse us.”

Together they entered the draper’s hall, stopping just inside the door. Rich lengths of fabric covered every wall in the merchant’s hall, reflecting not just the quality of his goods but his wealth, since such a display suggested he didn’t need to sell what were surely some of his most expensive goods. The draper’s whole household was in the hall, seated at dining tables for a late meal. Behind them the hall fire, set in a wall enclosure similar to that in the goldsmith’s house, threw its light if not its heat into the center of the room. That rendered the branches of candles on the tables nothing but the affectation of the wealthy.

In the house’s best chair at the middle of the high table, the chair closest to the fire and its heat, sat a hale and hearty Lady Roheise. Although this was but a casual meal in a commoner’s household, the noblewoman’s gowns were heavy blue silk. A great sapphire glinted on one finger while a necklet of pearls clung to her throat, the warm white of the gems the same color as the hair at the lady’s temples, visible through her silken veil.

To Roheise’s left sat a thin elderly man with a mane of white hair. By his rich attire alone did Ami know him to be the master draper. To Roheise's right sat a portly and equally as aged woman who wore a baron’s ransom in jewels upon her pudgy fingers.

“Why Lady de la Beres, how good of you to come,” Roheise called as her maid came to stand behind her chair.

Ami offered a smile and bob. “Lady Roheise, I give praise to our Lord. I came expecting to see you laid low but you seem quite recovered.”

“Aye so I am by God’s good grace and Mistress Avelin’s wondrous broth,” Roheise replied, touching the bejeweled hand of the woman next to her. The look of affection that passed between the two women was so warm Ami knew Roheise would have chosen this house even if the goldsmith had offered his. Here was more irony: an earl’s daughter doting on a common woman while spurning all other commoners as unworthy of her notice.

“Well then, since it seems you have no need of me after all, my maid and I will return to the king’s hall,” Ami said, with no hope that she might so easily make her escape.

“Why such haste? You’ve only just arrived,” the draper called out, the pride in his booming voice saying he enjoyed hosting his betters no matter how much it cost him. “Please. My house is yours for the night. Stay and take your comfort with us. Lady Roheise has spoken of how you so charmed her last week.

“Come, come,” he insisted, beckoning Ami nearer to the table. “My eyes are old, my lady, and no longer allow me to see with clarity. I’d like to judge for myself if you are as lovely as my noble guest claims.”

The last place Ami wanted to be was deeper in this chamber. Yet, to refuse was rude. More to the point, it would expose to Roheise how nervous Ami was when Ami didn’t need Roheise knowing another thing about her.

She crossed the room and stopped on the other side of the table from the draper. The old man looked up into her face. There was nothing weak about his eyes. Instead they gleamed with enough masculine appreciation to suggest he’d more than once strayed from his wife’s bed, and wouldn’t mind doing so again.

“See you Master Philip, she is all I said of her and more,” Lady Roheise told her host with a little laugh, then looked at Ami. “And my lady, I truly did speak to him of how you and your unusual ways charmed me. That’s why I thought of you when I fell ill on the road,” she said. “So will you bear me company here this night?”

Ami blinked. Although Roheise smiled, the expression in her steely eyes said she no more wanted Ami to stay than Ami wanted to remain. That was fine with Ami.

“I really can’t,” she demurred, scrambling to concoct some reasonable excuse for refusing. “I didn’t expect to be gone for more than an hour or so, thinking if you needed tending through the night my maid could stay. I made no provision for my belongings and am loath to leave them unguarded in the hall when I cannot afford pilfery.”