The Warrior's Game (20 page)

Ami’s hurt grew until all she wanted was to grab him by the front of his tunic and demand that he include her in what he planned. After being used so badly by so many, she wasn't capable of granting anyone blind trust, not even him.

Again, as he’d done yesterday when he’d found her on the road to her own properties, he but watched her, saying nothing. At last, the need to speak overwhelmed Ami. “Wearing it will make it seem as if you still rode with me,” she said, her voice low, her tone defeated.

Some of the blankness softened from Michel’s face while a little warmth returned to his gaze. He reached out to take her face in his hands. Ami sighed as he lowered his head to touch his mouth to hers. He filled his kiss with all the passion he owned for her.

Lord, but he was a dangerous man. It didn’t matter that he offered her nothing but a lover’s passion, or that he did not trust her enough to tell her something important, nay, something vital to her future. She couldn’t stop herself from relaxing against him.

Michel slipped his arms around her, pulling her close to him. The need to once again hold him against her body flared. Ami’s mouth opened under his kiss then the lines of her body melded to his in primal invitation.

As that happened Michel released her to look down into her face. “This is why you must give me my cloak,” he said, his voice gentle when his expression wasn’t. “Ami, what sort of gentlewoman so brazenly offers her body and her lusts to a commoner?”

Ami frowned at him. Brazen she had been, both last night and on the landing, but he had no quibble with that or so he'd said. As for the details of Michel’s birth, what did that matter? Although he had not and perhaps could never dismiss those details, she had named them unimportant the instant she decided Michel was the man she would marry.

“More to the point, cheri,” Michel continued, the word falling so stiffly from his tongue that it lost any sense of endearment, “tell me what wellborn men think of gentlewomen who offer themselves to commoners. If you wear my cloak and Sir Enguerran recognizes it, he’ll rightly assume we spent the night together. Ami, how would a man who prizes his lineage react if he learned the woman he must marry spent the night with a baseborn brute, one who most assuredly made free with that same woman?”

Ami drew a sharp breath as she stepped back into the world she'd yesterday wanted to discard as pretentious and false. She knew just the sort of violence this could elicit from most knights. But Sir Enguerran wasn’t just a knight. He was a toady who’d long since traded a man’s natural esteem in hope of advancement, only to fail, destroying both his career and his pride.

“He’ll kill me,” she said. It was a statement of fact, nothing less.

And this was the man Michel expected to carry her safely from here to Thame? How could he believe a man so desperate would simply hand her over to his opponent once they arrived? “And you will let me go to him?” she cried out in new fear.

“I will, doing so in the complete certainty that you will not be harmed prior to reaching Thame,” Michel replied, his voice yet flat. “Sir Enguerran wants you, and not just because John removed your bride price. The knight believes that marrying you will shield him from his king's rightful retribution.

“So, not only must you return my cloak,” Michel continued, “but you must lie if he asks with whom you traveled this day. Tell him I was the king’s man, commanded to protect you until you came into the custody of one of your pursuers. You can convince him of this by offering a few of your choice and unladylike words regarding our king and his game. Can you do this?”

Ami nodded. He smiled at her. It wasn’t that wide, easy grin she’d seen in the shepherd’s hut, or even that amused quirk she enjoyed. Instead, the corners of his mouth twisted into what was a grim upward-moving line.

“If you doubt your ability, I hereby testify you can be very convincing, having found myself on the wrong end of your clever and blunt-spoken manner,” he said, no softening of his voice to indicate he meant this as a compliment.

Ami gave a pained laugh as his words pierced like a spear’s thrust. She felt her heart closing, her walls rebuilding, to protect her from what threatened to hurt her beyond all bearing.

“It’s a facet of myself I will always cherish,” she said, so he would know that she would never change no matter what her manner cost. “And, you’re right to say Sir Enguerran isn’t likely to question me too deeply, not if John gives me to him without asking for a single pence in return for my hand.” These were bitter words, indeed. She was worthless, so declared her warden and her king.

Michel opened the pin that held his cloak around Ami. At his tug the thick garment slipped from her shoulders. Yet standing frozen where she was, she watched him toss the garment over his arm. It was only as he started to turn away from her that Ami’s pain grew past the point that she couldn’t bear it.

Reaching out, she caught him by the arm. Michel looked back at her, his brows raised in question. All she read in his gaze was his need to be on his horse and riding from here. From her.

A thousand words crowded onto her tongue. She wanted him to repeat his promise of marriage. She wanted to know which was true, all the lover’s words he’d spilled to her last night or what he’d said that first day in John’s chamber, that she was worth less even than the forty-five pounds of her original bride price. She wanted to tell him that she couldn’t trust Sir Enguerran to simply hand her to him at the abbey. Most of all she wanted Michel to understand how hard it was for her to trust him with her life. She'd been so many years alone, without kith or kin to support her. She would not survive it if he betrayed her, not now that he owned her heart.

Instead, all she could whisper was, “Don’t leave me.”

Not so much as a flicker of warmth filled his gaze. “Trust me,” was all he said, then turned to mount his horse.

Ami watched Michel disappear along the road toward Reading. He took with him any hope Ami had left. For a long moment she stared at the empty roadbed. The wind blasted past her, bearing in its depths the low of distant oxen from some nearby farmhouse. On the verge, browned grasses flattened only to ripple back to standing as the gust died.

Trust him? How, when he didn't trust her enough to tell her what he planned? She drew a pained breath.

Going to her mare, Ami retrieved her own outer garment from where she’d tied it to the back of the saddle. As her cloak unrolled, the sealed fold of parchment the king had given her fell from it. She picked up the missive, holding it between her hands as she studied the imprint of the king’s seal.

Here it was, her only remaining hope of escape from Sir Enguerran should Michel fail. Becoming a nun was a better fate than marrying her neighbor, especially when such a union promised only Ami's pain. However to have this choice she'd have to escape Enguerran once they were near the abbey. And that would take an act of God. Nonetheless, if a miracle presented itself, she wanted the option to act.

Ami shoved the parchment up inside the tight-fitting sleeve of her dark green undergown. The vellum softened as it absorbed the warmth of her skin, molding itself to the shape of her arm. When she was certain it would stay where it was, she donned her cloak, pulling it tightly around her and waited for her neighbor’s arrival.

She didn’t wait long. Far sooner than Michel had predicted Sir Enguerran’s troop crested the hill in front of her. Ami gave a surprised hiss. About this, Michel was right: her neighbor rode with almost twice the number of men she knew he kept on his estates. The woman riding next to him was the reason why.

Even swathed in a thick cloak lined with dark fur, her hair hidden beneath a thick wimple, Ami recognized Roheise de Say. Roheise looked far younger with her graying hair concealed, but then she’d been known as a beauty in her younger years. It was the noblewoman’s household guard who had expanded the number of Sir Enguerran’s men. Apparently Roheise’s determination to spark rebellion against England’s king was so great she would willingly ride alongside a toady she wouldn't otherwise have deigned to notice.

Ami let her gaze shift to Enguerran d’Oilly. Atop his spotted horse the knight slumped in his saddle. Rather than his chain mail, her neighbor wore only a sleeveless leather hauberk not unlike the one Michel wore beneath his thick cloak. As Michel had said, one of Sir Enguerran’s arms was splinted and bound across his chest in a sling. Her neighbor looked hollow-eyed, his face gray and drawn in pain, or exhaustion. Or both.

What sort of idiot rode around the countryside with a broken arm? Ami answered her own question. Only an idiot desperate to protect himself from something that he knew could hurt him worse than the pain of a moving horse. Such a man would hardly give up his chance of rescue without a fight.

As the knight and noblewoman brought their mounts to a halt in front of her, Ami drew herself to her tallest and readied herself for combat. No matter what Michel believed, she would never betray him.

The noblewoman smiled as if this meeting were an encounter in the bailey of Winchester’s castle. Ah, but behind that smile Ami caught a flicker of desperation. By now the noblewoman must surely know about the king’s game. That was, Roheise knew John had promised his ward’s hand in marriage to whomever caught Ami first, be that Sir Enguerran or Michel.

How that must terrify Roheise. If Michel won, the noblewoman’s plot shattered, for at that point the only thing her false charge would accomplish was to speed the abbot’s wedding ceremony; the most common legal redress for rape was to force the victim to marry her attacker.

“Why, Lady de la Beres, at last we’ve caught up to you, after following you half of yesterday and all of this morning,” Roheise said, her smooth voice revealing no hint of worry. “I cannot tell you how appalled I was when Sir Enguerran deduced you had left the custody of the king’s escort. When night fell yestereven, I despaired on your behalf. What horrors I imagined, you traveling alone upon this road.”

Ami bit back a scornful breath at this. The only horror Roheise dwelt upon was the possibility of her sacrificial lamb escaping her.

“Horrors?” Sir Enguerran protested to Roheise before Ami had a chance to reply. His voice was rusty and thick. Given his injury and that this was his second day on the road in bad weather, he was fortunate he wasn’t already raving with a fever. “You may have suffered such thoughts, my lady, but I never did,” he continued. “And wasn’t I right not to worry? See, here she is just as I said she’d be, whole and hearty. Lady de la Beres was never in any danger, not on the roads at this end of England. Indeed, the only horror the lady could have suffered in this neighborhood was that baseborn Frenchman finding her before me.”

Enguerran offered a laugh that sounded more like a cough. “I’ve done it, I’ve bested the lauded Sir Michel de Martigny and brought my wife, safe and secure, into my hands,” he crowed, right well pleased with himself.

“On the contrary, Sir Enguerran,” Roheise told him, the impatience in her voice reflected in her steely eyes. “Who do you think kept Lady de la Beres from reaching her own manor house yesterday, then forced her to turn toward the north? Who do you think also forced himself into your bride’s bed last night?”

Sir Enguerran frowned, a single crease forming between his brows marking his befuddlement. “Who?” he asked.

“Why, that very same Michel de Martigny,” the noblewoman said, her voice sharp in exasperation. “The commoner has already had his way with her. No doubt he took her by force.” Roheise made this pronouncement with as much drama as she might have had she offered the accusation before John’s full court as she originally intended.

Sir Enguerran straightened in his saddle with a jerk. For that instant the dullness of pain and oncoming illness ebbed from his gaze. He gaped at Ami. She waited for him to curse her or Michel. Instead, the surprise in his face returned to befuddlement. With his good hand, he reached beneath his cloak’s hood to scratch at his head, then shifted again to face the noblewoman.

“But that’s not possible,” he said. “A man cannot be in two places at one time and we saw Michel de Martigny on the Oxford road yesterday. He and his men spent the night in Thame. Don’t you remember we located the house that de Martigny leased in Thame proper? That was before the abbot told us the lady hadn’t been presented to him and we realized de Martigny, honorless and base commoner that he is, sought to portray he already had my bride in the hope that I might abandon my pursuit.”

Sir Enguerran made a scornful noise. “I must say I wasn’t surprised by such behavior from one who lacks any of the refinement of his betters. Nor do common brutes like him have the wit to puzzle things out the way men of purer birth do. I daresay he’s now scouring the way from Thame to Winchester, perhaps just now beginning to understand that Lady de la Beres left the road yesterday.”

Disappointment, surprise, and exasperation played across Roheise’s face. Ami pressed her gloved fingers to her lips to hide her smile. This was what happened when someone tried to craft a tool from a fool.

And judging from Sir Enguerran’s reaction it seemed Roheise hadn’t shared the details of her plot with him. Ami supposed that shouldn’t surprise her. Nobles didn’t trust unaligned tufthunters like him. The only toadies England's highest tolerated were those spineless creatures permanently bound, tongue, soul and fortunes, to their own houses.

“How clever of you Sir Enguerran, to divine that I left the Oxford road to go home,” Ami said. “You are also right to say it wasn’t Sir Michel riding with me.”

Ami folded her hands as if to plead. “I pray you will forgive me, sir, for not doing as His Majesty commanded and making my way to Thame. Know that it was never my intention to escape you, only this foul competition. I was angry that the king had made me into a prize like some purse offered at a joust. In my rage it didn’t matter a whit to me that I’d lose my escort if I turned my horse in any direction save Thame.”

Here she offered a helpless shrug as she threw herself into a tale as fabulous as any shared to pass the hours on long winter nights. “Had I taken the time to think, I would have realized that His Majesty couldn’t afford to completely abandon me for fear of courtly reaction to his deed. While the troop at my back did leave me, a soldier was sent to track me. When he found me he took control of my horse as Lady Roheise suggests, forcing me northward again toward Thame where he thought you and Sir Michel would be waiting.”

Lady Roheise gave a sharp laugh at this concoction. “If that were so, and the man was commanded to protect you, then why would that soldier abandon you here along the roadside?” she demanded, her jaw tight as she poked at what she thought the weakest point of Ami’s story.

“My mare's done for,” Ami replied, the lift of her hand indicating her mount, now laying on the ground. “She won’t go another foot. That's when the man said he recognized Sir Enguerran’s spotted horse and there was no point in lingering with me when Sir Enguerran’s approaching troop was the only movement he could see for miles. He complained that he was cold and tired, that all he wanted was a decent meal at the nearest cookshop in Reading.”

Ami spoke on, seeking to lay another blow, one sure to repay Roheise for her attempts to use her. “However, Lady Roheise rightly feared for me. Because of John Plantagenet and this despicable game of his, I am ruined, my good name destroyed. His Majesty commanded his man to remain at my side once he found me, to see that I didn’t again leave the road. No matter how I argued, the soldier couldn’t be persuaded that our king didn’t intend for him to sleep in the same chamber with me. Either that, or he was loathe to sleep out-of-doors on a nasty night. I had to share a shepherd’s hut with him last night.”

When she was done speaking, Ami slanted a glance at Roheise. Patent disbelief filled the noblewoman's face. Rightly so. That Ami had traveled unescorted and unchaperoned was ruination enough. No woman would ever blurt out the tale Ami had just told. Instead, she would have buried it beyond the ears of any man, woman or child.

Disgust curled the corner of Sir Enguerran's mouth. “You spent the night in the same hut with a common soldier?”

“I had no choice,” Ami protested. “If you now deem me a less than suitable bride because of this, I suppose I cannot blame you.”

“You lie!” Roheise snapped with enough vehemence to startle Ami into staring at her. Bright color flared in the noblewoman’s cheeks as her eyes narrowed. “That was no soldier I saw riding with you a few moments ago. No matter the distance, I know it was de Martigny, just as I knew it wasn’t either de Martigny or you we saw on the road yesterday.”

“It was Sir Michel on the road,” Enguerran growled, his face tense. “Didn’t the man we saw yesterday ride the mercenary’s horse? No stranger could do that, not when a knight’s warhorse is trained to his owner’s seat and touch. Did that man not also wear de Martigny’s painted mail? A man’s armor is fitted to him and him alone, and doesn’t move easily to another, not without giving an armorer time to tailor it. Nay my lady, if there’s only one thing in this world I know to be God’s truth, it’s that the man we saw at Lady de la Beres’s side a few moments ago wasn’t Michel de Martigny.”

Ami caught a breath in understanding. Enguerran wasn’t just determined to reject Michel’s presence, he was desperate to see that everyone else rejected it as well. For good reason. Once it was discovered Michel had spent the night with her, word that Enguerran had been duped by a common mercenary’s ruse would spread the way a house on fire set all London alight. Before the week was out folk would no longer only chuckle up their sleeves about him, they’d laugh openly.

“By God, but you are impossible!” Roheise snarled at the knight, her hands tightening on her reins until her mount danced. “I am tired of arguing with you over every obvious detail. Think! If de Martigny is clever enough to hire a woman to play the part of Lady de la Beres then he is also clever enough to hire a man to play the part of himself.”

Ami fought her laugh as Roheise again offered her former pawn yet another chance to strike at her.

“I pray you, my lady, say no more of Michel de Martigny in my presence else I may be ruined beyond all redemption.” Ami cried out, knowing her words would carry to every one of the listening soldiers. “You know how easily rumors fly, and how folk care nothing for whether the tales they spread are truth or not. It’s bad enough that the king’s soldier will return to his barracks eager to talk about His Majesty’s strange competition and how he spent the night in a gentlewoman’s presence. The tale will swiftly take on a life of its own until folk believe something untoward happened in that hut when it didn’t.”

Ami raced on, before she thought the better of what she did and cowardice took hold of her. “Are there not soldiers here today, listening to every word we say?” she asked, raising a hand to her audience.

Every man in the troop behind Roheise and Enguerran gawked at their betters, some leaning far to the side in their saddles so they could take in this unexpected bit of entertainment. Some shook their heads over Ami's claim that any of their own might exaggerate or gossip, while others muttered in agreement.

“Won’t they want to repeat your assertion that it was Sir Michel with me? Before long, there will be two rumors flying about me. Even though neither is true, everyone will soon believe I trysted with both the mercenary and the king’s soldier.

“Poor Sir Enguerran.” Ami shifted to look at the man she decidedly didn’t want to marry. “He already does me a great kindness, wanting to marry me despite all that has happened. What sort of reward does this do him, turning his new wife into a woman the world names a whore unfit for either marriage or convent?”

There it was, in all its destructive glory. With those few words, Ami lost everything she’d worked so hard to protect these last four years. Ah, but as she ruined herself, Roheise’s plot crumbled. There would be no charge of rape, and no rebellion at least not from the noblewoman’s spur. No whore could be raped.