Castles in the Air (25 page)

His gaze clung to hers, absorbing her reassurance eagerly. Then the light went out, and he said, “Sir Joseph. Sir Joseph…Satan.”

Comprehension came slowly, unwillingly. “
Sir Joseph
told you to abduct Margery?”

A faint nod answered her.

“Because she’s an heiress?”

An even fainter nod.

Now the full anguish swept her, and she cried, “Where’s Margery?”

“Sir Joseph.”

She sat back on her heels, her hands pressed to her mouth.

“With mercenaries…he took. I stabbed…him in the leg. His horse…”

“His horse did this to you?”

“He laughed. Raymond…”

Her fear grew weightier with his every labored word. “Raymond?”

“She said…he’d come.” As he spoke, he seemed to shrink. “He did. He fought…”

She spaced her words, enunciated clearly, wanted no confusion in this greatest of queries. “Is…he…dead?”

“Nay. Still fighting…” In a gigantic effort, the last
and greatest he would make, he pointed toward the end of the meadow.

“He still fought when last you saw him?”

“Not killing him. Sir Joseph said…”

“Not to kill him? Why? So that Sir Joseph could torture him?” She rose in a fury. She would go after her daughter. She would save Margery from the cruel hands of this bastard uncle.

She would go after her husband. She would save—

Before she could take her first step, a faint murmur stopped her. “God go…with you.”

She froze.

She didn’t want to look down. She’d forgotten about Denys, and she didn’t want to be reminded. She didn’t want to see him.

But she
could
see him, see his face floating in the tears of her conscience.

Hopeless young eyes faced a pitiable death, alone in a wood. Every fiber of her soul wanted to run to her child, to her husband, but…what if this was her child? What if Margery was dying like this? Juliana would want somebody to stay. To help. To comfort.

What the consequences of remaining would be to Margery, to Raymond, she didn’t dare consider. She sank back down again. “Why? Tell me why you listened to that…to Satan.”

“Riches in a dowry. Waiting for me. Margery…only a woman. Resigned.”

“And you believed that? Of
Margery
?”

“Stupid. She told me.” He sighed. “Already knew it. Never…touched her.”

She bit back the several pithy comments that hovered on her tongue.

“Only…so poor. Starved. Kicked…like a cur.” Tears built in his eyes, and he pleaded for understanding. “Mother…died.”

Against her will, her outrage dissipated, and she brought more water.

She dripped it into his mouth, but even the exertion of swallowing seemed too much. When he quit, exhausted, she settled herself beside him and soothed his face with the cloth. “I’ve done stupid things, too. I avoided marriage with Raymond, because I was afraid and because Sir Joseph urged me not to wed.”

“Satan,” he whispered, his voice a thin thread of pain.

“His fine schemes are woven into the web of my life.” Oh, God, it was true. Sir Joseph had manipulated her, and her voice wobbled as she continued, “You and I, you see, have much in common. We’re battered souls who met with an evildoer and succumbed to his lures.”

“Not you.” She almost couldn’t hear him. “Not your fault.”

“Aye, it is.” The responsibility for this disaster sat squarely on her shoulders, and she said, “If I hadn’t been such a coward about Sir Joseph, this would never have happened.”

“My fault.”

“Nay. If I had been more gracious to you—”

“Always gracious.” Denys’s voice was stronger with a spurt of indignation.

“I could have been better.” Wretched, she said, “I will make you a promise. Because I’m older and wiser, and have more than”—she swallowed—“more than a little responsibility for this disaster, I’ll take your sin as mine.”

His dull eyes fixed on her with something like hope.

“I’ll do penance for it all my days, according to the priest’s justice.” The priest would scream about that promise, she knew, but willingly she would take his admonitions. “In this way, your soul will be free.”

“
My
sin,” he whispered frantically. “No penance.”

“You’ve done your penance today,” she answered.

Denys closed his eyes while Juliana held his hand. She thought he had slipped from consciousness, but as the afternoon shadows lengthened, he opened them again. His lips moved, but he had no more breath. “Aye.” Aye, he would let her take the sin. Then, “Gracious thanks.”

Tears clouded her eyes as she gazed on the racked body of the youth. A refrain sang in her mind. “Margery. Margery.” Fainter, but sharper, “Raymond.”

She wished Denys would die to ease his torment, and knew that, in truth, she wished he would die so she could ease her own torment by action. So odd a death vigil, she thought, sitting here with the warm spring sun on her face and the birds singing all around. Released from winter’s spell, life sprang from the ground in crocuses and dandelions, and whispered to her with a zephyr’s breath.

He whispered, too, “Go,” but his blinking eyes told his bleak and lonely tale.

Although her heart misgave her, she said, “Nay. I’ll stay.”

His pallor grew, and as the sun sank behind the trees and the last light disappeared from the meadow, he whispered, “Mother,” and died.

Juliana had thought she would leap to her feet with his dying breath; instead she held his hand as it grew cold and wept for the lad who had no one else to weep for him.

Layamon pumped Keir’s
hand and cried, “How did ye know t’ come? Margery an’ Denys have disappeared. M’lord an’ Lady are chasin’ a troop o’ mercenaries. Lady Margery’s been abducted!”

With a vigor and emotion that plainly shocked Layamon, the travel-weary Keir swore a collection of international oaths that put plain English oaths to shame. “I know all about the mercenaries,” he barked. “They originated at Bartonhale under the command of the man I was supposed to watch. How long ago did Raymond and Juliana leave?”

Layamon straightened his spine to its greatest tension. “Early this mornin’!”

Keir looked at the setting sun and swore again.

“Salisbury came arunnin’ at noon, half dead wi’ excitement, squawkin’ that a troupe o’ men had killed Tosti an’ m’lord an’ lady were goin’ after them, an’ we were t’ come at once.”

Keir’s features froze. “Why haven’t you left?”

Scraping his toe in the dirt, Layamon blushed. “I haven’t ever put together an expedition such as this
one before. I guess there’s some things I don’t know how t’ do.”

Keir flexed his hands in frustration, but knew he couldn’t—mustn’t—berate the man-at-arms for inexperience. “Come inside with me. I must eat, and there I’ll give my orders. Prepare the fastest steed in the stables for me.”

Bewildered, Layamon glanced about the bailey. “But sir! When ye left for Bartonhale, ye took th’ fastest horse we had, yet ye return on as sorry a nag as I’ve ever seen. Wot happened?”

Layamon shrank as Keir turned on him, savage where he was normally stolid. “It was stolen by the same thief who will kill your lord and lady if I don’t find them at once.”

Layamon stared after him with open mouth, then turned to the stable boy. “Prepare Anglais fer Sir Keir. He rides tonight.”

Juliana trembled when the unearthly scream echoed again. She didn’t know which way to flee. The almost full moon cast ghost-white shadows in the midnight woods, and she was lost.

“Lost in more ways than one,” she said aloud, then hushed as the great silence swallowed her voice. A silence broken only by those eerie shrieks that drove her hither and yon.

Peering through the trees, she could see a clearing all silver with moonlight, and turned her horse toward it. There she could take her bearings from the stars. The approach to the clearing was easy, and as she examined the foliage, she realized she had found the trail of Sir Joseph’s
mercenary troupe. She should be glad, but instead she trembled.

Oh, God, she was afraid. Stupid, spineless Juliana was afraid.

She didn’t want to be tortured like Tosti. She didn’t want to die like Denys. But she did want her Margery back. She would help her Raymond. And Raymond was never, ever afraid.

Squaring her shoulders, lifting her chin, she pretended courage and moved toward the clearing—and she heard it, a scream of anger and pain. A shriek that blinded her, made her fall, made her cry.

When it finally died away, she found herself far back in the woods. Her palfrey danced in twitches and shudders. Her skin crawled as if she’d been tied to an ant pile.

Who was out there? What was out there?

Dull and clumsy with fear, she dismounted and crept toward the clearing. Her breath came in uneven whooshes of sound, then it stopped—even as her heart stopped.

In the center of the clearing, three large bodies lay sprawled, their arms outflung in death’s supplication. She rushed forward, calling, “Raymond!” tripped on a tree root, and plunged full length onto the ground.

It knocked sense back into her. Guardedly, she lifted her head.

A fire pit still glowed beside the bodies, offering a share of earthly warmth to those evermore unheedful of it. One body still wore a helmet that glinted in the moonlight, but even from the distance Juliana could see the dent that crushed it into his forehead. The others wore nothing. They had been stripped by the carrion crows that were their travelling companions.

Mercenaries. These were the mercenaries of whom Denys had spoken, and some great calamity had come on them.

A calamity called Raymond?

She got up slowly, but caution arrived too late. Nothing moved except the trickle of smoke, pale and ghostly as it lifted toward the star-studded heavens.

Sidling along in the shadow of the trees, her eyes moved back and forth, back and forth. Her feet crunched branches and dead leaves, regardless of her care. Her hands swung first before her, then behind, trying to anticipate any attack. She swept the clearing with her gaze, trying to see into the darkness—then one of the shadows moved.

Something—someone—stooped against a mighty oak. It looked like a hunchback, bent and twisted. She crept toward it, but it didn’t move.

It was a man. She could see the glint of the chain-mail hauberk that protected his chest.

It was…it looked like…

“Raymond?” she asked.

The stooped creature straightened with a jingle of iron.

It
was
Raymond, haggard and marked by battle, but Raymond nevertheless. She started forward at a run. His eyes glittered in the dark. He panted and snorted, and when she reached him, he leaped at her and screamed that terrible scream.

Valeska caught the reins of Keir’s destrier, and as the stallion leaped and pawed, she hung on with a strength unimagined in her aged frame. “You’ll take us, Keir.”

Keir tried to calm the war-horse and insisted, “You’ll slow me down.”

“Raymond will have need of us,” Valeska cried.

“Nay!” He jerked the reins to release them from her grip; Anglais reared. Valeska went flying, and though Keir watched anxiously he wasn’t surprised when she did a flip in the air and landed on her feet. Taking advantage of their distance, he called, “I’ll send word as soon as I can.”

Valeska muttered Slavic maledictions that boded ill for the continuity of Keir’s line as she watched him ride out of the bailey. Returning to Ella and Dagna in the shadow of the keep, she said, “’Tis the evil one, Sir Joseph, who’s wrought such havoc with our people. Keir leaves without us. Layamon prepares to ride without a thought.”

Ella demanded, “When are you leaving?” The two old crones looked at their charge, then exchanged glances, and two slow, wicked smiles broke over their faces.

Juliana found herself huddled on the ground some distance from the madman at the tree. Her fingers plugged her ears; she shivered with a palsy.

With all the pent-up despair of a condemned prisoner, Raymond shrieked again. She felt as if her heart had been ripped out and left bleeding on the ground. This was terror, the terror of a woman who approaches her lover to find he has become the devil’s spawn.

The scream came again and again, louder and louder. She didn’t know how he forced that noise from his throat, and she cringed even as the horror receded.

“Raymond?” she whispered.

He said nothing. He did not move, although even her thin voice reverberated through the silent woods.

Slowly, with many a nervous glance behind, she sat up. Pulling her knees up under her chin, she rested it there and watched the creature who watched her.

Oh, it was Raymond, but Raymond as she’d never seen him. His sleeves and breeches hung in shreds. His hair hung in tangled thread before his eyes. His lips were swollen. And his eyes never blinked.

Mad. Bewitched. She didn’t know what had happened to Raymond, but she was afraid. Afraid she couldn’t help him, and she had to help him. He was her love, the man who’d given her freedom and passion, and she would not—could not—abandon him.

Standing, she balanced herself as carefully as if she stood on Ella’s high rope and sidled toward Raymond. She moved, then stopped, moved, then stopped. “Sweet Raymond,” she crooned, and her voice shook.

Huddling back against the trunk, he showed his teeth in a snarl.

She stopped. He calmed. And she stared, unaware of the tears that dripped down her cheeks. “Oh, my dear Raymond.”

Like some evil darkness that ate at his skin, an iron collar circled his throat. The man who could not accept even an affectionate hug about his neck had been collared and chained like a dog—or a Saracen slave.

Well had Sir Joseph chosen his revenge.

The fear which shamed her faded under the sharp prod of pity. With every step, she murmured soothing nonsense, sang bits of French cradle songs, trying to charm Raymond as she would charm a bird to her hand.

No acknowledgment lit his face. He neither recognized her nor his name.

Slipping around him, she noted that the short chain was connected to a bolt driven deep into the oak. She saw that his hands, too, were restrained, wrapped around the tree trunk behind his back. Restive, he moved his arms, and she heard the clank of iron, saw the chain, about ten stout links long, biting into the bark.

When she emerged from behind the tree, his renewed tumult moved her to murmur, “I didn’t leave you.” Dredging her mind for ways to hypnotize the beast, she approached him, moving slowly and deliberately. “I couldn’t leave you.” Extending her hands, fingers spread, she showed him her palms. “I have nothing here except a caress for you. Would you let me give it to you?”

He no longer showed his teeth. The dark eyes still glinted, but he blinked as if confused.

“Blessed Raymond, husband of mine, please let me help you.” She wanted to touch him, but courage deserted her again. But he looked so like Denys—wounded, abandoned—she couldn’t hesitate. “Please,” she whispered again. With a tension that made her arms ache, she lifted them. He didn’t move, didn’t breathe. He seemed to be waiting, and when she placed her open palms on his chest, he sighed. One long, alleviating exhale, and he collapsed against the tree.

She found she’d been holding her breath, too, and released it in a sigh of relief. “Raymond.” Sliding her palms around to his back, she whispered, “Raymond. I have no snow with which to bring you to your senses, so I will bathe you in kisses and dry you with hugs, and you’ll be mine forever more.” She leaned against him. The iron of his hauberk pricked her cheek, and beneath it she heard his strong heart slowing to a normal beat.

“Juliana?” He tried to enfold her in his arms, but
the chain caught him, and every muscle in his body spasmed in fury.

“Don’t…” Compassion caught her by the throat, and she could scarcely whisper, “Don’t hurt yourself more.” She lifted her head and looked at him. Through the plethora of swellings and cuts that marred his perfect visage, she thought she saw tears; she knew she saw terror.

“Juliana.” His voice sounded as if it had been scraped by a dull knife. “How did you find me?”

“I followed the trail of bodies.”

“They’ve got Margery.”

“I know.”

“I couldn’t stop them.”

“No man could have done more.”

“If I could have slain that swine, Joseph”—he gasped a little—“you didn’t know, but ’tis Sir Joseph who has her.”

She bit her lip against the audible agony of his voice. His recitation seemed to have exhausted him, for he slipped further down the tree. To curb his rapid, guilty admissions, she said, “Aye. Denys told me who took her.”

“The youth?”

“Is dead.”

“Another failure.” He moaned. “Another…”

His knees gave way. He slithered down before she could restrain him. The collar and chain caught him; he gagged and choked while, frantic, she tried to lift him. At last he raised himself, and blood, warm and sticky, fell in droplets onto her head.

A fit of shaking took them both, and when he could speak, he said, “I am so tired. I just want to sit down, and I can’t. I can’t sit down. I’m so”—his body strained away from the tree—“tired.”

“Lean on me, then. You’re light as Saint Luke’s bird.”

“Saint Luke’s bird is an ox,” he said suspiciously.

“So it is.” He tried to pull himself up, but she pushed her body hard against his. “You’ve supported me for every moment you’ve known me. This is a small settlement on a big debt.” She tightened her grip on his ribs. “Lean on me.”

Released by her succor from the chain’s coercion, he slowly relaxed. He tested her strength in bits, easing onto her like the slow flow of honey in December. Tilting his head back, he seemed to slip away—to find himself again, she hoped.

Braced beneath him, she took his weight. Her joints creaked, her muscles groaned, but she rejoiced in the trust he placed in her. How long they stood there, welded together by his need and her strength, she did not know. She only knew the moon’s light had touched her face when Raymond stiffened and opened his eyes.

“Listen.”

Straining, she heard it, too. The thunder of a horse’s hooves.

“He’s coming fast,” she said. “How can he ride so in such a tangle of forest?”

“The road lies just beyond the trees,” he answered, hoarsely. “Sir Joseph wished for me to be discovered in my dishonor, taunted and ridiculed like any common felon.”

“Do you wish me to stop the rider?”

If alarm could have freed him, he would be unshackled. “Nay! ’Tis most likely an enemy, and I fear for you. Hide in yonder trees and don’t come out unless the horseman proves to be a friend.”

Indignation shot through her, stiffening her spine. “I will not.”

“You’ll do as you’re directed.”

“The last time I did as directed I found myself locked in a filthy, spider-ridden hut.” Pulling the dagger Salisbury had given her from her belt, she shifted to shield Raymond from the road. Over her shoulder, she said, “Accept my protection or be damned to you.”

The horse was almost upon them, travelling at a madman’s pace, and Raymond said urgently, “I am already damned, so I beg of you, don’t subject me to this torture.”

Ignoring him, she tensed for a fight, but the great white horse flew past, then reined in so abruptly it pawed the air.

“Keir!” Raymond shouted, while at the same time Keir roared, “Raymond!”

Rolling out of the saddle, Keir tossed the reins to Juliana and ran to the tree. Juliana thought he would simply smash Raymond against the trunk in an exuberance of sentiment, but he pulled up short. His brief flare of emotion vanished without a trace. As he walked around the tree, he became Keir again, observing Raymond’s dilemma without expression. Completing the circuit, he looked Raymond in the eye. “I see I should have brought my smithery.”