Defiant (19 page)

“Drop her,” commanded a deep voice.

Everything went still, then the pressure on her hair abruptly released. He shoved her viciously away. Eva stumbled to her knees, her nose practically sliding into the edge of her knife blade. She swept it into her hand and spun to face her attacker and whatever had attacked him.

Jamie was holding him, blade at his neck. Her frenzied gaze met Jamie’s calm one.

“Retrieve your boy.”

She spun again, crouched, scanning. Were there others? Had they gotten Gog? Was he—

There he was, swinging from one arm in the lowest branches of a tree, like some forest thing in one of Father Peter’s strange and beautiful sketches. A third attacker was scrambling up after him, inching out on the branch. Gog loosed his fingers and dropped to the ground where a fourth awaited.

She started running for him. Ry came in from her side, barreling over the sticks and leaves, a few steps ahead; then Jamie appeared from nowhere. With no fanfare and silent, deadly skill, Ry and Jamie moved through the men as if they were lumps of butter, until they were scattered on the earth, melting into the dirt and decaying leaves.

Eva stared in shock, then looked at Gog. He met her eye and . . . grinned. He was panting, his hand was bleeding, and he had a gash across his face, but excitement flashed in his eyes. Eva cleared her throat several times.

“Roger.” It was a croak. A terrible croaking thing, her voice. She cleared it again. “Gog, are you—”

She stopped, aghast to find her throat was unable to be cleared. Something thick was lodged there, and she could not speak.

She looked at Gog, wordless, her mouth open but no words coming out. Gog stared. She heard Jamie murmur to Ruggart Ry, who extended something. She looked down in a daze. It was a waterskin.

“Water,” Jamie murmured. “From upstream.”

She drank. The cool water streamed down her hot, dry throat. It ran down her chin and she kept drinking. Finally, she lowered the waterskin and handed it back with a nod.

“My thanks.” She turned to Gog, who was still staring in shock. “Are you quite a’right?” she asked with great calmness, as if the last moment of speechlessness had not occurred.

The concern on his face washed away under excitement. “Fine, Eva. Fine!” His eyes shone and he patted her arm. Eva suddenly realized he was taller than she. A great deal taller. How could she not have noticed this before? How could she not have witnessed this growth taking place before her very eyes? She felt shocked in a vague, unsettled way.

Jamie and Ry looked between Eva and Roger, then began dragging bodies into the deeper woods. As if leaving them to work this out, however waifs and their charges did such things, she supposed. Unfortunately, she had absolutely no notion how they did such things.

Hunters, murderers, rageful kings, she’d dealt with many obstacles in her life. But never an argument with Roger.

Really, it was not proper that battle could so light one’s inner fire. All she wished for was a cottage near a river, and sun for part of the year.

She waited until Jamie and Ry were well out of sight, then said in a low voice, “Why did you leave me?”

“I am sorry, Eva.” He did not sound sorry, though, bouncing
on the balls of his feet. His blond forelock fell over one eye. “I thought we would separate, come around from behind—”

“You cannot simply leave me,” she snapped, surprising herself.

Gog’s buoyant bouncing stopped. He looked at her in silence. This sort of emotional river was not Eva’s way. Speechlessness and now this, this upwelling of emotion that almost squeezed her throat shut.

“I would never have let them get you, Eva-Weave,” he vowed in a hushed voice. “I was going to come around—”

“You think I wish you nearby to ensure
I
am safe?” She gave an incredulous, hurt little laugh.

“Eva,” he said, his voice somehow stronger. “There were six of them. Six. The same six from the stables. The ones who took Father Peter.

“That means they were sent back, Eva. He knows we are here. And I am not going to hide behind your skirts and let
anyone
take us, Eva. Either of us. On my life.”

They stared at each other, a thousand unsaid things roiling below their silence. Jamie and Ry came into the clearing, shoving out of the trees. Roger straightened, raised his voice, loud enough for them to hear. “I was going to circle around, Eva. Come at them from the back. Protect you.”

“
You
do not protect
me,
” she said in a fierce, concluding tone.

“But he did,” Jamie’s low voice broke in. “If he’d have stayed with you, he’d have been captured. Both of you. Two of them holding you, the other four concentrated against Ry and me. He did well to circle around. It forced them to separate.”

She looked over coldly. Jamie was watching her, paused with his sword half-plunged back into his sheath. “I think it showed a good bit of warrior craft,” he concluded.

“Do you?” she said in a slow, low tone. It was intended as a caution. He did not heed it.

“Aye. Roger had a choice. He made one.” Jamie’s eyes held hers. “It only gave us a few minutes, but that’s all we needed.”

She stared sightless, seeing not Jamie but the past. All the men who had hunted them, all the things that had almost been. Sooth, all the things that
had
been. The murderous rage, the blood, the screaming, the running. And after, the innocent monks who’d tried to help them cast out like bloody jetsam whenever the hunters came on their big black horses, forcing Eva and Gog into the woods, running again.

What did Jamie know of it? Of the years spent protecting Gog, of running? From men like Jamie. Barren fury welled up in her.

If Gog died, she didn’t know what she’d do. Die herself, she supposed. If he was captured, though, oh, the thought of the horror of King John inflicting itself on Gog as it had his father . . . She knew precisely what she’d do: eat her way through the world, up to and including King John, who had started this madness.

Of course, if she was captured . . . . whatever was in store for Gog, ’twould be doubly, trebly, innumerably worse for her.

Best not to think of that.

“That is all we needed, is it?’ she said in a low, barely controlled voice. “A few moments, and all is well again? What would you know of it?”

J
AMIE
watched her closely, in part because she looked like a mine about to explode. Her hands tightened so her painted fingernails bit into her palms. Her jaw worked once or twice, then stilled with great effort. Her gaze bored into his, then ripped away with an almost physical force.

Whatever he had done to her before—and it could be argued that was much—she was tenfold more angry now than anytime before, not for something done, but for something said.

What had he said?

His gaze slide from her rigid, fisted stance to Gog’s animated, boyish bobbing. Something was niggling at the edge of his attention. Something disquieting.

They finished removing signs of a fight while he ticked off events in his mind, and his awareness coalesced around a single irrefutable fact: these men had not been about random attacks or petty robbery. They’d been hunting.

They’d gone directly for Eva and her Gog.

Which meant Mouldin knew Roger was back here and had sent his men back, yet continued on with the priest. Which meant however valuable Roger was, the priest was more valuable yet. As all his value lay in knowledge, Peter of London must know something even more valuable than where the missing heir of d’Endshire was.

T
hey rode hard through the rest of the day, as hard as the horses could handle, moving over to ride inside the treeline whenever they heard hooves or voices drawing near. By Jamie’s estimation, their quarry was no farther on ahead. They were keeping pace. Apparently, this was fast as Mouldin could go as well.

Else he was holding up, waiting for soldiers who would never return.

Or perhaps biding his time for a rendezvous. Or a confrontation.

But that seemed unlikely. These were empty lands, except for the wild things, and the only tracks visible went straight on north, so Jamie rode them onward, ever wary.

As the day wore on, Jamie allowed Eva and Gog to move on ahead a few paces, while he and Ry lagged behind.

Jamie said nothing for a few moments, and finally Ry looked over. “You suspect she knows more than she is saying.”

“I
know
she knows more than she is saying.”

“Why do you not push her, then? You have a long and illustrious history of pushing people into saying and doing things they do not wish to say or do.”

“I have been pushing her.” Although not as much as he could have.

Eva’s upright, slender back swayed as she pointed out something to Roger off to their right. The faded, tight-fitting tunic was cornflower blue, so she looked a bit like a flower herself, which again, he reminded himself, was ridiculous. She’d attempted a taming braid and enclosure in the morn, but strong breezes and hot spring sun had rendered her hair defiant. Now, by midday, she had the bindings off, her hair knotted in a complicated concoction atop her head, held in place by a few peeled sticks, allowing only wisps to fall down. They stuck to the sheen of her sun-heated neck.

He greatly appreciated the view.

“And our plan?” Ry broke into his reverie. “Are you going to be a ‘very bad man’?”

“I am.”

“How?”

Jamie gathered the reins more tightly as a hare bounded out from the ferns, making Dickon startle. The horse reared up slightly, and Jamie put his hand on the horse’s neck, calming him. “If Mouldin keeps on thusly, we will come very close to the town of Gracious Hill.”

He felt Ry examining his profile. “I don’t think she believed you about leaving her with a one-eyed Scotsman.”

“Angus owes me.”

Ry looked skeptical. “What will you tell him?”

Angus, compatriot in years past, had been the most loyal, the most ruthless, the most angry, of Jamie’s former companions. And he owed Jamie a blood debt. He also weighed in at over fifteen stone. He would be an excellent, if frightening, watchdog.

“I shall tell him what I need him to do,” Jamie said.

And then he’d never see her again. He’d leave her captivating, clever, butterfly self behind and never see her again.

T
HEY
rode through the springtime sun for two days. Roger spent a great deal of his time talking with Ry and Jamie, discussing blade edges and hilts and the correct wood for bows and other questions that would help him kill someone. Or, she admitted, prevent someone from killing him.

Gog looked quite pleased to be standing with two such strong knights, with their bright swords and clinky mail. She had not been able to breed this out of him. Despite being raised around monks who chanted and prayed, and woodland creatures who ate and mated, Roger was a boy fast becoming a man, and showed fervent devotion to such things as swords and the men who wielded them. This, sadly, had proven beyond her ability to prevent.

In the mornings, the sun would burn through the mists, giving the mornings a fresh, amber ambience. The light came from no single place; the wood simply glowed with gold. Wet green branches and dark brown trunks glistened with dew. The air was fresh and clean and cool. Small birds trilled morning songs. It was a glorious spring.

At night, she would hunker close to the fire. The men would polish their swords and talk in low voices, including Roger in their discussions, while the horses crunched grass and nickered in the background and the fire burned bright in the little pits Jamie dug.

These were comforting sounds, these quiet friends who worked so seamlessly together. She and Roger were this way as well, except there was more chatter, she admitted. But this quiet, this was nice as well. It did not shiver with the fearful quality she often felt in the night.

But of course Jamie and Ry
were
what she’d been fearing. The fear, having been founded, and thus satisfied, must have left to haunt others who had not yet had their nightmares realized in the form of dark-eyed knights and their closest friends.

Occasionally, they would burst out in quiet laughter. It was a good sound. A good scene, Roger sitting with men who smiled at him.

The problem lay in what was to come. The problem lay in Jamie. The problem lay in Eva and her nighttime dreams.

He’d sit cross-legged by the fire, sword balanced across his knees, wiping it down with the devotion of a master with his tools. He would listen to Ry, or Roger, mayhap smile or offer some notion; then his gaze would slide to hers and hold.

Then something hot and shivery would move through her, like a fiery, burning icicle. Being watched by Jamie was a dangerous proposition. He was a beast in his prime, his body honed to a taut cord of musculature that practically vibrated masculinity. Controlled, predatory, intent. On her.

Unfortunately, there was no room for passion, for caring, and most positively no room for a dangerous knight with pretty eyes and a shredded heart that made her desire to reach out and stitch it back up again.

J
AMIE
knew she watched him at night. He lay on his back staring up at the dark sky between the tree branches, waiting for the moment to be right. To probe her true intent. Perhaps to lay her curving body out beneath his and turn those little, unsteady pants he heard across the fire each night into long, breathless howls shaped around his name.

He stared up at the pinprick stars and let the fire die down, but he rarely slept.

“A
LL
of them?” Mouldin snapped. “All
six
of them? My best men, and not one of them has returned?”