Authors: Kris Kennedy
Acknowledgments
I want to especially thank V.K. and D.M. and L.C., who set aside their own work and families to do last-minute reads of this huge manuscript for one reason: to help me out. You restored my confidence. I owe you.
To my friend Rachel Grant, who always points out when I have too many moving eyebrows and too-slow-moving scenes. I thank you. So do my readers.
And a big hug to my buddies in the soon-to-be-renamed Destination Debut group, who have helped me not only feel saner but be stronger.
England, June 1215
A
t first, it appeared they both wanted the same cock.
But as Jamie watched, he realized the slender woman wasn’t after the rooster at all. And neither, of course, was he.
He settled back in the shadows cast by the knobbly stone buildings along Cheap Street as clouds piled up in the twilight sky. He’d only noted the rooster because a priest had been studying it, and Jamie was on the hunt for a priest. But this was simply some poor vicar studying a fowl. Neither was his quarry.
Nor were they the woman’s. Her gaze slid away with disinterest.
On opposite sides of the street, they were each tucked into dirt-packed alleyways, eyeing up the celebrations in the market square. The evening mists floated in flat ribbons around people’s ankles as they rushed through the darkening streets. Jamie tilted his head to keep the woman in sight. Hood drawn forward over her head, lantern extinguished, an almost motionless stance, all bespoke hunting.
He should know.
Taking swift inventory of the busy, heedless market square, he slipped out of his alley, making for hers. Skirting the block,
he came up behind her as the fair stalls closed up, leaving room for the more ferocious nighttime entertainments to come.
“Found it yet?” he murmured.
She jumped a foot in the air and tripped sideways. Quickly, with a graceful movement, she righted herself, her slim hand lightly touching the wall, fingertips trembling.
All he could see were the dark things about her. Her eyebrows slanted low in suspicion, little black ink swipes on a wide, pale forehead, framed by the dark hood.
“I beg your pardon?” she said in a cool voice. But her hand had slid beneath her cape.
She had a weapon. How . . . worthy of note.
He tipped his head in the direction of the crowd. “Have you found yours yet?”
She looked utterly nonplussed as she took a step back and hit the wall. “My what, sir?” But even in the midst of her confusion, she continued to appraise the crowd, swift, sweeping surveys of it and everyone within. Just as he did when he was on the hunt.
“Your quarry. Who are you after?”
She turned her full attention to him. “I am shopping.”
He leaned his shoulder against the far wall, a state of repose.
I’m not dangerous,
it said. Because she might be. “The bargains are awful back here. You’d be better served to actually speak with a merchant.”
Her eyes were dark grayish, but for all that, highly forceful. She watched him for a long moment, then seemed to come to some decision. Her hand slid out of her cape and she turned back to the crowd.
“Perhaps I am fleeing my husband and his terrible temper,” she said. “You should leave now.”
“How terrible would his temper be?”
She punched a small fist into the air. “This terrible.”
He turned and surveyed the crowd with her. “Shall I kill him for you?”
She gave a low murmur of laughter. The dark hood she had drawn over her head swooped in small waves beside her pale face. Long black tendrils of hair drifted out around her collarbone. “How chivalrous. Would you so easily? But then, I did not say I
was
fleeing a husband. Simply that I might be.”
“Ah. What else might you be doing?”
“Perhaps stealing roosters.”
Ah. She was cognizant, then, that anyone watching her would have thought she was intent on the rooster. In which case, he oughtn’t to be feeling the urge to smile whatsoever. A woman who knew she was being watched was a dangerous woman.
He turned and peered into the square where Father Peter was rumored to be coming for an evening meet with an old friend, a rabbi. Jamie had explicit instructions, which began with “grab the thick-skulled priest” and ended with “bring him to me.” A ruthless royal summons to a skilled illuminator and agitator who had declined previous invitations. But then, a great many people declined invitations from King John these days, because so often, those who accepted were never heard from again.
Jamie scanned the market. The rooster in question was in a cage atop a cage atop a cage, all filled with bantams trying to strut. The topmost one, drawing all the attention, was a magnificent creature.
“Green tail feathers?”
She nodded. He nodded along with her, as if it were common to skulk in alleys and discuss animal thievery. “Pretty. Do you steal often?”
“Do you?”
“All the time.”
She turned her pale face to him, her gray eyes cool and searching. “You lie.”
“Perhaps. Much like you.”
Why did he care? She was neither quarry nor obstacle,
therefore outside his realm of interest. But something about her bespoke the need to attend.
One of her graceful dark eyebrows arched up ever so slightly. “Were we to be honest with one another? I did not realize this.”
“No, you would not,” he rejoined, looking back to the crowd. Still no sign of the priest. “You don’t often inhabit such warrens as this. I, on the other hand, regularly cavort with bandits, thieves, and the like, who inhabit such crevices of humanity as this alley, so I know such things.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw one of her cheekbones rise. She was smiling. “Ah. How convenient for me. A tutor.” She was quiet. “Cavort? Do thieves cavort?”
“You should see them around a fire.”
She laughed, a small thing. He was vaguely surprised to find probing the intent of this stranger so enjoyable. He rarely . . . enjoyed.
They were silent for a moment, an oddly companionable condition.
In front of them passed a veritable river of humanity in the throes of madness. Or rather, jubilation, but of the mad sort. Civil war was imminent. On streets from Dorset to York, there was the feel of celebration in the air, a diffuse revelry that made men drunk. And reckless. Come midnight, it would turn to violence. It always did. The realm was like a fever, bright and hectic, flush with sickness.
“I am certain I ought to be frightened of you,” she said quietly.
“You most certainly ought,” he said grimly.
“Stab you with a blade, perhaps.”
He shifted his shoulder against the wall and looked down at her. “We needn’t go that far.”
“I knew this, of course,” she mused in a cool, graceful voice. “That you were dangerous. When I first saw you.”
“When was that? When I crept up behind you in an alley?”
Again, the lift of her cheekbones, like alabaster curving. “When I espied you across the road.” She tilted her head slightly, indicating the church on the other side of the square.
Ah. She had good eyesight. He had a way of blending in, being unseen. It was part of what made him so successful. That and the ruthlessness.
“Did you now?” he murmured. “What gave me away? The alley, the skulking?”
She glanced over. “Your eyes.”
“Ah.”
“Your clothes.”
He looked down in surprise.
“The manner in which you move.”
He looked up and crossed his arms in silence, inviting her to continue. She obliged him.
“Your smell.”
His arms fell. “My smell—?”
“Your smile,” she said, turning away.
“Well, that is about everything,” he said, anything to keep her talking, for she was growing more intriguing with each word that fell from her lips, although he wasn’t certain it was for the usual reasons. The vital ones, the sort that kept a man quick or made him dead.
“How do I smell, precisely? As if I am a hungry bear, or as if I am coated in the blood of my victims?”
“As if you get what you want.”
She had a good nose as well, then. Smart and comely. And lying.
She looked back at the crowds rushing past down the streets. “And what of you, sir? Are you intent on a rooster?”
“No.”
“A whore?”
He snorted.
“A head of garlic, perhaps?”
He paused, then, on impulse, told the truth. “A priest.”
She started ever so slightly, a small, repressed ripple that shook the trailing black ends of her hair, which is when he had his first suspicion things were about to go downhill to such a degree he might never climb back up again.
The startle could simply have been surprise at his offhand and irreverent reference to a man of God. Or that they were speaking at all. Or that she hadn’t been assaulted yet, huddled in an alley with only a blade for protection.
But Jamie had spent three-quarters of his life determining when people were hiding something, and she most certainly was.
She pushed away from the wall. “I must go retrieve my cock.”
He grinned. “You will be missed.”
She smiled over her shoulder, that cool, stunning smile, and he knew why he’d dallied with her. “You will not be lonely long. The Watch will come for you soon, I am sure.”
He laughed. “Take care,” he said, a caution that came from some heretofore unknown crevasse inside, for he hadn’t seen it coming and didn’t even recognize it as it emerged.
Again that little smile, which wasn’t cold, he realized. It was covert. Clandestine. Beautiful.
She slipped from their narrow refuge and out into the moving tide of bodies, heading directly toward the green-feathered cock, her worn black cape swaying as she floated across the muck. Then, just before she reached the cages, she veered sharply to the left—and his downhill ride began.
By the time Jamie found the rabbi’s home where the priest and his dangerous manuscripts were said to be staying, the rabbi was gone. The priest was gone. The documents were gone. And the gray-eyed woman was gone.
King John would not be pleased.
Jamie went after her.
M
ight I intrude?”
The softly spoken words hauled him up midstride as he barreled down the street. He snapped his gaze down. It was she, the dark-eyed elf who’d stolen his quarry.
He battled off the urge to shake her, seeing as she was about to talk without such inducements. Still, it barely lessened the urge. “What?” He spit the word out. “Where is the priest?”
“Some terrible and smelly men have taken him.”
This brought him up short. It must have shown. She nodded sympathetically. “Yes, indeed. I was equally shocked.”
“Perhaps not to the same degree.”
“No, perhaps not, because you are with two shocks, and I have only the one. But still, it is a terrible shock, is it not?”
“Terrible,” he agreed grimly. “Are you saying you did not take the priest?”
“Indeed, no. But I would use your help to recover him.”
How did one respond to this? “Would you?”
She looked at him sharply. “Did you think they were
your
men who have run away with Father Peter? They did not look like your men, so do not worry that you have been successful in stealing my priest.”
“I was not worried,” he said drily. He did not use men, in
general, but for his single friend and boon companion Ry, who was at present saddling horses for a ride they might not be taking this evening with a thick-skulled priest in hand. “Why do you say the men weren’t mine?”
“Come,” she said, tugging on his sleeve. “They went this way.”
He followed her down the narrow alley, his senses alert, allowing she could be trusted this far, to skulk down another alley together without having her turn and bash his skull in.
“I know they are not your men,” she answered as they hurried through the twisting cobbled and dirt pathways, “because these men had tiny eyes and looked mean and brutish. Your men would look dirty and dangerous.”
He eyed the back of her hooded figure as it swayed down the alley. “Are you wooing me?”
“Woo? None of this ‘woo.’ I am telling you, these offensive men have the
curé.
We must retrieve him, like a sack of wheat.”
“Why?”
She stopped at the edge of the alley just before it crossed over the High Street. It was busy, people everywhere, hurrying home. It wasn’t so much that it was dark, but the storm clouds had brought an early end to the evening. Lanterns were lit, people heading home or out into the dark, windswept night. Awnings of shops were being lowered and locked, while abovestairs, shuttered windows flared into flickering orange strips, glowing with candlelight as families and friends gathered in warmth for food and company.
Jamie scorned this time of night.
His companion turned to him, her curving dark eyebrows now flattened in reprimand. “‘Why?’ What does this mean, your question ‘Why?’”