Defiant (23 page)

“I know Mouldin will not be bartering the priest to the rebels. I know I have something better, for the right price. Where were you told to meet Mouldin?”

She hesitated, then said, “Gracious Hill. Why?”

Jamie shook his head. “Already you’ve been crossed. The king was told Misselthwaite. Mouldin, I expect, will not be at either location.”

An even longer moment of hesitation, suspicion, ensued. “Why have you have changed your mind so suddenly?” Chance asked.

Jamie gave the woman a look Eva had also received and did not much like: hard intent. “My mind has ne’er changed. I am as I have always intended to be: self-serving and rich.”

Eva felt frozen in an unconscionable way. This news should not freeze her like ice. Jamie had never been her ally. She was not
bound to him, nor he to her. But this . . . this felt like something breaking inside her chest, like kicking out the stained-glass windows of a church.

Chance was breathing through her mouth. It was choppy, as if she’d been running. “What do you have?”

Jamie glanced around the room. His gaze did not avoid Eva so much as slide over her as if she no longer existed. “Not here.”

He kicked his stool back, the woman straightened, and Eva got to her feet. The soldiers pushed off the wall. Another two moved in from a more distant position at the front of the tavern. The woman put her hand on Jamie’s arm. She looked . . . happy.

Jamie gestured to the back door. “Come, this way, and—What the hell is that?”

Eva’s hand went, shaking, to the little blade always tucked within her skirts, before she remembered that Jamie had long ago disarmed her.

J
amie tempered his shout of surprise just enough to furrow Chance’s brow, to make her glance toward her men, but in the end, to hurry to his side, just outside the back door.

In a single swift move, he clamped his hand over her mouth, which muffled the sound of his other hand coming up and hammering into the back of her skull, knocking her senseless against the wall.

Her goons were already on the move, pushing through the crowds, shouting, but no one else seemed to care, except that now they were all looking at the goons. And standing, jostling, getting in their way.

Jamie dragged Chance out the back door, into the small, shadowed courtyard, thinking,
What the hell is Eva doing here? And where the hell is Ry?

He didn’t stop to reflect on possible answers, just pinned his spine against the wall as the two closest guards came rushing through the doorway.

Jamie turned to the side and kicked out, smashing his boot into the first man’s kneecap. He went down with a shout of pain, clutching his leg.

The second man, running up behind, flung his arms out reflexively. Jamie grabbed hold of one and yanked so hard the
shoulder snapped as it popped out of joint. The man howled in pain as he swung around entirely until his face smashed into the wall. He rebounded backward and fell across the downed man, who was writhing in pain, trying to stand on his broken knee.

Jamie crouched beside him. Making a fist and cupping it with his other hand, he slammed his elbow into the back of Broken Knee’s skull, just as the one with the dislocated arm staggered back to his feet, swinging his sword in an indiscriminate, rage-fueled arc. Jamie ducked as it swooped overhead, then leaped to his feet and launched himself shoulder-first into the man’s stomach. They went flying, scuffling as they rolled.

Jamie was staggering back to his feet when he heard a soft call. “Dick?” It was one of the two guards who’d been stationed in the front. “Dickon? You a’right?”

“I have to change my horse’s name,” Jamie muttered as he drew his sword, keeping his attention on his current target, uncertain if he’d have time to select a second before they came rushing up behind him.

Then he heard the low crunch of boots on pebbles. He froze and slowly turned his head.

Ry and Roger stood there, swords drawn. In a swift glance, Ry took in the unconscious man on the ground, his leg bent at an unnatural angle, and the bloody soldier, facing off against Jamie, one arm hanging helplessly. Then he looked at Jamie.

“You didn’t save me even one?”

“Oh, they’re coming,” he replied grimly as the first beefy soldier barreled through the doorway. Another lumbered through behind. Both had their swords out.

They took them down quickly. He and Ry had been doing this sort of thing for over a dozen years; it was almost ridiculously simple. Skill and cunning always won over brute idiocy, but it was gratifying to have Roger’s sword arm in the mix. It took hardly a minute to sprawl them senseless on the ground,
then another couple to lash them together like hogs for the fire.

Ry had his boot on one man’s shoulder while Jamie gave a final yank to the rope that bound him to his mate. “I owe you, friend,” Jamie said roughly.

Ry nodded, tossing his head back to get hair out of his face. “You had best hope I never start collecting, friend, or I will bankrupt you.”

Jamie gave a laugh as he dropped the rope. “You would know. You handle the money.”

“Only because you have fooled yourself into thinking I have some talent for it.”

Jamie clasped his shoulder. “Only because you do,” he said, then turned to Roger, who was standing a few paces off, breathing hard. “Roger?”

“My lord,” he croaked, holding his left hand to his right upper sword arm, as if in pain.

“Do not call me that,” Jamie muttered as he prised Roger’s hand up to inspect the arm. “Are you injured?”

“It is naught,” the boy scoffed, but Jamie walked him backward, out from under the shadow of the willow, and examined the wound in the wash of late afternoon sunlight. “’Tis but a flesh wound,” Jamie said, releasing him. “You fought well. Now we must retrieve Eva. She was inside—”

“I am here,” came her soft voice.

Jamie spun. She stood in the doorway of the tavern draped in her dull-blue overtunic and hard brown boots, her hair flowing down over her slender shoulders. She examined each of them in turn, their gashed cheeks and bleeding chins and Ry, who was limping slightly. Then she looked at Jamie. “Did you make them all sorry to have met you?” she asked quietly.

“Aye,” he said, rather fiercely, because he could neither describe nor understand the feeling of rightness at seeing her there, waiting for him, her gaze calm on his after the fighting.

“That is good,” she said. “I did not like her, with the long hair.”

Jamie gave a soft half-laugh, Roger laughed outright, then the scowling, barrel-chested innkeep came rushing through the doorway. He stopped at Eva’s heels.

“Now, lass, what’s this about—”

Everyone froze. Jamie, Ry, Roger, even the innkeep. The only one who moved was Eva, who pointed gracefully to the bound and bloody collection of unconscious men and one woman sprawled across the innkeep’s courtyard.

“There they are,” she explained calmly, as if she were indicating buckets of water. “They were causing problems, you see.”

He stared at the downed men, then at Chance. “They Baynard’s?” he asked shortly.

Jamie readjusted his grip on the sword. “Aye.”

The innkeep’s gaze came back up. “You the king’s man?”

He hesitated slightly. “Aye.”

The man wiped his hands on his apron as two burly guards he clearly employed for the purpose of bouncing unruly guests out the door appeared. The innkeep nodded. “Men who can’t keep to their word do more damage than pestilence. That’s what I’ve always said.”

Jamie gave a small laugh. “I agree entirely.”

He turned to his men and hooked his thumb. “Take them into the reeds, down by the river. They’ll awaken come morn. Or not.” He turned to Jamie. “You’ll want away, sir. The ferry’s offloading again.”

Jamie sheathed his sword. “We could greatly benefit by having a place to pass those moments, Master Innkeep.”

The innkeep examined their battered crew somewhat doubtfully, ending on Eva. She smiled. He nodded and said, “My root cellar’s around the back.”

I
t took only a moment for them all to be ensconced in the vaguely musty earthen pit that was the innkeep’s root cellar.

Twice as wide as a plough and again that long, it housed few vegetables this time of year, but a great many roots. They nudged out of the fertile earth as twining brown fingers and indignant elbows. A wide swath of russet sunset light spilled down the steps into the room before the innkeep shut the door above them with a sudden, shocking slam.

Eva stared into the flesh of darkness around her. She was in the belly of dark. She could see nothing. The only sounds were the others’ breathing, the dim, distant thud of boots on pebbles on the road above, and the unrelenting absence of breeze. Around them, as if in vapors, rose the peaty scent of earth, ensuring things aboveground could grow, while down here in the dark, it was . . . dark.

“It is dark,” she announced quietly.

Her words could not even bounce back against the enclosing earth; they were sucked into it and disappeared. Silence. Someone shifted, the creak of leather and a miniature clang of metal against metal. Eva’s heart beat faster, and faster yet. She could hear it deep in her ears, feel the whipcords of coldness
ripping through her. If anything had ever counseled “Run!” this dark tomb did.

“Eva?” Roger murmured.

She could not answer. The ridiculousness of this fear, of dark and dirt, when the dangerous things all lurked aboveground. The mind had no power over this panic, though. She opened her mouth to breathe.

Suddenly, there was movement, boots thudding on hard-packed earth. A dull bump, then light, glorious red-gold light, came pouring in as Jamie threw back one of the two doors that lay flat atop this lifesaving grave.

“’Tis naught,” he said curtly, sitting on the step. “It lies flat to the ground; they will neither think to look, nor notice if they do.”

Eva stared up at the entrance, glowing with light, Jamie’s dark silhouette in the foreground, and breathed. The sun, the fresh air, Jamie, and that he had known what she needed; she inhaled all the things that made her feel alive.

He leaned back, looked up, then got to his feet, bent at the waist, and peeked out. He turned.

“They have passed.”

“Roger,” Eva murmured, getting to her feet. “Pull down your hood and look scrofulous.”

R
oger looked at her, startled, but he did so a second later, almost as quickly as Jamie had at the top of the hill. Ah, there was a lesson in that. If she kept them on this way, he would turn out as lethal and lost as Jamie.

“All of you,” she said briskly, “pull down your hoods, put on your gloves, tend leeward on the path. Yes, most certainly, you too, Ry, for all you are nothing but a very common bedstead.” Jamie’s leather creaked as he turned to look at Ry. “And you,” she said, turning sternly to Jamie, “for once you will keep your good mouth shut and your wolf eyes down.”

Jamie slid his hand down off the wall. “My what?”

She turned away. “Your everything.”

Ry grinned. Gog gave a small laugh, and these things helped to pass the tense moments wherein they pulled their hoods far down over their faces, then trod down to the ferry.

They waited for the next group of soldiers, with all their clanking steel and iron, to off-load. Eva felt the ground shudder beneath her feet as they passed. But more than that, she felt Jamie’s strong body an inch behind her own, felt his intent appraisal of every man passing by, and knew at the least the first man would die before he could strike.

It was the hundreds following that so terrified.

They hurried down the rutted track as soon as the last man passed. The tall, long-faced ferryman glanced up in surprise as Eva and her hooded little group approached. The sergeant stood on the bank above, grim-faced and potbellied, a subordinate wearing the livery of Robert fitzWalter.

Eva stepped forward.

“Nothing for ya,” the sergeant said before she’d even opened her mouth. “Get back.” He turned to the oarsman. “Push off.”

The ferryman, tall and pale, had his pole in the water when Eva caught his eye, a finger lifted slightly. It was not a command, not by any measure a commanding action, but he stopped. She turned to the sergeant.