Defiant (24 page)

“Sir, I am sorry to trouble you, but we must needs cross the river this eve.”

It took a moment for his leathery, glittery bulk to turn fully. He was easily a head taller than she, which must all be filled with empty air, for he cast a squinted, suspicious glance at her and said, “What?”

She nodded as if this were a wise thing to say. “Indeed, you are correct, we must pass tonight, sir.”

Setting him up to think agreeable thoughts did not seem to be effective, but the repetition helped her words penetrate the depths of his skull. It also made him scowl.

“Not t’night, you don’t. The lot o’ you can spend the night enjoyin’ the pleasures of the soldiers’ hospitality. Or lettin’ them enjoy the pleasures o’ you.” He gave a bark of laughter. “In the morning, mayhap, you can pass. If you make it worth my while,” he added with a smirk.

Eva gestured behind her, to the men whose lives were in her keeping at this moment. “You will not wish these ones here near your soldiers’ camp, sir. Lord Robert would be most displeased. I would rather not have this worrisome chance taken with all his honorable men.”

He scowled. “What chance?”

She gave a helpless shrug. “’Twas a most
virulent case.”

His eyes narrowed, marked between suspicion and utter confusion. He looked at Ry and Jamie and Roger again, all with their hoods drawn down to their noses, all slightly hunched over, all gloved, and all holding reins of horses.

“Case? Case o’ what?”

She sighed. “A passing sad one. Now, ’tis true that they’re
all
remarkably scrofulous.” She gave a general hand-waving to include the three of them, then extended one finger to indicate Jamie more directly. “But on him, it has spread everywhere. I do not exaggerate a whit:
everywhere.”

She aimed in the direction of his groin and spun her finger a few times, drawing an invisible circle in the air around this most private of places.

The guard took an involuntary step back.

“’Twas most was awful to see, sir. Or not see, as the case was. It simply shriveled up and . . . fell off.”

This time the guard took such a large and decided step back he almost tumbled off the embankment. Pressing her advantage, Eva took that step with him, lowering her voice.

“Even the monks were uneasy, which is why I am hurrying them to the leper colony by the priory, where they tend only the most
virulent
cases.”

She neglected to mention which priory, but he did not seem to be bothered by the omission.

“Christ’s teeth, go.” He snapped at the ferryman, whose face had gone pale. “Take ’em, you. Go on,” he ordered again, keeping his distance, willing to risk the edge of the muddy bank rather than come close to the lepers. He kept a careful eye on Eva and Roger and Ry as they passed, but he did not so much as glance at Jamie.

Eva nodded her thanks with a calm, dignified nod, letting
her patients board first. The ferryman, too, kept his distance from the hooded lepers as much as the small craft would allow, and thus they began their river crossing, four men rowing, the horses swimming behind in the high, gently burbling waters.

S
TANDING
as far to the rear of the flat-bottomed ferry as possible, Jamie murmured to Ry, “We cannot walk into that nest of soldiers. The horses alone will draw their eye. It appears fitzWalter has given no looting orders, but one cannot trust an army on the move.”

“At the least, we shall not.”

“So, we bribe him.”

Eva, standing a foot away, shifted with the bobbing flow of the river beneath their feet. Roger, standing at her side, looked slightly pale from the bobbing.

“Let me manage the negotiations,” she suggested in a low voice. Her and Jamie’s eyes met and she put out her hand. “I understand your reluctance to share with me your coin, but he might rather deal with me than a tall, angry leper whose . . .”—she lifted her brows delicately and tipped her head to the side—“fell off.”

“Shriveled up
and fell off,” Jamie corrected.

She smiled the faintest bit. “So sad. Such potential wasted.”

Ry snorted quietly. The winds blew with brisk efficiency down the channel of the river valley, bobbing the boat, as Eva moved with light, weaving steps to the ferryman’s side.

“Good sir, might we inquire about a small detour?”

She might have asked if they could please carve out his eyes. His jaw fell, then snapped shut. “A
de
tour? Are ye bleeding mad? Lord Robert has this ferry now, and if I don’t get his men across . . .” His voice faded at the sight of silver coins in Eva’s flattened palm.

“Just a few dozen yards downriver is all we require. I do not
like to think what those soldiers might do to a woman and three lepers.”

“I know what they’ll do to me. They’ll have me head,” he said with feeling. But he was looking at the coin.

She looked at it too. “But these currents can be swift and shifting, can they not? They must trust you in this, no? And then, of course, you will be removing a terrible threat from his men, keeping the lepers away. Even the brave sergeant at the dock agreed. How can Lord Robert argue with this?”

Before twilight came, they were downstream at the head of a small footpath, armed with directions on how to get through the darkening woods toward the road north, to their new target, the town of Gracious Hill.

S
ilently they climbed the path, then stopped to let the horses dry off before resaddling them. Jamie stood beside Dickon, rubbing him down with a rough cloth. Roger stood with Ry, practicing feints with a sword as sunset light came down in thick streams of yellow glow through openings in the branches. Where the bands of light hit the earth, the soil glowed a rich brown.

Eva sat in the middle of one such shaft, on a mossy log, an ankle resting atop her opposite knee. She had closed her eyes and was rubbing her calf with two thumbs, making slow, circular motions. Jamie watched a moment, then tore his eyes away and went back to brushing Dickon.

“Do you not find this all rather tiresome some days?” she inquired of his back. “All this hunting and capturing and running from soldiers?”

“Most,” he said drily. He made a long sweep with the rag down Dickon’s glossy back. The horse swept his chestnut tail. “I would much rather be sitting by a fire with a mug of ale.”

She made an impatient sound. “You Englishmen and your ales. I would sit by a river with a little cup of wine and have the sun shine on my shins.”

He was nonplussed and paused. “Your . . . shins?”

“They so rarely see sun. They are jealous of the top of my head.”

He smiled faintly and looked over. “Not of the inside?”

She gave him an arch smile. In the single thick cord of sunlight, it looked positively sultry. “You mean my brain? My very smart thoughts?” She switched ankles and began rubbing the new one. He looked away, back to Dickon. “My shins are surely not envious of
your
head. Taking us to that ferry was a most bad plan.”

Ry and Roger paused in their mock battle and Ry chimed in helpfully, “I agree with Eva.”

Jamie rested his arm on Dickon’s back and shook his head. “I should have pushed you into the Thames twenty years ago. What other course of action could we have taken?”

Roger at least remained a staunch supporter. Sweating lightly from his exertions, he said, “There were none, sir. None a’tall. And you mustn’t mind Eva. She likes to . . . instigate.”

She looked over with all the solemn wisdom of an elder sister. “This is a shameful lie, Roger. I do no such thing. I simply point things out. Such as the fact that your hose are unlaced, there in the front.”

He jerked his head down to where she pointed and immediately began making repairs to the little leather thongs that kept his hose bound to his belt. Eva smiled at Jamie over the top of Roger’s bent head. Slowly, he smiled back.

She not only had a fiercely sharp, insightful mind but a body he’d known was made of lush curves. Now he’d ranged over them and wanted her more than ever.

But it was more than that. Like the ray of sunshine she was sitting in right now, she kept shining up pathways of thought he’d never encountered before. Enough so that, amid their dark business, she made him want to smile and even laugh, and the wanting was even more rare a thing than the act itself.

But then, Eva made him wish to do many things he’d never done before, and not all of them involved hiking her up against
a buckle maker’s wall and stepping between her thighs. The remnants of that adventure still pounded between his legs. Looking at her body, her face into the sunset light, did little to reduce it. The opposite in fact.

“You were speaking about your river wine,” he prompted, which proved she was a
faerie.

“Ah, see?” She smiled happily. “Already I am turning you from the ale. Let me think . . . where was I?”

“Standing by the river getting snockered,” Roger piped up, his head still bent as he fumbled with his ties. He must be well accustomed to Eva telling such fanciful tales. Perhaps she had told them as bedtime tales when Roger was a boy and she was laying him down to sleep.

Jamie felt a sharp, dusty tug inside his chest.

“Ah, yes, Roger, thank you for reminding me,” she said in that voice Jamie could only describe as graceful, which boded no good for him, to find grace in her, not with what was to come. “We would be snockered,” she began again, and Roger grinned, “and as I sipped my wine, I would look over my shoulder and see my little home, with its red roof and garden. I would make supper, and before covering the fires, just about this time of night, I would go out and sit by the river and...” Her voice faded away.

Jamie was utterly captivated by the potency of the simple images, the red roof, Eva cooking supper, Eva sipping wine, Eva sitting by the sunset river. Eva.

“And maybe there are some little children,” she finished, so softly he could hardly hear.

Everything kept this last far away. Her volume, her words; everything was sent away on the breath leaving her body. She owned none of this. There were no
my’s
or
I’s
or
One day I shall’
s. It was all indefinites and passives and things that might have been.

Eva knew as much about standing apart as he.

T
hey set up camp quickly. Ry took the first watch. At Jamie’s murmured request, he took Roger with him.

Eva stood beside the fire, toeing little pebbles out of dirt pockets and shredding sticks in uncharacteristic restlessness. Jamie sat cross-legged and thrust a fat branch into the low flames. A few spindly twigs still clinging to it spat into angry flame, but the branch itself was a huge dark center in the midst of the glowing hot coals.

Eva broke the silence.

“Assassin?”

He countered this by looking up with his dark eyes and saying, as if picking up an interrupted conversation, “I believe the most surprising thing of all is that you were telling the truth all along. Just not about what.”

She let out a long breath. “Jamie, you lie. You have not once seemed surprised.”

He looked at the fire.

“You do not understand,” she said quietly.

“And you do not explain.”

“Jamie,” she said with a helpless, laughing gasp, “what is this you ask of me? How could this be, this ‘explaining’? We are on the top and bottom of a map, you and I. Mountains and seas
divide us. How can it be that I would explain myself to you? And in the end, it would not matter.”

He did look up at that. “It matters.”

His eyes had darkened to that deeper blue, something she now knew happened when day fell to night. It felt a very intimate thing to know about someone.

“Oh, Jamie,” she said softly, “you have done poorly, to bind yourself to King John.”

“And you have done poorly to bind yourself to no one.”

She took a swift, quiet breath and gave a sad smile. “We are a poorly matched team, then, you and I. The naught and the darkness, one of us bound to nothing, the other to the devil.”