Defiant (32 page)

“I, for one, am done with knights,” she said with finality.

“Aye, lass, I’m certain ye are.”

“Oh, you think ’tis your dangerous Jamie I mean, but no.”

He shrugged. “I don’t much care for them either, girl.”

“Nor are you overly fond of Jamie.”

He gave her a long, considering look, then said simply, “No.”

She sat forward. “Did he tie you up?”

His eyebrows flew high. “Who, Jamie?”

“Aye. Is this why you do not like him? Did he tie you up?”

He looked startled. “Nay. Did he tie
ye
up?”

She shook her head glumly and sat back. “He did, but then he untied me very quickly and decided to bring me instead. For this, I am sad.”

Angus burst out laughing. “Then ye needed bringing, I’m certain. Jamie’s not one for a baggage train. If yer with him, that’s where yer meant to be.”

She didn’t know if she liked the sound of that. But it told her something: this one trusted Jamie, respected him, and was very, very angry with him. “I feel just so, as you’ve described it, like a baggage train. The foodstuffs, perhaps. Or the pigs scooted along at the end.”

Angus took a sip of ale. “Were ye a servant, then?”

“Do I seem like a servant? A goose girl, no doubt.”

He eyed her from over the rim of his huge tankard. “Nay. You seem like a waif.”

She sighed. “Is it so clear?”

He shrugged. She glanced at his mug. He followed her gaze down, then passed her the huge tankard by its wooden handle. Her thumb and fingers barely met around its girth. She didn’t particularly want it, but one did not escape from bondage by refusing gifts from one’s captor, however stinky those gifts might be. But this, she admitted, was not so stinky. She put her nose over it and sniffed again, then sipped. Then smiled.

“That is quite good.” And she was not lying, this time. Jamie would be proud. Not that such a thing mattered.

“Aye,” he agreed comfortably. “It ought ta be. My mam’s recipe. Spend years perfecting it, she did. Have’s much as ye want.”

She took another little sip, then slid it back to him. “Your mother was a brewer,” she said, liking the notion. It wasn’t often she had such simple connections with people.

“Aye. Afore she passed,” he mumbled, and crossed himself. Eva did the same. They fell silent.

She looked down at her boots. The wooden soles had worn down terribly on the sides, and the leather was cracked, made wet, then dry, then wet again too often. The hem of her blue overtunic hung to the lace straps, entangled and torn in one spot. She fussed with it a moment. When had she last taken her shoes off? It felt like weeks. And her fingernails . . . it hardly bore thinking of. They were washed clear of any decoration, pale pink but for the the smiling half-moons.

“Have you any cherries?” she asked suddenly.

Angus looked up from his mug and eyed her in a vaguely suspicious, entirely confused way.

“If you have a cherry, or any sort of plum, I can do a remarkable thing.”

He sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. It was suspicion no longer, but doubt, skepticism, along the lines of
How could this dirty little thread of a woman do something remarkable with a plum?

Yet she could. With cherries, plums, carrots, and ever so many other fruits and vegetables, and even the bark of apple trees. Everything but a human heart.

“Aye,” he said warily. “My neighbor’s got a few cherry trees.”

Eva looked skeptical. “But we will not need to bother them?”

Angus might have actually blushed, under all his fur. “Nah, I just reach over the wall.”

She laughed. “This is most good. And perhaps a carrot, in your garden? And an egg, or two, but if there is none, it is not a thing that will stop us.”

“Good to know.” Angus took another sip of ale. “It doesn’t sound like anything my mam did for us. But then, she wasn’t making many fruit pasties.”

“This is not a pasty, Angus. How may ‘us-es’ were you?”

He rubbed his thick, calloused thumb over the edge of the table, then said quite proudly, “Eleven, all boys, and we all of us survived to manhood.”

She fell back in her chair. “But this is terrible, this sort of hearty stock! Your poor mother must have been dismayed, her home filled with all your big dirt.”

Angus laughed and stretched his tree-trunk legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles. His boots were scuffed and white-brown in all the grooves, like a dirty map showing all the work he’d done in them.

“There were days she fairly fainted from it, to be sure. But ye’d hardly have known. She was goodly. Never lost her temper. Well,” he quickly amended when Eva frowned, “never without cause, and the good Lord knows we gave it to her.”

“And this purveyor of hearty stock, what did she look like?”

Angus seemed taken aback. “Oh, well, she was”—he lifted his hand about level with his shoulder—“and somewhat,
well . . .” He lifted his other hand and held the two apart in front of him, looking baffled as he tried to explain his mother using these imprecise physical dimensions. “I mean to say, there were days, o’ course, but then...” His hands flailed helplessly.

“Hair?”

His eyes flew over. “Brown.”

She shook her head in despair. “What
manner
of brown? Like the trunk of a tree you climbed and no doubt fell from some afternoon, frightening your poor mother half to her grave? Or brown like a shallow river after a storm?”

“Like this.” He jabbed his blunt finger with great emphasis and certainty at the burl lines on the table beside him. Dark, but red tones, Eva assessed swiftly, expertly.

“Good. And her face?”

He stared at her blankly. “More like . . . the shallow river?”

She fell back in her seat a second time, laughing. Angus joined her, and for perhaps a half a minute, they laughed at the notion of Angus’s mother’s face having the hue of a shallow, muddy river, for Angus’s trapped response that had prompted the assessment, and for a hundred other things that perhaps should have been laughed at over the years, but there’d simply been no time. Eva suspected this might be true for this hard-soft Scotsman as well. So this laughing, for a brief moment, was a simple and good thing.

“I will not draw her thusly,” Eva said, still smiling, as she rose and walked to the fire grate.

“Draw her?”

Angus shot to his feet as she passed, torn no doubt between ensuring she did not escape and being the sort of host who would get things for a female guest. Surely his mother had instilled this.

Eva removed the necessity of worrying by kneeling in front of the fire pit and feeling around its cold edges.

“I was going to light us one, just got distracted,” he explained gruffly.

“That would be nice.” Eva touched what she wanted with her fingertips. “Soon the night will be chilled.” She stood with a charred, half-burned chunk of wood in her hand. He looked at it blankly. “To draw. Might we steal a cherry from your neighbor now?”

His face cleared. “Ahh. The cherries.”

“Ah, the cherries. Just a handful or three.”

Quickly, she had a charred charcoal stick and some makeshift dyes, and with quick, deft strokes, she spoke to Angus about his mother and sketched her on his tabletop, making long, loose sweeps of charcoal and fruit paint across the six-foot span. She stood, moving around it at need, leaning over, her hair tucked down the back collar of her dress, her eyes on her work, her ears attuned for nuances of emotion and truth Angus would not even know he revealed. When she was done, his mother was five feet long, bumped where her likeness crossed the planks of wood, lying flat on his table, smiling up at him.

He’d long gone silent. His breathing was uneven, his hands fisted where they hung beside his thighs.

“’Tis just her,” he muttered thickly.

She nodded as they looked down at it. “That is good.”

They stood staring down at it in silence for a long time. After, he lit the fire, and they transferred their silence to the sitting sort. Somewhere outside, a dog barked. And farther out, Jamie had Gog, he might have Father Peter by now, and he was most certainly leaving her behind.

“You call him Jamie Lost,” she said quietly.

Angus shifted in his seat and looked over. “He was lost. We were all lost, children on the streets. London. He found us.”

“Why do you hate him?”

A twisted smile burned on his face. “Someone found him.”

“And not you,” she understood quietly.

He got to his feet slowly. “I’ll put ye in yer room now.”

She rose without argument. “How long do you keep me here?”

He just pointed toward a narrow ladder set in the back of the wide room. At the top was a small, windowless loft. She put her hands on the aged, gray wooden rungs. Draped over the edge of one were several ribbons, dusky, dark pinkish red, quite remarkable, really. A silent, deep, stunning shade. Silk.

She looked away and reached for the next rung.

“They’re for yerself,” Angus gruffed.

She stilled.

“The ribbons. Lost left ’em for ye.”

She reached for them, clutched the delicate silks, crushing them, which was a terrible thing to do, of course, but she had no choice. Holding them to her chest, she started up the ladder. Then she paused and looked over her shoulder, down at Angus’s bristly, damaged face and angry, sad eyes.

“Might I have a sip of wine, Angus? Or perhaps a drop of water?”

R
oger and Ry sat in the common room of the inn while Jamie went up to bathe. They were ready for their second servings of ale by the time he came down. The drinks were brought swifly, along with a plate of cheese and bread.

Roger picked up his mug and drank with such great gulping swallows, Ry and Jamie lowered theirs to watch. Eventually, Roger pulled it away, wiped the back of his hand over his lips, saw them staring, and grinned.

“Eva doesn’t often let us stop at alehouses.”

Jamie smiled. “No, I expect not.”

He took another casual survey of the room. The tavern was loud but not overly crowded, and no one looked particularly interested in three men, only one bathed, who were drinking ale.

“Tell me, Roger, are you still in mind of hiding as you have all these years?”

Roger sat up straighter. “Nay, sir. Not at all.”

“Know there has been merit in this course. Eva saved your life by it. Coming out of the shadows,”—Jamie met Roger’s eyes—“’twill be a hard row.”

Roger nodded gravely but looked undeterred.

“You have a choice to make, before all else,” Jamie said, picking up his mug.

Roger looked uncomfortable. “Eva said you were King John’s man.”

Jamie looked over the rim of his mug. “You certainly should think of me that way.”

“Then are you not bound to take me to the king?”

Jamie drank, then replied, “I am no man’s conscience, Roger. You are not a cow being led to the field, and the battle has not yet been launched. I found you, that is all. Or,” he amended, “you and Eva found me.”

“And if you deliver me—”

“I would not deliver a sheep to his father’s murderer.”

Roger’s face was taut and pale. “Eva told you about that night.”

Jamie nodded. From the corner of his eye, he saw Ry take a visual sweep of the room. They’d spent their lives in constant surveillance. God knows, he was weary of it. Suddenly, crushingly weary.

“I still dream of that night, upon a time,” Roger muttered

Jamie looked back. “As do I.”

Roger started in surprise. “You, sir?”

“We have a great deal in common, Roger. My father was murdered too. I watched it.”

Then ran. He’d stood ten feet away as they murdered his father, then he had run. And for that, he was already in hell.

“I didn’t have to watch it, sir,” Roger said, his voice as low-pitched as Jamie’s. “Eva put herself in front of me.”

They both stared down into their mugs.

Then Roger downed the rest of his tankard in two long swallows. Ry silently signaled for more. The maidservant brought them, weaving through the swaying bodies crowding the room. Roger sat back, leaned his shoulders against the wall, and muttered, “How to choose? The rebels or the king?”

“Some would say do what your conscience guides.”

“Is that what you say, sir?”

Jamie hesitated slightly. “I say lay your money on the side that will win.”

Roger sat forward. “Then you think John will prevail?”

Jamie said nothing.

“But if you had to choose, sir . . . ?”

Jamie wiped his hand over the top of his thigh, suddenly restless. Mayhap it was all Roger’s eager, admiring energy, aimed at him. “I do choose, Roger. Every day. My choices are my own. Yours are your own.”

Roger looked taken aback at the sudden sharpness in Jamie’s voice.

Ry leaned forward into the tension, to deflect it, or perhaps absorb it. “Jamie. What is it?” he said quietly.

He shook his head. “I do not know.”

And there was no time to wonder on it, for Angus’s beefy, bearded visage suddenly appeared amid the shifting bodies at the far end of the room. He waded over and gave a great, heaving sigh when he reached their table. “’Tis sorry I am, Lost, but she escaped. Just like ye said.”

T
HE
hot rush of happiness stunned him, the simple, expanding experience of it. So this was happiness. Joy. It suffused him, filled him like drinking hot mead.

“I’m a rare sort of sorry, Jamie.” Angus hung his head. “She did just as ye said.”

“Which was?”

“I’m ashamed to say.” Angus’s next words were muffled. “She asked for wine.”

Jamie nodded. The urge to smile was strong.

“And after we’d already been drinking my mam’s ale,” the Scotsman said in misery.

Gog sat forward with interest. “Eva drank ale?”

Angus tipped his shame-descended head up a bit and stared at Roger, whom he’d never seen before. “Aye,” he admitted suspiciously.

“Did she like it?”