Authors: Traci E. Hall
He bowed his head. “I keep trying.”
She waited for him to explain, but he decided enough had been said already. Silence was a Templar rule, as the commander had reminded him.
Mamie brought the sword tip below his chin in a clever move he hadn't anticipated. If she'd wanted to cut his throat, he'd be dead.
Gone was the laughing temptress, the teasing seductress. In her place was the goddess Athena, hell-bent on putting him in his
place. His body reacted appropriately for a man. A warrior. He'd throw her to the tile and tear off that new dress. The lobe of her ear was perfect for biting, and he couldn't wait to lick the slope of her white throat before nuzzling his face in her breasts.
“Are you here to harm the queen?”
“Non.”
She let the sword drop, the energy in the air shifting between them. Heating. “I believe you. What were you doing?”
“I was curious to see the palace.” Scout it out. Discover what King Louis had in mind for Edessa.
“I do not trust you,” she said.
“Why on earth not?” He was a very honorable man. Most of the time.
“You are a fraud.”
Had she found him out?
“A man as good-looking as you should never have sworn himself to God. Do you have a dozen brats at home?”
“I do not have children.”
Of my loins.
“My brothers are dead.”
An expression of sorrow flitted briefly across her face. “I,
too, am alone. Normally in this situationâwhere we each suffer
a deep sadness, I would offer a woman's comfort.” She traced her fingers over the fullness of her chest, her voice dropping to a purr. “My breast to pillow your head as I soothed your grief. And you, mine.”
He gulped at the vision and closed his eyes, grateful as hell for the loose brown robe.
“But you are sworn off women, and God and I already have enough issues without me getting you in my bed. Go back to haunting the halls, Dominus, but take care. This is the women's wing. There is nothing for you here.”
She turned on her heel, the swift movement revealing the embroidered beads on her shoes. What kind of woman was she, to gift a slow child with a favorite shoe? And then refuse to seduce him, for his own good? His fondness for Mamille grew.
“A damn waste is what you are,” she muttered, looking over her shoulder as she paused. “I am amazing at offering solace.” She went inside with a slam of the door.
Dominus shoved his knuckles to his mouth, biting down hard. He prayed to God that all of his sacrifice would be worth it in the end. He had sworn an oath, and he had no choice but to fulfill his obligation.
They were almost to Jerusalem, and he would have a decision to make. But for now Mamie was right on many counts,
to his misfortune. There was nothing for him on this side of the castle.
And her breasts
would
make the finest pillow.
“What just happened?” Fay asked, her cheek red from where she'd pressed her ear to the door. “Was that Dominus I heard in the hall? What did he want?”
“He is up to no good,” Mamie said, sadly patting her chest. “But I don't know what. Templar business, I think. He gave me a song and dance about being lost.”
“You are right to doubt him,” Fay said. “I would not believe that story either.”
“He's a good-looking man,” Larissa said. “I've never seen a knight with thighs as thick as tree trunks.”
“Larissa!”
“What? I am not dead, thank you. I have eyes in my head, and while my heart belongs to my Albert, I doubt there is fault in my admiring such a man.”
“I do not disagree,” Mamie said, laughing at the prim expression on the handmaiden's face. “I am sorry for it, myself.”
“If you cannot sway him from God's service,” Larissa said, “I don't know who can.”
“I think that may have been a compliment,” Fay said, giggling at them both.
“I cannot, in good conscience, sway him from God's work.” She paced toward the window. “He said I smelled nice.”
Larissa chuckled. “Perhaps the game is not over. God has not got him yet.”
Mamie hugged her stomach, knowing she'd seen a spark of desire in his eyes before he banked it. “No games.”
Eleanor stepped inside the room, beaming, non, glowing, as she shut the door behind her, thanking the servant who had brought her back.
“Raymond is wonderful. Simply lovely. We spent the last hour laughing like I haven't since I was in Poitier as a child. He tells the funniest stories and mimics people perfectly. Constance and I were in tears.”
Mamie guided Eleanor to a chair by the window overlooking the busy river. “He missed you?”
“He worried for me after our mistreatment at Manuel's hands.”
Mamie said nothing, but shared a look with Fay. That mistreatment had been prodded by Raymond trying to get his niece to commit treason. Lady Isabella, a fellow guard for the queen,
went in Eleanor's stead. King Louis had pulled strings, and Isabella
had been banished to England with her lover rather than killed in Constantinople.
The first of them to go.
“I assured him that this place, his golden palace, is exactly the rest I need. He's given me jewels and bangles. Trunks of clothes and perfumes.” Eleanor released a delighted sigh. “I feel like a girl again.”
“You are not exactly long in the tooth,” Fay said. “You are also the Queen of France. A mother. A leader. A wife.”
“Do not be a bucket of water just yet,” Eleanor said with a wave. “I would relish this feeling a while longer before returning to my dull life.”
“Dull?” Mamie asked. “Did I miss something? This last year has been nothing but one harrowing adventure after another.”
Fay nodded. “We are lucky to be alive.”
“And once I go back to France? I will catch a chill from the drafts in that damned castle and die. An old crone.”
“Cheery,” Larissa observed.
“Tell us the good parts,” Mamie said, “of your visit.”
“You noticed the bustle on the river earlier? Well, Raymond
said he trades with places all over the world. He's met a Chinaman. Yellow skin and short of stature, black hair, and very polite.”
“So you'd like to go to China?” Mamie tried to understand the queen's mood. Capricious, teetering on sadness.
“Non. Perhaps. One thing I do know: I will never meet a yellow-skinned man in Paris.”
Mamie feared she was beginning to see the light. Eleanor found Antioch much to her liking . . .
The Queen of France could not be Queen of France from Antioch.
Mamie had been looking forward to the banquet, but now she wondered how to protect the queen from having too good of time.
Dominus slipped out of the palace after discovering Louis's suite of rooms, though he could not get past the royal guard. After their bungling today on the boat, he was glad to see they were at attention, protecting the king. He walked along the courtyard to the back gate of the Templar House, thinking about his greatest temptation. If she only knew what personal hell her perfume sent him to, she might be kinder.
Waiting until the Templar guard's back was turned, Dominus
snuck inside the kitchen yard and into the single-story square building. It stretched across the yard as if the Templars were not quite finished adding on rooms.
He crept past the snoring chaplain and found his chamber, where Everard lay stretched out on a cot.
“Not much wider cots than what was on the galley,” Everard
said, his eyes still closed as he dozed.
The plain beeswax candle spluttered, and a glazed lamp flickered from the desk by the window. The furniture was bare but serviceable. Quality, sturdy. Simple. As God wished for each man who served him to be.
“Sorry to wake you,” Dominus said.
“You did not,” the knight said in a drowsy voice, his eyes still closed. “I was resting before the banquet.”
“I thought the Templars were not allowed to go.” His heart sped as he thought of the chance to see Mamie. Not Mamieâthe banquet would give him the opportunity to eavesdrop on Louis. Maybe Odo and Thierry. He would be able to observe the primary players in Prince Raymond's court. Surely that would interest the bishop.
“The prince and princess wanted us all thereâyou and I
especially because of our assistance with the queen this morning.”
He sat up.
Dominus rubbed the bump on his nose, broken by his father as they'd fought before he left home for good. “Commander Bartholomew does not care for me as it is. If I get special dispensation, I doubt he will like me anytime soon.”
Everard chuckled. “The commander told me he'd asked you to fast and pray instead of going to the banquet, but I explained
how we had fasted already, thanks to the ship tossing about and little food. He agreed that perhaps there was a misunderstanding.”
Dominus lifted his head in surprise. “I did not mind missing the festivities.”
“There will not be any merrymaking, brother.” Everard counted off on his hands. “We are not to dance, flirt, or touch a woman in any way. I was reminded, for my own soul, of the oath. To not gorge or indulge in idle conversation.”
Weary, Dominus sat on the edge of his bed, facing Everard. “Anything else?”
“Commander Bartholomew said that the strict order of conduct is imperative to following God's will.” He shrugged. “I was never married, like some of the other men, so I do not miss that joining of lives. Were you wed before you took the oath?”
Dominus thought back to his life before the Crusade. His father, a duke of a very small duchy on the coast, ruler of a rot
ted keep that smelled of fish. His half-brothers as wild as their father. Sometimes he'd felt like the only sane person in the village.
“No. I never married.” His father had not believed in marriage. His philosophy had been to get as many women pregnant
and have their bastards run his fishing empire. Delusional. Most of the time, they'd all gotten along. His father's plan had almost worked.
He enjoyed women, but he'd avoided love and commitment, certain he had plenty of time to discover his mate.
“So you do not crave women's company, as some of the others do?”
“I try not to think about them that way.” Dominus had thought to end his days on the battlefield, a sword in his hand and a war cry on his lips. Not an ocean in sight. Only the wheel of Fortuna, Tyche, spunâand here he was in the Mediterranean, still risking his life by sword and losing his heart to a woman who thought he was a monk. God help him.
“Do you regret joining the brotherhood?”
Dominus answered the younger knight as honestly as he could. “Non. No regrets.” His time here was a means to an end. “We can eat our fill of the food and not have to dance.”
“I was never good at dancing,” Everard said.
“There was a lot of dancing in the tavern?”
“My sisters would make me practice with them before I stepped all over their feet. Then they left me alone.”
“How long has it been since you've seen them?”
Everard smiled. “A year ago. Right before we left France. I was fourteen when Peter came for me, and I am twenty-four now. My sisters have children, and my mother's hair is all gray. But my grandfather still runs the tavern.”
“No sisters for me.” Dominus remembered sitting in the dining hall, his brothers crowded around the long table, benches on either side. They had finished eating his older brother's favorite meal, lobster with cream sauce and a side of wild greens. He and Drummond were the only two fully related. They were celebrating his brother's eighteenth birthday, and his father lavished attention on Drummond, plying him with ale and regaling them all with stories of his misspent youth. It had not changed much from his current state, although after their mother, his father never married again. “Seven brothers.”
“A large family,” Everard noted.
Fifteen years ago, he'd been sixteen. His brother's party had turned into a drunken brawl.
Keep the village operating and the village daughters pregnant.
Not something to share with Everard, whom Dominus suspected was a virgin.
“Count your blessings,” Everard suggested. “Did you get a horse?”
“Two. And a blade.” He'd quit counting blessings a while ago, concerned with keeping a roof over the heads of the ones he already had. His brothers had all followed his father's ideology, spreading their seed throughout the village. He had two dozen children to care for, waiting for him to accept his responsibility as the only surviving relative of his generation. If he chose. He could also finish the quest to Jerusalem and disappear into the wilds of Scotland.
“Have you met the patriarch yet?”
“No.” Everard's eyes lit up. “Tonight, I hope. I heard some of the fellows say how he blessed them all, coming off the boat. He left as soon as he knew there were Turkish archers aiming at our party. You know there is a bit of controversy around his acting as patriarch?”
“How so?”
“Do not get too friendly with him, as he is not officially blessed by the pope.”
Dominus leaned back on the bed, stretching his legs before him. “Can he do that?”
“The previous patriarch, who helped Raymond marry Constance when she was a child, was deposedâimprisoned in Saint Symeon's monastery.” Everard lowered his voice. “He escaped, made his way to Rome, and is demanding, right now, to be reinstated.”
“What would happen to the laws made in the last four years with Aimery acting as patriarch?”
“It could be a problem. Just take care.” Everard tugged his bushy beard. “We both have appointments with the barber tomorrow. I would like to trim this rat's nest before supper.”