Taming the Beast (4 page)

Michaela wanted to weep. Instead, she let a shaky smile curl over her face as she suddenly realized how terribly handsome Lord Alan Tornfield was. At his side, Elizabeth's face turned toward Michaela, hopefully expectant.

“I will,” Michaela breathed.

He was home.

Roderick's heart thudded in his chest like a war drum as Cherbon came into his view by way of the gatehouse. He reined his mount to a halt to collect himself, and leaned onto his right thigh to give his screaming left knee and hip a moment of rest from gripping the horse's side. Hugh Gilbert drew his horse even with Roderick's and stopped, the misshapen bundle bound to Hugh's back by lengths of wide, fine linen crisscrossed over his chest giving him a hunched appearance.

“This is it, is it?” Hugh said, and looked to Roderick with his usual sardonic grin. “Likely enough, I suppose.”

During the long, long months of Roderick's recovery, the Hugh Gilbert Roderick had first met before Heraclea had slowly changed into a different man. Although to be fair, Roderick guessed that Hugh likely hadn't changed at all. The man he knew after the battle had been a desperate man, a guilty man—qualities taken on in a time of trial. The Hugh Gilbert who sat the horse next to Roderick's side was the true man. The man he had been before his pilgrimage and the man he was now. And although in those early days of sickness, Roderick would have never guessed that their lives would become so closely entwined, he liked the man Hugh Gilbert was, owed him a great deal, despite Hugh's protests.

And Roderick was glad that Hugh accompanied him now to his home. Roderick would have not admitted it under threat of death, but the sight of the soaring gatehouse of Cherbon Castle struck old, cold, weary fear into him. Even though he knew the Cherbon Devil was dead and buried more than a year past, Magnus's ghost seemed to reach out to Roderick from the mortar between the rough stone with bony, pointing fingers, and his deep, menacing voice seemed to ring in the ears of his son.

Failure. Failure!

Worthless, useless cripple!

You should have died instead of me.

But Roderick had not died, much to his own surprise, instead drawing morbid, determined strength from the news that Magnus Cherbon had met his own final judgment halfway around the world, ironically within the formidable and decadent walls of Cherbon. And now the Cherbon demesne was Roderick's—the Cherbon Devil reincarnated, in his own bitter mind, but for different reasons. Once, a desperate lifetime ago it seemed, this fortress had housed a frightened and cowed young boy, then a rebellious and angry young man. Now it welcomed an injured and embittered lord back into its cold arms. Roderick was home again, and unlike his hasty and solitary departure, he had not made the long return journey alone.

The bundle strapped to Hugh's back squirmed and gave a cross squawk.

“Yes, yes, Bottomless Pit,” Hugh said over his shoulder. “Nearly there. I vow you've wet me through to my front side.”

The wind gusted, whipping the ragged remains of the Cherbon standards topping either side of the gatehouse tower into snapping strips. Ivy had laid siege to the imposing fortress and been left to run its mad reign unchecked, giving the walls stretching away to the north and east an abandoned, dangerous, wild appearance. The drawbridge was lowered, but there was no fanfare, no bustling serfs attending the castle's business either on foot or in cart. In the cloud-covered gloom of that rainy and cold afternoon, no harker so much as called out a warning.

Not even the sound of a footstep could be heard from beyond the curtain wall. Only the lonely wind, skimming the gray stones.

Roderick adjusted in his saddle onto his screaming left hip once more and clucked his weary horse over the drawbridge, wordlessly prompting Hugh to follow. Young Leo began to cry in earnest as they passed into the barbican.

The inner bailey of Cherbon was more derelict than its exterior. Vines ran their wicked, tangled maze here, as well, almost like a plague of vegetation had been visited upon the castle, and the old, crackling growth seemed a carpet of despair. Strewn about the ground were bits of broken furniture, barrels that had burst their staves as if dropped and left to lay where they had vomited their contents, now long picked over by scavengers. Shattered jugs and wedges of pottery—Roderick saw a jagged piece with the Cherbon crest cleaved where it had broken. He saw a length of once-costly and now weather-faded cloth—perhaps a piece of the drapery belonging behind the lord's table in the great hall.

Roderick walked his horse through the crackling, crunching litter of the bailey, around the great tower of the keep toward the entrance of the hall. He stopped and put his back to the south wall, also covered in choking vines to the battlements and wallwalk above. Over the keep, between where Roderick stood and the hidden inner courtyard, a gossamer finger of wood smoke struggled to scratch at the low blanket of sky. A crow cawed. Roderick let the reins fall from his hands and grasped his left leg below his knee. Using his right fist, he beat his boot backward out of the stirrup, and prepared to lift his leg over the pommel.

Hugh was off his own horse in a blink, and Roderick felt a familiar pinch of jealousy at the man's ease of movement, even with stout little Leo strapped to his back.

“One moment, Rick. I'll get—”

“I can do it,” Roderick growled.

“Don't be an ass,” Hugh snapped, searching beneath the vines for a chunk of discarded firewood, left to rot where it had been dropped. He wrested it away from the greedy vines, Leo now silent, and brought it to Roderick's right side, where he stood the wide length on its end. “We've been astride all the day. With as stiff as you are upon dismounting, you'd break your only good leg. And then where would you be, I ask?”

Roderick had no reply, for of course, Hugh was right. He grasped Hugh's shoulder and stepped onto the wobbly wooden pylon. Holding his nearly useless leg aloft, he made the short hop to the ground, pain shooting up the muscles of his buttocks and to either side of his spine, all the same. Then, for naught but petulant spite, Roderick kicked the wood length over with his left boot and bit back the painful cry it elicited in his knee.

Roderick pulled the walking stick from the sheath that at one time had held his broadsword and extended it. Leaning heavily, he snatched up the horse's reins with wide, awkward sweeps of his free arm and tugged his mount toward the bailey well. Once there, he found that the bucket was missing several planks and the hemp rope had rotted nearly in two.

Roderick threw the useless garbage to the vines with a crash and a growl, where it splintered completely. He turned and jerked the horse toward the doorway of the hall, his stomach in painful knots.

He told himself it was not fear he felt. Only anticipation. Relief for the end of their long, long journey.

“Going in now, are we?” Hugh called as Roderick ducked through the doorway, pulling his horse onto the cobbled floors after him.

The hall was darker and, oddly enough, colder than the bailey, although a pitiful fire burned in the giant, square stone-lined pit near the end of the room. A remnant of the meters-long swags of drapery that had once ran the course of both long walls hung in one pitiful scrap there near the door, replaced with long swoops of cobwebs, gossamer threads of dirt, and crumbling vines straggling over the painted plaster murals set near the beamed ceiling. The floor was only marginally clearer than the bailey he'd left behind, the intricate pattern of stonework hidden beneath a thick layer of dirt and dead vines and broken furnishings.

Only the lord's table still stood aright, a lumpy pile of what looked like discarded cloth resting on its center. Whoever had built the fire had likely left it, Roderick thought, and he wondered if the person in residence was of Cherbon or just some wanderer who had stumbled upon the deserted castle in a spot of luck.

Behind him, Roderick's horse stamped and blew quietly, shaking him from the scene of destruction before his eyes. His eyes sought the doorway at the opposite end of the room, leading to the kitchens and the interior well within, and was readying to limp in that direction when the pile of cloth on the table stirred.

“Harliss!” the lump of clothing shouted, and Roderick stopped. He knew that voice. “Roderick? Is that you, my son?”

Roderick wanted no one to ever address him as “son” again in that room, not even Friar Cope, but he limped around in a circle all the same. “Yes, Friar.”

The older, rotund man immediately reached for the jug at his elbow. After a long swallow, he stood. “I'm glad you've returned,” he said, as if Roderick had just come back from a day of hunting in the wood beyond Cherbon's walls. “Glory be to God. But, my son, your father is dead.”

“Good.”

The friar nodded. “Cherbon is yours.”

“I know,” Roderick said with a touch of impatience. “My horse thirsts.” He turned back toward the kitchen doorway and was met by yet another ghost from his past, the ghost of the woman Friar Cope had called out for in the midst of his stupor, and the source of the knot in Roderick's stomach.

“Good day, Roderick,” Harliss said in her thin, stingy-gray voice.

Before him was the woman who had sought to take the place of his mother, the nurse who had cared for him and reared him under Magnus's orders. Perhaps more skeletal, more gray, than when he'd left Cherbon, but still the same severe coif, the same dire gray gown and apron, the same permanent, disapproving frown. Her hands were clenched before her waist. How many times had those hands struck him?

When Roderick gave her no return greeting, she spoke again. “Do my eyes deceive me, or are you entertaining your animal in the great hall?”

“You will address me as ‘my lord,'
servant
,” Roderick stated flatly. “And yes, this is my animal, and yes, he is in the hall, although it is of no concern to you save that had you cared for the bucket in yon well, he would not be here. As it is, this chamber is akin to a sty, and were my father still alive, I'm certain you would be whipped.”
Take that, you bitch
.

Harliss's knife-thin nostrils flared. “Oh, I do doubt he would resort to that.
My lord
.” Harliss turned her crone's face to Friar Cope as he puffed to a stop between she and Roderick. “Have you told him, Friar?”

“Yes, he has,” Roderick snapped.

“No,” Friar Cope wheezed. “Roderick—”

“So there
are
others about,” Hugh said merrily as he entered the doorway, his voice rather loud for the large, quiet space. “They aren't transients, are they? I do so crave a hearty meal and Leo is—
my God!
This hall is a disgrace! No matter—I will go fetch my own mount and we shall have a pagan feast upon the floor.”

Hugh had unbound Leo from his back and re-seated the toddler astride one hip. Harliss looked at the pair of them as if they were beggars, although Hugh's clothing was as rich as Cherbon's hall had at one time looked, and Leo wore a gown of silk and wool embroidered with gold thread, and tiny leather slippers upon his feet. He looked like a small prince.

The costume was the last gift Aurelia had given him. Roderick had watched her fashion it with her own hands.

“Wod-wick!” Leo shouted, and held his arms toward Roderick.

“He can't take you now, Wart. But do get down and have a run about,” Hugh declared, and set the toddler on his feet. Leo immediately ran to Roderick despite Hugh's words, tripping as his feet became tangled in the dead vines, but catching himself with Roderick's long cloak, burying his face behind Roderick's knees.

Roderick struggled not to let his leg buckle under the slight but horrendously painful pressure of the boy's head.

“Cherbon
is
yours,” Friar Cope continued, as if Hugh had not interrupted them. “But there is a condition to the inheritance, Roderick.”

Hugh turned a frown to Roderick. “What kind of shit is this, Rick?
A condition?
Ridiculous. You know these two, I suppose?”

Roderick nodded, and the knot in his stomach threatened to snap. Of course there was a condition. Even from the grave, Magnus was intent on making certain his son was miserable.

“Cherbon's Friar, Cope,” Roderick said through clenched teeth. “And my old nurse, Harliss. Where the other residents of the keep are, I know not.”

“Ah, at last I meet Harliss the Heartless,” Hugh said with more than a bit of frost in his tone. “I have heard much of your charity.”

“I save my charity for those in need,” Harliss sneered. “It is wasted on prideful, disobedient little boys.”

Roderick pinned the old friar with his glare. “What condition?”

“Ah, well,” the friar stammered, “in order to claim Cherbon, you must marry.”

“Is that all?” Roderick said, the knot loosening.

“Ah, the lady must be of good family,” Cope muttered, searching the folds of his robes. “I have the directive here, somewhere….”

“It matters not. Does the king know of this?”

“Of course, my so—my lord,” Friar Cope corrected himself. “Magnus ordered a copy sent to him shortly after you departed for the Holy Land.” The round man crossed himself. “But, my lord—”