"Let it go," Will advised quietly. "As he says, there will be other tournaments to look forward to. We have far weightier matters to occupy us over the next few days."
Robin held his gaze a moment, then nodded. The ruddiness in his cheeks faded briefly as he was reminded of the primary purpose of their attendance here, and he scanned the blur of faces in the courtyard again, searching for a familiar one with dark brown eyes and long Welsh braids.
"If Dafydd was waiting for us here, he would have found us by now."
"Or he may not have risked coming inside the castle walls. He may have decided to wait until we pitched camp."
Robin glared. "Or he may not have come at all and we are wasting precious time." He started to push his way through the crowd, heading back to where they had left the horses. Sparrow was fast on his heels, as were Will and Brenna, and it was not until they were halfway across the bailey that she realized they had left Griffyn Renaud standing on his own at the booth without any attempt to explain or excuse their hasty departure. She stopped and looked over her shoulder, but there was no sign of the errant knight's broad shoulders or jet-black hair. There was nothing to catch her eye other than a gull circling in the air currents overhead, screaming at the foolish antics of the humans below.
Deep in the bowels of Gaillard's donjons, there was another kind of screaming. Driven by a pain so immense the sound was almost crystalline in its purity, echoing from wall to wall, reaching a high, stunning crescendo of ear-splitting agony before it shivered away in an airless paroxysm of defeat. The chamber from which the sound emanated was large, twenty paces by twenty paces, with a low vaulted ceiling comprised of several stone arches and niches that served to break it up into smaller compartments. There were no cell walls or doors, but the mortared blocks were hung with thick iron rings and shackles every few paces. Located in the center of the chamber was an array of tables, boards, a firepit, and a large circular rack on which a body could be tied and stretched until every bone and joint was separated from its neighbor. The ceiling dripped constantly with evil-smelling leachings from the floors above. Slimy black pools collected in the hollows of the uneven stone floor, the surfaces shivering with each new ploop of added moisture. Rats shuffled in the dark corners, huge sharp-toothed creatures crouched on fat haunches, their small, feral eyes reflecting a spark of light now and then. They were well fed and patient, content to wait for the humans to leave and take their lights with them so their feasting might resume in private.
There were three humans in the donjon today—four, counting the shattered mass of flesh and bone strapped to one of the tables. Two stood in the outer ring of pale yellow light cast by the single horn lantern, while the third bent over the table and waited for the final echoes of the scream to fade. Suspended overhead like a tinker's wares were an assortment of hooks, knives, pincers, tongs, prods, and saw-toothed instruments designed solely for inflicting pain. The table itself had open slabs for drainage and boasted deeply embedded iron manacles for the holding of wrists and ankles, plus leather straps for the chest and waist if the victim began to thrash too much to insure the subjugator's delicate touch.
One of the observers lifted his goblet of wine to his lips and enjoyed a sip. "Do you suppose he has told us all he knows?"
The thin little man beside him scratched his head with the sharpened end of the feather quill he was holding and thrust his tongue into his cheek to consider his answer. "He has spilled more than he wanted, I warrant, but I doubt he has told the half. The old Marshal picks his men well."
The first man drew a deep breath and released it through his long, fine nose. "The Black Wolf and William Marshal.
After nearly forty years, the link is still there. Solange, my dear, can you not persuade our friend to simply admit he has been carrying messages from Pembroke to Amboise? It would save so much time and effort, not to mention the cost of a dozen spies to verify what he has told us."
The woman bending over the table looked up and raised her hands—which were red to the elbows in blood—in a gesture of frustration. "I can ask, but in vain, I fear. The bastard is dead."
"Really?" Bertrand Malagane, Count of Saintonge, walked forward into the light and peered down at the frozen, tormented face. Nothing much remained of the features; even his nose and ears were gone. A close acquaintance might have recognized him by the Welsh braids that hung limp and bloody over the side of the table, but nothing else. The count straightened and frowned at the extraordinarily beautiful woman who stood opposite him. "How unfortunate. But no matter." He sighed. "You kept him alive two days and nights, long enough to give us more than what we had hoped."
In a gesture of self-disgust, she jabbed the knife she had been holding in the unresponsive flesh and shook her head.
Two days was hardly a record to boast, not for someone whose talents were well known throughout all of Normandy. It was said the king himself, Philip of France, had suffered vivid, sweat-soaked nightmares after once observing the pleasure Solange de Sancerre derived from her work. And while Malagane often experienced the odd cool shiver rippling across his own skin, it was not from any sense of revulsion or fear. It was because he could barely keep his eyes off the lush curves of her body, and because his own blood throbbed and raged in his veins every time her artistry was rewarded by a particularly exquisite shrill of pain.
At five and fifty years of age, Bertrand could afford to indulge his little luxuries. He was a handsome and powerful man, with a full head of iron-gray hair and a neatly groomed beard still liberally salted with the reddish-gold threads of his youth. His eyes were deep-set and heavy-lidded, blue as a lake in winter with as much inclination to reveal what lay beneath the frozen, placid surface. He had been custodian of Chateau Gaillard for the past seven years, five of which he had spent in thrall of the talents and pleasures of Solange de Sancerre.
Born, it was rumored, under the influence of a bloodred moon, she was feared to be half sorceress, half siren. She had the ripe, sensuous body of a voluptuary, with breasts large enough to bring a man to his knees and the carnal talents to keep him there long past the normal limits of sexual endurance. Her eyes were a clear, opaline green, slanted under thick copper-colored lashes; hair as red as flame framed a face so white it was nearly translucent. So many men, seeing a vision of such rare and striking beauty, were led to their death thinking it to be their salvation.
So many screamed for the first time out of sheer horror that something so erotically beautiful could prove to be so hellishly evil.
Malagane watched her cross in front of the lantern as she went to wash her hands in a large oaken barrel.
"Aelred ... you will, of course, transcribe all of your scribblings into something legible for me to read?"
The scrivener, who was still making furious scratching noises with quill and ink on the topmost page of parchment, looked up. "My lord?"
"By tonight?"
He blinked owlishly. "Tonight, my lord? There are ... why, there are fully a score of sheets here, my lord."
"Then you had best get started, had you not?"
The little man started to stammer another protest but saw Solange look over and arch her eyebrow. "Y-yes, my lord.
At once, my lord. I shall make my fingers fly, my lord."
"Just make your feet fly," Malagane said quietly. "And find my son. Tell him to meet us here."
"Here, my lord?"
Malagane turned only his head and the scrivener backed hurriedly out of the circle of light, his shoes scraping the stones in his haste to leave the airless chamber. When the count looked at Solange again, he caught his breath, for she had unfastened the thong that held the blood-spattered linen tunic closed over her shoulders and let it slide down the long, pale curves of her body. Under his unblinking stare she unbound her hair and shook it so that it spilled around her shoulders in a sleek red curtain. She raised a ladleful of water and poured it down her breasts, leaving them wet and gleaming in the dull lantern light. Another scoop slicked her thighs, but the third was gruffly intercepted and sent splashing to one side as Malagane came up behind her and cupped the heaviness of her breasts in his hands. The nipples were already hard and jutting, and as he pressed his mouth into the curve of her throat, he heard her laugh, soft and husky, and felt her hands reach up to twine around fistfuls of his hair.
"Most men would be spewing their stomachs onto the floor, had they viewed the name entertainments as you, my lord."
"I am not most men," he growled. "And you, surely, are not the slightest part like most women."
She laughed again and twisted around in his arms so that their mouths could meet. Her breasts were crushed against his chest and her belly against his groin, and he groaned as she rubbed herself over his flesh, rousing him to a painful hardness.
"Witch," he breathed into her mouth. "Only you can do this to me."
"Not your loving wife? Not the lovely Ysenne?"
Malagane cursed and thrust one of his knees between her thighs. He had married Ysenne de Boulogne for her lands and her wealth, and he had kept her for her ability to breed sons. In truth, he had broken out in a cold sweat the first time he had seen her, for she had been—and still was— broad-hipped and flat-nosed, ugly as a wart with most of her teeth lost to a childhood accident... likely brought about by tripping over her own clumsy feet. Thirty years ago, however, he had not had the luxury of being able to choose a bride on merit of beauty and bedroom talents alone. He had married her because her father had been counsel to the king of France, an alliance of influence Malagane could not have afforded to ignore. And in the darkness of their bedroom, he had done his duty and she had done hers, insuring his small but rich duchy of Saintonge would have heirs. There were eight of them, all sons, most of them brutish and dull to be sure, but four had already made politically sound marriages into families that could only strengthen Saintonge's ties with the Crown. The oldest was here at Gaillard serving as captain of the guard; another aspired to wear the red robes of a bishop, though there was nothing chaste or particularly holy about him. The youngest was by far the cleverest of the lot, however, and if it could be said that Malagane held any special affection for one of his sons, it would be for Lothaire, who was also here at the chateau, come for the tournament.
"What are these private words you would share with Gerome?" Solange breathed into his mouth.
Malagane shuddered as he felt her hands tugging at the points to release his hose. "I do have some business dealings I conduct without you, my dear."
"All of them dull and boring, I am sure." Malagane clenched his teeth together and tensed himself around his lover's less than tender touch as she found the opening in his braies and released the straining heat of his flesh. "Especially if they are shared with Gerome."
"And yet you yourself shared more than just words with him last night, did you not?"
Her laughter tinkled in his ear. "Oooo ... can this be jealousy I hear in my lord's voice? For his own son?"
"My son," Malagane spat, "is a brute and a lecher who has bedded every woman inside Gaillard and half of those within a two-day ride of the walls. I am surprised you do not worry after catching some flesh-rotting disease."
"If I do," she whispered, biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, "I would be only too happy, then, to share it with you in turn."
Malagane cursed and started to push her out of his arms, but she was strong for so slender a woman, and quick.
Before he could drag his focus away from the urgent throbbing in his groin and stop her, she had caught up one of his hands and snapped it into a manacle that hung from the wall. A second startled gasp was too late to forestall the iron bracelet closing around his other wrist, or the violent kicks that parted his ankles and secured them to thick, rusted shackles.
He strained instinctively against the irons, knowing the gesture was futile. A hundred men before him had tested the union of iron and mortar and had not weakened it by so much as a crumb. His chest heaving, he watched as she pulled on each chain to take up the slack and pin him flush against the rough stone wall, splayed and spread-eagled in his silk finery like an exotic bug crushed underfoot.
"Release me," he commanded. "At once."
"Not until you beg my forgiveness."
"For what? For expecting some measure of loyalty from you?"
Her eyes sparkled and her lips curled back over small white teeth. "I am as loyal to you as you are to me, my lusty lord. Your loving wife arrived last night from Taillebourg, did she not? And did you not dispatch that poxy little worm Aelred to inform me you preferred her company over mine?"
"I have not seen the ugly bitch for three months. She brought correspondence, ledgers, accounts from Saintonge.
And then there was Lothaire. He kept me locked in conversation well into the small hours of the morning."
"Whereupon you came directly to me."
"Whereupon ... I stood outside your door and listened to you keening and wailing Gerome's name in the frenzy of your pleasure."
"I wanted to be certain you knew who took your place. And with exceptional vigor, I might add."
Malagane surged against his restraints again, managing only to cut the skin of one wrist and gain a meager inch of space between himself and the wall before sagging back in defeat. He was under no illusion of fidelity where Solange was concerned. She tried other men as easily and as often as some tried different spices on their food, and Gerome was exactly the kind to appeal to her more vulgar appetites. He was big, bullish, and hung like an ox, and once he caught the scent of a wet female in his nostrils, he had little time for anything so mundane as conversation.
"Solange ... you test my patience."
"I intend to test it a good deal more," she said evenly. "You know how I dislike jealous men. And besides, it has been a long while—too long, methinks—since I have heard you beg, really beg for my mercy."