Fulgrin's complexion turned a livid, mottled red. "It seems I have made a grievous error after all! I should not have wasted my time—nor my master's—by coming here!"
He made as if to leave but Brenna's fist around the fringed edge of his collar stopped him—that and the sudden appearance of Richard and Dag behind them, blocking the exit.
"Something wrong?" Dag asked.
"Sparrow is venting air again," Brenna said and turned to Fulgrin. "Please, will you not tell Robin what you told me?
Will you not let him help?"
"Help?" The squire scowled and glared back at Sparrow. "Such help as I see here will more likely get my master killed ... if he is not dead already."
"Brenna—" Robin pushed painfully to his feet as Will handed him his shirt. "What is the matter here?"
She held Fulgrin's gaze a moment longer, then answered her brother. "Bertrand Malagane is planning an ambush for us on the forest road. He has taken Griffyn Renaud prisoner and intends to make it look as if he attacked you in an act of revenge."
"Why the devil would the Count of Saintonge want to ambush us?"
"For the same reason he hired my master to kill you," Fulgrin said bluntly. "To keep you from going to England and spoiling the plans he has made with Prince Louis."
There was a subtle whisper of leather closing around steel as both Richard and Dag put hands to their swords. Sparrow, to whom subtlety was a foreign affliction, leaped forward to plant himself like a shield in front of Robin and, in a wink, had two small axes clutched menacingly in his fists.
Robin finished pulling his shirt over his shoulders and calmly reached for his hose. "Where would Bertrand Malagane come by the idea I was making plans to go to England?"
"He came by them through the screams of your man—Iowerth?—who was a guest in his donjons for two days and two nights. I warrant he knows exactly where it is you are bound and why."
Richard took an angry step forward. "He has Dafydd?"
"Had, my lord. When my master saw him, he was already dead. Mercifully so," he added, quickly crossing himself,
"to judge by what he told me. And now the same thing will happen to him, because it was plain to anyone with eyes— and the Count of Saintonge has those of a hawk—that my lord did not fight to win today."
"Not fight to win?" Richard exclaimed. "What tripe is this? Robin—let me take this bag of bones outside and rattle a few loose!"
He did not wait for Robin's consent, but grabbed a gloved handful of Fulgrin's jerkin and started dragging him to the door.
"Wait!" Robin shouted. "Wait. Tripe it may well be, but let us hear it anyway." "Robin!"
"I said, let him speak!"
Richard thrust the squire away from him as if he was a bag of steaming offal. Fulgrin stumbled awkwardly onto his knees and recovered his balance only to find himself staring eye to eye with Sparrow, the razor-sharp blades of both axes pressed to either side of his throat.
"Now then, Skrint," the seneschal warned. "Have a care what you say, or the words you hear will be the last you utter through your God-given mouth."
Fulgrin glanced up at Brenna from a stretched neck and managed only to stammer, "M-my lady?"
"What do you know about this?" Robin demanded.
"Not much more than what Fulgrin just told you," she said quietly. "I saw Lord Griffyn last night, but he never mentioned Dafydd. Perhaps if he had, I might have believed him ..."
"Last night? You saw him last night?"
She looked helplessly into Robin's handsome face, a face that had turned as hard as granite and twice as cold.
"I... went to his tent. I had hoped to persuade him not to fight today."
"Christ Jesus, how were you planning to do that?" Dag blurted.
"I took my bow," she said flatly. "I had every intention of shooting him, especially when he told me the count had paid him to goad you into fighting ... but then he started talking about assassins and told me that it would accomplish nothing if he left or even refused to fight, and—"
"Wait... wait..." Robin held up his hand again. "What assassins?"
She let out a huff of breath. "He gave me their names, but—"
"De Chanceas and Cigogni?" Will asked. He answered Robin's frown with a nod. "I told you I saw them in the bower yesterday. And today, they were lurking in the shadows like carrion."
"They have been sent to the forest road now," Fulgrin croaked. "To lurk there with the purpose of collecting the thousand marks that went unearned by my master."
Robin absorbed all of this, but his eyes had not left Brenna's face. "Why did you not come to me before now, whether you believed him or not?"
"I did not come to you ... because I did not want you to know what a fool I have made of myself."
He saw the shine in her eyes and frowned. "How big of a fool?"
"Big," she admitted quietly. "The biggest, I suppose." "Did you know he was ...?"
"No! No, I did not know he was the Prince of Darkness until he lifted his visor on the field yesterday. That was another reason why I wanted to shoot him—because he made such fools of us all."
"Yet you believed him enough to let him live. And enough to be convinced he deliberately offered me an opening today in the lists."
She started to lower her lashes, lower her chin ... but then she raised both again, slowly, and searched the solemn gray eyes for a long, revealing moment.
"You believe it too?" she whispered.
"I fought that man for the past five years in my dreams. Not once did he make the smallest error in judgment."
"Then you will help him?"
"Help him?" He turned to Will and signaled angrily for his hauberk and chausses. "I may just kill the bastard myself."
Sparrow grumbled in agreement even as he spared Fulgrin's throat and fit the axes back into their special belt loops.
He was not so quick to exonerate Brenna, however, and while Robin finished dressing and Richard and Dag sent for their armor, his agate eyes bored into her with the wrath of a man fated always to watch the ones he deemed to possess the most common sense show the least when it came to matters of the flesh.
Will was no less subtle as he brushed past her to fetch Robin's hauberk. "You picked a hell of a time to turn female on us," he murmured.
"I have not turned anything other than what I was already," she murmured right back.
"Perhaps I just phrased that wrong. Perhaps I should have said: you picked a hell of a bastard to throw yourself away on."
Griffyn's head felt as if someone were jumping around on the inside with wooden-toed boots. He had regained consciousness on the bed of a small cart, smothered under a pile of moldering, stinking hay. The dust sifted into his mouth and nose, throat and ears, making him cough incessantly. His wrists and ankles were bound so tightly his extremities were numb, swollen beyond pain, and whoever was driving the cart paid little heed to the deep ruts and rocks that jolted the wheels and caused him to bounce unmercifully on his wounded shoulder. He judged, by the sound of hoofbeats on either side of the cart, there were at least a score of outriders, one of whom was Gerome de Saintonge, whose nasally voice was unmistakable even through the muffling thickness of hay. Someone had dressed him in his tunic and hauberk, and he thought he felt an empty swordbelt buckled around his waist, though there was nothing that could be used as a weapon within reach.
He squeezed his eyelids tightly shut before opening them again to the torment of burning dust, but he could see nothing through the hay. One of his eyes was blurred by more than dust and as he squinted to try to clear it, a fresh trickle of blood flowed down from his eyebrow to hamper his vision more. His jaw felt swollen and bruised and he Could fit the end of his tongue into a bleeding gap where a large molar had been broken off at the gumline.
He had no idea what had happened to Fulgrin. He might, for all Griffyn knew, be trussed in the cart beside him ... or dead.
He heard a muffled order to halt and a moment later the terrible jolting stopped. The hay shifted and rough hands reached into the cart, hauling him upright and pitching him down onto the road. Someone bent down and cut the ropes around his ankles, but his wrists were left painfully fettered at the small of his back.
He blinked to clear his eyes and spat out a mouthful of broken straw, and when he could see past the pinkish grit, the first face he saw belonged to Gerome de Saintonge, the second to Solange de Sancerre. She was dressed in tunic and hose, with a molded leather byrnie armoring her upper body. She wore a falchion strapped around her waist and a brace of daggers thrust into her belt. The two were pointing into the woods and discussing the best vantage for the ambush, but when they saw him struggling to sit upright, they walked over and smirked down at him with obvious amusement.
"Well, well, and so we see how the mighty have fallen." "Untie my hands," Griffyn spat, "and I would be more than happy to bring you down with me." Gerome laughed. "Oh, I intend to untie you, all right. I may even put a sword in your hand"—he glanced at the stiff, swollen fingers—"not that I imagine you will be able to use it to any good effect."
"I have heard that is how you fight best," Griffyn spat. "When your opponent is bound and helpless and cannot fight back."
Saintonge's dull blue eyes glittered and he lashed out
with his boot, kicking Griffyn on the upper thigh where there was no armor to protect him. The force of the blow sent him into a tight curl of pain, and, laughing again, Saintonge leaned over to grab a fistful of the ebony hair.
"You will not find yourself possessing half so much wit by the end of the day."
"Even half—Griffyn gasped—"is a full share more than you can claim."
Saintonge tightened his grip on Griffyn's hair and smashed his fist across the handsome face, reopening the split in his lip and the cut on the inside of his mouth. He would happily have added tenfold to the bruises and gashes delivered in the first beating if not for Solange putting a restraining hand on his wrist.
"Gerome, dear, he will be of no use to us dead."
Saintonge snarled and delivered a last savage kick to Griffyn's unprotected flesh before he called upon Cigogni and de Chanceas to tie him to a nearby oak tree.
Panting, coughing out blood and dust, Griffyn was hoisted upright and dragged to the side of the road. A rope was passed around his chest several times, the final loop adjusted by Solange so that it circled his throat and held his head flat against the trunk. The slightest pressure, if he attempted to twist or turn his head, would crush his wind-pipe. Even swallowing was difficult, and he nearly gagged on the blood flowing from the split in his lip.
Solange's sympathy extended to tipping his head forward so that the blood spilled outward.
"You will have to forgive Gerome's... enthusiasm," she murmured. "He wants nothing to go wrong this time."
Her hand slipped beneath the hem of his tunic and rubbed him with a measure of her own enthusiasm. "I was so hoping we could spend more time together. Perhaps when this is over?"
Gerome de Saintonge interrupted her musings with a scowl as he brought her horse forward.
"You had best leave now and rejoin Father. The view should be adequate," he added, shielding his eyes to look up at the jagged dome of a hill that rose above the treetops nearly half a mile away. It was as thickly wooded on the crown as the surrounding hills and gullys, and anyone standing at the top would not be visible to those below.
Only a careless glint of sunlight sparking off metal would betray their presence, and Malagane was anything but careless.
"Fight well, my bold lord," Solange whispered, reaching up to press a kiss over Gerome's mouth. "Bring us the head of Robert Wardieu and I will come to you tonight. I will come and you shall know pleasure beyond your ability to comprehend."
A small bead of saliva formed at the comer of Saintonge's mouth as he watched her being handed up into the saddle.
When she was gone, he grinned and cupped a hairy hand over his groin then turned and glared at Griffyn Renaud.
He came slowly back to the oak tree and stood Staring for a long moment before he drew his sword. It was Griffyn's own blade with its polished steel surface and serpentine hilt.
"A beautiful weapon," Saintonge murmured, running a thumb along the exquisitely sharp edge. He saw the writing on the shaft and tilted it to reduce the glare, his fat lips moving as he read the Latin inscription and translated it. "
'You ... need not hope ... that you will ever see heaven ... for I have come ... to take you to the other side.' " He grinned and glanced sidelong at Griffyn. "How prophetic. And heavy too. One stroke, I should think, would part a man's head from his shoulders. I will test it on Wardieu, then leave it thrust in his corpse so that no one will doubt whose hand wielded it. But first..."
He brought the gleaming edge of the blade up and rested it just beneath Griffyn's jawline, in the same place a scabbed stripe marked his own throat. He slid the blade slowly across the skin, parting the edges of flesh, sending a fresh sheet of blood down onto Griffyn's collar.
"I owed you that," Saintonge murmured. "The rest of your debts will be collected in full when our business here is done. Perhaps"—he leaned forward so that the rancid heat of his breath stung Griffyn's nostrils—"I will even let Engelard have his fun with you. Right here. In the grass. With the other men cheering and vying for a turn."
Cigogni grinned through black and furry teeth and, mimicking Solange's caress, shoved his hand beneath Griffyn's tunic and closed his fist around the bulge of flesh.
Griffyn strained against his ropes but was limited to a futile contortion that only increased the pressure on the rope at his throat and brought a gust of laughter out of Cigogni's mouth. The fist tightened around his flesh and Griffyn could not think, breathe, or move through the blinding sheet of agony that tore through him. Only when the clawing fingers released him could he see clearly enough to acknowledge the leering grin on the assassin's face.
"I look forward to it, my sweet," the Italian hissed.