The Last Knight (9 page)

Read The Last Knight Online

Authors: Candice Proctor

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #General, #Historical, #Erotica

Suppressing another craven impulse to flee, Attica dropped her bags to the floor and gripped the edge of the table. Threading one foot in between board and bench, she swung the other leg over and sat down opposite him. It was an amazingly easy movement, without the hampering encumbrance of long skirts, and it occurred to her that, in some ways, at least, she could almost begin to enjoy this disguise.
“Where is Sergei?” she asked, her gaze sweeping both sides of the board and finding only strangers, several of them other knights.
“In the small chapel near the base of the town walls,” said de Jarnac, raising his cup and taking a slow, deep swallow.
“In the chapel?” she repeated. “Now? Whatever for?”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Praying, one presumes. For the souls of the day's dead, both those dispatched by my own sword and some others we came across in a burned village this morning.”
“I saw them,” Attica said, her voice hushed as she remembered the crackle of the flames, the smell of burning wood and freshly spilled blood. She had seen the dead and been troubled by them. Yet it hadn't occurred to her to pray for them. And she certainly felt no compulsion to pray for the souls of the dead
routiers
.
“He is unusual, your squire.” She accepted a cup of wine from a buxom, red-headed young woman who gave her
a beckoning smile that had Attica looking away quickly.
“Where did you find him?”
“Sergei? At a slave market in Acre.”
Caught in the act of swallowing a mouthful of wine, Attica choked and fell to coughing. “You bought him?” she said when she was able.
He had his attention focused on a juicy pork joint he was selecting. “I bought his mother. The boy came with her. He was only about six at the time.”
“He is Saracen, then?”
“No. He's from a place known as Kiev. He and his mother were taken by nomads who raided their town and sold them down the Dnieper to some Byzantine traders.” De Jarnac glanced up, his lips twisting into a cynical smile at the sight of Attica's horror. “Did you think only Muslims were killed and enslaved in Outremer? Believe me, we're not particular.”
Attica took another quick swallow of wine. “Why did you buy her, this woman from Kiev?”
De Jarnac's grin broadened in a way that made Attica's heart begin to beat in odd, unsteady lurches. “Why do you think, lordling? She was a very beautiful woman.”
As he spoke, his voice softened and his eyes darkened, as with old, sweet memories. Attica watched him take another long drink from his cup, the red wine wetting his lips, and she found she had to drop her gaze from his face. Only then she found herself staring instead at his strong brown fingers, curved around the base of his cup.
She realized that she was suddenly intensely aware of him as a man. A man who had fought and killed beneath a scorching foreign sun. A man who had once bought a beautiful woman in a noisy Eastern slave market and laid down with her beneath a hot, star-brightened desert sky.
“Was?” Attica said, her voice husky.
This time he was the one who looked away. “She died of a fever in Egypt.”
Attica studied his averted face. She could see no sign of emotion, only a closed, cold kind of detachment. And yet … “You kept the boy?” she asked. “And trained him as your squire?” It was unusual. Knights typically took only the sons of other knights as their squires.
De Jarnac shrugged. “Sergei's good with horses. Although I'm beginning to think he'd be happier as a priest.”
Attica laughed softly. On the far side of the room, the innkeeper's servants were already moving among the tables, clearing away trenchers and platters. One of the minstrels stood up and strummed his lute. Attica turned her head to see better and found herself staring into the massive cleavage of the red-haired young woman.
“Here you are, monsieur.” With deliberate, provocative slowness and an enticing smile, the serving woman leaned over, her breasts pressing almost into Attica's face as the woman placed a trencher overflowing with choice meat cuts on the table before Attica.
Attica didn't know where to look.
“My name is Rose, when you're ready for something more,” she said with a giggle, and whisked herself off before Attica had time to clamp shut her dropped jaw.
“
Ha!
You see,” said the man on de Jarnac's left, a thin, long-boned knight with a lined face and the blue eyes and fair hair of a Norman. “It's the soft, pretty boys that women like.” He waved one arm expressively through the air in a grand gesture that tottered the ewer of wine at his elbow. “Not mature, battle-tested men like us.”
The other men at the table all laughed while another
knight with black hair and a bulbous nose said, “I'll drink to that,” and called for more wine.
De Jarnac quietly settled back until his shoulders touched the wall and he could cross his arms at his chest. “What do you think, lordling?” he asked teasingly, slanting a look up at Attica from beneath lazy lids.
Attica shifted uneasily on her bench. She never, ever should have come in here, she thought despairingly. “What do I think about what?”
His lips curled into a faintly malicious smile that told her he hadn't entirely forgotten their confrontation on the road, either. “What do you think women want?” he said.
She ducked her head and feigned a sudden, intense interest in her supper. “How would I know?”
“Ah, look at the lad blush, the sly thing,” said the long-faced Norman knight, displaying a mouthful of half-chewed pork. “He's had himself a few pieces of tail already, and that's a fact. Go on, lad. You tell us what makes the women happy.”
Attica flung up her head, her cheeks burning, her determination to keep silent forgotten. “I can tell you what women don't like,” she said, her voice rising higher than she'd intended. “They don't like being referred to as
pieces of tail
.”
To her chagrin, the other men at the table all looked at her and laughed, including the Norman, who washed his food down with a swig of wine and grinned. “All right then, lad. You tell us. What
do
women like?”
From the far side of the room came the drunken jongleur's rough baritone, raised in song. “
En cest sonet coind'e leri
…” he sang.
“What's the matter, Roger?” someone said with a snicker. “Had so little luck lately, you're looking for pointers?”
There were a few catcalls and lewd suggestions, but the general noise quieted down, and Attica realized they were all looking at her. Oh, God, she thought wildly.
Why didn't I keep my mouth shut?
“Go on, lad,” said de Jarnac softly. “You've let yourself in for it now.”
“
Fauc motz e capuig e doli
…” sang the jongleur.
She glanced, panic-stricken, down the row of expectant and faintly hostile male faces staring back at her. “I should think,” she said, her voice sounding uncharacteristically prim and dangerously feminine, “that most gentlewomen wish for nothing more or less than a good Christian knight.” Her chin lifted as she felt de Jarnac's sardonic gaze upon her. “A man who is courageous and loyal and—and charitable toward the weak and unfortunate.”
“I thought we were talking about tavern wenches,” said Sir Roger, sloshing more wine into his cup. “Not gentlewomen. Gentlewomen listen to too many damned troubadours and expect us all to be damned Rolands.”
“Oh no, not Roland,” said Attica with a quick shake of her head. “For does Roland think of his lady, the Fair Aude, at the moment of his death? No, his last thoughts are of Durendal, his sword.” Some of the men laughed, but she pushed on, her gaze locked with de Jarnac's. “A woman dreams of a knight who is not only brave and honorable but also gallant and chivalrous.”
“Bah,” said the bulbous-nosed knight. “You've been listening to too many troubadours along with the ladies, lad.”
“Aye,” agreed Sir Roger, nodding his head sagely. “What a gentlewoman wants is a rich, powerful lord. It doesn't matter how he acts, or even what he looks like, as long as his estates are grand enough.”
“It's not that simple,” said Attica, her voice lost amid the general chorus of agreement.
“No?” said de Jarnac, sitting forward so that his words reached her alone. “Just ask your sister Elise.”
Attica felt her breath leave her body in a painful rush that brought her splayed hand up to her chest in an unconsciously feminine gesture. “You say that as if you fault her for her betrothal. Yet she only does what her father wishes.”
De Jarnac's eyebrows rose in a mockery of polite incredulity. “And if her father had wished to marry her to a poor man known as Fulk the Fat, would she have agreed so readily?”
“Women have no choice in such matters.”
But de Jarnac wasn't about to let her get away so easily. “Are you saying she would have agreed?”
A ridiculous and wholly incomprehensible threat of tears stung Attica's nose, taking her by surprise and filling her with terror, lest she give herself away utterly. “You speak as if a woman's interests in marriage are different from a man's,” she said, seizing on anger as a desperate antidote to this dangerous weakness. “Yet tell me, Monsieur le chevalier: What does a knight want?”
De Jarnac's lips curled away from his teeth in a quick smile. “An heiress, of course.”
His laughter seemed to break the strange, inexplicable seriousness of the moment. She folded her hands on the tabletop and looked down at them. “How did we come to speak of marriage, anyway? I thought we spoke of love.”
The jongleur's voice warbled in the background. “
Qu’Amors marves plane daura
…”
“Of love?” De Jarnac reached for the wine ewer. “Hardly. A knight can't afford love. At least not a knight-errant.”
She drew in a deep breath and pushed it out again before she could trust herself to speak. “I think you're wrong.”
He paused in the act of pouring his wine and looked at her from beneath quirked eyebrows. “Do you, indeed?”
“Yes, I do. I think a knight must learn to harmonize his knightly virtues with love—”
“Sweet Jesus. Not the knightly virtues again.”
“Laugh if you want.” She leaned forward, her weight on her elbows. “But it's true. Without love—without
fin’amors
—a knight will never truly achieve what he seeks.”
“Here, here,” said Sir Roger, startling Attica by lifting his cup high. “To the eternal quest.”
“To the eternal quest,” rang the chorus up and down the table.
“Which quest?” called someone from the far side of the room.
“The quest for love,” shouted Sir Roger, the wine sloshing over the edge of his cup. He looked down at it, startled; then his eyes rolled back in his head and he slowly sank beneath the table. The room rang with laughter while the minstrel, abandoning the sweeter rhymes of Arnaut, strummed a new chord and raised his voice gleefully.

“I quest for love
o'er hill and dale
Yet ne'er do I find
A willing female.

“Or if I find her
And she's generous
Her lord's a miser
And her cons gardatz.”

Attica felt her cheeks flame with embarrassment at the crudity, but the men in the room all let out a bawdy whoop that turned into a chorus of laughing boos as the jongleur staggered drunkedly and, clutching his lute to his breast, closed his eyes and began to howl like a hound baying at the moon.
“Here, give me that,” said the bulbous-nosed knight, rearing up to pluck the lute from the drunken minstrel's grasp. He turned. “You play for us, de Jarnac.”
Attica ducked as the lute sailed through the air. Standing, de Jarnac deftly caught the instrument around the neck and began almost absentmindedly to tune it. She found herself staring at him in astonishment, for he held the lute as easily and naturally as he held his sword.
“Sing us a song about a knight,” called someone.
“
Oui
,” said someone else.
“De Jarnac,” chanted a third, thumping the table in front of him.
Tilting his head, de Jarnac looked up from the lute and smiled, a smile so open, so boyish even, that it took At-tica's breath away. His fingers began to move, coaxing from that battered lute a sound so beautiful that the entire room fell silent. Then, as she watched, his smile broadened and became faintly rakish. “
Ferai un vers, pos mi sonelh
,” he sang in a clear, rich tenor.
A roar of appreciation rose from around the room, then quieted as he launched into the familiar, lighthearted tale about a knight who pretends to be a deaf-mute in order to enjoy the carnal favors of two obsessively discreet ladies.
At the end of the last verse, he started to put the lute down but paused amid shouts of “More!” and “Don't stop now.” His gaze met Attica's for one intense instant. Then he laughed and, clearing the table with an easy leap, landed
lightly on the balls of his feet in the center of the room, his fingers already plucking the strings as he launched into a classic
vers
about a valiant knight and his beautiful, wise, and courteous lady.
A lithe shadow moved along the near wall. Turning, Attica felt a breath of cold night air and caught the faint echo of incense as Sergei slid onto the bench beside her. By now, de Jarnac had changed songs and moods, shifting gracefully into a hauntingly beautiful canso that she realized with a jolt of surprise was about love. Not lust, but the kind of tender, eternal, ennobling love this man claimed he had no use for.

“I die for you.
You are my hope
My life
My love.”

“I've never heard this before,” Attica whispered to Sergei, pushing the trencher of meat toward him. “It's beautiful.”
Sergei nodded, his gaze on de Jarnac. “It's one of his own.”

“In you alone
I see
I hear
I breathe.”

Attica swung her head around abruptly to stare again at Damion de Jarnac.
His own.
The torches in the wall brackets sputtered and flared, casting a rich reddish-gold glow over the roomful of upturned, enraptured faces. She felt the rough edge of the table pressing into her side, felt a strange, enveloping heat that spread over her as she looked at this man.
In the torchlight, his eyes seemed almost black— mysterious, unknowable. She let her gaze drift over the line of his jaw, the flaring elegance of his cheekbones. She watched the graceful, athletic movements of his body, the broad line of his shoulders beneath the rich dark cloth of his tunic, the lean length of hip and thigh as he strolled slowly about the room. She watched his long, tanned fingers move effortlessly over the lute's strings, watched him make sweet, beautiful music.
She thought what it would be like to take a man such as this to husband. Not a plump, weak, sulky boy but a man grown. A man who was big and strong and brave, a man who could be brutal with a sword yet was capable of composing such heartbreaking poetry and coaxing such magic from a battered old lute.

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