Chapter 33
“Why trouble yourself, Ran? The brute
is damned. If you must have him buried, let your men do
it.”
“I will be quicker,” Ranulf grunted,
digging on with the spade he’d had one of his men fetch from the
camp. He had ordered the others out of the gaping hole because he
wanted to put all his force into this and have no one in the way.
The grave was still too shallow but he kept hitting tree roots that
took much hacking. He sweated in the trench, loathing the dead man,
despising his own useless, awkward oafs, and most of all
distrusting Giles.
“I am sorry for any discourtesy to your
lady,” Giles said. He was leaning against a tree, paring his
fingernails with a narrow knife.
Ranulf heaved another gobbet of earth
and roots out of the hole and did not bother replying. His
shoulders burned and the callus on his sword hand was rubbing
against the rough wood of the spade, but he kept on. A rough tangle
of legs shifting nervously above him showed where his men stamped
their slowly numbing feet and clustered in edgy little knots. He
sensed their disquiet and the unease of Giles’s men, too. A spear
in the back had the knack of making men uneasy, although Giles
seemed as puffed up and happy as a well-fed owl.
“My Lady Blanche is sick. A summer
fever,” he remarked, stepping back as Ranulf chucked another
spade-full of dirt out of the deepening grave. “And that unruly,
unholy huddle at the church have vanished.” He gave a chuckle.
“Moved on to better things, no doubt.”
How does Giles know
these things? Ranulf wondered. The news of
the church, yes, one of his men could have spotted that, but how
does he know about Blanche? No one else in the tourney camp has
spoken of her sickness. He nodded as one of Giles’s men
jumped down into the trench with him and began to shape the
sides.
No soldier does this
for a stranger, he thought as he dug, hearing the other man
panting beside him. He knew the fellow. Giles has
killed one of his own.
He did not believe Giles’s scandalous
tale of ravishment for an instant. Edith had said she was unharmed
and he believed her. She and the dead man had been yards
apart.
But why had she been alone? Why had the
man approached her?
Ranulf tossed the shovel onto the grass
above his shoulders and scrambled out of the grave. This was the
main reason he had dug: so he could dispose of the body and look
closely as he did so.
He slung the corpse over his back and
climbed back into the trench, aware of a low burning ache in his
back. He would have liked to have seized a torch from somewhere and
studied the fellow, but Giles was watching—sighing and paring his
nails, but watching all the same. He did not want Giles to suspect
anything.
Swiftly, he laid the body out and
despoiled it, taking this moment, where Giles could not see into
the grave, to look more carefully. The stranger’s limbs were cold
now, his face pale and shrunken in death. Ranulf tried to recall
seeing him around Giles’s camp, but he could not think of a single
occasion when he had noticed him. Frustratingly, in death the man
looked like a hundred others that he had seen on battlefields
around France. His eating knife, his short dagger, his belt buckle
were all serviceable but commonplace—perhaps Edith would know more,
being a smith. Ranulf tucked them into his tunic, intending to
question her later.
“Anything worth keeping?” called a
languid voice from above.
“Nothing much,” Ranulf answered,
appalled at his own easy lie. Giles was a fellow knight and he was
as glib-tongued with him as his own maid-princess was to the rest
of the world.
I must teach her by
example; show truth and loyalty and no lies, he thought,
but not with Giles.
“I go hunting tomorrow,” Giles said
above him. “Will you ride with me, for the sake of old
fellowship?”
“Most gladly,” Ranulf answered, the
words feeling like stones in his mouth. Was this how Edith felt as
she lied? But his lies were needed, and if he could keep Giles away
from his camp and Edith by hunting with him, then he would do so.
“Shall I come to your tent on the morrow?”
He began to scoop earth back into the
grave, saying a swift prayer as he worked. The moonlight silvered
his hands and gave Giles’s profile a ghostly look. The soldier in
the trench helped him, but Giles would not dirty his
hands.
“Let us meet in Woodcock Wood, beyond
the church,” his former friend suggested. “Just after
sunrise.”
“And what of the mob?”
“They are long gone.” Giles flung back
his head and stared at the moon, as if thinking. “If we catch a
fine deer, Lady Blanche will reward us even from her
sickbed.”
“Aye,” Ranulf said. He seized the spade
again, dragging more earth over the dead man. Giles’s device was
naked to him, stripped bare by a new insight that was shocking.
Before Edith, he had not thought it possible for fellow knights to
lie; now he suspected everyone. Six months ago, he would have asked
Giles directly, “Why did you kill that fellow?” Now he knew he
would not get a true answer.
Giles, though, he had suspected for
some time—suspected without admitting his suspicion, reluctant to
do so because they had been friends and comrades in arms in
France.
He tossed the spade to one of his men.
“Finish this!” he barked, and stepped up out of the
trench.
He did not like to feel this way about
another knight, a man he had called a friend. Why agree to go on a
hunt, then? Again, he admitted reluctantly that it would keep Giles
away from the camp, away from Edith. And a hunt would bring them
meat.
“Until tomorrow.” He thrust his hand
out to Giles, who, after a small pause, took it. His clasp was
firm, seemingly honest, Ranulf noted, as they both squeezed with
sufficient force to crush a rat. Letting Giles think he had a
victory, he released first.
“Take care in this dark,” he said,
stepping back. “There are strange ones about tonight.”
Without waiting for Giles’s answer he
turned away, his spirits firing as he did so. Now he had another
liar to deal with, his little liar, and she had better be waiting
for him in her tent. . . .
“Where are the others?” Ranulf asked
her in a low voice. He had entered her tent a few moments earlier
with stark, unreadable eyes, but, finding her sitting alone, on a
stool with only a small brazier blazing by her bare feet for
warmth, he had softened.
She hoped he had done so. Her silent
plea had been not for pity but to keep the rest of her folk out of
the range of his rage. Now she pointed to the curtain hanging
across the middle of the great tent, mouthing, “Behind
there.”
“Eating their supper.” Ranulf’s
nostrils widened as he inhaled. “A white porry?”
She nodded, hoping her own stomach
would not growl. She was also hungry, but their provisions were
going down rapidly, so she had chosen not to eat. After what she
had witnessed earlier that evening she had expected to have no
appetite, but to her self-disgust the simple vegetable stew made
her mouth water.
Ranulf’s lips quivered. “I think we may
do better than that.”
He crouched and deftly unpinned her
veil. “They can keep the brazier, but tonight you are with me,
Princess.”
Giving her no time to react or
speak—although “Princess” was a good sign, a sign his earlier
temper had cooled—he lifted her and the stool into his arms, moving
swiftly and lithely to the entrance. She could feel the steady beat
of his heart as she rocked against his chest, and now, safe in his
arms in this curious embrace, she found her tongue.
“The man you buried. I knew him. He was
one of those who battened us into the church at Warren
Hemlet.”
That startled him; she felt his
heartbeat quicken. “What is this?”
Swiftly, before she was overcome by the
memory of the event, she explained. “On the order of Giles, all the
village was driven into the church and locked in there to die.
Giles feared the pestilence, and when some of our villagers fell
sick—”
She stopped, seeing the revulsion,
horror, and shame on Ranulf’s face.
“On Giles’s order, you say?” he ground
out at last. He lowered her and the stool to the floor rushes and
stared at her. “Giles was your overlord, the
one who deserted you?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I am one of his
serfs, out of bond.”
“From this Warren Hemlet.”
“It is to the east of
here.”
Ranulf shook his head, as if that was
nothing. “So here is your final secret. Here is why you feared and
distrusted Giles so! Why did you not say this earlier? I asked you
his name—why not say then?”
“You and Giles were once friends,
fellow knights. You might have found it too strange.” She tried to
say false and failed. “Too
outlandish.”
“You feared I might think it a
falsehood?” Ranulf cursed, then crouched and gave her a tight,
enveloping hug. “I would believe you all on this, Edith,
all.”
They were still a moment together, in
silence, both stunned. Finally, Ranulf spoke again.
“So Giles did more, even, than desert
you?”
She nodded.
“And this man tonight was one of those
who blindly followed such orders? Then, ’fore God, his death is no
great loss! How long did it take him to recognize
you?”
“He spoke of the priest and remembered
him. He did not know that Gregory was my brother.”
“Ah,” said Ranulf, and she felt him
kiss the top of her head—a consolation, she assumed. She felt
herself and the stool being picked up again and then Ranulf was
moving, walking with her, easily and steadily, from her tent to
his.
“I did not seek him out. Rannie, I am
sorry he is dead.”
He tightened his grip. “Not by your
doing.” He understood her fear and rebutted it strongly. “Once
Giles knew I was out in the woods and closing, he wanted the man
dead.”
“But he was his own!”
“His own spy, I wager, and that is what
killed him. But what did he know of Giles that Giles would not have
me hear?”
“Warren Hemlet—”
“I am sorry, Edith, but Giles would not
be concerned by that and he would not think me troubled by it,
either.”
Edith shivered, but knew he was
right.
“He said something strange, about your
being much wronged by Giles, and that you should look at your
homeland; something in your homeland.” Edith fought to recall the
rest. Her memory, usually so reliable, was failing her
tonight.
“My homeland? I do not understand
that.”
She seized on what she knew for
certain.
“He is branding people.” She could not
say the word runaways: it was too near her
own truth.
Ranulf shook his head. “Giles would
argue such was his right,” he answered, with the casual ease of a
lord free of the dread of such punishments. “It must have been
something else, something touching Giles directly, perhaps this
homeland thing.”
Edith trembled at his accurate
assessment, blinking as they entered into Ranulf’s tent to be met
by a living wall of men and torches. Ranulf swept through them and
his soldiers, grizzled veterans every one, by their looks, saluted
and marched outside.
“They will keep watch outside this
night, though you will be glad to know the church mob seem to have
melted into the earth—they are gone, at least.” Ranulf lowered the
stool beside his own couch, plucked her off it, and sat on it
himself, with her on his lap.
“Giles has asked me to go hunting with
him tomorrow.”
“You must not go!”
He raised his sandy eyebrows. “Is that
a lady’s request?”
She paused, sensing a
trap.
“Should I obey you? As you did my
request?”
Guilt overwhelmed her as she thought of
the nameless spy, killed because he had spoken to her. Whatever
Ranulf said, that death would always be on her mind. In a moment of
weakness, she considered finding a priest to whom she could make
confession.
You think all that
false, reminded Gregory in her mind. You
have fallen out with God.
God has fallen out with
the world, she thought, considering the ever-present threat
of pestilence.
“How is Nigel?” she asked.
There was a pause as Ranulf plainly had
to recollect who she meant. “My wheelwright is doing well now.”
Ranulf’s mouth twitched. “I saw him rushing after another of those
wretched pie-men, keen to risk another bad stomach.”
“Is Lady Blanche truly free of the dark
death?” she asked, distracted afresh by that fear. “Do you know
that for sure? If—aahh!”
Falling, she scrambled wildly, trying
to grab Ranulf’s hands or tunic. She found herself cradled, still
on his lap, but with her legs pinned by one of his arms and raised
above her head. Her shoulders were pressed against his knees, her
head cushioned by his bed. Guessing he had planned this and furious
at her own helplessness, she writhed and kicked.
“Let me up!”
Leg-wrestling against Ranulf’s
encircling arm was futile.
He tickled her bare navel with the hand
attached to the arm gripping her legs. “More orders,
Princess?”
Without meaning to, she lifted herself
to his teasing caress, mortified anew as he chuckled. “What if
Edmund or Gawain come in now?” she hissed.
“They will see me with my bride-to-be,
laying down the terms of our marriage: bed and board.”
“What manner of terms? Why should you
think I wish to be humiliated?”
He shook his large, fair head. “All of
my folk, including Edmund and Gawain, are under strict orders to
remain outside this night.”
“All night?” She wondered
why.
“A summer night under this moon will be
a fine adventure for Gawain. As for the rest, I admit to teasing
you a little, but truly, maid of mine, I wish only for your full
attention.”
“But what we have spoken of already, my
village? You do not wish to know more?”
“No more of Giles and his filthy doings
tonight, no.”
With his free hand—humiliatingly, he
still had a free hand, although she could only wriggle—he held up
something that glittered in the torchlight. “My family ring, and
badge. Too large for your fingers, but it is my pledge to
you.”
He flipped the ring in the air like a
coin, caught it, and dropped it onto her navel. She stiffened at
the chill gold against her skin and he laughed aloud, the
brute.
“I cannot wear it,” she ground out. “
’Tis too cumbersome.”
“You will wear it, my prize. I wager
you will carry it proudly and show it off as soon as may be to the
other damsels.”
His blithe certainty made her long to
find a smithy and melt the thing down. “I will n—”
He leaned down and ravished her mouth
with a kiss that tingled her lips, breasts, and loins. The gold
ring slid off her belly as he kissed the tops of her breasts not
covered by her bodice.
“My ring!” she moaned, trying to reach
down.
“Yours already, eh? I knew it would not
take long.” He leaned and rummaged in the beaten earth and floor
strewings, recovering the ring and tucking it in her short bodice
between her breasts. “There. I hope it is not discomforting? I know
other ladies place all manner of objects in their
gowns.”
Jealousy smoked in her at the idea of
those other women, but she was determined to be cool as summer ale
on a hot day. “Please, Ranulf, I grow dizzy like this. You would
not have me turn nauseous, would you?”
“You have too high a color for that to
be the truth, my prize.” He softly patted her rump. “A vulnerable
position for you to be telling lies.”
Before she could answer, he drew back
her long skirt, giving it a little flip and shake. To her horror,
it fell away completely from her legs and nether
regions.
“No!” Exposed, she clamped her thighs
together, mortified that he could see her most intimate
places.
At once he stopped, raising a fold of
silk and draping it across her. He kissed her, teasing her mouth
with his tongue. “Are you sure you wish me to stop?” he
whispered.
She felt his arousal, snug and tight
against her.
“I will never shame you.” Full and
bright with feeling, his eyes held hers as he made the vow. “I will
never deny you. I will cherish you all the days of our
lives.”
Will this be something
I will whisper to a daughter in later years? Edith wondered.
Your father once made a solemn vow of love to me
when I was helpless on his lap in a most strange
way?
An arousing way, she admitted, as she
sensed his iron-willed restraint and care.
“I am yours to command,” he said,
stressing the shift of power between them. She was helpless, but
not.
He watched the desire gleam in her eyes
and ignored the brief flare of shame that twisted in his chest. He
had thought to tame her, yes, and tease her as he had said, but she
was still his Lady of Lilies.
Her falsehoods are but
dreams, and ones we all desire.
Still, he was a man, and it was for him
to instruct her, as need arose.
He licked his lips, feeling his manhood
hard and aching. Of course, he had looked when he ruffled her
skirts—what man would not?—and that swift, brief glimpse of her
nether curls, so soft and dark, had piled on the sweet
agony.
Her small hand had found his and was
guiding his hand: down the curve of her ribs, lower to the jutting
bone of her hip, and lower, and now she jumped in his arms as if
burned and burrowed her head into his shoulder. Then, as if
reminding herself to show courage, she looked straight at him and
said something.
“I hope that was ‘I love you,’ in that
curious tongue of yours,” he remarked, gratified as her perfect
features were suffused by a glow of deepest rose. He would wager
she had not said that, but no matter: they were questing for the
same end.
“I have yet to see any of your Eastern
dances,” he hinted.
She raised perfectly shaped eyebrows
but took the challenge at once. “A princess only dances on special
days. It is a holy rite for us.”
The naughty elf!
Desire and amusement warred in him. “It is not a special day this
day?” To press his suit, he glided his other hand for the second
time beneath the silken sheath of her skirts, keeping her wriggling
legs meantime snugly tethered in the coil of his arm.
She bucked on his lap, “dancing” around
his tent pole in a very satisfactory manner. The skin of her thighs
was smoother than spring water and warm as cream; to caress her was
better than any joust. For an instant, memory flung him back to him
and Olwen, so very formal with each other for so long, and so
careful in their joining. That sadness was lost in a new, urgent
blast of joy, bright as a lightning bolt in his eyes and body, as
Edith rolled so much that her bodice became unlaced. This wild,
sweet play was new to him, and to Edith, he guessed.
He touched her intimately and she
sucked in a great breath, her eyes closing. Beneath her dark curls
her flesh was soft, pliant, and warm, and dewed by her desire. He
throbbed to explore her, to bury himself in her. She tried to
stroke him in return and when he quickened his fingers, she reared
and squirmed.
“Easy, my sweet,” he murmured. “We have
all night.”
It was for this that he had chosen
their unusual privacy, with no one else close to hear or see. Her
rapid gasps and urgings were for him alone: he would share them
with nobody.
“My lady first,” he said, stopping her
reaching hand. “Will you dance for me, lady?”
At once she weaved and threaded her
glistening parts about his fingers, her buttocks quivering and
pinking up as she bounced unashamedly on his thighs. Her own thighs
opened wider and he smelled her salty-sweet perfume, a delicious
savor that mingled with the scent of lilies at her wrists, ankles,
and breasts. He reveled in the sight of her curls and folds and
creases, so pink and soft. . . .
Her desire was so powerful he almost
lost his control. Each of her writhes jostled his manhood and he
ached for release. Hoping his smile was not a grimace, he hung on,
taking his pleasure in hers.
“Dance, too,” she moaned and he obeyed,
stroking her, freeing her breasts and kissing her pert nipples,
caressing her bottom. Her skirts were now coiled about her hips and
he tightened his grip on her thighs so she would not fall at her
moment of release.
Still licking her round, perky breasts,
he stroked her longer and faster, each of his fingerings going
farther and deeper. She stiffened and shuddered, crying his name,
her face rosier than a sunset.
“You, you,” she gasped when she could
speak again. He lifted her onto the bed, half tossing her onto the
pallet in his haste, and plunged into her.
“All, all,” she chanted as the blood
sang and roared in his ears. He filled her, plugged her, besieged
her, and she was his, his prize, his glory.
Moonlight filled the tent. Edith
stirred, finding herself changed to silver and Ranulf sweeping his
hands over her breasts.
“Should we not talk of Lady Blanche, or
the church mob, or the dead man, or my village?” she asked, even as
her throat was parching with desire.
“Look at your hand, dear
one.”
She glanced and stared. There, tied
onto her betrothal finger with a piece of her own silk ribbon, was
Ranulf’s family ring. It shifted and rolled on her finger but shone
on her hand like a crown.
Her eyes filled. She had been married
once and betrothed twice, but this was her first true ring. “It is
beautiful,” she stammered.
He laughed, his teeth silver in the
moonshine. “I would not go so far, I wager, but it will
do.”
She raised her hand. The ring looked so
proud and at the same time clumsy that she giggled.
“Less levity, young woman.” He
contradicted his own suggestion by gently squeezing her
breasts.
She forgot her dread of Giles and his
plotting. She did not forget the spy’s dreadful statement,
he is branding people now, for she knew that
meant the people were here, in the camp, and she might know
them.
We must find and save
them, she thought, even as she wrapped her arms about
Ranulf, her beautiful brute, and began to kiss him wherever she
could reach.
She had tongued her way to his navel
when he spun her like a child’s top, over onto her
belly.
“Sweet mounds.” He cupped her breasts
and then her bottom with his hands, and with each touch pleasure
slicked through her. “Did you help with the harvest in your
village?”
His fingers trailed down her legs,
circling and lightly pinching.
She nodded, wondering at his
question.
“You would make a right pretty wheat
maid, with your legs brown as cone sugar. Did you hitch your skirts
to glean more freely?”
“Yes,” she croaked as his hand
fluttered back up her legs.
“And all the village lads would hope to
catch a glimpse of this round little backside of yours.” He stroked
her bottom.
“They never saw,” Edith protested, her
breath rushing out in a great gasp like a bellows as he hooked an
arm about her waist.
“Never fret, sweeting, I know this.” He
swirled his palm over her naked haunches, circling one nether
cheek, then the other. “So open to me now, you are,” he whispered,
circling slowly. “So honest in your desire.”
He eased his hand lower, over the curve
of her bottom and between her thighs. Held by the loving clamp of
his arm, Edith could not reach him in return.
“You tease,” she moaned as he began to
alternate his circles with light pattings.
“No—I will save making your rump as red
as a peony by daylight, or I will miss that pleasure,” she heard
him growl, mostly to himself, and now, as if he had finally heard
her complaint, he sank his fingers more deeply into her intimate
places.
It was as if a sweet fire blazed within
her head, behind her half-closed eyes. She began to move with him
and smelled her own rising desire and his.
“Good, little one.” He knelt behind her
and she backed against him, embracing his male organ with her lower
lips, bumping along his long, hard length as she tried to embrace
his member with herself.
He entered her very slowly, filling
her. She laid her head on the pallet, gripped the nearest pillow,
and sighed.
“Lovely, gorgeous thing.” He caressed
her breasts again, complimenting her on their fullness, rolling the
nipples between his thumb and forefinger. She felt her own inner
moisture increase and, as if taking that as a sign or perhaps
because he could no longer hold back, Ranulf lunged into a furious,
fierce motion. Faster and faster he swept into her, yielding and
imperious together, his body beating a rising tattoo against hers.
At the final moment he shouted her name, a triumph for them
both.