PART THREE
~ I Was A Child And She Was A Child ~
His ears were ringing quite badly.
In fact, his entire head was ringing. When Rhonan opened his eyes, all he could see was a big sword in his line of sight and a cold tip of death against his throat. He didn’t panic; he remained calm as he grasped at his last recollections, remembering where he was and the female sentinel who had confronted him. He remembered charging her.
Now, he was on his arse with ringing ears. He could hardly believe it.
“Lady,” he said. “If you are going to kill me, get on with it.”
The sword tip lingered on his skin, not hard enough to puncture it but enough to send a message. Rhonan looked up to see those lush blue eyes looking down at him, glittering even in the darkness.
“I will not kill you if you promise to go away,” she said.
He inhaled deeply, slowly. “You know I cannot make that promise.”
She considered his answer. “Then I will not kill you if you take your men and leave the King’s House,” she said. “You do not belong here.”
He found himself looking up into that face. From what he could see through the opening in the helm, her skin was pale, like cream, and he could see a dusting of freckles on her nose. Her eyes were quite lovely. He didn’t dare move for fear those lovely eyes would turn on him and he would find himself gored through the neck.
“My people were here long ago,” he told her. “This was our land. That is why you know my language. We belong here more than you do.”
The sentinel’s brow furrowed slightly as she pondered his words. “That is not true,” she said. “Your kind has always roamed our coast but you have left our kingdom alone for a hundred years. Why have you come?”
He simply lifted his eyebrows, a motionless shrug. “Why not?”
She didn’t like that answer. The sentinel frowned at him and moved away, removing her sword from his neck and moving back to the door that was flanked by two torches, burning low and smoking heavily from the fat they had been dipped in. The low ceiling above them was black and she backed up to the door, her sword still leveled at him.
“I did not kill you,” she said. “I showed mercy. Now you will take your men and go.”
Rhonan sat up, slowly, his ears still ringing a bit. He noticed that his sword was several feet away, on the damp earth where she had thrown it. Above them, he could hear screaming and scuffling as more of his men poured into the House of the King. Soon, they would try to come down into the tunnel and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted their help. In fact, he knew he didn’t. What he did here, he would do alone. He needed no help against an inferior female.
“I told you that I cannot leave,” he said, looking at her. “I came to find the king. Where is he?”
The woman shook her head. “If I knew, I would not tell you.”
He believed her, on both accounts. Without question, he did, and a small part of him was becoming increasingly impressed with this lady warrior. She was tall, which is what initially led him to believe she may have been a young man before she spoke in her dulcet voice and he got a good look at her, but the face beneath the warrior’s helm was anything but masculine. He could see her lips when they moved, pinkish and sweet, belying the fact that she was fearsome and strong.
“What is your name, woman?” he asked.
She regarded him carefully. “That is not for you to know.”
“But I must call you something. I cannot keep calling you ‘woman’. Surely you have a name?”
“I do.”
She didn’t say anymore and the silence was deliberate. He smiled faintly; he simply couldn’t help himself. She was certainly brave; perhaps a bit foolish, but brave. Laboriously, he stood up, head still swimming a bit, and made his way over to his weapon, which he collected off the ground. He looked at it to see if there was any damage from the fall or the tossing; there was none. He turned to look at the lady sentinel again.
“My name is Rhonan,” he said. “Now will you tell me yours?”
“No.”
He lifted his shoulders in resignation. “Very well,” he said. “You are forcing me to choose a name for you. Since your eyes are of a deep and lavish blue, I shall call you Bluebell like the flower, for that is what the color reminds me of. I do not care if you do not like it.”
The sentinel was watching him as he inspected his blade and she couldn’t help but notice he was moving away, towards the stairs that led back up to the common room. She didn’t reply to his comment about the name he had chosen for her because she was positive he was trying to trick her into giving her name. She wasn’t going to permit him to corner her. Truth be told, she was greatly relieved that he was moving for the exit but there was something inside her, an instinct, that told her it was a trick.
Don’t trust him!
Rhonan paused when he was nearly to the steps leading up into the common room, looking up into the room and seeing sights he imagined the lady warrior would not like to see. There were dead men on the floor nearby and on a table nearly out of his line of sight, one of his men was forcing himself on a female servant. He had his fist in her mouth to stifle her cries as he thrust into her small body. But Rhonan wasn’t particularly moved by it; such things happened in war. He was fairly certain such things were expected of him, too, in yet another way to prove his manhood and his worthiness to supplant Nordjul when the time came. His gaze lingered on the carnage of the room, thoughtfully, before returning his attention to the woman.
“If you do not know where the king is,” he said casually, “why are you down here and not fighting alongside the other solders?”
The sentinel was careful in her answer. “Because this is my post,” she said. “I will not leave my post.”
Rhonan’s gaze moved to the door she was standing in front of. “Ah,” he said. “Of course. You nearly killed me for coming near the chamber that you guard. But you must also realize that will not stop me. I will gain access.”
The woman stiffened and the sword in her hand moved into a defensive position. “You may try,” she said. “But remember what happened the last time you tried.”
She had a point. She was crafty as well as brave and Rhonan had a healthy respect for that. Still, he would not be deterred, so he moved away from the stairs, back in her direction, and brought his sword up offensively. He had the freedom of movement; she did not. All she could do was stand there and take a blow so heavy that he threw her right back into the door she was guarding. But the moment he brought up his sword again, she tried to undercut him and would have taken out the backs of his knees had he not been fast enough to block her.
After that, the battle was on.
Rhonan was twice her size and twice her strength, but the sentinel fought dirty. She was very fast, and very skilled and she literally ran circles around him as he tried to fight her. More often than not, he was going on the offensive against her but she would somehow manage to hold him off, at least a little, before moving away and trying to bring up a blade between his legs to cut his manhood off. Twice she had tried, and it had only succeeded in both impressing and infuriating him.
Rhonan realized, several minutes into the fight, that he really wasn’t trying to kill her. She was quite remarkable in her talent and he thought that it would be a great waste to kill a woman with such skill, so he was only really trying to disarm her. But the sentinel would not allow herself to be put in such a position that would see her easily disarmed. Three times, he tried to knock the blade out of her hand and three times he failed because she switched to the other hand and fought him, just as skilled with that hand. Rhonan’s attempts to disarm her soon stopped because it was clear she was well schooled as a warrior. This was no ordinary female.
Still, he had to win.
Coming to realize that any attempt to disarm her would be futile, at least while she was still fighting strongly, he went about trying to exhaust her. He took the offensive against her and pushed her around quite a bit, smacking her into the stone walls and generally battering her. Not enough to really hurt her, but enough to shake her up. He knew that if his father saw him, the man would have berated him for not going in for the immediate kill, but that was where Rhonan and his father differed a great deal. His father had no mercy and Rhonan saw beyond the stark line of life versus death. He saw the people, the places, and the motivations behind everything. He saw the sentinel in a way his father never could and his curiosity was great. He wanted to know how a woman like this became so skilled with a blade.
Who was she? What was her story? Rhonan had to know. Here, in the midst of a Northman raid, this woman was determined to fend off a man twice her size and doing it quite ably. But he began to see, eventually, that his attempts to exhaust her were working. She was starting to fade, breathing heavily, and her pale cheeks were red from exertion. When the sentinel began to grow sloppy with her sword thrusts, he managed to get a hand on the hilt of her sword and, with one big yank, pulled it out of her grasp.
Rhonan thought that was simple enough, to toss her weapon aside, but the sentinel was so infuriated that he’d managed to disarm her that she grabbed his sword hand and sank her teeth into his wrist, which at that point was marginally unprotected. Startled, he shoved her back by the face, sending her crashing into the wall. Her helm flew off at the impact, spilling forth long, red hair, messy and braided.
Rhonan wasn’t looking at her luxurious hair, however. He was looking at the bite on his wrist where it met his hand. He frowned.
“So you bite like an animal, do you?” he demanded. “I’ve not known a true warrior who ever bit an opponent.”
The sentinel was frowning deeply at him. “If I’d had the chance, I would have gouged your eyes out!”
He thought on that and conceded the point. “I have seen that in battle, in fact,” he said, looking into her young and angry face. She is little more than a child, he thought. “’Tis a good thing you did not have the chance, then. But one more move against me like that and I will spank you soundly.”
The sentinel lurched up from her knees where she had fallen against the wall, staggering her way over to the door that she had been so staunchly protecting. The deep blue eyes were glittering again.
“I will not give you the chance,” she said. “And I will not let you through this door. If you want to come through, you will have to kill me first.”
Rhonan didn’t want to do that. In fact, he realized that he really didn’t want to fight her at all. As the raid continued over their heads, his curiosity about her grew. A woman like this didn’t simply come to be. It took training and grooming. He wanted to know about her more than he wanted to find the king, which his men would do in any case. Right now, he was in a standoff with a sentinel guarding something very precious. Perhaps he could reason with her and earn her trust. Perhaps he might even take her back with him and take her as his wife. Whatever the case, he was disinclined to leave this position any time soon.
She intrigued him.
“I have no desire to kill you,” he said. “Why are you so eager to die?”
The sentinel pushed tendrils of red hair from her eyes. “I am not,” she said. “I am simply telling you that if you are determined to come into this chamber, it will be over my dead body.”
He leaned back against the wall behind him, studying her serious, young face. “And I have told you that I have no desire to kill you,” he said. “Are the contents of that chamber really worth dying over?”
She nodded. “They are.”
“Why?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“Why not? Do you even know?”
“Of course I do.”
Rhonan tilted his head, trying to figure out how he could trick her into telling him. “Let me guess,” he said. “I would say that there is something very valuable behind that door. Gold and jewels, mayhap?”
“Mayhap the treasure of Jerusalem as well.”
Rhonan grinned because she was trying to throw him off course just as he was trying to trick her into an answer. “Possibly,” he said. “Does it belong to you, personally? Is that why you are so eager to die for it?”
The sentinel eyed him, her blue eyes dark in the dimness of the corridor. “You ask many questions, Northman.”
“How else am I to learn?”
She shook her head. “What are you trying to learn?” she wanted to know. “Your men are already taking everything of value and, I would imagine, killing everyone they can. You should not be wasting time speaking with me – you should have killed me long ago and then you would know what is in the chamber.”
Rhonan thought on that. She was right, of course. He should have, indeed, killed her the moment he found her and he should already be in that chamber which, he suspected, did not hold the king. As their conversation had suggested, he really did suspect something like an artifact or Bible or something else that was precious to the people of Hendocia. Perhaps she was guarding a vault with Hendocia ancestors in it. It must have been something of religious or sentimental value because, surely, one woman would not be guarding the treasure of the entire kingdom.
Or… would she?
“You have been more than eager to die the entire time I have been here,” he said. “Here you stand, guarding this door without a weapon in your hand, and you continually make attempts to provoke me. Why do you do such things? I already told you I did not want to kill you, Bluebell. Why do you not take me for my word?”
The sentinel eyed him. “Why should I?” she asked. “You seem intent on talking when the rest of your comrades are destroying my world.”
He pointed to the door behind her. “Because I want to know what you are guarding.”
The sentinel studied him carefully. It was clear that she was debating what to tell him. They’d fought, verbally sparred, but he still hadn’t managed to get through her and all he seemed to want to do was talk, which was incredibly odd. The sentinel had never heard of a Northman being so… chatty.
“Why do you want to know so badly?” she said. “I told you that it is not meant for you.”
He shrugged. “Mayhap it is a great treasure,” he said. “As you suggested, it might be the treasure of Jerusalem. Or even a great magical sword, something I could use in my travels. Is it a great magical sword, Bluebell?”
Perhaps he will go away if I tell him a story of what lays behind the door, the sentinel thought. Clearly, he wasn’t giving up because it seemed his curiosity had the better of him. He was bigger and stronger than she was and if he attacked her again, she wasn’t so sure she could hold him off, especially now that he’d tossed her weapon away. Therefore, she had to use the only weapon she had left – her wits. Perhaps she could scare him into leaving….
“Nay,” she finally said. “It is not a great and magical sword. And who is to say that I am protecting the chamber beyond. Mayhap I stand here to protect the world from what lies in the chamber. Rather than preventing you from going in, mayhap I am preventing something from coming out.”
Rhonan listened seriously, but his attitude was feigned. “Is that true?” he asked, pretending to be quite interested. “What could possibly be in that chamber that you should not let out?”
She cocked an ominous eyebrow. “Do you really wish to know?”
“I do.”
“It is quite a frightening tale how I came to be sentinel of this door. You will not want to go into his chamber once I tell you the truth.”
“I am intrigued. Tell me everything.”
She did.