Chapter One

North Yorkshire, A.D. 1155

 

Lady Merry of Heathersgill watched the prioress walk slowly along the length of the refectory. With a rustle of black robes, Mother Agnes of Mount Grace took her place behind the oak table next to her seated colleague, the Abbot of Fors. Her angular figure, made all the taller by her wimple, blocked the sunlight beaming through the slit in the stone wall behind her. Yet even with much of her face in shadow, the few candles in the chamber revealed an eager gleam lurking in her brown eyes as she prepared to deliver her verdict and her sentence.

The nuns and novitiates, many of whom like Merry were daughters of noblemen, had gathered for the verdict, yet they stayed huddled at the back of the room. Though still September, a wintry chill rose off the stone tiles under Merry’s feet. Locking her knees to keep them from quaking Merry stood alone, accused and most certainly about to be found guilty.

Despite the thick grey habit she wore, a shiver skittered up her spine like a long-legged spider, and with every shallow breath, her heart beat a desperate tattoo.

Glancing at the abbot, better known for his cheese-making than for his good sense or his deep thinking, she wondered if he might seek to soften her sentence. Nay, going by his distracted expression, Merry knew he would go along with the prioress. After all, it was Mother Agnes’s business acumen that created a lucrative market for the monks’ Wensleydale cheese.

How many lashes at the mother’s hand? she wondered. And would she survive them?

“Sister Mary Grace,” the mother intoned, her voice was as dry as fallen leaves, “you blaspheme the name you were given when you took the first vow of obedience—a vow you have so atrociously and irrevocably broken. Henceforth, you are once more only Merry of Heathersgill, for you have proven yourself a holy sister no longer.”

Merry’s heart beat faster. Five she could handle, ten even. More than that and she would be irreparably maimed. With so much of her skin split open, there’d be little left to sew together even if one of the nuns skilled at needlepoint attempted it. In any case, who would help her heal when it was she who treated her fellow sisters? Certes, not another soul at the priory could create a balm to stave off infection.

“After lengthy interrogation and deliberation,” continued the prioress, “we find you guilty of attempted murder and of heresy.”

Merry swallowed her dismay and kept her chin up, her gaze fixed on Mother Agnes.

She had been delivered to Mount Grace to avoid persecution for practicing the art of healing. Though some in her previous existence had said she worked miracle cures, others had accused her of only dark motives, even murder. While she had gone reluctantly into exile, once at Mount Grace, she had hoped to live in peace. However, even after five years of residence with the sisters, she had yet to take her final holy vows.

How could she? Pledging her life to God under the tutelage of Mother Agnes seemed a blasphemy, for, in this supposed sanctuary, she had experienced only cruelty and intolerance.

Her trial had been a farce from beginning to end. The eyewitnesses to her crimes had clearly been coerced to speak against her or suffer the mother’s wrath, which was fearsome and sometimes fatal.

One of her sisters in Christ had seen her after compline frolicking naked under a full moon. Another had caught her copulating with the devil on the wooded land behind the priory. Others, still, had espied her drinking a potion that had all the qualities of human blood.

Tales of nonsense and fancy! The only true account was that she’d been seen in the company of a cat. And how could that be a crime?

Those same nuns would have thanked her if the prioress were dead.

Except she wasn’t. At the last minute, Merry had put only two leaves of henbane in the prioress’s wine instead of three. Oh, how she wished she were more hard-hearted. Her reluctance to murder any living thing might ironically be the death of her.

“Heresy is a grievous crime committed against God and the Holy Church,” the prioress added, clearly savoring her victory over the troublesome young woman.

Merry’s jaw came suddenly unhinged. “What of your crimes, Mother?” Her challenge echoed in the suddenly silent refectory. “Are they not grievous, having been committed against helpless women, some mere girls, entirely under your mercy?”

The nuns behind her gasped in awe. The abbot emerged from his lethargy to share a wide-eyed look with the prioress. He had to know of the woman’s perverse pleasure in wielding her whip, but like the other elders, chose to turn a blind eye.

“Silence!” Raising both her arms, Agnes resembled a great, black bird. “The accused is not to speak! How dare you malign me when you have proven yourself an abomination in the sight of God?”

She narrowed her gaze at Merry. “I was going to display Christian tolerance by reducing my sentence to a whipping of twenty lashes, but I have changed my mind.” She paused, then finished in a voice so rough and deep, it might’ve belonged to Mephistopheles himself: “Death is the only suitable punishment!”

The blood roared in Merry’s ears, drowning out the cries of horror now coming from her sisters. That was it then. She would die at the priory, and her life of misery and fear would finally be over. So be it. Only, . . . not the rope, she prayed, dreading the thought of slow suffocation if her neck didn’t snap at once. A drowning she might survive for she swam quite well. Even so, she would elect to draw in lungful’s of water and sink into the blissful silence at the bottom of the nearby river.

The words of the prioress broke into her fatalistic reverie. “The Church condemns you to burn at dawn tomorrow, and tomorrow, you shall burn!”

Burn! Merry widened her stance, determined not to swoon as the floor seemed to shift beneath her feet. The unforgivingly cruel sentence struck her as absurd. Burning was common, she’d heard, in the Holy Roman Empire or the domain of the Franks but rarely occurred in England.

The Abbot of Fors who had hitherto remained seated and mostly silent rose uncertainly to his feet. Standing nearest to the pair, with only the planked table between them, Merry alone overheard him.

“Execution admits defeat,” he argued quietly. “Are we quite certain we can’t save this woman’s soul? ’Tis the Church’s duty, after all.”

Agnes turned a sour expression toward Merry. After all, the prioress knew, as Merry did, that the laws of England forbade clerics to kill. She would have to be turned over to a secular court for such a punishment, would she not?

Perhaps considering all this, Agnes raised her eyebrows inquiringly and asked Merry, “Do you wish to make a full confession of guilt?”

Merry turned over the option in her mind.

To plead guilty and beg forgiveness would automatically stave off a sentence of death. Yet twenty strokes of Mother Agnes’s whip were as likely to kill her as any flames—and would no doubt be done as painfully as possible, taking out Merry’s eyes in one lash, splitting open her back with another.

“But I am not guilty,” Merry replied, amazed that her voice sounded as steady as it did. She had committed no heresy. Her only crime was to shield her sisters from the wrath of the tyrannical—sadistic—prioress. In the past year, whenever the mother whipped them, Merry ensured there was a consequence: a seizure that made the woman bite her tongue, a rash that wouldn’t go away, warts upon the prioress’s hands—all designed to make Agnes hesitate ere she raised her whip again. And all to no avail.

The prioress was occasionally subdued but not reformed.

Her most recent victim, a young novice, had suffered an infection from the whips’ slashes in her back, dying despite Merry’s best attempts to heal her. In reprisal, she had put the henbane in Mother Agnes’s wine, and the prioress had endured a purging of the bowels so violent it might have left her dead. It had not because Merry was not a murderer.

Clearly, the prioress now wanted revenge.

Long suspecting the only reason she’d been spared the whip these past years was the fact of her sister’s marriage to the Slayer of Helmsley, Merry decided to invoke her connections.

“You will have to notify my family,” she asserted, desperate to avoid the torturous pyre.

The mother’s eyes flared. “Your family isn’t the least concerned with your fate, else they would have written long ago,” she pointed out. “Or visited.”

It was true, her elder sister, Clarisse, and her mother, Jeanette, had made no contact since delivering her to Mount Grace. Given the trouble she’d caused them in her younger years, it was unlikely they would wish to save her. Only her younger sister Katherine might care, but what could she do to help?

Merry would face her death alone. Since the day that had changed her life forever—when her father’s hospitality to strangers had wrought his death and the destruction of their family—she had found no justice, no peace anywhere, not even in a priory. What matter if she died on the morrow?

“Well, have you something to say for yourself?” the prioress prompted. “Are you sorry for turning from the Church and making a pact with Satan? Come, where is your penitence?”

In her eagerness to hear Merry beg for mercy, the prioress leaned over the table, her face drawing out of shadow and into the candles’ illumination.

Merry drew back in alarm, for the resemblance between this tyrant and her wretched stepfather, Ferguson, was uncanny. ’Twas the bone-chilling look in their eyes, she decided, along with the ugly sneer to their countenance. Thankfully, Ferguson was long dead, slain by Merry’s own mother.

Righteousness flamed suddenly within her, beating back the chill and loosening her tongue once more.

“I would rather die than remain in this hell on earth with you, Agnes,” she replied, knowing it was true as she spoke the words. “If I am to burn at present, then let it be so. Yet for disfiguring the innocents under your protection and causing their unnecessary death, ’tis you who will burn through all eternity.”

 

Luke d’Aubigny, a commander in the king’s army and grandson of the Earl of Arundel, never suffered the infirmities of mortal men, or at least that’s what he told himself when pushed to exhaustion. He had urged his army to ride through the night, setting a pace for his soldiers that made sleeping in the saddle impossible.

Held before him on his pommel, his heat-blackened helmet seemed to gleam a dull and cheerless gray in the pre-dawn light. Riding with his finely wrought mail aventail lowered, its hood draped around his shoulders, Luke was able to crane his neck to see his flagging army. Behind him and his groggy squire, Erin, who slouched half-asleep in his saddle, two score soldiers rode in neat files, two horses abreast.

Regret lanced him at having forced his men to keep riding apace. Yet there was still so much to do and so little time left to him. His division of the king’s army had pledged a year of service toward the destruction of adulterines—strongholds built without royal sanction. Nine months out of twelve were already spent. In the past months, they’d destroyed only one castle in Lincolnshire while another in Drax in northern Yorkshire still required razing.

With only three months remaining, one might question whether they would complete their final task.

Luke, however, suffered no such concern. He would set a grueling pace, bloodying his fingers, inspiring his men to match his expectations. He truly believed anything was possible. After all, he had only to look at from whence he’d come and to where he had risen. And still, his gaze was cast upon an even brighter future.

True, he’d started life as a half-English, half-Saracen bastard, but it certainly helped that he had saved Henry’s life in a fire when the king was yet a boy and Luke, himself, merely a gangly teen. It further sealed his fame that he’d emerged from the burning building, his cloak in flames and young Henry in his arms uninjured, earning him the now-famous sobriquet of the Phoenix. By this name, his renown had spread.

Luke had become the king’s most trusted and efficient military leader. To the benefit of his liege and to save unnecessary slaughter, he preferred to strike a truce rather than to fight. For that, he was well respected, abroad and at home. However, this unpopular matter of tearing down unsanctioned structures built in Stephen’s reign was taxing even Luke’s diplomatic skills.

Yes, he’d been lucky. And like the phoenix itself, Luke felt nearly immortal. He emerged from battles unscathed, his dignity and poise intact, utterly unaffected by whatever drama seethed about him. He’d been called imperturbable and ineffable.

In truth, however, if Erin, or rather anyone who would dare to ask him, questioned how he felt about his royal undertaking, the inquisitor might sense that Luke’s heart no longer lay with his labors. No, not since a week prior, when a communication had come by courier informing him of his grandfather’s sharp decline. No one would have blamed the king’s commander had he turned home with his work yet unfinished to tend to the Earl of Arundel.

Ah, how he adored the man who’d plucked him from a life of misery and poverty and brought him to England.

Yet Luke was a man divided—between family and duty. However, loyal vassal that he was, he set aside personal concerns in the name of service to his king, fording moor and mountain to convey the full reach of Henry’s arm.

Even so, he tried not to look like a man who had ridden through the night. Casting a protective eye over his loyal followers, he made certain none had tumbled from the saddle, fast asleep. Then he fixed his grit-filled, weary eyes on the dark horizon, searching for their destination, a priory where at last his army could rest.

“Thank the good Lord,” he muttered to himself spying its walls about a furlong away in the dim light. Spurring his richly hued sorrel to a canter, he set out to arrive at the gates before his men, smoothing the way for them, as was his custom.

Hearing Erin commanding his mount to follow, Luke smiled. No doubt the lad was eager for a meal and a pallet, in that order. Not only that, the squire was ever determined to be his lord’s spokesman. Luke didn’t know how the spindle-thin youth kept up with him, but he did.

Built on the edge of the fells, the priory proved to be a small, sullen-looking enclosure. With the sky turning silver behind it, it appeared most unwelcoming with its doors closed and its windows shuttered tight as a tomb.

Luke drew his horse alongside the entrance, the destrier’s great size dwarfing the narrow gate set in the stone wall. Gesturing for Erin to alert the occupants of their arrival, the youth dismounted quickly, no doubt happy to feel the ground beneath his feet. He moved with no apparent stiffness to the bell rope and tugged on it.

After a short time, the peephole cracked open.

“Who goes there?” inquired a frightened girl’s voice.

Erin looked back at Luke who nodded to encourage him.

“King Henry’s royal army,” Erin said, tempering his boastful reply with humility. “We seek rest and a meal behind your walls.”

To their mutual surprise, the peephole slammed shut. Erin sent a startled look back toward Luke, who shrugged at the youth and gestured for him to try again. He watched as Erin tugged the bell rope a second time.

It seemed a very long interim before the peephole opened once more. A very different voice spoke, harsh and grating to his ears, “I’m the prioress. Why are you here?”

Erin took a step back. The prioress herself had come to the door. How strange! He looked once more toward his commander.

Her rudeness—when she clearly knew who they were—pricked Luke’s irritation on behalf of his hungry and tired men. He swung his leg over the back of his horse and dismounted with an inward groan. Nudging Erin gently aside, he approached the door and squared off with the peephole, seeing nothing but a shadow on the other side.

“We serve His Grace, King Henry,” Luke said, unable to keep the terseness from his voice. “We require a place to sleep and a meal.” Now. The command was unspoken but clear, he thought.

Yet, incredibly, the prioress argued with him.

“You’ve picked a poor time to ask,” groused the woman.

A poor time? Luke felt like reaching through the tiny hole in the door and throttling her.

Then, in her deep voice, she added, “There’s an infection within these walls. We’re quarantined.”

Luke wondered at her words. There was no black flag tied to the gate in warning. Still, he took a precautionary step back.

“What manner of illness is it?” he demanded.

“A pox of some sort,” said the prioress in her husky voice. “’Tis horridly contagious. This morning, we will burn the bodies of the dead sisters amongst us. You had best be away.”

With that, she shut the little opening between them.

Luke closed his eyes and for the briefest moment allowed pity for himself and all his men to wash over him. Jesu! A simple meal and a few hours on ground protected by walls rather than out in the open. How had that become so difficult to obtain?

He glanced at Erin who hung his head in abject misery. Luke could hear his army closing in on them. The relieved expressions on their faces was not something any commander would want to disappoint.

Bracing himself, Luke turned to face them.

“Take your rest on the ground,” he called as the first of his soldiers drew their mounts abreast of them. “We’ve been denied entrance,” he added with no inflection.

As the men lamented loudly and slithered off their horses, Luke drew a length of rope from his saddlebag and locked gazes with his squire.

“Come with me, Erin,” he instructed. “Pierce,” he called over his shoulder, addressing his second in command, “I am going to investigate.”

With that, Luke struck out toward the corner of the building, hearing Erin chasing after him a second later as he rounded the priory’s wall. The grass, brittle from the summer’s drought, crunched beneath their boots. Coming upon a roughly hewn segment of the wall, Luke hesitated, pulling off his mail gauntlets before running a hand over the craggy surface.

Content with what he felt, he shucked his aventail so the head-and-shoulder mail wouldn’t encumber him, and unbelted his sheath, handing it to an open-mouthed Erin. Then he began unlacing his purple surcoat.

“Are you climbing the wall, my lord?” Erin guessed, with dawning appreciation.

Luke nodded. “Help me get this mail off.”

Bending double, he stretched out his arms and let Erin struggle to remove the heavy coat of iron chain over Luke’s head. Quickly divesting himself of his remaining armor, he stood in only his padded gambeson, wool hose, and boots.

As the first pale rays of sunlight fingered the cold gray stone, Luke reconsidered. “I may not need the rope.”

Carefully crooking his fingertips over projecting stone and finding footing in the crevices, he scaled the ten-foot wall foot by foot.

In less time than it had taken to undress, the Phoenix was peering over the thick partition.

To Luke’s grim satisfaction, he had an unfettered view of the priory’s courtyard. His gaze went at once to the figure at the center of the stake, and a cold blade of shock pierced his lungs, making him gasp. It wasn’t a dead body about to be burned at all, but a girl—fully alive, struggling against ropes that tied her to a stake!

God’s blood! The prioress meant to burn her alive! The memory of fighting his way through a fire flashed through his mind, along with the terror the memory had incited.

His jaw muscles flexed. A pox, indeed. He’d suspected something untoward from the moment the first frightened nun had cut off communication.

The figure at the stake was also a nun, dressed from head to toe in black homespun. She was scarcely a woman by the looks of her, her face young and narrow, her eyes enormous as she stared up at the dawning sky to avoid seeing the workers spreading straw at her feet.

Disgust simmered to life within him. How had such an injustice come to pass? Ecumenical law forbade the Church to enact such punishments. The word sanctuary would mean nothing if the Church wielded such terrible power!

His gaze swung toward the dark figure circling the pyre like a buzzard. Tall and angular, she wielded what appeared to be a whip in one hand. What in heaven’s name?

“Hurry!” Her harsh voice carried to his ears betraying her identity as the prioress. “I want more tallow on it!”

Clearly she hoped to get the matter done swiftly, no doubt wary of the army outside her walls. An attempt to negotiate would be a waste of his time, he surmised.

That left only one course of action, an alternative with grave ramifications. No mortal man, not even a commander of the king’s army, had the right to enter a holy house uninvited. On the other hand, honor demanded that Luke save the condemned. To walk away would make him as much a murderer as the prioress.

Figuring his odds for success, he glanced down.

“What do you see, my lord?” his squire asked, his open boyish face looking up at him.

“A girl being put to death at the stake,” Luke said evenly.

Erin gasped. “Is she a witch?” He crossed himself.

Luke sent a thoughtful look back at the victim. He couldn’t tell much about her, enveloped as she was in black robes and her head swathed in a devout head covering.

“There are no such things as witches,” he replied, curbing his squire’s imagination. At least, not that he’d ever encountered in his travels. Healers, pagans, even diviners, some who claimed to practice sorcery or necromancy, but all harmless.

Seeing that the nuns had stopped splashing tallow on the straw and were stepping away from it, he quickly devised a plan.

With a smirk on her long face, the prioress approached her victim.

“Don’t think you can beg now,” she taunted. “You mocked my offer of charity, remember?”

Luke cut his gaze to the doomed young nun, curious to hear her reply.

“I do not require your forgiveness.” Her voice was as steady as steel and marked her as older than her appearance. “Forsooth, ’tis you who should ask forgiveness of me.”

Luke’s eyebrows rose in admiration. Such defiance in the face of tyranny deserved reward, no matter the consequence. He considered his odds of success. With only nuns in attendance, save for a man in abbot’s garb and two other clerics, he would face no serious resistance.

“Throw me my sword,” he called down to Erin.

The youth complied with an accurate hefting of the heavy broadsword, which Luke handily caught, laying it soundlessly on the top of the wall.

“Return my mail to your horse,” he added, “and do so quickly. Tell Sir Pierce we must away from here immediately. Every man must mount up at once. Look for me at the gate. Hurry!”

Erin knew better than to question his commander. The lad gathered his lord’s hauberk, mail aventail, chausses, gauntlets, and belted sheath within the circle of his skinny arms and staggered away, grunting with the effort.

Putting both hands upon the top of the wall, Luke hoisted himself onto the ledge.

No one had seen him for all eyes were fixed on the prioress as she lowered her torch with flourish toward the pyre. The kindling closest to her exploded into flame.

Black smoke billowed upward then dissipated with the morning breeze. So, too, did the victim’s bravery. Even from a distance of some 12 pieds, he could see her eyes widen with terror. Her slender body strained against the ropes.

As the rest of the tinder and twigs ignited, creating a snare of fire, Luke realized he had less time than he’d wagered. Snatching up his weapon, he braved the long drop to the ground, rolling to break his fall on the hard-packed dirt. Gripping his broadsword firmly, he sprinted toward the roaring conflagration, and the years fell away as if he was in Normandy once again, watching the kitchen at Castle Carrouges become a deathly inferno.

 

 

Merry shut her eyes against the encroaching flames. She clenched her fists tied behind her back, feeling her fingernails break the skin of her palms. The hungry blaze sucked away the air around her, making it nigh impossible to breathe. She pressed herself against the stake, dreading the first contact of fire against her bare feet.

Be brave, she counseled herself, but she could feel the screams welling inside her.

Think of something pleasant, she urged herself, and immediately she thought of Kit, the stocky feline that had entered the small window of her cell on her first night ever at the priory. She wondered with a pang who would feed him after her death.

Suddenly, the platform shuddered, and a breath of cool air hit her face. Her eyes snapped open, and she found a man balanced on the stage beside her.

Baffled by his mystifying arrival, she regarded him in silent wonder, watching as his sword disappeared behind her back and the rope binding her against the stake fell suddenly away.

“Hold on to me,” he instructed.

She threw her arms around him and gladly. Given his handsome visage, he could only be an angel come to deliver her soul. And she didn’t even feel any pain. God had been merciful, after all. Glory be!

In the next instant, the world turned upside down as the angel hefted her over one of his broad shoulders. He leaped from the platform down the face of the pyre and over the rising flames. Even still, the long tongues of the fire licked at Merry’s wimple, singeing her hair, and releasing a noxious scent. She snatched off the head covering and tossed it down. Watching it roll in the dust behind them, she questioned for the first time whether she were indeed heaven-bound.

What if the angel hadn’t taken her soul but, rather, her mortal shell. That made far more sense for as he sprinted toward the gate, his hard shoulder pummeled her belly. The discomfort confirmed the fact that she was still of the earth and apparently still in danger of leaving it.

Unable to draw a breath, Merry craned her neck to see the prioress pursuing them. With braided whip in hand, Agnes ran behind, teeth bared like a wolf. Others followed in her wake, many of them gaping in wonder, some of her sisters even smiling.

Merry’s savior beat them all to the gate. Hauling back the crossbar, he yanked the wooden door open, and suddenly she was surrounded by milling horses and gleaming weaponry.

He set her on her feet with dizzying speed, and she staggered. Before she could orient herself, his broadsword whistled past her head and was sheathed in a scabbard attached to his saddle. His strong hands spanned her waist, and in the next instant, Merry landed jarringly atop the same large saddle, her wool habit bunched up to her thighs and her legs dangling precariously on either side of a large mount.

“Ride!” her dark-haired savior called out with authority, and all around them, horses leaped into thunderous motion. At the same moment, his large, hard body straddled the space behind her and his arms enveloped her as he took up the reins.

She held her breath in anticipation of her savior’s destrier bounding forward when the prioress’s voice raked over her.

“Stop!”

The tip of a whip whistled by her cheek, and Merry lurched back, smacking hard against the man behind her.

“Hand her over to me at once!” Mother Agnes insisted, and the whip cracked again, threatening them both.

The prioress was a daunting woman, but Merry’s rescuer was more formidable still. Twisting in her seat, Merry saw his dark eyebrows lower into an unsettling frown. At the same time, he released one hand from the reins, pulled his sword once more from its sheath and turned his horse toward the aged nun.

Clearly, he wasn’t an angel but a warrior of some sort—and rather fearsome at that. Yet his voice, as he confronted Mother Agnes, was at odds with his battle readiness. Steady and dignified in contrast to the prioress’s unseemly rage, the man’s tone comforted Merry.

“As a representative of King Henry, madam, ’tis my duty to intervene. You said you would be burning the bodies of the dead this morning. This holy sister does not look dead to me.”

He flicked a glance at Merry, his thoughtful gaze running over her upturned face.

“She is dead of spirit, dead to the Church!” the prioress raged. “How dare you interfere in matters of religious concern! This witch tried to poison me!” She glared at Merry.

“Indeed,” said the warrior smoothly. “Then I will convey her to the nearest bishop to be tried in an ecclesiastical court. It seems to me you have forgotten whom you serve.”

Conveyed to the nearest bishop? Merry’s heart skipped a beat. Nay, to endure a second trial!

“I will not stand for this disruption!” the prioress seethed. “What is your name? I intend to bring a formal complaint against you. How dare you breach my wall!”

“’Tis not your wall,” the warrior corrected softly, edging his horse closer to the nun. “’Tis God’s wall. And my name is Luke d’Aubigny,” he answered. “Complain all you like, only be prepared to account for your actions if you do.”

He dismissed the mother with those words, and tugged the reins to turn the destrier away. Yet Merry could not take her gaze from the seething face of the nun. Mother Agnes drew back her whip.

“Beware!” Merry cried.

The sword flashed by her eye, severing the whip in two. With scarcely a pause, her savior spurred their mount into a gallop, riding into the golden trail of dust the army had left behind.

A hundred lengths down the road, the man behind her placed his sword across her lap. “Hold this,” he requested, taking the reins with both hands.

Merry’s fingers closed about the heavy weapon. She registered the smooth, cool quality of the blade, its razor-sharp edge. Her senses seemed strangely heightened, so that the newly risen sun blinded her, the grass filled her nostrils with dusty perfume, and the wind wafted through the weave of her nun’s attire, cooling her skin—details reminding her she was not only alive, she was outside the walls of the priory and could be riding toward freedom.

Yet instead of joy, only despair blanketed her. She had come so close to death that she’d welcomed its oblivion, if not its manner. How much better for an angel to have taken her soul! Moreover, according to this man, she would be made to stand another trial. No doubt the prioress would be present to secure a second conviction.

She did not want to hear the filthy lies again—allegations that she had fornicated with the devil, who had put a mark of conquest on her backside. Indeed, she would be made to strip and show the birthmark again and in front of more than only her fellow sisters. By heaven, she was weary of it. She simply could not live through it again! She would not.

A quiet rage simmered, overtaking the shock of her reprieve and the consuming despair. Setting her jaw, Merry lifted her gaze to find them gaining on the army. Soon, she would be surrounded by dozens of soldiers, not merely the captive of one. It hadn’t escaped her notice that her rescuer wore no mail, no protection of any kind. She glanced down at his sword, lying across her thighs, and moved a hand to grasp the odd-shaped pommel. The steel had been beaten into the shape of wings. If only she had wings herself to fly!

It wouldn’t be right to kill the one who’d saved her. Her soul would go straight to purgatory should she do that. Neither could she wound him, though perhaps if she did, she might be able to thrust him off his horse and gallop away. Yet where would she go after that? If she’d had any place to go, she would have left the priory years ago. In any case, the king’s soldiers would be on her in an instant.

Yet another trial! Nay, if she could not escape from her savior, ’twould be better simply to take her own life—again, purgatory but at least not at the cost of another’s soul. Could she accomplish it while held captive on horseback? The rocking movement alone might send the point sliding between her ribs if she could angle the wide sword correctly.

God’s teeth, the sword was long! She struggled a moment, extending the pommel as far as she could. She slipped the tip under her arm, trying to angle it toward her heart . . . and succeeded in pricking the man behind her.

“What are you doing?”

With one hand, he reached around her to grab the pommel and wrench the sword from her grasp. He slid it back into the saddle scabbard and, at the same time, brought his horse to a sudden standstill.

Merry should have known oblivion would not come easily. Worse yet, she’d angered the warrior in her attempt. Would he send her flying with a well-placed blow?

“Were you trying to kill yourself or me?” he demanded incredulously, his breath fanning the top of her uncovered head.

When she said nothing, he captured her jaw and angled her head halfway around so she was forced to meet his gaze.

Her heart beating wildly in her chest, Merry tried to clamp down a familiar terror that rose like the fiery flames she’d faced, making it hard to breathe. The strength in his fingertips astounded her. Obviously, he could break her neck without calling upon even a portion of his power.

With a belated gasp, she realized his motives for saving her could not be pure. No man was that noble. He intended physical malice to her person; of that, she was certain. No doubt he never intended to take her to a bishop to stand trial, at least not before assaulting her.

Swinging her leg abruptly over the horse’s neck, she counted on the element of surprise to aid her as she slid from the saddle, dropping the distance to the ground and sprawling in the dirt. Unmindful of her bruised knees, she scrambled up again, deaf to the warrior’s command that she halt. With the dry grasses feeling like a thousand quills under her feet, she could not understand why it pained her so to run, why her usual speed and grace were hindered.

Merry felt only dismay, not disbelief, when two powerful arms snatched her from behind and effortlessly lifted her off her feet. Still, she would not give in easily. Thundering her heels against him repeatedly, she made painful contact with his hard boots and firm muscles. After a moment of useless struggle, she realized she was spending her strength for naught. Better to conserve it for a later time—she let herself go limp.

How miserable her existence, she marveled. She’d spent years in the woods, avoiding being raped by her stepfather and his men who’d occupied her parents’ home; for another five years, she’d dodged the whip of the prioress on many an occasion, not letting the woman beat her as she did the other novitiates and nuns; and she’d even escaped certain death by burning at the stake.

Only to face ruin at the hands of a warrior too powerful to overcome!

Her lip curled at the notion of being at his mercy. Why did it always come down to might?

What she knew of such men as the one who currently held her effortlessly off the ground, she had learned firsthand. Bloodthirsty barbarians who used women ruthlessly and painfully. Her own mother had been raped by such a beast.

“If you force me,” she warned, calling upon the unique defense that had kept her chaste this long, “your member will shrivel and fall off. I swear it! For I am a powerful sorceress,” she added on a ragged breath, “and you will rue the day you ever did me harm!”