Chapter One
Gascony, 1355
“It’s him, my lady,” shouted a knight from the ramparts of the castle. “Your father is coming home!”
Squinting up from the courtyard below, Aliénor de Tournan paused from marking the symbol of her father’s house on a barrel of grapes. Her fingers tightened on the chalk as her heart clenched. She’d been waiting for her father for weeks, and every day’s delay had filled her with anxiety. But now that he’d been spotted, she shuddered under a new and different kind of fear.
Waving acknowledgement to the knight, she shoved the chalk in her pocket and strode across the courtyard. As the only daughter of a motherless house, she would be expected to present a grand dinner, have a new wine-barrel tapped, and arrange pallets in the main hall for the returning warriors.
But her wayward feet weren’t leading her to the center tower of the castle, where her true duty lay. No, they were leading her to the shadow of the stables, her beloved palfrey, and a recklessness that she would pay for later.
Fumbling with the saddle, she tossed it across the back of her horse, hurrying to buckle it before the stable master saw what she was doing. Mounting, Aliénor urged the mare into the courtyard and then gave the beast a nudge before any good-hearted soul could shout for her to come back. A page scurried out of the way as the horse’s hooves clattered on the wooden drawbridge.
Tearing across the open field before the castle, high on a cliff, she let the wind blow through her hair as she gazed over the rolling lands of her family’s domain. To the west lay the silver ribbon of the river Arrats, which curved its way around the castle hill. To the south she could see the faintest outline of the Pyrenees in the crystalline air. And the long, fertile valley between gleamed a pale ochre, the harvest down to stubble.
She nudged her horse down the cliff side path where fig trees blocked the view. Only when she reached the bottom of the hill and approached the village did she see the first bobbing spike of a blue and green banner between the half-timbered houses.
Father!
The mare must have felt her jittery excitement, for the horse lurched toward the village with new vigor. Aliénor strained her neck trying to count the number of mounted men, but the winding streets thwarted her. It wasn’t as if the total would give any hint if her father had been victorious, or whether her future offered a fresh bridal wreath or the cold shroud of a convent veil. God’s Blood, she was acting as superstitious as the kitchen maids, trying to pick out the profiles of their future husbands in the hearth ashes.
Her father emerged from around the last bend and her heart fluttered like a startled bird. Though there was no blood on his tunic, the fabric of his sleeve was torn and there was a new dent in his helmet. There had been a struggle, a fight, perhaps even a battle.
“Father,” she blurted, as she rode up to shorten the space between them. “Did you capture my dowry castle?”
The Viscount of Tournan took his time unhooking the chain-mail curtain attached to his helmet before lifting the bascinet off his head. A scarlet slash marred his cheek and nose, discoloring his swarthy, hard-planed face. He handed his helmet back to his squire as he fixed his black gaze upon her.
“So this is how you greet me, daughter.”
She swallowed, sensing the darkness of his mood. “Forgive me, Father, but—”
“I should think those nuns would have taught you better in your youth.” His gaze flickered to her empty hands. “You didn’t even think to bring me wine.”
He spurred his charger and shot past her. She breathed hard, trying to squeeze her spirit into the restraints her father demanded. Provoking him was dangerous, even for her. But she had spent the years since her father had returned wounded from the battle of Crécy studying his fluxing moods, his hot temper, and his tendency to rage. She knew his limits down to the last breaking straw.
So she turned her mare around and came up beside him. “I beg your indulgence, father. Patience is not one of my virtues—”
“We’ve ridden hard this day, and fought harder, all for your sake.”
“I’m very grateful—”
“We did not capture the castle.”
A painful buzzing started in her head.
“Castétis was strongly guarded.” Her father’s unshaven jaw tightened. “It was impossible to assault, impossible to seize, impossible to recapture without a significantly larger force than I had with me.”
She gripped the pommel and watched her knuckles whiten.
“Nonetheless,” he continued, “men have been wounded, Aliénor. Men have died—all for your sake.”
God’s Blood, no. She twisted on the saddle, searching the line of men behind her for beloved, missing faces while her vision went blurry.
“Do you believe I failed you, girl?”
“You did not fail me, father.” But her heart was not in the words but in her mouth as she counted helmeted heads.
“Indeed, I did not fail you. Are you listening to me?”
She turned back to him. “I’m listening, father.” Not a man missing, it seemed, but the road was so narrow she couldn’t be sure.
He said, “I captured something better than the castle.”
She started.
“I captured the thief who stole it in the first place—that lowborn, sell-sword bastard of a usurper.”
On a gasp, she said, “The English knight?”
“Indeed.” Her father’s smile was a slash of ill-humor. “Jehan de St. Simon is in my custody. I will ransom the knight for Castétis, and then you, my unruly, impatient, doubting daughter, you will have your dowry castle once again.”
He kicked his charger up the steepest and narrowest part of the slope, dismissing her. She fell into place behind him as the implications of his news sank in. Could it be true that she wouldn’t be ushered off to a convent? Could it be true that she wouldn’t forever be a servant in her father’s house? That she would have a home of her own, where she and her brother Laurent could live in peace, safety, and maybe with even a glimmer of happiness?
A slow excitement filled her. Reaching the top of the hillock, she thundered across the field in her father’s wake, not stopping until she reached the courtyard. She dismounted in a sliding rush, tossing the reins to a stable boy. All but dancing to the steps of the donjon—the main tower—she joined her frowning father as they watched the other knights file in. She couldn’t wait to lay eyes upon the English thief. She had a mouthful of accusations for the man who’d stolen her future one year ago, and not a single one of them was maidenly.
The thief, slumped on his tethered horse, was the last to come into view. He wore a short tunic over his chain mail but the cloth was so dirty she couldn’t see the colors of his heraldry. As he was led closer to where she and her father stood, she noticed the dirt was reddish-brown.
The angry words she’d summoned stuck in her throat, followed by a deepening concern. The prisoner was barely conscious.
“He dared to battle us all,” her father bellowed to the gathered men and servants. “No man can steal from me without punishment, eh, St. Simon?”
The prisoner didn’t move. Fresh blood dripped in a rivulet over the steel of his shoes. A short, sharp quiver of fear speared through her. If the knight was still bleeding, he might very well die.
“Away from him, girl. Now.”
Halfway down the stairs she stopped short, her blood running cold. She was all too familiar with the tone of voice coming out of her father’s mouth.
“Tend my wounded,” he barked, “not my enemy.”
“But father—”
“I’ll rain hell on any man—or woman—who aids him.”
Her father swept up the stairs, his metal shoes clanking on the weathered stones. She remained where she was until the heavy oak door of the donjon closed behind him. Only then did she turn to his men-at-arms, questioning silently. To the last, they averted their gazes, busying themselves by pulling the wounded thief off the horse and carrying him, limp and dripping a trail of blood, toward the cells of the northwest tower.
Something terrible had happened at Castétis. Something done, no doubt, in a white-blind rage so fierce that her father had forgotten one vital point: A dead prisoner couldn’t pay ransom.
Jehan de St. Simon was her worst enemy.
Yet she had to make sure he lived.
***
Aliénor waited late into the night for the muted sounds of drunkenness to die in the great hall. When the last voice had faded into silence, she tossed off the fur coverlet and pulled open the velvet curtains surrounding her bed. Her chamber lay at the rear of the castle, lit by two arrow-slits along with the dim glow of burning embers in the hearth. Margot, her chambermaid, slept soundly on her pallet.
Aliénor shoved her feet into slippers and seized the sack she’d hidden under her pillow. Picking up an unlit tallow candle, she slipped over the dry rushes and unhooked her fur-lined mantle from the peg by the door. The rush lights in the hall had sputtered out hours before, but she knew the stairs well and had no need of light to make her way. At the bottom of the stairs she paused to slip on her mantle while listening for sounds in the pantry or the buttery. When she was sure all was still, she headed through the narrow passage, past the screens, into the great hall.
The embers of a fire still glowed in the massive fireplace, throwing a red-orange light over her father’s sleeping men-at-arms. One of the mastiffs lifted his head and sniffed the air as she crossed the hall. As she reached the arched wooden door, she heard the click of hounds’ nails as, one by one, more dogs rose from their slumber. Unable to order them to stay without alerting the sleeping knights, she pushed open the door and herded them out into the chill October air and then closed the door behind her.
The courtyard was bathed in bluish starlight. The frigid wind from the Pyrenees—the autan wind—swept through, scattering dried leaves. Bent d’autan, ploujo douman, she thought, absently repeating the peasant prediction of rain. Shivering, she descended the stairs to the courtyard and headed toward the warmth of the kitchens.
Inside on the work tables, wrapped in linen, were the remnants of the evening’s feast: chicken and pork pies, large, half-eaten chunks of boiled beef, rectangular loaves of trencher bread, and earthen jugs of hippocras, the heady spiced wine her father liked too much. The dogs lifted their noses and trotted to the tables, but with a hiss from her they hung back. Fortunately, the servants were accustomed to people entering and leaving the room to indulge late-night appetites, and they slept through any interruption. Aliénor peered through the sleeping servants until she found one large figure lying apart from the others. She bent close to him.
“Hugo,” she whispered, touching his shoulder. “Wake up, Hugo.”
The boy’s eyes opened, then widened as they focused.
She lifted a finger to his lips so he wouldn’t make a sound. “I need your help.”
Hugo nodded, still groggy with sleep. As he rose from his makeshift bed of dried hay she was once again struck by how much he’d grown. Hugo’s mind was like a child’s, but his body was no longer so. Years ago, she’d rescued Hugo from the brutal, teasing wrath of the village boys and brought him into the castle service. If those boys could see him now, they wouldn’t dare tie the brawny orphan to a Maypole and singe him with glowing ends of tinder.
She handed Hugo a wooden platter and pointed to what she wanted. The boy loaded a large piece of cold meat, a loaf of trencher bread, the ashen carcass of a well-cooked duck, and a jug of hippocras and another of water onto the tray. She dipped the wick of her tallow candle into the embers in one of the fireplaces and then, with her dogs and Hugo in tow, she left the warm kitchen.
The dogs jumped and whined, the scent of food in their nostrils. Aliénor clicked her tongue until they were silenced and then shredded some of the duck to distract them while she and Hugo slipped away and passed through the door of the northwest tower. Once inside, she saw a faint glow at the bottom of the spiral staircase.
She shielded her candle from eddies of wind and descended, the nape of her neck prickling. It was here where she and her mother had housed and tended many victims of the plague during the last wave of sickness, back when they thought it would help to keep the suffering away from the healthy. But the villagers had fallen like sheaves of wheat both here and in the fields, and her two older brothers had died from the plague in these rooms. Though the last of the victims had died six years before, imprinted in the air was a miasma of suffering.
A ghostly voice floated up the stairs, startling her. “Who goes there?”
“The daughter of the house,” she said, bracing herself. “I’ve brought food for the prisoner.”
She rounded the last curve to face the guard at the doorway of the cell. His sword was sheathed, but his hand lay on the hilt.
He released his weapon as he saw her. “My lord ordered that no one is to see the prisoner.”
“But certainly he needs to eat, Sir Rudel.”
The guard swayed a bit, as if he had drunk too much wine from the freshly tapped cask at dinner. “My lord ordered—”
“My father is not himself today,” she interrupted. “Surely you understand? In the excitement of victory, he neglected common courtesy—”
“He told me not to feed him.”
She feigned surprise, though she too had heard her father’s angry orders. Most of the castle had, since he’d roared them across the trestle tables when one of his vassals, Sir Rostand, had requested permission to tend to the prisoner’s welfare. Behind the screens where she had tended the wounded men, Aliénor couldn’t coax any of them into divulging what had happened at Castétis, but their censure and disapproval of her father was palpable.
“Rudel,” she said, “you’ve been my father’s vassal for many years. Surely you recognize this rage will pass, like every other.”
“So will my life, if I defy his orders.”
“Do you prefer to be punished by my father’s hand or to die by the sword of the Prince of Wales?”
The guard quieted. Her father was a staunch supporter of the French king, but the wounded thief was a vassal of the English Prince of Wales. She thought it highly unlikely that a mighty prince, heir to the English throne, would turn his face away from more weighty matters to concern himself in the fate of a single knight in the wilds of Gascony. But considering her father’s rage, she figured she needed all the leverage she could get to convince Rudel to grant her access.
She leaned in and placed her free hand on his arm. “No need to tell my father I was here, of course,” she said. “Best for both of us, I think.”
“But if St. Simon harms you—”
“The knight is hardly in any condition to attack. Besides, Hugo is here.”
She gestured into the gloom behind her. The guard looked at the looming boy-man and his laden tray.
“And from what little I saw,” she added, pressing her advantage, “the knight may already be dead.”
The guard frowned. With some reluctance, he pulled out the iron key hanging around his neck. He fumbled with it until it scraped into the lock. Yanking the door wide, he took the tallow candle from Aliénor’s hand, thrust it into the small room, and glanced about as he gripped his sword.
She saw a body lying motionless against the far wall. Approaching the knight, she sank to her knees an arm’s length away. He was a large man, broader of shoulder and longer of limb than she had noticed when he’d been slumped on his horse in the courtyard. He still wore his chain mail and armor plates at his elbows and knees, but his baldric and all its attached weapons had been removed. Congealed blood covered his features.
She reached out to touch his face, biting her lip in fear it would be cold and lifeless under her hand.
He moved so fast she barely became aware of the motion until her fingers flared out at the pain of his grip.
“Call off your guards, woman, or I shall shatter every bone in your wrist.”