Chapter Seven
He might have stood there for hours, snared by the way her lower lip quivered, entranced by the blush stealing up her jaw. He might have stood for days, captivated by the way her shoulders shuddered with the swiftness of her breath. He might have stood there for weeks, on the faintest hope that she might allow him, with the slightest encouragement, to lower his head and press his lips against her mouth.
He would have happily stood there forever, indeed, if a shout hadn’t come from the ramparts.
Shout followed shout and they were no longer the center of attention as the courtyard erupted in activity. Women hurried out of the goat and chicken pens, grain baskets on their hips, splattering mud as they flooded into the courtyard to see what was happening. Men-at-arms rose from their ease, emerging from the kitchens, the stables, and flooding through the door of the donjon.
Aliénor gave him a startled look before turning on a heel and all but flying away from him. He watched the slim curve of her back as she shot toward the mews and slipped inside. He stared at the mews’ door, as fixated as her hounds, until she reemerged. He watched as she brushed paw prints off her kirtle and headed toward the stairs to the donjon. Only as she stepped up did Jehan notice her father descending the stairs to await the rider whose horse’s hooves now clattered on the wooden drawbridge.
The messenger yanked his steed to a stop and all but fell out of the saddle, as drenched with sweat and mud as his mount. The man swayed as he made his bow. “My lord, mademoiselle,” he said, heaving out a breath. “The Prince of Wales and his army are in Seissan.”
Seissan.
Jehan’s blood thundered in his ears. The walled village was less than a half-day’s ride to the east.
His liege lord had come.
Jehan turned his face to the viscount, feeling the brightness of his own triumph, but the viscount didn’t spare a look his way. The nobleman tossed a leg of fowl to the ground with such fury even the hounds hesitated to leap for it. Jehan stepped forward, determined that the murdering fool would see him and know he was the cause of the army soon to arrive at the gate—but then his gaze fell upon the woman by the viscount’s side.
Unease tempered the heat of his triumph. As much as he wanted the prince to rain fire and arrows upon her father, he didn’t want Aliénor in the midst of it.
Jehan jerked as a guard seized his arm. He dug his feet into the stones when the guard yanked him back, no doubt toward the door to the northwest tower. Jehan then did what he should have been doing since he’d been released into the courtyard: He took a swift inventory of the barrels of arrows and oil and stones lying about, as well as the number of fighting men climbing to the ramparts.
“Rudel,” Sir Rostand shouted, striding toward them from the stables. “Leave Sir Jehan to me. You’ll take the first shift on the wall-walk.”
His guard said, “I’ll put him in his cell first—”
“I’ll escort the prisoner to the cell.” Rostand waved his hand toward the ramparts. “Now go.”
As Rudel headed for the stairs, Jehan eyed the thick-bearded Sir Rostand with sudden, but cautious, interest. The burly knight cast an emotionless gaze over his shoulder at the courtyard—made chaotic as servants raced out the portal to gather their families and possessions from the village below. Once Aliénor’s father had climbed the stairs to the ramparts and was out of sight, Sir Rostand casually walked past the door to the northwest tower and continued to walk on a path paralleling the main rampart wall.
Curious, Jehan followed Sir Rostand to the far side of the central tower, an isolated place under an arched awning. As the knight turned, his sword clattered against the plate armor. Jehan crouched into a fighting stance, his heart leaping.
“Stand down,” Sir Rostand hissed. “Our time is brief.”
Jehan didn’t lower his fists. He wouldn’t put it past Tournan to have him murdered and make it look like an escape attempt to save his tattered honor. But Sir Rostand made no move for his sword. Instead the black-bearded knight glanced around the narrow area with unease.
“I represent myself and two others,” he said. “Sir Geoffrey of Garrigas and Sir David de Bourreu. They, like me, took no part in what happened the day you were captured.”
His thoughts darkened. “Yet my squire and three of my men are dead.”
“I can do nothing for your dead now except pray for their souls.”
This knight had told him as much when he’d arrived in the cell with a jug of new wine and a troubled brow. “You bring me words, Sir Rostand, but your mistress showed more courage than all of you.”
“Yon maiden is the only living creature who can tame the beast of her father. Do you want to hear our offer or don’t you?”
“Speak.”
“Tournan is our liege lord. We cannot openly defy him lest we lose our land and be branded traitors.”
Jehan nodded. He understood the importance of vows of fealty better than Sir Rostand would ever know.
“If the prince comes,” the knight continued, “we will fight him, according to our sacred oath.”
“If the prince comes, you will lose.”
“Perhaps that is true,” Rostand said, and the skin above his beard darkened. “And perhaps it’s not. We have high walls, enough men, and time on our side. But I don’t relish the prospect of a long, hard siege.”
Jehan resisted the urge to contradict him. The prince wouldn’t suffer sitting around waiting to starve out the inhabitants of some small castle. The prince certainly hadn’t done that for the bastide of Seissan, a walled village that should have been able to hold off an army for months at a time. This English prince liked to win his battles by boldness, burning, and extreme force—and frequently in ways few warriors expected.
“To avoid a siege,” Rostand said, “I can think of only one solution: If you escape, there’ll be no need for a conflict.”
At the word escape the world opened up before Jehan’s eyes, as if the walls themselves dissolved around him to reveal the rolling sweep of land and the great vineyards beyond, and for a moment it was as if he were on a racing steed flying free from here, free from the viscount, with Aliénor’s blonde hair streaming across his face.
No.
Impossible.
“Decide quickly,” Sir Rostand urged, “before we are discovered.”
“What price for this freedom?”
“A promise to ward off your prince,” he said. “Ask him to spare the village, the fields, this castle and all within it. With you returned alive and healthy, your English prince can go off and seek easier quarry because he will have already won what he came here for.”
Jehan’s chest constricted so he felt the soreness of every bruise. Vengeance was not an easy thing to surrender when he’d had so much time to nurture it in a cold dungeon cell.
“Lady Aliénor saved your life,” Sir Rostand reminded him. “If you will not do this for me and my fellows, then at least do it for her.”
Jehan breathed hard, his fists flexing, imagining the prince’s army pouring over the ramparts, into the courtyard, into her room.
“I’ll ask the prince,” he said, as doubt crept along the edges of his determination. “But I cannot promise you he will listen.”
“If you do not try, then there’s no hope at all.”
***
He’d escaped!
With Hugo’s help, Aliénor fumbled to roll out a new wine cask, an excuse to do something other than wince at the shouts and raised voices coming from the great hall. She’d herded all the servants inside the buttery to get them away from the hail of cups, jugs, serving trays, and food her father flung about in his inchoate rage. Now she could only hope Sir Rostand had enough strength left in him to ward off her father’s fury, for when the big knight had come stumbling, bloody and half-conscious, into the hall, the look her father had lain upon him had made her blood go cold.
Escaped!
She should be furious, she thought, as she wrestled the wooden bung from the cask of wine with trembling hands. Jehan had seen the defenses of the castle and knew the extent of their preparations. Setting the tap, she picked up a hand-mallet and fixed it firm with a few double-handed hits. Maybe Jehan had played her for a fool as he’d squired her around the courtyard, no doubt taking count of men-at-arms while distracting her with conversation. Maybe from the very first he’d meant to escape without ever surrendering her castle at all.
I saw a bright future within my grasp so I seized it with both hands.
Yes, he’d seized an opportunity, and for that she should be despairing. But she didn’t dare put a label on these strong, shivering feelings coursing through her—as if she herself were escaping to freedom along with him, her heart like a kestrel cut free of its jesses.
Bewildered, she turned her mind to the easier task at hand. “Heft the cask into the rack, Hugo,” she ordered. The boy-man lifted the wine cask like it was a pillow, then, once the barrel was settled, she turned the tap and caught the golden flow in a jug. She was halfway through filling the second jug when she noticed the silence.
Closing the tap, she set both jugs upon the table and hurried to peek into the mead hall, flinging out a hand to keep the servants from tumbling into the room. Except for the furious swirling of dust motes in the light streaming from the narrow windows, the hall was completely empty.
She strode across the hall, kicking chunks of meat and splattering through puddles of wine, glancing up to meet the stares of the villagers now leaning against the wooden rails of the gallery, where they’d laid pallets for what might be a very long night. She flung the door open to the courtyard, not knowing what to expect.
She splayed her hand against her stomach as if to stop its turning. There her father was, sitting on his restless horse in the middle of the courtyard, sword raised, ordering her great-uncle to raise the portcullis and Sir Rostand to lower the drawbridge while many of his other knights saddled around him. There was her father, shouting in red-faced fury that once St. Simon was found, he’d put his head on a spike for the Prince of Wales to see.
Her brother came up beside her with the sound of his dragging foot. “Is he leading a search party for the prisoner?”
“Yes.”
“Father shouldn’t leave,” Laurent said. “He’s taking too many men out of the castle.”
“I know.”
“We need those men here,” Laurent insisted. “In case the prince and his army come.”
From her perch at the top of the stairs, she swept the ramparts with her gaze to assess how many men-at-arms her father had left behind to defend the castle. Her heart dropped as she finished the count too quickly.
Laurent said, “Perhaps the prisoner didn’t get far. Perhaps father will return before the English army arrives.”
“Of course he will,” she said. “Sir Jehan has a limp, he couldn’t have gone far.” She hoped her voice sounded more confident than she felt. Her father would likely search the hills and the deep woods to the north, where an escaped prisoner could more easily hide, rather than over the open fields to the southwest through which the prince would likely march.
Her father and his men wouldn’t even see the danger until the English army poured over the ridge.
“I saw you two,” he said, his dark gaze sliding to her. “This morning, in the courtyard, walking around together.”
She flushed, remembering the sight of Jehan’s broad shoulders descending as he crouched to nuzzle one of the hounds, the bare skin of his neck exposed as he bent his head. Her father intended to aim the sharp edge of a sword at Jehan’s vulnerable nape, forever snuffing out the teasing light in the knight’s brilliant blue eyes.
She mentally shook the thought out of her head. “While we were walking about, Sir Jehan was probably counting barrels of arrows and the number of knights on the ramparts all the while.”
“He wanted to kiss you.”
I wanted to be kissed. “Can you read minds now, frai?”
“Everyone in the courtyard was chattering about it. I’m not blind, either. Sir Jehan couldn’t stop staring at you.”
She cast Laurent a glare, noticing the frown on his face as well as the sword strapped around his hips and the dagger in his boot. “Mindless chivalry, Laury, nothing else.”
“That might be enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Should Sir Jehan reach the prince’s army—”
“Don’t speak so,” she interrupted. “The prince is miles and miles away and the knight is wounded.”
“But should he reach the prince,” he persisted, “there’s a chance Sir Jehan will persuade Prince Edward not to attack Castelnau.”
“Why would he do that? After all the terrible things father has done to him?”
“Because of his tenderness toward you.”
The word tenderness burrowed deep, spreading rays of warmth inside her. How much she wanted to hope…but she couldn’t let sentiment overpower her good sense.
“This is war, Laurent,” she said. “I don’t think there’s room for tenderness.”