A Knight's Vow Part 41

" 'Twas a long time ago." Not long enough to erase the pain in his voice.

"I lost my mother when I was a child," she told him. "She fell ill. I remember listening to her, night after night, coughing and coughing. 'Twas a horrible sound."

Ryance remembered that sound. Four years after, he could still recall his second wife's wheezing breaths

as she struggled to find air in the fluid drowning her. "But not so horrible as the night it ceased."

"Aye. I blamed myself. For years afterward I thought I'd caused her death by praying she'd stop coughing."

Her words struck a familiar and dissonant chord in him. He, too, had prayed for Elaine's end.

"Did you blame yourself for your wife's death?" Hilaire asked, startling him with her candor.

"Nay," he lied. "The physicians did all they could-bled her, gave her poultices to draw out the sickness."

He blew out a tired breath. "I even summoned a healer the chaplain claimed was a handmaiden of the devil."

"I'm so sorry," Hilaire whispered. "You must have loved her well." "I... cared for her." He hadn't dared to love Elaine, not after losing his first wife. She'd simply been the King's choice, a political alliance, and though he'd treated her with respect, he'd stubbornly closed his heart to her.

Until she'd taken ill. Then, forced to watch her face an agonizing death with courage, her sweetness unwavering, her faith undimmed, he grew to care for her deeply. Which was the crudest blow of all. For when she finally succ.u.mbed, it was as if a piece of him had been torn away. Worse, while he knelt,

stunned with grief, beside her grave, vicious tongues began to wag. And before long, the rumor grew legs.

The Black Gryphon had struck once more. He'd poisoned his wife.

"Have you never loved again?" Hilaire's voice broke into his thoughts.

"Nay." This time he didn't lie. After losing two wives and a daughter, he'd kept his heart under lock and

key. To his third wife, he'd shown courtesy and companions.h.i.+p, no more.

"What of your parents?" she asked. "What is your father like?"

"Dead. My mother as well." It was no great loss in his mind. His father had been a cruel man, killed in a

brawl he'd probably instigated, and his mother had been feeble, living under her husband's shadow most of her life.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"That, too, happened long ago."

"Forsooth? How old are you?" Hilaire asked.He smiled humorlessly. "Old as Methuselah." He felt that old at least, despite the fact he'd only pa.s.sed histhirtieth year. "Old as dust."

"Old as sin?" She laughed, and he thought how incongruous the sound was in this tomb. "And just what

have you done to pa.s.s all this tedious eternity then, Sir Rag?"

Ryance furrowed his brow, puzzled. Was she flirting with him? It had been so long since he'd heard the lilting music of a woman's jesting that he hardly recognized it. But aye, it seemed she curved her words around a coy smile.

So how could he answer her? He'd done naught but eat, breathe, fight, and mourn for years. But there

was a time...

"I suppose," she said, filling in the silence, as he found most women were wont to do, this one in particular. "I suppose you haven't much time for pleasure with traveling from place to place, going on your n.o.ble quests and so forth."

He raised a brow, a gesture completely wasted in the darkness. The only n.o.ble quest he'd everundertaken was trying to catch a b.u.t.terfly for his little Katie."And how have you filled the hours?" he asked her."With music," she gushed, and he could feel her pa.s.sion like a living thing in the dark."The harp.""Aye."

Before she could be reminded of her injury again, he intervened. "When we are out of here then, my lady, and you are healed, will you favor me with a performance?"

"Aye," she softly replied.

"I count upon it." His lip curved up into a wry smile. "You shall sing of the great underworld adventures of Sir Rag and Lady Hilaire."

"Aye, and you shall accompany me on the rock wall."

Her gurgle of laughter washed over him like a healing balm, and he couldn't help but wonder what kind of peace he might have found listening to a lifetime of that delightful sound.

five.

There was little enough air in their prison, certainly not enough for idle chatter. But Ryance took pleasure in the sound of Hilaire's voice, and she reveled in conversation. Exchanging pleasantries seemed the best way to keep her demons at bay. So he obliged her as he chafed away at the wall, though he doubted he'd uttered as many words in a month of days heretofore.

"Tell me of your adventures, if we're to immortalize them in song," she entreated playfully, reminding him of his daughter asking for stories by the evening hearth. "What great feats of prowess have you undertaken? What dragons have you slain?"

"No dragons," he said, chuckling. "Dragonflies mayhaps."

"Have you saved a maiden in distress before?"

"Maiden in distress." He paused to think. "Once I rescued a damsel from a swarm of bees."

"And how did you do that? Did you battle them with your sword? Lay siege to their hive? Gallantly let

them sting you while she escaped?"

He grinned at the memory. Elaine had been none too grateful for his rescue. "I tossed her into the moat."

"Oh, Sir Rag, you didn't!"

He rather liked the sound of that silly name on her lips. And he liked the way she chided him.

"What of you?" he asked. "Any feats of great renown?"

She sighed. "Alas, nay. I am my father's youngest, his only girl, and he guards me like a mastiff. My brothers have seen the world," she said enviously, "but I've not set foot outside England."

"Never?" Ryance asked, incredulous. A wealth of images suddenly riffled through his mind like pages of a book-scenes of the stark Syrian desert and the steamy Tunisian coast, of crumbling Roman temples and lush Greek olive groves, Flemish towns crowded with craftsmen and fishmongers, and Paris, where velvet-clad n.o.bles encrusted with jewels shared the streets with waifs and mice skittering through alleyways. To take her there, to see it all again through her unworldly eyes...

But it would never be. She feared The Black Gryphon. Even if, by some incredible quirk of fate, they got out alive, it would be on another man's arm that she'd discover the world.

"I wager you've traveled far and wide," she marveled.

"Some."

"Tell me the places you've seen." He could almost hear the sparkle in her eyes.

He paused to lean against the rock wall and think. "My father took me to Spain when I was four." Odd, but he hadn't thought of that journey in years." 'Twas the first time I'd seen the sea." He smiled. "I waded in the waves near the dock, and my mother scolded me for ruining my new boots."

"Is it as vast as they say?"

"What-Spain?"

"The sea."

He blinked. "You've never seen..." Sweet Mary-she was young. He wiped the sweat from his careworn brow with the back of his hand. He'd always loved the sea, but how could one describe it? " 'Tis magnificent. The water stretches as far as you can see, like an enormous coverlet, till it meets the edges of the sky. Its hue is always changing-blue, green, silver-and sometimes the wind whips the peaks of the waves to white froth. You can taste salt in the breeze, and when you're far from sh.o.r.e, the only sounds you hear are the lapping of waves against the s.h.i.+p, the creak of the hull, the slap of the sails, the screech of the gulls circling above the open sea."

"The open sea," she sighed. "I should like to sail there."

And he should like to take her, to share the ecstasy of wild ocean breezes caressing their arms, salt spray bedewing their faces, to point out the sleek silver dolphins that followed, leaping and frolicking and chattering like playful children.

"Where else have you ventured?" she demanded, her appet.i.te for his travels only whetted.

He should be tunneling at the wall. Time was slipping away, and their discourse wasted precious air. But it was so long since he'd engaged in agreeable patter with such a charming companion. Her words were like sweet mulled wine to his parched spirit.

"I earned my spurs at Havenleigh and went on campaign in Scotland."

"Scotland," she repeated reverently.

"The country is rugged there. The mountains weep with waterfalls. In the fall, the heather turns, and 'tis like the hills wear a plaid of purple and gold."

"Oh," she breathed. Then she hungrily asked, "Where else?"

"After Scotland? The Holy Land."

"On Crusade?"

"Aye." Those images were not so joyous. But despite grim memories of poverty and bloodshed, he

recalled other things-the warmth of the desert wind, the magnificence of the walled cities."Tell me about it.""The fighting was ugly, but the country... The air is scented everywhere with exotic spices-myrrh and cinnamon and frankincense," he remembered, "and the people dress in layers of cloth as sheer as mist and in every color of the rainbow."

"Was... he... with you then? The Black Gryphon?"Her question caught him off guard. "Nay. I... came after the death of his first wife." In a sense, it wastrue. Ryance, the man he once was, had been buried by The Black Gryphon, sunk into the grave besidehis wife and daughter.

"Were you not afraid of him, of his curse?"

Aye, Ryance thought, that curse was the only thing he, feared. Instead he said, "I'd not judge a man bythe misfortune that plagues him.""Some say 'tis more than misfortune. Some say he's," she murmured, ending in a whisper, "the servant of Lucifer."

"G.o.d's blood." Ryance didn't mean to swear, but it was just such gossip that had made his life a living

h.e.l.l. Just because he'd lost faith in a G.o.d who would tear away all the beauty in his life did not mean he was the devil's minion. "The Black Gryphon is a man, no more, no less, and anyone who..."

Her hand made awkward contact with his chest. "I'm so sorry, Sir Rag. 'Twas wicked of me, speaking

thus of your lord. Please forgive me."