Defiant (13 page)

“No?”

She shook her head. “Never.”

“I think he’ll come, Eva. If you are in danger.” She gasped as he slid his hand into the warmth under her hair at the base of her neck. “Call for him.”

She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

“Call for him, Eva.”

They stared at each other through an echoing silence.

Then the greenery behind him rustled ever so slightly.

His muscles bunched to push away, but before he could
move, a blade came swinging out of the bushes. It sliced through the air, arcing up to his throat, and stopped short. He froze. He heard a scream die in Eva’s throat.

From the corner of his eye he could see a young man, maybe fifteen or sixteen, off to the side. His face was white but grim, one long arm extended out in a straight line, trembling slightly as he held the steely edge to Jamie’s neck. His other arm was up and slightly behind him, counterbalance. He looked as if he were walking a log. The blade trembled, shivering close to Jamie’s neck.

No one moved.

Then another whispered hush whirred, steel slicing through air, and Ry’s sword arced down and in. It stopped half an inch from the front of the boy’s throat, not trembling in the least.

Everything fell silent. Not even the birds were moving. It was an absolutely silent copse of trees. Long heartbeats hammered by.

Then the soft, rushing sound of Eva’s inhale. She took a deep breath, expanding her lungs, then followed the lines of steel and human flesh down to Jamie’s hard, angry eyes, and said:

“I suggest an alliance.”

J
amie laughed.

A single, short bark. The movement it required bobbed the sword at his throat a bit closer.

Eva lifted her gaze over his shoulder. “Lower your blade, Roger,” she said quietly.

A long, weighty pause ensued, then Roger did as she bid.

The moment the blade was a safe distance from Jamie’s throat, Ry kicked it the rest of the way to the ground and hauled the boy around backward. Jamie spun from the tree, pulling Eva with him.

“Wisely done.”

“Yes, I am very wise.”

He turned to Ry, who had the boy’s arms bent and twisted up hard against his spine, so he was bent half over. Still, he managed to keep his head up sufficiently to eye Jamie with enmity.

“Anything you want to tell me, Roger?” he inquired curtly.

The hard glare became a bit more set. No reply. Eva sighed.

“For there was a great deal you wished to communicate to me a moment ago. Care to elaborate on any of it now?”

Roger jerked fiercely, which did nothing to budge Ry’s tight, twisting hold. Roger settled on fixing one eye on Jamie; the other was hidden behind a fall of dirty blond hair. “If you touch Eva, I will kill you. Sir.”

“Hush, Roger,” Eva murmured. “I am in negotiations here.”

He did not remove his glare from Jamie, and neither did Jamie stop glaring as he asked curtly, “How old is he?”

“Fifteen,” she said.

“If he wishes to see sixteen, counsel him not to issue such challenges when he is stripped of his weapons and bound.”

“I am certain he is making note of that just now.”

Jamie’s gaze sliced to Ry. “Can you manage him?”

Ry gave a clipped nod.

“This is your last opportunity, Roger,” Jamie said coldly. “Anything for me? Before I get it out of Eva?”

Roger jerked again, then said in a cold voice, “Mouldin. Guillaume Mouldin took Father Peter. Leave Eva be.”

Silence. Complete silence rent the sounds of the wood, the trilling sunset birds and soft burble of the creek.

Jamie was staring. Nothing was revealed, neither in his blue eyes nor by his armored body.

Then came his harsh echo:
“Mouldin?”

And in that single repeated word, Eva heard something that conjured a sensation she hadn’t thought even a witch could magic up anymore: hope.

For what she’d heard in Jamie’s echo had been disgust, perhaps to a degree as wide as her own, for the monster of Mouldin. This odd, awful affinity brought a warming glow to the perimeter of her belly. It did not warm her cold, dark core, of course, but there at the edges glowed a pale little light.

She marveled inwardly, while Jamie and Ry exchanged looks of the sort that were grim and unpleasant. But all she felt was a strange, floating sort of hope. A leaf on a stream, rushing to new lands.

Then Jamie started toward her and dashed all her hopes to hell, which was no new land at all.

“T
AKE
him to the horses,” he ordered grimly, moving toward Eva. “Why is Mouldin in this matter? He deals in heirs. Rich ones.”

“Mouldin deals in humans,” she said breathlessly. “He was a slave trader before your king favored him.”

“And why is he in this matter with the priest?”

“He is an opportunist, no? Tell me, Jamie, how much do you think Peter of London would be worth?”

“I do not know,” he said slowly, eyeing her from the hem of her skirts up to her lying eyes. “Why don’t you tell me: how much is he worth?”

“I do not know either, Jamie Knight. How much is a kingdom worth to the king? The rebels? Mouldin? You?”

He walked up to within an inch of her. “And there we are, come back around to the heart of the matter. Father Peter and the many people who are interested in him.”

“All of the bad men,” she fired back.

“For instance, me.”

“For
very
instance, you. All of you, men who want nothing of his skills of negotiation.”

“Except you, of course, who greatly desires peace.”

She looked ready to bite him, if only she could move more than her eyelids. “What I greatly desire is that you all use your swords to push each other into the sea. I care nothing for the peace of England. Nor do they. All of you, madmen with swords.”

“I agree. The likelihood of peace erupting in England is on scale with the likelihood of Cross Fell erupting.”

She drew back slightly and regarded him in suspicious silence. Long trails of vines snaked down the rough bark behind her head, and the tiny white flowers within framed the dark
tumble of her hair. It was surprising how regal and graceful she could look, backed up against a tree in a forest glen.

“What do you think they want instead?” he asked. “If not to negotiate, then why call for him at all?”

“I’ve no notion.”

He slid the back of one knuckle down the side of her cheek. “Now that is a paltry lie.”

Her face retained its whiteness, but her eyes fairly shot flames into him. “Upon a time, before England’s interdict and the king’s excommunication, Father Peter was present at a great many of your king’s events. Contracts and writs and royal eyres, when the courts went out, when witnesses were needed. And, unfortunately for your king, when they were not.”

“Unfortunately for you, Eva, you keep telling me things I already know. Why not try for things along the lines of, who sent you here?”

She closed her eyes, hopefully in surrender, then opened them. For a brief moment, he could see a wash of green from the branches above reflected in their gray depths.

“No one sent me. As I have said, Father Peter is a friend. I served as a nurse in a noble household for a time. The father was . . . died.” She tripped slightly over the word. “Mouldin came for the heirs. My services were no longer required. Perhaps I was not so good at it. In any event, I left. Roger and I.”

“And your own parents?”

This provided a full-on dam to the flow of information, for a good ten seconds. He counted them off, two beats of her heart for every one that slid by. “We have no parents. It happened when we were very young.”

He showed no response, he was certain of this. A decade in the king’s service required one to become skilled at revealing nothing more than a mirror would: the viewer’s own self. But inside, he was thinking,
She was an orphan. Like me.

Sunset was on them. The gloaming would not be far behind, when spring mists would slide out from the wet places of the earth.

“So,” he said slowly. “You are here for a debt of the heart. And this thing with Father Peter is to do with papers and contracts. Nothing more.”

She met his gaze sadly. “I know not all the things in Father Peter’s head and heart. But I do know he is a friend, he once saved my life, and if ’tis within my power, I will now save his.”

Which was absurd. This sparrow elf, to thwart vengeful kings and warring barons and Jamie, who had more secrets, had foisted more intrigues, and knew so many ways to kill he’d never fit through the gates of Heaven, and
she
was going to save Father Peter? Foil them all?

And yet . . . she had. Outwitted him. Aye, she was currently bound in ropes, hyperventilating against a tree, but there was something about her. Something deep set. Determined.

Resolute, he amended wryly, as he held her gaze. She was scared, but she was unwavering. With depth. Like wind or water or air. Like a storm at sea, or the pressing sun on the deserts of Palestine.

Indomitable.

Perhaps the wonder at finding such expansive elements in such a small fire explained why he did not push her any further, why he thought more of bending to run his lips down her arched neck.

Or perhaps it was the telltale crack of a stick under someone’s boot. He jerked his head around. Ry stood there.

“Where the hell is Roger?” Jamie said sharply.

“Tied the hell to the tree.”

He pushed away from Eva. The hilt of his sword bumped his
elbow as he shifted. He had a variety of other blades strapped across his body and wore mail that would protect against all but the most powerfully shot arrow.

Eva wore a blue skirt.

Some of the small white flowers that had framed her face had pinned themselves in her hair. They floated amid the curtain of dark tresses that swirled down to her hips, looking like little faraway candles on a river.

What would it feel like when he ran his fingers through it?

There was the smallest, oddest twinge of something in his chest. He shrugged it off and turned to Ry, who stood, arms crossed, watching him.

Miniature trails of mist started forming in the stream valley and tendriling up. Twenty years of friendship meant Ry had been subjected to twenty years of mayhem, triggered by a plethora of furious, focused choices by Jamie.

Fights of the angry sort on the London streets at eight, afterward limping to Ry’s home in the Jewry, where Ry’s mother would patch him up with scolding love and stinging tinctures, only one of which ever did any good. Intrigue of the precocious sort at twelve, involving barons and horses and messages gone awry; recruitment at thirteen, albeit an awful one, binding himself to King John with a larger goal, always the larger purpose in mind.

And Ry had hurled himself into the fray after Jamie each time, for some unknown and much appreciated reason. Jamie owed Ry his life a dozen times over, from the day they first met, when Ry had seen him at his weakest, his lowest, bloody and reeling down the street, half-dead, wanting to be fully so. Ry had coaxed him into his house like the wild thing he’d been. Jamie had vowed to repay him one day, a thousand times again.

At the moment, Ry was waiting for him to look over, at
which point he met Jamie’s gaze impassively, arms still crossed. He lifted a brow.

“Are you finished?”

Jamie turned on his heel and started back to the clearing. “Seeing as you haven’t anything useful to do, why don’t you loosen the cinches on the horses? Let us go see about Eva’s little hut and discover what mischief is afoot.”

“I do not engage in mischief,” she said primly.

“You engage in something,” he muttered, reaching back to tug on her arm. He added to Ry, “Be prepared for anything.”

E
va went ahead of them, pushing through the thick, untouched underbrush that enclosed the hill path. Twilight trickled down between the thick latticework covering of branches like water through a sieve. It was dim, but not dark.

She remembered it just like this, the haunting glossy gray glow, silvery when the moon was bright, the green leaves looking black in the shadows and moonlight.

Did Roger recall it as well? She could not risk a glance back.

Who knew what it might reveal to Jamie?

Moss dripped from the tree limbs, the pale green roughness almost glowing in the twilight. Huge trees were downed right and left, their decaying bodies topped by mushrooms and baby trees, nursing on the rot. The sound of their footfalls and breath seemed to bounce back against the wall of green, rejected by all the silent growing things.

They reached the top of the hill. In the center of a large clearing was a small hut. It was utterly dilapidated.

Eva felt a small rush of relief. The south wall had collapsed entirely, and what was left of the roof had crashed in atop it. The other three walls stood, but barely, bowed in, crumbling, covered in moss and mushrooms. It was decaying, nondescript, and unremarkable in every way.

Except for the door.

Her heart sank.

Below the bowing triangulated eaves was a small, off-set door. It was a sturdy, no-nonsense sort of door, except that even now, a decade later, one could still discern it had once been painted a wild, reckless red and covered with vivid black sketchings.

She felt her captors exchange a silent glance.

“What the hell is that?” Ry muttered. “It looks like witchcraft.”

Jamie shrugged. “’Tis like what Eva has done to her fingers.”

Ruggart Ry turned blankly. “Her what?”

Eva curled her painted fingernails into her palms, but Jamie only tipped his head in her direction. “See, if she’ll let you.” He swiveled and she found herself staring into his eyes. “What of this place, Eva?”

“It is old,” she said in a low voice, looking around. “Beyond that, I cannot say.”