Devil at Midnight (16 page)

“At least the minstrel is leaving you alone,” Michael said.

“Not bloody likely,” Philippe laughed. “I think her plan is to let Charles and William present the case for her charms.”

A scuffle up ahead caught Christian’s eye, Lavaux and Charles testing each other’s quickness as they tried to slap each other. For once, Charles was getting the better of Lavaux, which might not have been the best idea, given Lavaux’s short temper and his skill with knives. Fortunately, Oswald hooked Charles’s neck with an elbow and neatly yanked him away.

“You should not make me sorry I fed you,” Christian heard the cook’s fathoms-deep voice say.

“Never!” Charles declared. “You, dear Oswald, are a prince among men.”

“You are a child,” Oswald returned. “Do not make Christian ashamed of you.”

This last admonition had Christian’s father looking back from the height of his saddle with narrowed eyes. Christian wondered if the normally reticent Oswald recognized his blunder. Christian’s good opinion was not supposed to matter to anyone.

 

 

F
reedom was good, Grace decided as she hiked up her gown and bounded from rock to rock. Her balance was so much better than it had been when she was human, and her lightness allowed her to accomplish truly Olympic jumps. Her control over which things she passed through and which were solid to her was improving. Falling didn’t hurt her, either, not when obstacles she wasn’t paying attention to melted.

Maybe she would figure out how to fly in time.

She laughed to herself at that, propelling herself upward to land like a monkey on a frosty rock. This world Christian lived in was wide open—no highways, no suburbs filled with ticky-tacky “ranch-style” homes. Grace did miss her beloved movies, but she was having fun, maybe more than she’d had in life.

She might only have one friend here, but she wasn’t alone.

She liked looking down at Christian and the other big men-at-arms. Mercenaries or not, they looked like knights in their mail and plate armor. They were in a longer, more straggling line than they’d been before, not so tightly packed on the beaten-down dirt track. To spare themselves tiring of the weight they carried on their bodies and in their packs, some of them used their halberds as walking sticks. To her eyes, Christian stood the straightest, his strides both graceful and confident. Even though they’d been interrupted, attempting to pleasure him last night had been exciting. Now that her chagrin had faded, she could hardly wait to try again. Christian would find a way they could be alone. She knew he wanted her as much as she wanted him.

That knowledge might have been the most thrilling. Grace was free to explore with him.

At the moment, she had bounded so far ahead that the group below her needed time to catch up. Grace squatted where she was and hugged her shins. Another of those funny house-towers poked up from a hill some distance ahead. Sheep or possibly cows dotted the pasture next to it. Grace squinted at them without thinking. To her amazement, the shapes sprang into focus as if she’d pressed a pair of binoculars to her eyes.

The shapes weren’t cows or sheep. They were burly men, more than a dozen, lying on their bellies behind a scarp of granite that overlooked one side of the road. All were wearing leather jerkins and what looked like metal pots on their heads. They had weapons, too: clubs and crude axes. When one of the men shifted on his elbows, she saw he held a long wooden bow. Arrows bristled from a quiver that lay nearby.

Good heavens!
she thought, awareness slapping her.
They’re setting up an ambush.

Christian would never see them from down below. Grace only did because she was higher. The ambushers weren’t as well equipped as the mercenaries, but between the element of surprise and their sharp-tipped arrows, they might get the advantage.

She ran back to Christian, leaping down the scree like one of the local goats.

“There are men up there,” she shouted, waving both arms to get his attention and then pointing. “At least a dozen setting up a trap. I saw their bows and arrows.”

Christian looked where she pointed, the hand that shaded his eyes more habit than help at night. A moment later, Nim Wei looked up, too, which tugged a shiver down Grace’s spine. The minstrel shouldn’t have heard her, and Christian was behind her line of sight. Whatever had caught her eye, she checked her black mount so sharply that it turned in a nervous half circle. Christian’s father was ahead of her, but he just snapped his reins with impatience when his big bay slowed.

“It’s the horses,” Grace speculated to Christian. “Hers are so pretty they must want to capture them.”

“I cannot see anyone,” Christian admitted under his breath. All the same, he didn’t wait for her to argue him into believing.

With a decisiveness that stole her breath, he used a small hand signal to stop the men who’d glanced around at his delay.

“Philippe,” he said, his voice intense but quiet. “Run ahead and warn my father that we are in danger of attack, then join William guarding Mistress Wei. Michael, see if you can climb quietly up the slope and get behind them.”

“Behind who?” Michael asked.

“Bandits. I think they hide in the shadow of that outcropping.”

Michael peered doubtfully upward but did as Christian asked.

“I will go with him,” Charles volunteered eagerly.

Christian opened his mouth, then shrugged, probably concluding that Charles was well enough to go. In moments, Charles and Michael were clambering up the steep hillside, as silent and quick as if they weren’t loaded down with weapons and plate armor. They made Grace feel a lot more humble about her gains in agility. Charles, in particular, was every bit as quick as she’d been.

The rest of the escort continued to move forward, perhaps not wanting to signal their attackers that they’d been spotted.

“Shields close,” Christian said to the other men. “Be prepared to cover your heads.”

The men reached for their round bucklers, which didn’t look nearly big enough to Grace. In the meantime, Christian’s father rode back to him. His face was a picture of annoyance.

“What shadow are you shying at, son?”

“Sir,” Christian said, his chest inflating with an automatic defensive breath. “I saw figures behind that outcrop.”

A whistling sound had all the men flinching.

“Arrows!” someone cried farther ahead. The mercenaries’ shields went up in unison, reminding Grace of a synchronized display at a baseball game. Sadly, this game wasn’t going to finish as peacefully.

The single whistle was followed by an eerie chorus, a rain of arrows now coming down. One man yelped as he was struck.

“To Mistress Wei,” Gregori ordered. “Get her off her horse and form a wall around her. Do not let her ride away by herself. More brigands may be lying in wait out there.”

His men scrambled to obey. With them dispatched, Gregori wheeled his horse back around to address Christian and Matthaus.

“You two. Up the hill. Hail me if you spy any more attackers concealing themselves down here.” He galloped off before they could move. “Form up!” he bellowed to his men as Christian and Matthaus leaped into action.

Grace followed them, speeding ahead as soon as she was able so that she could warn them of more dangers. She didn’t know how useful she was at that. All she could do was gasp when two arrows whizzed through her body. Luckily, they didn’t hit their intended targets. Christian and Matthaus dropped flat beneath their trajectory, crawling onward on their bellies over the stones and grass.

When they reached the top of the hill, they found Charles and Michael struggling with the bandits who were not firing bows. At least one of the enemy was dead. Grace almost tripped over a severed arm that had rolled away from its owner. Christian’s friend Michael had lost his halberd and was using his giant sword to fend off two men who were bashing at him with spiked clubs. Michael had more reach, but the clubs were sturdy. A bite-size chip had broken out of his blade.

Fighting not too far from him, Charles was roaring like a madman as he swung his halberd around. The axe at its top whistled through the air much like the bandits’ arrows had. Shockingly, an arrow stuck out from the joint in the armor beneath Charles’s arm. Despite this handicap, he was in better shape than Michael, who appeared to be losing steam. Charles’s roar became a laugh as he decapitated a man, striking him so cleanly that the head went sailing over the scarp.

Apparently, this wasn’t a common feat. Christian gaped at Charles right along with Grace. A moment later, he twisted around to meet an attacker who was trying to creep up on him from behind.

“Get him!” Grace exhorted, then plastered her lips together for fear of distracting him. Christian and the new man’s hand-to-hand combat soon devolved into a wrestling match. They rolled back and forth on the ground with the bandit cursing, until Christian knocked him out with a clanging helmet to helmet butt.

“Behind you!” he panted to Matthaus, which was when Grace realized she had about as much knack for following a battle as she did for a football game—in other words, none at all. Christian was in the thick of it, but he knew what was going on around him better than she did.

She pulled back and tried to watch more comprehensively, but even then the action moved too quickly for her to sort it out. Charles caught her eye by punching a bandit in the nose with his well-articulated steel gauntlet. Though Grace was feeling pretty bloodthirsty, she flinched at the wet sound of the impact. Not surprisingly, Charles’s opponent dropped to his knees and toppled. Charles finished him off by smashing his skull in with his own club.

Ergh,
Grace thought in the second she had to feel horrified.

“Get the bowmen!” Charles called to his three comrades.

Grace’s fog of confusion cleared.
Oh,
she thought. The men Christian and his friends had been fighting were protecting the archers, because
they
were inflicting the worst damage on the troops below.

The others knew this, evidently. They pushed up and ran after Charles. The bowmen had taken shelter within a circle of big stones, from which they were now shooting arrows in both directions. Fortunately, their aim was not as accurate while being rushed by huge armored men. Sensing this, Charles paused to snap off the end of the arrow shaft that had pierced him, after which he barreled forward with a fearless berserker’s cry.

Grace covered her eyes, able to watch only through her fingers, but the fighting ended soon afterward. No doubt she should have guessed it would. The mercenaries were better armed and fought together with more coordination than the bandits. A few of the would-be horse thieves had climbed down the slope to escape, but they were no match for the trained professionals on the road. All in all, Grace doubted twenty minutes had passed from the first flight of arrows to the last bandit being sent to his presumably just reward.

As silence fell at last, Charles staggered, dropped to his mail-clad butt in the pasture, and began to laugh. He didn’t seem drunk the way he had the previous night—more as if he simply didn’t believe what he’d accomplished.

Far less inclined to be giddy, Christian strode heavily to him. Rather than wearing enclosed visors, which Grace imagined would have been difficult to maneuver in, the mercenaries’ helmets had mail attachments to cover their mouth and nose. When Christian tugged his down, he was trickling blood in a few places.

The sight shocked her. Grace couldn’t be harmed by physical attacks, but Christian certainly could. For a breathless moment, her fright was entirely selfish. Without the one person who could see her, how would she bear being stranded all alone in the past? Then she thought about losing
him
, this friend she was only beginning to know. If Christian were gone, who would look at her as if she were special? Why would it even matter if she learned to be brave? It was his opinion she valued, his courage she took as her model. Most of all, she wanted the chance to be here for him. It hadn’t escaped her notice that he enjoyed the sort of kindness she offered. She didn’t think her friendship was more important, but it was different than what he got from his men.

And then he wiped the blood from his cheek, the motions of his fingers absentminded and casual. The cuts he uncovered were barely seeping. Grace’s lungs emptied in a rush of relief. He wasn’t hurt badly.

Seeming unaware of her state, or really that she was there at all, Christian dropped his hand to his comrade’s shoulder.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“Never better,” Charles gasped, caught between breathlessness and humor. “I think I killed five of them.”

“Six,” Michael corrected, still on his feet but more winded. “You finished off one who was fighting me.”

“We need to get you out of your armor,” Christian said. “Have Oswald remove the rest of that arrow.”

“God’s teeth,” Charles groaned. “I hate that part.”

He tried to get up and didn’t make it. A look flickered from Christian to Michael. Grace concluded Charles had not been hit in a harmless spot.

“We could call Oswald up here,” Matthaus suggested, his face concerned as well.

“I swear it looks worse than it is,” Charles said. “You three need not plan my funeral. I am not even bleeding much.”

“We will carry you down,” Christian decided. “I think I spied a broader path than the one we came up.”

“Eyes like an eagle,” Charles panted gleefully. “Your father will be wroth that you were right about that ambush! ”