The Warrior

Raising himself on one elbow, Ranulf cupped her chin and turned her face up to his. “I am glad you are not a man,chérie. ”

His smile, soft and poignant, failed to hearten her. Seeing the look of bleakness in her eyes, Ranulf stroked the delicate line of her jaw, wishing he could ease her despair. He felt a primal, almost savage p

rotectiveness toward her, an emotion he had never felt for any woman but her.

Just then the sinking sun descended behind the gnarled oaks that arched high over the verge of the meadow. Ariane shivered as the lengthening shadows probed the bed where they lay. Solicitously Ranulf drew an edge of the mantle over her and wrapped his arms more tightly about her.

Resting his chin lightly on her hair, he gazed unseeingly out across their quiet haven. Ariane had confided her fears for her mother, confessed to her strained relationship with her father, arousing painful memories of his own past. Like she, he knew the futility of yearning for something he could never have. As a boy, he had desperately wanted the man who was his father to look at him once, just once, without hatred, without cursing him as “devil’s spawn.” It was not even affection he coveted, just simple acknowledgment of his existence.

“I once wished,” Ranulf murmured tonelessly, “that I could be anyone but who I was . . . the adulterine whelp of a faithless wanton . . .”

His voice was low, remote, devoid of feeling, and yet Ariane could hear the quiet ache of things left unsaid. She sensed in him a loneliness even greater than her own, a bleak despair that had festered within his soul. She went still, wondering if he would say more.

The silence stretched out between them. When he did not speak, she said softly, “Tell me.”

Disengaging himself from their embrace, Ranulf drew away, rolling onto his back. Ariane felt the absence of his warmth keenly.

Her own woes forgotten, she turned toward him, gazing at his harsh, handsome face. His eyes were closed, one corded forearm resting on his forehead.

“I was no man’s son,” he said finally.

The quiet anguish in his voice made her yearn to thread her fingers through his hair and draw his head protectively to her breast. Yet she was far from certain he would accept comfort from her. Tentatively she reached up, her fingers stroking his face, tracing its harsh angles and planes. She felt him tense for an instant, but he did not reject her touch.

“You were born at Vernay?” she prompted gently.

“Aye. I never knew my lady mother. She has been dead these twenty years. I was taken from her and given into a nurse’s care at my birth.”

“That was when your father imprisoned her?”

The corners of his mouth twisted. “Who told you such?”

“Sir Payn. He said . . . your father abused you sorely when you were a child, in retribution for your mother’s sins. And . . . I have seen the scars . . . touched them.”

“Ah, yes, my scars. The sign of my purification.” His chest moved with quiet laughter, bleak and bitter. He could still recall the terror as he knelt trembling before his father, as he fought back screams of pain. “My earliest memories are of my father’s beatings. They were intended to punish my mother for her adultery, to drive the devil from me, her son.”

Beatings, Ariane thought with silent anguish, which had left cruel scars on Ranulf’s soul as well as his body.

“I thought him right to wish the devil from me.”

“No!” Ariane cried softly. “You were but a child, a defenseless innocent. A helpless pawn at the mercy of a cruel monster!”

“Aye, I was defenseless. My lordly sire was bitter and hate filled and maddened with rage.”

He stared into the fading light above her head, his eyes dry and burning, his chest and throat tight with a familiar pain. “I was sent to foster with another lord when I was six. God’s blood, how glad I was to escape my father! I hated him. I cannot count the times I wished him dead.”

“But . . . you did not kill him when the chance came.”

Ranulf’s jaw hardened reflexively as he remembered the years when he had lived and breathed for revenge, the deprivation that had fired his determination to become more powerful than his despised father.

“No, though I craved to. He refused to give me my due, casting me off like so much offal. So I pledged my sword to Henry and gained sanction to recoup what was taken from me. I fought for what should have been mine by right, and defeated my own father in combat.”

Ranulf laughed softly, humorlessly. “I pretended to feel no guilt for my revenge, but I could not escape it. I could not kill him.I stayed my hand. After all he had done to me, I still could not bring myself to strike the final blow.”

Ariane’s throat tightened with a fierce ache. “My father always said . . . it takes a valiant man to show mercy to his bitter enemies.”

“Valiant? Is it valiant to wish your sire dead?”

“You had good cause!”