The Conqueror

“Well, then,” she remarked brightly and turned on her heel. With great dignity, she began hiking down the highway, a lone, dark, limping figure, damp skirts clinging to her knees, which she kicked away on every alternate step.

“For certes, I stepped onto a strange path when I left the house tonight,” she muttered, pushing unruly strands of muck-covered hair out of her face. “If I thought life was a thing in my control, I have been proven wrong.” She fumbled to remove the heavy clump of fabric that edged its way higher and higher between her legs. “And I do not like that.”

Behind her, Griffyn ‘Pagan’ Sauvage stood for a long time, staring down the road. A breeze crept up and blew persistently around the hem of his cape.

The last thing he needed, the very last thing in all the world, was another burden. Tonight of all nights.

Griffyn’s mission was clear and uncomplicated: Prepare England for invasion. Lure the powerful, enlist the merchants, persuade the wise, and bribe the fools, but come hell or high water, clear the way, because Henri fitzEmpress, Count d’Anjou, Duke of Normandy, and rightful king of England, was poised to blow through the country like a tempest and conquer it from Sea to Wall.

Landing in secret on the English coast six months ago, Griffyn had met with dozens of war-weary lords since then, men balanced on the edge of a knife, and convinced them Henri’s blade was the sharper. He had done things no other man had been able to do, and he was planning to do them one last time, tonight, in the most vital meeting of his entire mission. At a remote hunting lodge half a mile off the king’s highway. One carefully-arranged meeting with the most powerful baron in Stephen’s realm, the earl of Leicester, Robert Beaumont. Turn him, and they had the country.

The name of that hunting lodge? Hippingthorpe. The very place she’d asked to go.

Could she be more in the way? Literally, in his path.

The fate of two kingdoms rested on this meeting. Turn Beaumont and England would fall like chaff.

And Griffyn could finally go home.

A flash of pain eddied into his chest. Dimmed by time, it was always there, a burning ache: home. Sweetly scented hilltops, primeval forests, and heather bracketing the everlasting moors. Mountains and seas. Wild, windswept, home.

He did not need a distraction. Not tonight, not ever.

He watched her lone, dark, limping figure diminish in the distance for a moment longer, then cursed softly and swung away.

Chapter Five

Gwyn sniffed and peered optimistically up the highway. Then she scowled. St. Alban’s did not appear to be any closer. Then again, she’d only been walking for about ten minutes.

“I suppose I’ll have to sleep in a hollowed tree stump tonight, and hope no wild boars find me too tempting to resist.” She wrinkled her nose. “With the way I smell, I’ll attract them from all around.”

She glanced up at the sky. Clouds were moving in. Her brows came down in an angry glare. “Perfect. I could have predicted a storm. Of course it would rain. Why not send a cloud of locusts and splay me with boils next? ’Twould be a fitting end to this wretched night.”

She was trembling from head to soggy foot, chilled from the outside in. Her fingertips were numb, her knees trembling from cold and spent emotion. Lifting a hand, she wiped her nose and scrubbed at her eyes, which were beginning to leak. “No crying,” she ordered in a furious whisper. “You brought this on yourself. Headstrong, foolish, wretched girl.”

She kept walking, stumbling through mud puddles and over a small crest in the road. Her legs wobbled and threatened to give out fully. Part of the reason became clear when she looked down: the heel of her slipper had given out completely.

She plunked herself on the ground and wrenched it off. Accursed thing. What good was a pair of shoes if they couldn’t stand up to a night of combat? Her dress was torn from collar to waist, and she clutched feebly at the shreds of silk, trying to pull them tighter, feeling colder and more alone than she ever had in her life.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

The question came from above. She craned her neck back and stared into the pewter eyes of her saviour. He sat astride his raw-boned horse with an easy grace, and against the backdrop of night sky and blowing tree limbs, appeared even more the mysterious presence he’d been when he stepped out of the shadows and saved her life.

She lifted the slipper into the air. “My shoes are wet.”

The grimness in his face shaded with something else. “What are you doing?” he asked again, his words a deep rumble of masculinity.

“I’m going north.” Hot tears pushed against her nose.

He nodded, then paused. “That’s a very general area.”

She tried looking fierce. He appeared undeterred, kept staring at her with those unfathomable eyes. She began again with frigid dignity, her only defence against the panic and tears welling up inside her. “I wish only to go north and am beset with people who wish otherwise. May I not simply walk along the king’s highway—”

“No.”

Angry tears pricked harder.

A dark gaze slid down her cloak and up again. “You are not safe on the highway, and certainly not alone.”