The Conqueror

She stood in the antechamber outside the lord’s chamber. Edmund was looking at her beseechingly. Despite all the trauma and drama of the last days, his naïve earnestness was a light balm over her mood.

“Can you make it a’right, my lady?”

She laid a hand on his shoulder and smiled. “I will do my best.” She glanced at the chamber door. “You go get some food, Edmund. And find my scribe. Have him teach you a few notes on the dulcimer.” She smiled. “We need some music in this keep, Edmund. Do you not think?” He nodded vigorously. “Can you make me some?”

He puffed out his chest. “Rest assured, my lady,” he promised, and hurried off.

She took a breath, turned, and rapped her knuckles lightly on the oaken door of the inner bedchamber. “My lord,” she called, her voice raised slightly. “’Tis I.”

There was a pause. The door swung open. Alex stood there, his body slightly to the side.

“Come in.”

They stared at each other for half a moment, adversaries in some sudden truce, then she nodded and swept past him, into her bedroom. Griffyn looked up.

His hair was damp, sticking up in damp, dark spikes, and he was clad in chausses and a linsey-woolsey tunic. Its soft material draped against his hard stomach and over his powerful thighs, almost to the knee. He was sitting at the small table they’d played chess on so many nights, where he’d laid out manuscripts, where he once laid out her body.

From some reservoir she didn’t know existed, more tears sprung up. She looked at the ceiling, pain pinching her nose. Hadn’t she already wept herself dry?

“Come in, Guinevere.” His deep masculine rumble drew her into the room more than his words. She took a few tentative steps forwards.

“My lord. I do not mean to disturb. I came only to—Why, you have Papa’s chest!” she cried softly.

“Aye.”

“When did you find it? Where? I thought Marcus had…”

Griffyn’s chest expanded with a deep inward breath. “I found it a over a week ago.”

She considered the various implications of this. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“No.” His eyes met hers. “I am sorry.”

Her hand shot up, warding off the apology. “Please. Don’t. Don’t apologise to me. Whatever was, it matters naught anymore.”

In the shadows behind him stood Alex. So be it. Everything was up to Griffyn now. She reached out and touched the box. “So beautiful,” she murmured, then looked up. “Did you find Papa’s letters inside?”

“I found my father’s letters.”

“What?”

He nodded.

She shook her head. “But why? Why would Papa have given it to me to protect if it wasn’t—.” She stopped herself and sat back with a thud. “Of course. The chest must be yours. Your family’s. Not mine. It belongs to Everoot, and we,” she laughed bitterly, “were never Everoot.”

“You are now.”

Her eyes were filling up with tears. “Not yet,” she said in a brittle, bright voice. “Our nuptials are not until the morn. And perhaps Henri will have off with my head before then.”

“Henri will not have off with our head. You did no treachery. To him.”

She stared at the table, her fingers closing around the edge of it. Splinters bit into the skin under her nails. “I will do whatever you wish me to, Griffyn. Nothing is as it was, and I know nothing anymore. Except,” she added with certainty, “this is what Marcus was talking about. This chest. Whatever you needed, or wanted, ’tis in here.” She tapped its lid.

“I know.”

She looked at him, sitting there, his eyes unreadable, watching her. It brought a shiver down her spine. Not sexual, not fear. Just, shivery. “May I ask something, Griffyn?”

“Guinevere,” he said in a low voice, “now is not the time to be timid. You may ask whatsoever you wish. As you say, what was, is no longer.”