“You are mine,” he said thickly. He shoved his hand through her hair, dragging her head back. “Your mother is dead.”
“I know.” She fought off the urge to mark him, to carve up his face. Ten years ago it had gone like this, and she hadn’t known how to defend herself. The knife on the marriage bedstead had been a stroke of luck. Now, she knew very well how to defend herself. And she couldn’t do it.
If she killed Rardove, if news went out that he was dead, King Edward’s men would crawl over the castle like fleas on a straw tick, and they would find the pages. They would find her. And they would find someone who, given time, could decipher the deadly recipe of the Wishmés. Then Ireland would fall, Scotland would fall, and Finian would have ropes tied about his wrists and ankles.
Rardove’s vile lips were by her ear, breathing into her hair. “And I swear, Senna, I will kill you, too, if you do not craft the Wishmé dyes for me.”
She gathered every scrap of reason and sense from the cold, trembling corner of her petrified mind, and drew herself up. “I will work on the dyes this night,” she said, putting a hand on his chest. “In the morning, come to me.”
In the morning, she would kill him.
Or he would kill her.
But really, it couldn’t go on like this.
Twilight poured through the high, narrow windows of the empty great hall, creating a mingling of firelight and pale purple light, illuminating the spinning, dancing dust motes into an unearthly glow. Blue-black. Much like the Wishmés.
Pentony should know. He’d seen the color they made. And not the sample that was hundreds of years old. He’d watched a fresh batch be born, hatched by Senna’s mother.
Sooth, he’d helped pound out mollusk shells himself, when the baron was out hunting one afternoon and Pentony had not yet fully adapted to the groaning silences of Rardove Keep.
Elisabeth de Valery had been like fresh air when she arrived, twenty years ago. She’d chatted and laughed in that winsome, unique dialect of hers, some melding of Scots and mid-England French—and her hair practically glowed red, and she’d cared not a whit for Rardove’s rage or the gloomy Irish winters, which is probably why, when she’d handed him a mortar that dreary afternoon, Pentony simply took it and started pounding.
It is probably also why, when it became needful, a year later, he helped her escape.
And it is certainly why, when she entrusted him with the last copy of the dye manual, he did as she bid.
He’d sent it, along with a small sample of the dyed fabric, to her husband, de Valery. ‘He’ll either receive me or the secrets,’ she’d said to him, smiling. Pentony knew which he would have chosen.
Then, the night she fled, she handed him a clutch of parchment sheets, scribbled over with her mad, beautiful sketches. For my daughter, on her wedding day. Just in case, she’d whispered, and this time her smiles were covered in tears.
Then she slipped out the gates and ran for her life.
Ten years later, Pentony had followed up on that final request. He had sent the parchment sheets to her daughter. Under cover of darkness and packaged to appear a gift from an ‘unknown’ Scottish grandfather, on her betrothal eve, Senna de Valery, at fifteen, became the possessor of the last secret of the Wishmés. The only person who could create the beautiful weapons.
Right now, Pentony knew two things with absolute certainty: Rardove would never call off this war—probably couldn’t now—and Senna was a dead woman.
Just like her mother.
He stood a moment longer in his vantage point of shadows lurking at the corners of the hall, then stepped out and hurried across the room.
Chapter 57
The night dragged itself out without incident, the only remarkable thing about it being the armies encamped around the baron’s keep. Tents and small fires lighted the plain before the castle, dark things disturbed now and then by shouts of male laughter.
To the west, on the abbey’s hummocks and streaming down their sides for miles, camped the Irish. Pitched battle was not the usual state of affairs in Ireland, but then, the threat was not a usual one.
As midnight became a distant memory, Rardove sat in the great hall, slumped on a bench before the low trough fire. He drummed long, thin fingers on his stained breeches, drunk and incredulous. The events of the day were forcing upon him a self-examination he hadn’t experienced since he exploded inside his first wench, thrusting and quivering, leaving him spent and sure that this was what he wanted from the world above all else.
He swallowed a bolt of wine, staring straight ahead. His entire world had crumbled. Everything he ever wanted had become a curse or been destroyed. Elisabeth, his only true love: gone, and in a sudden blaze of heartache that had never stopped thudding, even twenty years later.
How could she have preferred Gerald de Valery over him? For a short time, he thought he’d won that battle. She’d come to him, had she not? He’d secured these Irish lands, at great risk to himself, for her. She’d wanted dyes, and he’d got her the most legendary ones around. And, eventually, she came. Left de Valery for him.
Having her close was all he’d wanted from living. Listening to her, watching her move. And for one blessed year, he’d had his dream.
Then she fled. Dead on the Irish marches.
God, how he missed her. The bite was as sharp as the morning he realized she was gone. With the recipe. She hadn’t wanted him after all.