The Conqueror

But then, she decided for the hundredth time, he had loved Mamma so much.

And Gwyn had seen to her death as much as if she’d plunged a blade through her heart.

Her heart twisted. She’d spent the last decade of her life trying to make it up to him, to no avail. Of course, killing one’s brother and mother did have unintended consequences. Such as one’s father hating one.

She ran her hand over the chest and tipped up the lid. Her parents’ letters lay inside. She touched them reverently, as always, then pushed her hand down, feeling along the bottom. She felt a little further.

Oh, Lord. Coldness washed through her limbs.

It was gone.

Her heart skidded a little. In addition to the chest, Papa had given her two little keys, one gold, one steel. His frenzied insistence on safeguarding these items had been mystifying, since neither key opened a single lock throughout the entire castle. Gwyn knew: she’d tried them in every lock in the castle since then. But promise she had, on her knees, at his deathbed.

Now the steel one was missing.

She picked up the scrolls with trembling fingers and looked inside. No key. She sat back, her blood chugging, mind racing. Yes, that must have been it. When she’d dropped the chest back in London, the key had fallen out.

But whyfore feel so awful? They were remnants of the past, of no value. But they’d mattered to Papa, and so it felt like another minute, irreparable hurt.

Her hand went instinctively to her skirts, touching the hard length of metal concealed inside a pouch sewn to the inside of her skirts. At least the little golden key was safe.

What could it matter that she had lost the steel one?

She pushed sharply to her feet. The chair tipped backwards. She plunged the chest back into its pouch, then knelt beside the tub. Warm steam rose up to engulf her cold, damp fingertips. She began disrobing.

She glanced at the bag again. Papa had been a lettered man—uncommon in a warrior—and Gwyn’s mother had learned from him. Stranger still, Gwyn thought with an unsettling pricking just on the fringe of her awareness, that Papa would so vehemently deny the skill to her. But so it was, and the letters remained unread. Surely she could have asked William of the Five Strands, her aging, cantankerous, beloved seneschal, to cipher them, but Gwyn felt strongly that they were private, for her eyes alone.

She had looked through the missives, of course, ran her gaze over the ink and her fingertips over the scraps of soft vellum and crinkled, aging parchment, but she couldn’t read a word of the spidery ink-lines. One day, she would learn to read.

And then, maybe, she could fathom the mystery of what lay underneath the letters, in the locked compartment with the steel lid that not even fire could unseal.

Chapter Fourteen

Griffyn stalked down the stairs to the main hall of the building, which was not an inn and had never been an inn. What it had been was a fortress for Saxon sentries some ninety years ago, on the eve of William the Bastard’s invasion. It had not passed its usefulness either. Men still stood amid its walls and plotted the overthrow of empires. Men like Griffyn and his band of knights bred in the killing fields of Normandy.

When Griffyn had given Noir over to the soldier who had hurried out upon their arrival, he had also sent word for the men to convene in the feasting hall within the half hour.

Twelve men and a woman sat around two huge, rough-hewn wooden tables and lounged against the wicker walls, their calloused hands wrapped around tepid mugs of ale. A brazier burned hot coals in the centre and on each of the two tables sat three or four candles, affixed in a puddle of wax to keep them upright. Twelve men gathered in relative darkness, steeped in danger and peril for their lord.

Griffyn told them what had happened in swift, clipped words. First the meeting and agreement with Beaumont, the most important item by far, but he soon discovered it paled in contrast. Much more interesting was the tale of near-abduction, sword fight, and subsequent rescue. Twice.

He received a series of skeptical looks, more than a few guffaws, and too many curses to count when he relayed an account of the battle with d’Endshire’s men.

“So, they’re dead?” queried one Norman knight, Damelran.

Griffyn brought his gaze from the fire in a slow arc. “Not all of them. De Louth escaped.”

“There’s a piece of comfort,” the knight quipped as he lifted his mug for another swallow.

Griffyn leveled him a flinty look. “Glad to be of service.” He observed the smirks around the room, half-shrouded in shadows, and half-lit by flame, and scowled. “What would any of the rest of you have done? She was alone and in danger.”

The chorus of hooting and laughter that followed his declaration drowned him into silence for a good two minutes. He looked around glumly. All were men he trusted with his life. None were men he trusted with this kind of information. They would only turn it into something it was not, and have a lot of annoying fun with it. It was already happening.

Men clapped each other on the back and lifted their mugs in unamusing and inaccurate toasts. Alexander, his second-in-command, watched him silently, the only one not joining in the revelry. Griffyn met his gaze and shr

ugged. Alex shook his head and took a swig of ale. The rest of the room stayed in different spirits.

Hervé Fairess, an Angevin knight with a wicked sense of humour, was fighting so hard to contain his laughter his eyes were crinkled up and his red cheeks puffed out. The ‘innkeeper’ and his ‘wife,’ in fact a Norman knight and a young widow sympathetic to any army who would crush the king who’d killed her husband, had no such compunctions. They sat in the shadows and laughed until they cried, hanging on one another as if they were drowning. Griffyn sent a fierce scowl around the room. No one paid it any mind.