The Conqueror - Page 53
“I know what Pagan said, but—” Alex began.
“—we wait,” Hervé finished.
Alex nodded. “He’ll come this way no matter what, on his return.” He looked over his shoulder. “She’s trouble. I feel it in my bones.”
Hervé glanced back at the inn too. “What harm is there, Alex? She’s just a woman.”
“She’s more than that.”
“How much more?”
Alex shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Turning away, they slowly dissolved into the brown and green dampness.
Griffyn walked back to the inn, aware of a truly novel thing: without warning or bidding, the rage of seventeen years was slipping away.
Ionnes de l’Ami had become as greedy and single-minded as Christian Sauvage—simply look to the hand he’d laid on the world. Forsworn an oath, stolen a castle, betrayed a blood brother.
Surely then, Gwyn, too, knew the desperation of watching your father warp before your eyes.
Like ice that has melted to just the right degree, everything started flowing. And that was, he admitted, surprisingly welcome. Rage had fanned his actions for too many years to count, driving him onwards, making him friend of kings and counts, but also making him unnatural. Mayhap it was coming time to focus his energies elsewhere.
Soon they would retake the country and he would go home. To the Nest. Mayhap, seeing as the woman abovestairs would be there too, would one day be his wife, he might settle his bones into this new thing: family.
It need not be as it had been for these last seventeen years, as it had ended for his father. It might, possibly, be like what he’d had a glimpse of last night. There was only one way to find out.
Chapter Twenty
The sun was westering by the time they reached St. Alban’s Abbey. Gwyn rode behind Griffyn, constantly aware of his bulk before her. They sat silently just inside the covering of trees, a few dozen, hidden paces from the abbey walls.
A handful of monks were arrayed out front, milling nervously and talking in animated conversation Gwyn could not overhear. Hands gestured, people pointed. She pressed her cheek against Pagan’s back and sat quietly, absorbing his heat and solidity.
He reached around silently and held her wrist. She knew this for what it was: a parting. Not that it should matter, she chastised herself savagely. She neither knew who he was nor whence he came, but somewhere deep inside her she knew what he was, and that meant good-bye.
It should mean her head being separated from her shoulders.
She ought to be grateful. She felt like dying.
One of the monkish voices rose above the others clustered outside the Abbey. “They come!”
From over the far crest of a hill, a handful of riders approached. They wore silk tunics diagonally split with colours, red and gold.
“Lord John,” called out one of the monks, his dark robes floating over the soggy earth as he hurried to greet them.
“Why, that’s John!” Gwyn exclaimed quietly, peering over Pagan’s shoulder. “The one I sent the message to, just last night. How on earth did he get here so quickly?”
John of Cantebrigge flung one foot over the saddle and bypassed the monks, heading straight for the abbot, who was lingering inside the gates. He tore his helm off as he went, and pulled the churchman aside, bringing both closer to where Gwyn and Pagan stood in the shadowy eaves. The men spoke quietly and in rapid voices.
“I ne’er thought you would make it,” said the abbot, Robert de Gorham.
John of Cantebrigge looked at the abbot hard. “So my messenger arrived?”
“Barely an hour ago.” The abbot lifted his hand and waved the others inside. A trail of monks and armoured men started inside the abbey walls. “We ought go in, my lord. ’Tis a dangerous place—”
“With Endshire about,” John of Cantebrigge finished grimly. He wiped his arm across his sweaty face. “I was returning to home from the London council—praise God, or who knows when I’d have been found—when a rider caught up with me, giving word that Lady Guinevere was making her way here.”
“But how?” exclaimed the abbot. His dark Benedictine habit shrouded his frail figure, and with the onrushing night darkening the skies, he looked like an enrobed spider with pink cheeks. And a shiny, tonsured head.
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