She felt nauseous. “What?”
“Did your father not tell you anything? Marcus was your father’s page, years back—”
“What?”
“—long before you were born. He was forced on your father by Miles, Marcus’s father. Griffyn Sauvage was supposed to go to your father as squire too, but something happened. I do not know how, or why, or anything of the tangle, but something binds these three families together, something unholy. Sauvage, fitzMiles, and the de l’Amis.”
“Marcus knows Pagan?” she asked weakly.
“Marcus knew his father, and aye, he knows the son. And Marcus has as much reason to hate him as the de l’Amis do.”
Hate, she thought numbly. I am supposed to hate him. “What are you saying?”
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“What I am saying, Gwyn, is that if you gainsay Marcus one more time, you are doomed. Everoot will go to him in wardship, and so will you. And then he will take you to wife.”
Her hand went to her mouth, fear rushing through her like a raging, frothing wave of madness. The movement seemed to anger John.
“Was your night with Pagan worth so much you would barter Everoot for it?” he demanded savagely. “Why did you not mention anything of your rescuer?” His face paled. “God save us, Gwynnie. You didn’t know, did you?”
She shook her head wildly, denying it, all the while, inside, crying, Yes, yes, I knew he was not what he seemed, and that should have been enough.
She held her hands to her face. Her fingertips were freezing on her cheeks. She could barely concentrate on John’s face. It was weaving and slipping in and out of focus.
“I’ve no time to tell you stories, Gwyn. If you would have Everoot be yours, then it must be yours. Above all else. Do you understand me?” He looked at her oddly. “Did you father not even teach you so much as that?”
She reached out instinctively for John’s arm, reaching for anything stable in her wildly shifting world. Papa knew Pagan. Papa hated him. There was something unholy binding these families.
John touched her grasping hand and softened briefly, back to the gentle, companionable John she’d known for years. The one who could explain this madness to her.
Only he didn’t.
One of his men appeared at the end of the shadowy corridor and beckoned. “I must go,” John said. He turned her, gently this time, by her shoulders and led her back to the room, pausing before the door on his way out. “’Tis best this way.”
He shut the door.
Gwyn stared at the wall. The silence of the room was deafening, hurt her ears. She looked down at her hands, upturned and opened on her lap. They were the same hands as a day ago, a week, but they were not hers. She looked dumbly around the room, seeing familiar objects—a desk, cupboard, table—but now so hideously warped they seemed revolting.
Two things her father had left her, the only two things she ever treasured—Everoot and the box of letters. She’d given one to a pagan she’d loved for a day. The other would be lost if she tried to save him.
Thrusting back the chair, she ran to the door, flung it open, and plowed smack into one of Marcus’s knights. It was de Louth. Good God, she was surrounded by nightmares.
“Get…off…me!” she shouted, fighting the hands that were suddenly wrapped around her.
De Louth’s voice was quiet but firm as he caught her up and deposited her back in the room. “Be calm, my lady.” She thought she saw a small flicker of emotion cross his face, then it was gone. Limping, he took up a post by the only door in the windowless room, and stood with an expressionless face.
“He said you’re to stay here.”
Griffyn rode hard for London. He rode on the back paths, galloping past tree trunks and over downed logs, silent but for Noir’s thundering hooves. He was blasting past the treacherous woods near the Saxon outpost when they found him, spilling swords and fury across another moonlit night.
Ten men were too much for one, and he was dragged off in chains. In their wrath, they missed capturing his horse, Noir, who cantered away under the eaves with a small bundle tied around his saddle. Later, Hervé slipped out of the forest shadows and took the horse. He and Alex silently tracked the company to the walls of London, then rode like demons to the Gloucester port where the others waited.
Griffyn was thrown into the Tower of London, beaten daily, threatened with beheading, and lashed on his back within an inch of his life. Only Henri’s intercession, bartering him for a highborn hostage taken on their last campaign, won him his freedom six weeks later.
Throughout his imprisonment, the only thing that kept madness at bay were thoughts of Raven. Of her laugh, which was almost scent here in the filth and grime. The look in her eyes when he’d promised to find her. The thought that the world might, indeed, be filled with light, and not the darkness of his father’s awful desires and unbreakable oaths. That he could go home again. That he had a home to go to, and Gwyn was waiting for him.
The horrors of his rat-infested prison were not so vivid as these lucid dreams, and it was the hope of her that sustained him.