The Conqueror
Then he overheard two guards talking a week before his release, when his body had been beaten too many times to count, and his dreams shattered like a million shards of ice.
Voices tinged with a Norman accent, mixed with Saxon roughness, lent a strange, rustic, lyrical quality to the rough talk of the wardens outside his cell one evening.
“Aye, well, and what do ye expect? A woman gave him up,” said one gruff voice in reply to some unheard comment, then grunted. “We ought to begin hiring wenches as spies. I’ve said it before. Men can’t keep their cods and their brains working at once, and the women is a good bit cheaper to pay into the bargain.”
This was greeted by a coarse laugh. “Aye, well, there you’re right. I wouldn’t mind a bit of spying bein’ done on me, if I had one as savory as they say this one was. But ’twasn’t a wench, Dunnar. ’Twas her ladyship.”
Griffyn dragged one swollen eye open and stared at the slit of light coming under the door.
“Aye, I heard she was tupped right well,” said the first, grunting again, “and ’twouldn’t have been given up mor’n what she already did.”
More coarse laughter.
“’Twas the lady, all right,” said the second. “Word is the king’s going to increase her lands, her bein’ the heiress ’n all.”
“Pah,” came the spat reply, “as if Everoot’s not a big enough thing for herself to manage.”
Griffyn went still.
The other laughed in reply. “And ye’re thinkin’ ye might do wi’ some’a the rewards?”
“And why not?” the Grunt retorted indignantly. “Ack, I know ’twouldn’t be right, but I do mor’n those rich earls and whatnot. Pah,” he spat again. “I’d like to compare what she done to the years of shit-hauling I been doin’ down here these past years.”
The voices started to fade away. Griffyn rolled to his knees and braced his hand against the wall. It couldn’t be.
“I could do wi’ a bit of som’in’ meself,” said the first guard with another coarse laugh, “but I’d ruther a piece of the lady than a piece of the land, iffen ye know what I mean.”
The other spat a series of curses and their voices started to fade further. A squeal of rusted iron indicated they’d reached the outer door and would soon be gone. Griffyn dragged himself as far as his chains would allow and stood, swaying on his feet. He leaned one palm against the fetid wall and bent his head, listening.
“Naw, the Countess Everoot stumbles ’cross a spy, gets rightly tupped as her first reward, then turns him over and gets an increase in the lands so’s now they reach halfway to York. Bloody nobility. Can’t trust ’em so far as ye can spit.”
Griffyn staggered backwards, his head filled with a hot, hard roar. The agony of realisation dropped him to his knees. He slid down the wet wall, his knees bending under him, the back of his head against the hard, wet stone.
Sometime over that one storm-tossed night, he had imagined, for just a moment, he had found love. Instead it was betrayal, the ever-present truth.
He banged his head backwards against the stone, fighting the almost overwhelming urge to bellow his rage and fury. Traitor, deceiver, betrayer.
Spawn.
No one ever changed. It was in the blood.
His heart was splitting and hardening all at once, so it was a splintered mass of frozen shards by the time he was ransomed seven days later.
Interlude:
A Fallow Year
Winter through Summer, 1153
All of England
The armies of Henri fitzEmpress marched across the parched earth of England and laid it to waste. Castle, garrison, village, homestead; everything was decimated.
&nb
sp; King Stephen fought on, along with his combative, petulant son, Prince Eustace. Some said the king was goaded by those who feared Henri fitzEmpress’s wrath, or perhaps the obligation to tread, weary now, a path long chosen. The prince had more at stake: a kingdom.
But for most, the truth was plain to see. The civil wars would end as soon as Henri fitzEmpress was crowned king.