A Knight’s Enchantment (8 page)

Joanna felt herself go clammy with relief as she saw the young man’s pale face and blinking, clearing eyes. He was in shock, but relatively whole: Hugh had not mauled him.

Beowulf whined softly by her side and she rubbed the space between his ears, wishing for a moment to use the hound as a barrier as Hugh approached.

“We are leaving,” he said. He had not yet removed his helm.

He held out his gloved hand and opened his fist. In it, resting on his huge palm like some exotic butterfly, lay her golden tassel.

Silently, she took it.

Silently, he now offered her his arm to lead her away.

“What did you say to him?” she asked, her voice low.

“I told him that his horse was whole, scratched but whole.”

Hugh’s voice was muffled by the helmet, she could not tell if he was yet angry, but then he added, in softer tones still, “The lad has a broken finger but no more. I will not take his horse or armor: he needs both more than I.”

Joanna knew she should thank him, for by custom he could have taken all, but her tongue failed her in that endeavor. “Is it always this way?” she croaked at last.

“Worse,” came the laconic reply. “Now let us go. This skirmish has brought no honor to anyone.”

Joanna nodded. She wanted to say she was sorry, but she would not apologize for the favor: such tokens were part of the courtly game and Hugh knew it.

Still, she wished Hugh and Tancred had not met as they had….

Walking away with her captor, her limbs stiff as she tried to prevent herself from shaking, Joanna heard the fussing behind her.

“She is Destroyer’s woman! She never told us!”

“Jealous! I have never seen him so!”

“Do you mark how dark and tanned she is? Has she been living in a field?”

Trying to ignore the titters of laughter, Joanna moved on.

“I like Tancred,” Hugh remarked, after he and Joanna had ridden together in flinty silence for more than a mile. “Why did you give him your favor?”

“Because he asked me for it.”

Hugh could only see the back of Joanna’s head but he could sense the tension rolling off her, like waves of heat. He knew he was being unfair and unjust but, like his wolfhound scratching at a scab, he could not leave it alone.

“Then you should have refused. You should have known I would fight him, that I would have to fight him, once I saw it.”

“How would I know anything? I have never been at a tourney before today.”

It irked him that she was right, and that she would not twist round a little, to look at him.

“The customs are well known. You gave that young lad a token to defy me. I hope the outcome is to your satisfaction.”

“Nothing is to my liking. Do not blame me for your jealous conscience.”

They were riding up to a ditch that the horse would have to jump or go round, but Hugh drew rein, determined to look Joanna in the eye.

“I gave up rich prizes today for you.”

“I am your hostage, so that was your choice,” she answered coolly, still without looking at him. “Besides, you have Orri’s gold. Will he be able to joust again today?”

Hugh felt his belly boil at the lilt in her voice. “Why not?” he snarled through tight lips. “I have ridden again in jousts with two fingers misplaced.”

“Dislocated?” She touched the hand that was always hovering near her waist. “Which fingers?”

Her fingers were soft and warm against his, making him briefly wish that they were dislocated now, so she might tend them. Dismissing such folly as worthy of Tancred, he raised his right hand.

“The first two here. A surgeon yanked them back and they hurt like the devil when he did it, but they give me no trouble now.”

“Did you leave the field today for shame?” she asked quietly, adding, “I am ashamed.”

“Why?” Already he knew it was not for handing Tancred any favor.

Her narrow shoulders tensed. “I am a scholar, a seeker after rare knowledge. Your world of war should not be for me.”

“Because your world is better?”

“I did not say that. But I should be for peace. A wise man is always for peace. Yet today, at the tourney, I felt excitement.” She turned now in the saddle, her legs brushing his as she moved. “I should not be moved by
glamour.
” She spat the word, as if it were a curse.

Hugh could hardly believe his ears. “Did you compliment me, then?”

In profile he saw her wet her lips with her tongue, a nervous gesture. “Perhaps I did. Your world is strange to me, Hugh. Terrible and strange. Yet…” She sighed, rubbing her eyes like a little child does when tired. “Yet it is a true world, with its own honors. I saw that, too.”

She tugged at the scrap of veil still trailing off his surcoat. “Do you feel you fought well today, my knight?”

The question pierced him like a lance and now he admitted the dismal truth. “It was a carnage. We were not well matched, and yes, damn all to hell, I am ashamed.”

Wanting no more of this, he spurred the horse. Where they were going gave him no joy, but it would be better lodgings for Joanna than a tourney ground.

If—and this was a large if—his father admitted them.

Hugh rode hard and fast, counting off remembered landmarks under his breath. His men and baggage were following behind and he would send the wolfhound back to them if all went wrong and his father would not have them through the bailey gates. To return at all, after a gap of more than a year, was to swallow his pride, but he would have the satisfaction of asking his father face-to-face what he intended to do to help his son David.
It would be good to see the old man squirm.

Before him, straddling the long saddle of his palfrey with its pommel driving into her stomach and her skirts in a swirl about her knees, Joanna rode in silence, her fingers white as she clutched the rough mane of the horse. Taking pity on her, he checked Lucifer, came to a stop, and gave her the mead flask.

She drank, nodding her thanks.

“Do you see that ridge of hills to the south? We shall reach them before twilight and find rest and shelter.”

“In the strong new keep of your father,” Joanna said.

“David told you.”
Damn him.
Hugh took a drink so quickly that he began to choke.

“We have spoken of many things. He said your father’s lands were nearby.”

Feeling mead trickle down his nose, Hugh coughed and tried to snatch breath enough to answer. “You must wonder why my father does not parley with your lord the bishop.”

“It seems to me you are wondering that yourself,” Joanna replied, pulling a windblown apple blossom from her hair. Hugh wanted to tell her to leave it there, but the old bitterness against his father won through.

“Oh, he will do nothing for us, the lesser sons. We must make our own way. I prefer that,” he added swiftly, lest she think he was moaning. “I would not be beholden to him for as much as a penny.”

“Nigel is the eldest, is he not?”

Did David give out our entire lineage?
“He is, and we have no sisters; no mother, either, thanks to me. Can you ride on now? We have a way to go before twilight.”

Joanna ached in places she did not know she had, but she would not beg for another break. Sore and uncomfortable, she tried to recall the language of birds, the secret language of alchemy, in order to distract herself, but the pain in her hips and thighs from riding made it impossible. How did heralds and messengers bear this? she wondered. The ease of her earlier bath had long since vanished.

Behind her, as solid yet fluid as molten lava and as warm, Hugh rode with the horse, moving with a grace she could only envy. What had he meant by his
No mother, either, thanks to me
? She tried to recall if David had ever mentioned his mother in their talks, but nothing came to her. Instead, she tried to imagine Hugh’s father. Would he be dark, like his son, and as stubborn? Would he be grim or gay, like David and Mercury? Grim, she thought, especially as he and Hugh were clearly estranged.

And Hugh was taking them to his father’s castle for the night.

“Madness,” she breathed, biting her lip as the palfrey stumbled on a stony part of the road and her soft and tender thigh scraped along the horse’s flank.

They reached Castle Manhill an hour after sunset. Framed by hills and woods, it was possibly a handsome place by day but by the slender curve of a new moon it looked oppressive. The bailey loomed over Joanna’s head as the palfrey began to canter up the final track to the main gate, and the stone keep within towered over the raised enclosure of the bailey. As she and Hugh rode closer, she could hear guards on the palisade and walkway calling out.

“Will we be shot at by a bow or sling?” she hissed, too tired now to slump around in the saddle to face her captor.

“The men know my banners,” Hugh replied. “See: they are opening the gate.”

There was another rush of darkness under pounding hooves, a blaze of torches, more shouting, and then they were through the gate and into the bailey, riding briskly for the keep. As Hugh stopped by a narrow stone staircase leading out of the first floor of the keep, a door at the top of the stairs opened and a man came out.

“What is your father’s name?” Joanna whispered. She knew someone had told her, David or even Hugh himself, but she was so worn down with travel that she had forgotten.

“SirYves.” Hugh swung down from Lucifer, half catching her as she began to slide off the saddle. “Stay there. I will get you down in a moment.”

“How many times must I say I am no parcel?” Joanna protested, but Hugh was striding up the stairs and embracing a stocky, bearded man dressed in a long mantle of some dark color—she could not say what hue, with the moon so new and dim. At a head shorter than his son and as broad as a barrel, SirYves was a surprise, and his reception of his prodigal youngest was far quieter and more subdued than she had expected. He gave no true kiss of greeting, but no harsh, loud words, either.

Because it was easier to stay where she was, Joanna forced herself to stretch protesting muscles and slither off the horse. A groom was now holding its head, so the task was simple enough except she went the wrong way and finished on the cobbles of the bailey, with the horse between her and the approaching Manhills, coming side by side down the steps. She grabbed the pommel to keep herself upright and waited.

Sir Yves stopped on the final step.

“Will you introduce your lady, so that I may greet her?” he demanded, his voice lighter and less gruff than Hugh’s as his hooded blue eyes coolly assessed her smut-smeared face and wind-wrecked hair.

“I am Joanna of West Sarum, sir,” she replied quickly, before Hugh could crassly recount she was his hostage, or worse, that she was the bishop’s mistress. “I am of Bishop Thomas’s household.”

“The same place which holds David,” Hugh put in.

Sir Yves still did not move off the step. “I am aware of that.”

“Yet you do nothing,” his son answered.

Yves’s light blue eyes darkened to the color of his son’s. “The Templars are his kin now. They should deal with it.”

“And if they do not?”

“Be not so proud and stiff-necked!” his father roared out. “You come here after months, without word, greeting, or gift, without a by your leave—”

“Forgive me!” Joanna pitched her voice to rise above the scuffle as Hugh looked ready to grab his father by his dark red mantle and hurl him off the stair. “I have your gift.”

Both men turned and stared at her unexpected interjection, expectation lighting Yves’s narrow features while Hugh was frowning. In truth, Joanna wondered at herself and why she had troubled to intervene, but then she thought of her own father, patient and uncomplaining, asking for nothing even while in prison, and her temper sharpened.

“But I am sure you have no wish to conduct our affairs on the doorstep?” she went on, with deadly sweetness.

Hugh’s broad shoulders tightened as he stifled a chuckle. His father, mastering himself with a visible scowl, refused to smile.

“You must enter,” he said, speaking without offering her his arm. “Tell me, what place have you, a spinster, in Lord Thomas’s house?”

Marking both titles, Joanna spoke as Hugh did.

“I am alchemist to the bishop.”

“She is with me, Father, and in my care.”

“A fine care, that is, sir!” Sir Yves exclaimed, showing some bad teeth as he grinned. “The wench is exhausted. Bring her inside before she falls asleep over your horse’s neck!”

With that sparse welcome, Joanna found herself ushered inside.

Sir Yves, Joanna swiftly discovered, was a glutton, and Hugh was embarrassed by this. Yves’s greed showed in the supper table she was led to within the great hall of the stone keep. On the dais was a table with enough food piled upon its boards to feed several families for a week, and the servers were bringing in more pies and trenchers.

Sitting down beside her at this massive table, Hugh murmured, “You shall sleep in your own chamber tonight. I will clear out the clerks’ room.”

“They will not object?”

“They will bed down with me in the corridor and like it,” Hugh answered. “Now, can you sit through a dozen courses, or shall I make your excuses and have a bite brought to your room?”

She looked at him steadily. With his tanned good looks it was hard to tell, but she thought she saw a blush across his cheekbones, and discomfort in his dark blue eyes.

“Still ashamed?” she almost said, but then checked that meanness. “Thank you for not contradicting me earlier,” she said softly.

He smiled and shook his head. “You are shy for a lord’s mistress. Have you—?” He stopped. “I will say nothing unless you do of that matter,” he went on gruffly. “Will you have some wine?”

Pouring her a goblet instead of waiting for one of the many swarming servers meant that Hugh leaned toward her. As he did so, he whispered, “Be careful of my father. He craves gold. In truth, I am surprised you told him you were an alchemist.”

Only because I feared you would tell him I was the bishop’s mistress,
Joanna thought, sipping her wine to disguise her expression. “I should have said I was a cook, or laundress or farrier, I know!” she hissed back. “But had you not brought me here, against my will, I would not need to lie!”

“You are too slight for a farrier, and too disagreeable for a lady,” Hugh said, tapping his own goblet as if they were discussing the wine. “And you know why I took you. But heed me. Watch if my father offers you a place to stay and study here. He will expect results.”

A stay meant more time away from her father, more days slipping away of her own deadline. Suddenly more scared than she had ever been since the start of her strange captivity, Joanna ignored her clammy hands and dry mouth and fought to make a cool, considered answer. “So do all men. Have you no faith in me, Hugh?”

“I have less in my father,” he growled, in a way that had Joanna anxiously glancing along the table to the central chair where Sir Yves was bent over a mutton pie. He was chewing with half-closed eyes, intent on nothing but his trencher. There were crumbs in his beard. The sight quenched what small appetite she had, and she was already light-headed with the toil of the ride and the shocks of the day.

“He will be at table for hours yet, and I will have to stay, else he will accuse me of being a poor son,” Hugh remarked. He beckoned to a page. “Escort the lady Joanna to her bed-chamber,” he said. “It should be ready now.”

The following morning, Joanna woke to the news that Sir Yves had allowed Hugh to send one of his messengers to Bishop Thomas, demanding a hostage exchange—herself for David.

The herald also told her that Sir Yves was eager for her to begin her experiments in finding gold, and that her sleeping chamber would now also be her workplace.

“Whatever you require shall be brought here,” the herald intoned, which had Joanna hurrying to recite a list of her basic needs.

She was moving her pallet to the wall in the darkest place of the chamber—for she, unlike her experiments, did not need the light—when Hugh knocked on the open door. For an instant she was reminded of Richard Parvus, the bishop’s steward, but Hugh was far taller and broader and younger. More disturbing, too, as he filled the doorway.

“You have heard, then,” he remarked, entering the chamber and picking up a sturdy chest as if it weighed no more than a feather. “This—arrangement—is my father’s price for sending a messenger from here to the bishop on behalf of David. Else he would have done nothing.”

Say nothing,
Joanna told herself, torn between anger and pity.

“He would have done nothing. For his own son. Where do you want this?”

“The chest? Under the pallet, please,” Joanna answered, hating herself for blushing as she spoke of a bed to him. “I would applaud your concern for your brother,” she went on, “were it not that what you plan is at my expense.”

“He will want you back.” Hugh straightened from lowering the chest and folded his arms. “I know you are right. David will scold me forever, once he is free and you are safe again with the bishop.”

Safe?
Joanna started to laugh.
When have we ever been safe, Father and I?
She was laughing still as Hugh backed from the chamber, saying he would find her some breakfast.

While he was away and tables were brought in and Joanna spoke with the seneschal of the castle over supplies, she was thinking. It was clear from the seneschal’s answers that Sir Yves understood that he would need to spend gold in order to beget more. This was a vast relief to her. If she could continue her work that must surely help her father: there was an elixir she was seeking to purify and a few more days would see that complete. It was not
the
elixir, the substance that would create gold, but Bishop Thomas would surely appreciate its virtue and value.

As for Hugh and his father…Joanna sighed, nodding thanks to a servant who had carried in a huge earthenware pot, the first of many. As she quickly relayed a list of herbs and minerals and glassware to the seneschal—after being told she could not leave the castle to scour the markets of the closest town for such items—she was working out, in her mind, how to deal with Yves and Hugh. And by the time Hugh returned with a slice of bread and soft cheese and a cup of ale, she was smiling.

Over the next few days, waiting for the messenger to return from Bishop Thomas, Hugh knew that Joanna was up to something. From being harsh and critical—
“Can you do no better than that? Is this what you call a horse? Your sword is too heavy. That helm is out of shape.”
—his father was growing smooth. Not sanguine, that would be too great a transformation, but lively. The old man went about the castle rubbing his hands, asking after others, staring every evening at the heavens, something he had never glanced at before Joanna had been held up in the clerks’ chamber.

“She says she will have something for me by the half-moon,” Sir Yves confessed one night, and Hugh, aching from a poor tourney practice—his squire had been able to whack him hard on the helm because he had been trying to see if smoke was rising from Joanna’s room—thought it wise to agree with him.

After he had doused his head in a water butt, he strode up the keep staircase to the tiny side chamber off SirYves’s that Joanna had made her own. Greeting the guard outside, he ignored the man’s protests, knocked, and entered.

She was not there. He had hoped to find her, busy among her distilling glasses, or whatever those curiously shaped items were called, with her clever fingers flying over bowls and candles and her brown fringe escaping its net and curling slightly over her forehead, damp with the steam.

Hugh blinked and the vivid picture vanished. The room was empty. The dull pounding in his head sickened to a sharper ache as he turned.

“She is in the bailey garden,” the guard said. “I did try to tell you.”

“Aye, man, you did. I was not paying attention,” Hugh agreed. These days he was often distracted.

A walk outside would clear his head, he decided. A stroll in the garden…

He found her crouched by a rosemary bush, brushing her hands over its green spines.

“Do the same,” she suggested, without looking up. “The scent will help your head.”

“Did your spies tell you about my encounter with Henri’s mace?” In less than a week, Joanna had pages and maids talking with her as they never spoke with him. He envied her that ease of making friends.

“I saw it myself.” She looked up and beckoned. “It truly will help, Hugh.”

He knelt, and when she held out her fingers, he sniffed. He did not want her scolding. She was damnably right, though: the pungent scent cleared his head a little.

“You did take quite a knock. Follow my finger.” Joanna moved her hand before his eyes, her narrow face solemn as she concentrated. “How many fingers am I showing you?”

“One.”

“And now?”

“Three—Joanna, I have taken far worse in practice and in tourneys.”

“You are not seeing double? Feeling sick?”

He shook his head, then wished he had not.

She laid a cool hand across the back of his neck, devilishly soothing. “Have you ever drunk sage tisane?”

“No. Will you make me some?”

“For my knight? Gladly.” She smiled and the furnace in his head cooled more. “I have finished here.”

She rose and picked up a basket, balancing it on her hip. “I have a powder, too, in my chamber: I make it and purify it myself. My father and I use it when our heads ache or we are feverish. The same should help you.”

She took his block of a fist between her slender fingers and raised him. “A drink and a sleep. That is what you need, Hugh.”

I am going soft,
Hugh thought, as he allowed her to lead him away. And what did she mean, calling him her knight?

He did not care. Sage tisane and some strange alchemist powder, however filthy, had never seemed more appealing.

Within the castle he drank what she prepared for him, swallowed what she told him to take. After that, she suggested he lie on her bed and close his eyes.

Had his wits been less mazed he would have joked about sprawling on her pallet, but somehow the words would not come and he was already too comfortable. A warm languor was sweeping through him and he buried his head under the pillow, hearing her pad about the room. She was singing softly to herself, in words he could not understand, but her voice was sweet and true. Imagining Joanna singing to a babe in a crib, Hugh relaxed and fell asleep.

He woke to find a blanket over him and his father in the room, sitting at a table while Joanna pounded something with a mortar and pestle.

“I can wash bandages and make salves and make more of the white powder,” she was saying.

“That is a wonder, that powder,” his father said, more animated than Hugh had known him, except when Yves was speaking of a new food. “Now, do you need any help? That maid under the blanket: will she be of any use?”

“Of course, SirYves,” Joanna answered, as Hugh had to bite on the pillow to stop him laughing. “Once her sick day is over.”

“Very good!” There was the scrape of a stool as Yves clambered to his feet. “I shall leave you now and see you at dinner.”

“My lord.”

After she had bowed him out, Joanna came to the bedside. “I told your father you were a lass sickened with her monthly course. I knew he would let you bide there, then. How are you?”

“Very well.” Hugh emerged from the blanket and stretched both arms above his head; he did feel very well indeed and he wondered how he might conjure Joanna onto the bed with him. He wanted to ask how long he had slept, for how long his father had been chatting so easily with her, but began with an uncontroversial question. “How did you guess I was awake?”

“I have sharper ears than Sir Yves.” She stopped grinding and pointed her mortar at him. “You should leave now, my knight, or find us a chaperone. Tongues will wag, and you cannot rip them all out.”

“Nor would I!” Hugh answered, stung by the image. Did she truly think so little of him?

She laughed, a merry, generous sound that made him want to kiss her.

“Ah, you are so easy to tease, my knight.”

Hugh had flung off the blanket and was rolling off the low pallet, the better to catch her in his arms and claim, he hoped, a forfeit kiss. Now her use of that title twice in as many moments was a disconcerting reminder of his less than knightly conduct.

I keep her because of David.
Hugh shrugged off his guilt again and made a play of folding the blanket. Anything so Joanna would not see him looking thoughtful, soft as a cleric.

“You are safe here. My father would never harm a guest.”

“You say Sir Yves adores gold, expects results, yet will never harm me? That is a strange mixture, is it not? Were I to put such essences into a flask, I think they would explode.”

Joanna resumed grinding with the mortar. The scraping seemed to scratch along the insides of his ears. He spotted the wolfhound slinking out of the door and was tempted to do the same.

“Why do you call me ‘my knight’?” Anything to stop that scratching.

“You are mine, are you not?” She pointed the mortar again. “You must be, since you have taken me from the bishop’s household and bed. And did you not wear my token?”

I have it still. That, and the golden tassel….

Hugh coiled the blanket into a messy ball, his insides coiling, too. The idea of Joanna with that loathsome slug Thomas made his eyes burn and teeth ache. “I suppose you expect me to quest for you?”

She stopped her work. A scent of fire and wax and cinnabar swirled in the air between them, like a demon’s kiss. Hugh shook himself to rid his head of the fanciful image. “We have no time for games of courtly love,” he said. “Tomorrow, you should be on your way back to the bishop’s bed.”

“The messenger will take longer than that.” She held out the mortar and pestle. “If you truly wish to quest for me, as you put it, then you can help. I want this ground down to a fine powder, please.”

Hugh stared at the tools, affronted at the very notion. “I am a knight in arms—”

“Then you will be strong enough to do it quickly.” She tilted her head to one side, her eyes bright and knowing.

“How fine?” Hugh rapped back, almost snatching the mortar from her.

“As fine as good salt,” Joanna replied, turning back to her worktable. “Then we have some bandages to wash, you and I. I promised your father I would clean them well, and I like to keep my vows.”