At Her Service (Swords of Passion) (5 page)

“Aye!”

“A fairytale. A filthy tale. You want only me, but you will bed me for silver.”

“I. Have. No.
Choice!”

The two of them paused, toe to toe.

In a whisper, she ventured for another truth which she feared might strike her heart more violently than the last she’d heard. “Why is that?”

He hesitated, but his brooding eyes gave him away. “I owe King John my compliance in this matter. He is devoted to keeping Alphonse and his heirs in power in these upper marches. The Scots do harry John and his allies all along the border, and Alphonse is wealthy enough with sufficient retainers to fight the savages back into their lands. John knows of your intelligence and the fealty Alphonse’s men show you.”

“Nay!” she scoffed. “No fealty will be left if they learn I have been tupped by the legendary Knight Divine and thus soiled my husband’s honour as well as mine!”

“No one will know.”

“Do not be blind. My maid knows. Cleve knows.” She pointed towards the door. “Your…your little man knows!”

“Katani has no tongue and cannot tell anyone anything. Your maid, however, I leave you to secure. Both she and Cleve can be bought.”

“Cleve? Bought? You think he may not be welded to my husband’s cause?”

“Best not to trust someone like Cleve beyond where you may see him. But in this case, Alphonse’s cause can benefit Cleve even after the old man is dead.”

“How?” she taunted him. “I see no one with the power.”

“You do not credit me with much beyond raw brutality,” Simon mourned.

“You mean to say you can pay Cleve? Ha! How is that? You have some of your new-found gain on your person now, do you?”

“Alphonse has given Cleve orders that I am to run the estate. My word is law.”

Her heart pounded at the betrayal of her husband to her power. She stepped back. “Is that so? I am superceded in my own house? By a lover? By my husband’s cuckold while he lies on his death bed?”

“Nay. You are superior here. But I am second.”

“Fine and well then.” This was small recompense, but she would use it. “Leave me.”

“Elise, I warn you—”

“Aye, warn me well, my Knight Divine. I see what is at stake here. At first, I thought it was only my virtue. Only my body given to you for him. But now I see, it is my country, my king, my kinsmen who can die if I do not lie abed with you and make a child. Interesting that the reasons given to me to betroth me to my husband are the same as those that now demand I spread my legs for you.” A sob rose in her throat, and she caught back its sorrow with a hand to her lips. “Leave me. We will resume our sport when I am ready. When I am willing. When I can do this with full mind to the cause.”

She watched him back away towards her husband’s room. There Simon picked up his tunics, his braies and his slippers. He yanked them on and strode towards the back stairs which led down to the smaller room beneath hers where he was lodged. He turned, fury lining his brow.

“I take my leave of you for my own quarters below where you may join me at your leisure. But heed me, do not let your anger simmer long, my lovely. The world is waiting for your baby. And we must be about making him, before your husband dies, and no one who lives in these climes can still claim their country is
England
.”

Chapter Four

Snowflakes obliterated her view, but Elise trudged onward, a hand to her forehead. Ulred’s hut had never seemed so far from the castle walls as it did on this day when she needed to see her old friend—and do it quickly.

The snow of this storm was not yet deep, but it laid a slick layer on the ice that caused Elise to slip and almost fall more than once. The wind cut through her cloak, and she tried to brace against it to no avail. She stopped, one arm out to steady herself and pant against a tree.

Something crackled in the forest. A tree limb falling under the weight of ice? She jerked her head around and surveyed the terrain but saw nothing. She shivered in fear. A family of wild boars had moved into these woods last autumn and attacked anything that moved. Before Christmastide, the male had chased Ulred and cornered her, slicing one of her ankles with his long sharp tusks. But Elise saw nothing that resembled the huge, hairy beasts. Still, a flapping of wings made her jump, and she looked up at a fat crow, high above her in a tall pine.

“Best you stay there in this storm,” she murmured to him. Clutching her hood deeply about her face, she bent to the wind once more and headed for the thatched home of Atherton’s only outcast.

Elise scurried towards the woman’s hut near the creek where Ulred had lived since she’d been fourteen and Alphonse had banished her for predicting his second wife’s death. No one in the castle’s walls wanted Ulred’s eyes upon them, claiming Ulred alone had put evil spells on all Atherton’s countesses. But Elise felt no harm from the woman who, if she had a more pleasant demeanour and regular meals, might even have been lovely. Elise had often consulted her in the past twelve years, asking for potions to help make her fertile or aids to make her desire her husband. While none of those had ever worked, Elise knew Ulred had other medicinals that had cured coughs and headaches and other maladies of her, her husband and their serfs.

“Why won’t your herbs help me bear a child, Ulred?” Elise had asked often, but Ulred had given her a weary look and dismissed her with some babble. “I cannot make a child blossom where no seed lives. The same I cannot grant your wish that your husband were a lustier man.”

Thus, Elise learned and accepted that there were limits to everything, even Ulred’s fame and talents.
Still, I come today, hoping for more.

Scurrying to Ulred’s door, Elise called through the hanging of animal skins sewn together by Ulred’s artful fingers. “Ulred, ‘tis Lady Dumond! Are you there?”

“Aye, where else would I be in this storm?” she called to Elise as she flung the heavy blanket hide aside and grinned at her with yellow teeth. “I expected you, I have. Get in here.”

Elise ducked to let herself inside the place where Ulred had lined the walls with more hides from the wild beasts of the woods. The room was surprisingly warm as she went towards Ulred’s fire in the centre of the earth-packed floor. There, the woman had hung a pot, boiling with a stew. “What do you cook, Ulred? It smells wonderful.”

“My dinner and your potion.”

Elise attempted to demur, one hand up. “Mine? Nay. I have no idea what you brew there, woman.”

Ulred approached and leaned close, her breath sweet with mint despite all her dark teeth. She inhaled Elise’s essence and closed her eyes. “You’ve been mating.”

Elise’s eyes flew wide. She had bathed, washing her nether lips until she had pleasured herself with the rub of the cloth against her still swollen and tender cunny. “How can you tell?”
If Ulred could, might not others? Men. Cleve. Her servants.

“I can smell it on your breath. Your flux was more than a fortnight ago, and your skin breathes with a fecund musk. Your eyes glow with it. Your man has appeared at last, has he not?”

There was no reason to deny it. ‘Your man’ had long been Ulred’s term for a tall, dark warrior whom she had predicted more than five years ago would be Elise’s saviour—and her tormentor.

Elise inhaled. “Aye. May I sit?”

Ulred squeezed her dark eyes in glee and clapped her hands. “I knew he was about. I could feel him.” She leaned close and sucked in a huge draught of air. “He smells like sandalwood and anise. Am I right?”

Elise nodded. “That you are.”

The woman dipped in close once more and shut her eyes, a look of bliss on her craggy face. “He mates with hearty appetite, too. How is your pretty cunny now that his giant member has stretched you?”

Elise could not restrain herself from putting a hand over her mound as it quaked for Simon. “I want him inside all the time.”

“As you should. As I told you, you would. He is a strong goat, no?”

“Aye, a satyr.”

“Whom you love.”

Elise shot up. “Nay. I do not. Cannot.”

The woman waved a gnarled hand. “Matters not. He is the man for you, my lady. He makes you a ripe woman, as he should have done long ago when you were both young and eager for a marriage.”

“That was not possible then.”

“Aye,” Ulred muttered. “The foolishness of men to order how we marry, when how we love should be honoured.”

Elise sighed. “I have come because I want you to read my palm again. Now that he is here and we are…”

“One.”

“One,” Elise agreed, pronouncing the word aloud with a glee previously foreign to her. “Now that we are one, I need to know how soon I will conceive, how long I must lie abed with him—”

“Why?” Ulred peered at her with narrowed, nasty eyes. “Why spoil your happiness with knowledge of its end?”

“I must know, Ulred!”

“Why? Are you so privileged that you must know all, when most women and men live only by instinct and hope?”

“I have neither good instincts nor hope, Ulred.”

“Balls.”

“If I had good instinct, would I not have found a way to avoid this situation in the first place? God knows, it brings me more trouble than I have ever known!”

“And more joy.”

Elise stared at her.

“Admit it, my girl,” Ulred harrumphed. “You love the man, the art, the joys he teaches you. You can no more withdraw from him or bar him from your bed than I can live here without my herbs growing round me.” Ulred’s gaze grew black and dangerous as she approached Elise again. “Your fate is sealed, my lovely countess. In your man’s arms, he will teach you delights you have never imagined—and give you your heart’s desire.”

Elise caught her breath, seized Ulred’s hand to put it on her stomach. “Tell me, can you feel a child there now? Already?”

Ulred threw her head back to laugh. “What I feel here is a cunt well tended, fully ploughed, soft and begging. What I feel here is a womb well plundered. What I feel here is that you came not to learn how you can cut yourself from your man who pleasures you with the feast of his hands and his eyes and his shaft. Nay. You came here to learn how to keep him.”

Elise drew back, but there was no running from the hag’s truth. “Aye. I crave him. As much of him as I put inside me. As often as I can take him. I want him. I need him. Tell me how to keep him happy.”

“Do as any instinct tells you. He is a bold man in bed—and he wants to give you every drop of seed he has. Let him and take more.”

“But…how?”

“Take him in your arms. Into your wet channel. Put his shaft in your mouth, as well. His tool is an iron rod, but you will delight in how his heart softens when you lick and taste him on your tongue.”

Elise quivered with the pulsing of her cunny at the very idea. “This kind of joy is…good?”

Ulred chuckled. “Good? My lady, favour him with your desire. Do these things as they inspire you. You will delight him, and he will teach you the pleasures of the kingdoms of the earth. Are you not worthy of his glory?”

“Oh, Ulred, I am!” The truth rippled up out of her like a geyser. “I
deserve
him. The pleasure he gives. The joy of his manly form. I deserve to have him for what little time I might. I have been good and kind and wise to all. Why may I not have some joy from life?”

Ulred smiled broadly and moved to pat Elise on the shoulder. “Come, my countess, have this stew. I made it only for you because you need wild meat to build your strength. Your man needs to have you as a willing and wicked partner.” She lifted a rough-hewn pottery cup and ladled some of her concoction into it. “Drink all of this, my pretty one.”

With a new-found appetite, Elise sat and began to sip the steaming broth. “What have you in here, Ulred?”

“Roots. Dried rosemary and thyme. And the head of another boar.”

“You shot another?” Elise asked between swallows, eyeing Ulred’s bow propped against the far wall.

“Fiends. They breed almost as well you will with your man.”

Elise paused and whispered, “Will I?”

Ulred nodded solemnly. “I have seen it for lo, these many years.”

“Once?” Elise asked, using the word Simon had dismissed that first night when he had first taken her and shown her heaven.

Ulred tipped her head to one side in consideration. “How much can you bear to know?”

Elise licked her lip. “You mean how brave am I?

“Aye, this is what I ask.”

“You will have many children, my pretty countess. But my vision is clouded by who will sire them on you.”

Elise pressed her thighs together. Her greedy cunny pounded at the idea of Simon fathering many babes inside her. But she balked at the idea that another might plough her field, too. Would he be friend or foe? “I need an herb to help me get a babe by Simon.”

Ulred examined Elise as if she wore no clothes, and she snorted. “Simon needs no help from me.”

“What if I cannot carry the child to birth? What if I bleed and lose the babe?”

“You will not.”

“You are certain?”

“There is a tragedy to come in your castle’s walls, my countess. That tragedy is not the death of any babe.”

Elise grabbed Ulred’s hand. “What then? Tell me.”

“The night creeps forth when you will learn of a stranger in your bedroom. Make haste to discover who he is and where he gains his power.”

Elise shook her head. “I have no way to understand you, Ulred. Your puzzle confuses me.”

“It will not confuse you when you see it, my countess. But be bold when you do. Root it out. Cast out the man who did it, lest you lose your life, your baby’s and your man’s.”

* * * *

Elise left minutes later, her cloak pulled low against the storm that now raged more briskly. Hurrying over the ice-packed land, she headed for the castle gate where her maid waited to open it and fool the guard to readmit her. That could not come soon enough for Elise who slipped and slid with every step over the rocks and stones of the barren earth.

A loud crackle in the ice had her twisting and turning to find the source. She froze. Something black and swift scurried between boulders, hiding from her. Her heart picked up a beat, and she began to run.

Snorts rent the air. She spun, a hasty move that sent her to the ground where she fell, caught herself on her hand and wrenched it.

“Oh, no, no!” she cried out in pain and scrambled up. A huge narrow-faced boar with beady eyes and long straggly hair headed straight for her.

To her left, another dark figure came around a large tree trunk, a bow and arrow in his hands, fully poised to take down the creature. “Run in patterns, Elise! Run in circles, for Christ sake!” He focused on the hairy brute careening towards her petrified body.

She did as he bid.

“Elise!” He shot the arrow, pierced the animal in the front leg and made him squeal in protest.

She picked up her skirts to better escape the pig and the slashing of her ankles by his keen-edged tusks. But the trees were dense, and she found herself running this way and that, no circle possible. Crazed, she could not watch what Simon did, but she could hear the animal squeal louder once more.

“Climb that tree!” Simon yelled at her.

She glanced up at a pine with a low-lying branch, large enough to support her. Or so she hoped.

“Oh, please.” She grabbed the branch and hauled herself up. Her feet dangled down and she yelped as the boar rammed tusks-first into the tree, jarring her and making her cry out in fright.

“Pick up your feet,” Simon yelled at her as he ran towards her. “Up, up!”

“Simon! What are you—”

He ran forward, a short sword, long as his forearm, in one hand. With a giant leap towards her, he jumped up onto the limb with her. “Hang on, my pet,” he commanded and bent double to the boar. With one sweep of his arm over his head, he came down with his sword and sank it to the hilt at the nape of the animal’s head.

The pig dropped like a stone.

Elise clutched her throat, gaping as she stared at the animal and his slayer, who only for a moment sat still beside her.

Then he jumped down to survey his kill.

She swallowed hard. “Where did you come from? How did you know I…?”