Awaken My Fire (38 page)

"Yes?"

Her blue eyes filled with the fear of it. "There is a secret Papillion knew, a terrible secret, a potion or a spell, I do not know. But Rodez wanted it, for this secret had the awesome power to separate one's soul from God."

Vincent's brows furrowed as he exclaimed, "That is such nonsense!"

"Is it?" She shook her head, a profound sadness in her voice, for she understood so well. "I think not. For even if it were a thing that exists only in the mind, it is still too awful to contemplate. Do you not see what it means? Rodez saw himself as warring with God—with God!—for Angelique's heart. To live against God is to live without Him, a fate so terrible that the only way priests relate it to simple minds is through these endless descriptions of the terrors and tortures of hell." Her voice was filled with emotion as she said, "Papillion chose death before he gave the secret to him, and as Rodez held that dagger at his throat, Papillion set it to flames."

Vincent stared at her for a long moment, still hearing the emotion in her voice. Whatever the story meant to her, it explained much. The ruthlessness of this beast in Burgundy, he saw, knew no limits. He would have to choose the battleground carefully; there could be no mistakes.

"I know what you are thinking," she said with anguish. "You are wrong! Wrong! You see an enemy and you think of a battle—its victory determined by strength and skill and courage.''

Vincent studied the blue eyes as they searched the darkness, the fear of this monster changing the very light there and startling him with a glimpse of what she had lived through these past years.

"You cannot fight him! For in his battles the victor is never in question. Now, now you are doomed as well. Doomed—"

Emotions swelled through her again, for she suddenly understood what his life would cost her. The tragedy of the future spun dizzily through her mind, and, desperate to escape, she tore herself from his grasp, cursing the first day her eyes came to behold him and every day since as she ran from the dark walls of the stables into a still darker night.

The assassin never used his Christian name, going by John of Lyons. The grand Duke never asked. The roan-colored stallion tossed back his head to loosen the lead before returning to the grass.

The giant of a man smiled. Fastest horse in Flanders, a personal gift of the duke. In case he had to leave in a hurry.

With the Duke of Suffolk's head.

Though that was not usually his way. As he had had to explain to the Duke of Burgundy, not wanting to think of what the man might want with a head. Still, for that much gold, he would get it if he could, but he'd be damned if he'd risk his neck in the bargain. "Ye might just have to be satisfied with a nice, clean death, plain and simple."

"My satisfaction is guaranteed," the duke had replied.

The man's dark eyes swept upward to the misty gray sky. The morning sun shone just beyond. The mist would be gone in an hour, offering him a sweeping view of the castle, all the comings and goings, and like he'd done all day yesterday and the day before and the day before that, he'd stare at the view until darkness, waiting. He was ever patient. 'Twas only a matter of time before the almighty Duke of Suffolk rode out for a hunt, a bit of jousting or to put his famous war-horse through the paces.

The man withdrew a sharp dagger from a leather bag that held steel-plated arrows, a halbert and his illustrious sword, and with knife in hand, he began whittling away on a stick.

It was only a matter of time...

"Milord!"

Wilhelm nudged Bogo and cleared his throat, nodding toward Vincent. Bogo looked up to see why he had lost Vincent's attention. All gazes followed the duke's over the battlements, where a groom held the reins of a magnificent mare. Roshelle took the reins in her hand before lifting them over the mare's head, and without the groom's hand, she agilely leaped onto a bare back.

Shrouded in the morning mist and atop the fine creature, Roshelle appeared as the sad and doomed princess of many a knightly tale. A cloak of midnight blue covered her head and spread behind her. The mare tossed her head, fighting for the bit. The girl ran the horse in five quick circles before she leaned forward, soothed the animal's tousled mane, and whispered into her ear. A slippered foot kicked the mare's side, and horse and rider leaped into a gallop.

A strange vision filled Vincent's mind as he watched, like a memory misplaced in time and sent to counter the force and fear of the vision of the white tower: he saw Roshelle riding up to him, stopping as his hands reached around her small waist to lift her into the air from the saddle. To the music of laughter mixed with joyful tears, he spun her around and around in the air before lowering her to the ground for his kiss. A kiss without end…

He drew a sudden sharp breath, the force of his desire momentarily stunning him. He shook his head to rid his mind of it and closed his eyes, but it seized him physically. She had been away from the castle all this past week, staying at a poor cotter's hut to tend a young boy who had caught his foot in one of Edward's abandoned and forgotten fox traps. Vincent had been told that Papillion had taught Roshelle everything he knew about healing and the medicinal arts, while keeping her mercifully ignorant of anything connected to the occult. Apparently, this skill had saved the boy his leg. Yet her absence had shown Vincent exactly how far they had traveled.

"Bogo?"

The small man paused before answering, aware of a sudden tension, that Vincent would say something of import. "Aye?"

"I need you to take a message back to England and personally address my king."

He exchanged confused glances with Wilhelm. They had just sent Henry a message regarding the escalating tensions and suspicions surrounding the Duke of Burgundy. "What is so important that it cannot be said on a parchment, milord?"

"I need you to beg his Majesty's permission, to plead my case."

With caution and dawning comprehension, Bogo asked: "A case involving the young countess?"

"Aye..."

For he would marry her now.

It would be a problem for Henry. Love and marriage were a rare combination in his exalted class; Henry would never find that compelling. On the other hand, the marriage of lands, French to English, would please Henry greatly; he would see it as a tremendous boost in his quest for the French crown. Yet such a prize as Roshelle would not come for nothing: even if the Duke of Burgundy could be made to agree, he would no doubt want concessions Henry could not, would not make. Unless Vincent made the appeal to Henry as his friend rather than as one of his vassals.

Then Roshelle would have to be told.

He could not guess her response. All the violence and fury had left the night he'd met her fear and grasped the nature of these past hard years of her life. Years in which she had lived with the illusion her love would kill the man she gave it to, an illusion he had shattered. Or had he? Did she know the curse never had been, never was? Or, dear God, did she still have doubts?

Wilhelm stared at him in solemn amazement, but Bogo did not hesitate long. "I shall begin the preparations at once." With a short bow, he withdrew.

Roshelle and mare disappeared into the mist atop the hill and Vincent turned to meet the solemnity of his friends' gazes. "Richard," he said to his squire. "Saddle my horse."

"Aye, milord."

"Oh, no," Wilhelm said, shaking his head to send his red mane falling over his shoulders. "Not without guards, you don't. Owens, saddle me up, too. That lone knight stalking the place still has not been caught—"

"Stay where you stand, Owens." Vincent contradicted Wilhelm's order. "You can believe my intentions call for no company. Besides, that knight has not been caught because he is no doubt many days gone from the place, an innocent traveler—"

"Huh! Innocent? Then why did the bastard hide tail and run? As innocent as the whores of Babylon. And your intentions will no doubt lay the girl's backside to the ground with her eyes closed and yours on only one thing. So I will go with you just the same—"

Vincent lost his patience with his friend's last words. "And I say you won't."

The black stallion crested the top of the hill. Vincent drew hard on the reins to stop, turning the stallion around to absorb the view. The morning sun burned through the thin layers of fog, and the whole of the Reales Valley emerged below. The five towers of the castle jutted up from the gold-and-brown tents of the army surrounding it. Nearby, nestled in the hollow of the tree-lined valley, were the thatched roofs of the township; the two muddied roads of the town formed a perfect cross from this spot above. Behind him, the river raced toward its mother water, the ocean. In the far distance, the thatched roofs of the village cottages appeared scattered about the patchwork of the plowed fields. It was an arresting view, for only from above could one see how many fields that had once been left to weeds and encroached by the forest were now newly cleared and planted.

Did you look back from atop the hillside, Roshelle?

He turned his stallion to the east and held him still as he searched for her path. He saw nothing but the mist-shrouded forest of beech. He waited for some sign or movement to give her away. Nothing. She had just disappeared.

After over an hour of tramping through the thick, carpeted forest, Vincent finally gave up his search and was turning back toward the castle when, a few dozen paces away, the sudden shrill cry of a bird overhead drew his gaze to the heavens. He spotted the bird through the tree-tops at once. Greyman. The falcon circled not far away. He turned his stallion toward the place.

Within minutes, he found her.

Time stretched and lingered, marked only by the subtle play of illumination and shadow over the place where she knelt in prayer. A stream of golden morning light poured through the towering beech trees to fall on the carpet of bright violet bluebells all around her, the flowers blooming in urgent brilliance before the leafy canopy above them grew too thick. The air filled with their sweet fragrance. A dragonfly danced a circle around her. A group of wood warblers chirped from a nearby tree, the only sound violating the silence.

He could not move; for a long time he could not move. He had always been a man of action and deed, war-hardened and calloused to the continual march of human folly around him, and much of that folly derived from the pretensions of the religious. He had little patience for it and, with few exceptions, he viewed the plain idiocy of most of the religious teachings and practices of his time with a bemused, if not cynical, eye. Those few times he encountered the truly reverent were inevitably through the written word: especially those of the Greek philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, one heretical monk of the Moslem faith and two of the Hebrew faith, but that was all. Until now.

He quietly slipped from his horse, but his gaze never left her, as if he, too, were drawn into the profound sanctity of the moment. A mysterious air surrounded her, indeed, seemed to emanate from her as she knelt there on the forest floor in a marvel of perfect stillness. That he had happened upon a secret moment was obvious; that it was sacrosanct, even more so. He wanted badly to honor it, to turn away and leave her moment inviolate. Yet another, stronger force compelled him to stay, a thing far greater than simple curiosity.

He did not know how long he watched her, but gradually the light cascading from above shifted, changed, and finally disappeared altogether. She knelt in a shadow. As if this were a cue, she seemed to suddenly wake and take stock of her surroundings before she fell back on her heels and covered her face with her hands.

The sound of her tears came to him in a whisper.

He drew a sharp breath, released in the sound of her name. "Roshelle."

She came to her feet with a gasp, turning to see him there in the same motion. Her blue eyes widened, staring as if questioning the very reality of his presence. The strange aura around her lingered still; she looked otherworldly somehow, angelic and, dear Lord, so innocent. Her vulnerability was a thing felt, and powerfully. The blue pools were moist with tears, large, and haunted with that strange sadness. The thought of lowering his lips to taste those tears brought another heady rush of desire through him, and he went weak with it.

"What has made you cry?"

The question was whisper-soft. She shook her head, still unable to speak. The sadness gathered in her throat, waiting, threatening with the first spoken word. She did not want him to see her like this. The mystical revelation still trembled through her, the joy of it retreating, dissipating: Sadness and longing filled the empty space, leaving her defenseless, like dandelions beneath the breath of wind.

Delicate blossoms crunched beneath his boots as he came to where she stood, the soft sound loud in the stillness of the forest trees. She met the intensity of his stare as he stepped in front of her.