Behold the Dawn (20 page)

“Thank you.” She glanced to where Annan still stood in the same soiled tunic he had worn since the prison camp. A ribbon of blood marked a tear in the right sleeve, probably from the battle yesterday. His sword was girded at his side, and his right hand rode the hilt.

He had promised she would be safe with these people. She had nothing to fear with them.

Except losing him…

With a sigh, she reached to rub the stiffness in her shoulder. It was a strange thing to have no one in the world save a gruff, battered tourneyer… A tourneyer who had done everything in his power to protect her and had been more than willing to give his life for her.

He was a far cry from the man she had thought him. And now, just as she was discovering that, he was leaving, perhaps to be mangled on enemy swords and never to see her again. Suddenly, she wished she had never asked him to return for the Baptist. God would save the monk if he were innocent. And, if he were not, as Annan claimed, then wasn’t it much better that Annan stay with her, his broad shoulders a buffer between her and the winds of a cruel world?

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen my lad Marek out this way?” Annan asked Stephen.

“That fidgety runt? Nay, I thought you’d have let him go years past—indentured or not.”

“He comes in handy on occasion.”

“But now he’s missing?”

“We were separated yesterday. He was supposed to meet me here.”

Stephen shook his head. “Sympathies, but he has yet to arrive. Likely he got it in the back, eh?”

Annan’s jaw tightened: again the swirl of emotions in his eyes. Mairead caught another glimpse of the hard painful knot buried somewhere inside, and her chest ached.

To wake each morning, as he did, with no hope of better things to come, no knowledge of acceptance by a higher love, would leave even a better man in a mire of darkness. She longed to lay her hands on those knots that bound him so tightly and to smooth them into nothingness. She had the inexplicably ridiculous desire to hold this battered warrior in her arms, as she would a child, and sing away his pain.

But Marcus Annan would not be held, and his was not a pain that could be sung away.

She let her arms fall to her sides, feeling suddenly as if she had no more strength left in her at all.

The door banged open again, and a silver-headed woman marched into the room. Quick gray eyes took in the two visitors and brightened when they landed on Mairead. She bowed to the room at large and turned back to Annan. “Master Annan—delighted to see you, of course. I rather expected you to be dead by now.”

He smiled, but no flash of good humor lit his eyes. “You and I both, Lady Eloise.” He turned to Mairead and held out a hand. “May I present the Lady Mairead.”

“Indeed you may.” The flush of Lady Eloise’s cheeks glowed even beneath the lead base she had obviously used to lighten her complexion. “And I hope you continue presenting her for a long bit yet.” She looked at Mairead. “You’ll forgive me, my dear, but this heathen land hardly produces feminine companionship in great droves.”

“Lord Stephen has granted that she remain with you while I pursue a personal matter,” Annan said.

Eloise fluttered a hand in his direction. “Get on with you, laddie, and good riddance. You can leave her to me as long as you like.” She returned her attention to Mairead. “How long a journey has it been?”

Mairead bowed slightly. “Since Tyre, madam.”

“Tyre! And here I stand gossiping, with you exhausted on your feet. Come with me, and let these knaves bore themselves with tales of their inept war.” She cast a glance at Annan’s unshaven face and torn and bloody tunic. “Though if Lord Stephen has any civility, he’ll give Master Annan into a servant’s hands ere long as well.”

With Mairead’s elbow clamped between two ring-adorned hands, Eloise shepherded her to the door.

Mairead wasn’t quite out of the room when Lord Stephen spoke. “An admirable woman. You surprise me again, Annan. I’d no thought of your taking a wife.”

She stopped. Would he tell Stephen the truth? He had not told Marek.

By unspoken agreement, they had yet to disclose their marriage. Lord William had placed her under Annan’s name to protect her from
her
enemies—certainly not to draw skeptical glances from those who knew him.

And yet…

His gaze shifted past Lord Stephen’s face to meet hers, and for that moment she wondered what it would be like were they to drop the charade and tell the world she was his to do with as he liked.

Her lower lip crept between her teeth.
And he liked only to protect and honor me.

“No,” he said. His gaze pulled from hers, and the connection snapped and shattered, falling to the floor between them like so much broken glass. “I am entrusted to grant her safe passage to Orleans. She is the wife of William of Keaton.”

Mairead turned away, the muscles in her back clutching with renewed intensity.

Lady Eloise waited outside the doorway, her hands folded into the wide sleeves of her
kirtle
. “Hmph. I thought you too nice a maid to be lying in Marcus Annan’s arms. Come, dear heart, no frowns while you’re under my roof. By the saints, life will be beautiful again come the time we’ve finished our fun and I must send you back to your Lord William.”

Mairead followed in Lady Eloise’s wake, trying to absorb the Englishwoman’s chatter. But somehow, as she was ushered through the hallways and up the twisting stairs to a bedchamber that was huge and cold in all its English splendor, she heard not a word—only the dull beating of her heart beneath her cloak.

The late meal was served in the afternoon’s fourth hour. Annan, too restless to sleep, had spent the day pacing the upper ramparts, watching for a rider on a bay palfrey. With every passing hour that brought no sign of Marek, the frown lines in his brow deepened.

Now, as he stood in the noise of the Great Hall, behind the seat Stephen had indicated, he gritted his teeth in frustration. It was Marek he should be searching for. Not Gethin.

But Marek would have to wait. Mairead—and now Gethin—took precedence. Annan gritted harder, his back teeth stabbing pain down his jaw. If that lad was out dawdling somewhere, Annan would yank every hair from his loitering head.

From where he stood behind the seat of honor in the middle of the high table, Stephen leaned in Annan’s direction. “My wife would doubtless have done worse than call me a knave had I disturbed your rest this afternoon, but I would like the opportunity to discuss these plans of yours sometime this even.”

Annan nodded.

“An English courier rode in an hour ago.” Stephen pointed to the tables on the cavernous floor below, where some two score servants waited to seat themselves. The courier was distinguishable from the others only by the flowered blue livery of King Richard, which bore considerable evidence of a long journey. He seemed to be having trouble communicating with his Syrian neighbors and was gesturing with his hands to explain some point of confusion. To Annan, it looked as though he were recounting the storied proficiency of Saladin’s mounted archers.

“He’s brought some rather interesting news from the Crusade,” Stephen said.

“So I see.”

The double doors at the room’s far end ground open, pulled by two lads, and the crowd below quieted.

Stephen straightened away from Annan. “Ah, the ladies. At last.”

Annan followed his gaze to where Lady Eloise, garbed in scarlet, her
wimple
embroidered in gold, promenaded between the lower tables. Her keen eyes sparkled like a child’s.

Mairead walked behind her.

In silence, Annan watched. The reason for Eloise’s glee was evident: Mairead had been transformed. Blue the color of midnight illuminated her fair skin better than the sun’s rays could ever do. With her skirt trailing her like the last whispers of night, she walked like a queen.

His eyes drifted to her dark hair. No longer the long, unruly veil that had blown in the hot winds, it was now a crown of braids piled on the back of her head. An absurd resentment for Lady Eloise seized in his chest.

Mairead’s eyes found his, and for a moment the queen disappeared and she was again the frightened girl who had ridden through the long nights with her head against his shoulder. Her lip found its place between her teeth, and he knew she was trying to read his expression, trying to understand the flash of anger that had burned there for a moment.

He knew she wanted a smile, the encouragement of a friend among strangers. But he could not. If he said anything to her now, it would surely surface in the growl that had caused her to distance herself from him so many times.

He turned to Lady Eloise as she mounted the steps to the high table. At the trumpet flourish, played by the lips of a servant lad no higher than Annan’s hip, she took the seat at Annan’s right, placing herself between him and Lord Stephen. Mairead sat at Stephen’s other side.

After a visiting monk had invoked the blessing and as the servers began bearing in the platters of capon and wood pigeon that would be their first course, Eloise leaned over to speak to him. “You may know, Master Annan, that my opinion of you has never been very high. But this is twice now you’ve done me good service. Lady Mairead is delightful. I should have died for want of companionship before winter had you not brought her when you did.”

“How fortunate.”

“Indeed. And now I should like to offer you a proposal.” She tipped back for a moment, until the server had finished heaping their
trenchers
with the fragrant meat. “I should like,” she said, “to relieve you of your responsibility to this girl.”

Annan reached for his wooden drinking bowl, which another servant had filled with a mulled wine.

“She has told me enough of her story for me to know she will be safest from her enemies if she is delivered to this St. Catherine’s with all haste.”

“Indeed.”

“And since you can hardly deliver her anywhere with any haste while you are pursuing your business back in the Holy Land, I should like to offer our services in seeing her safely into Christian hands. Stephen already plans a journey to Constantinople within a few days.”

“And what of my promise to Lord William of Keaton?”

“Explain it to him. I’m sure he’ll agree it is the best thing for her. I heard of him often when we were yet in England, and I know him to be as sensible a man as can be made.”

Annan stared at the cloves drowning in his wine. “And what does the Lady Mairead say of this?”

“She seemed content to leave the matter in your hands, but undoubtedly she wants to be returned to her husband as soon as possible.”

His lip twitched. Returned to which husband? The one that was already in the grave—or the one that was walking dead? “Yes, of course.”

Eloise flipped her long sleeves off the table and dipped her fingers into her trencher’s mound of oily meat. For a moment, Annan didn’t stir. He smiled a sardonic little smile that meant nothing to anyone but himself and tossed back the contents of his bowl. He set it back on the table and turned his head just enough to see Mairead, two seats down. Her eyes, larger in her face now that her hair was caught back, darted away from Lord Stephen. Her lip crept between her teeth, and Annan saw the tiny bead of blood where she had punctured the skin.

“Yours is a strange kind of honor,” Lord Stephen said from his fur-piled seat behind Annan. The smile in his voice dimmed what might otherwise have been an affront.

Annan, arms crossed against his chest, stared into the flames that snarled within the hearth of the now empty Great Hall. They were flames that mirrored those within himself. Telling Stephen his reasons for returning for Gethin hardly made them sound any more satisfactory. “The Baptist was once a friend. I can’t leave him to his fate, even if he is guilty of falling into his own trap. Besides, where I find Gethin, I may also find Marek.”

Stephen’s chair creaked as he pushed himself to his feet and walked up to stand beside Annan. “Well then, I wish you Godspeed, and I don’t doubt that you’ll need it. Any idea where you’ll begin this search of yours?”

“In Acre, I suppose, or wherever the Crusaders are camped.”

“May I suggest Arsuf?”

Annan glanced at him.

“That courier I was telling you about—he’s brought word of a great battle near there, in the plains between Acre and Jerusalem.”

“Did he say who won?”

“The Christians, led brilliantly by King Richard. Though the courier may perhaps have been a bit prejudiced.”

“The king’s left his sickbed then.” He rubbed absently at his sore shoulder.

“Yes. And the French king has returned home. His own illness and a number of petty quarrels with Richard overwhelmed his spirit of piety, apparently. He did leave the majority of his force behind, however.”

Annan sighed, calculating the days it would take him to ride to Arsuf and back, even without delays. “I’ll leave at daybreak tomorrow.” He pressed his middle finger in the corner of his eye and held it there, trying to relieve the pull of weariness. “I’ll have to borrow a horse.”

“I’ll have to give you a horse, you mean.” Stephen’s smile grew a little crooked. “This saving one’s life business is rather profitable, isn’t it?”

“On occasion.”

Stephen chuckled and laid a hand on his arm. “Indeed. And what about Lady Mairead? My wife beleives she would be better off if we provided her an escort for the rest of her journey. Business takes me to Constantinople in a few days’ time. Eloise feels it would be wise for me to take Mairead with me.”

“So she told me.”

“You disagree?”

Annan let his hand slide from his eyes down over his mouth. He stared harder into the fire, watching the blackened logs flake beneath the heat. “I don’t know.” He met Stephen’s gaze. “You don’t think she’d be safe here until I return?”

“You insult me, Master Knight. She’s safer within these walls than she was in the hills with half a score of men-at-arms trailing her.”

“They’re trailing her still, Stephen.”

He waved a dismissive hand. “You have my pledge that she will be safe until you return or until you send word that she is to go on without you.” He lowered his hand to grasp Annan’s. “That much I owe you. Trust me.”