By Design (36 page)

She swallowed the urge to scold him for the way he spoke of Rhys. He only gave voice to the truth. If she found that truth irritating, and saddening, it was not her brother's fault.

She gazed over the fields. “I had forgotten this, too. How different it is away from big towns and cities. What it feels like to stand on a high wall and see miles of the world spread out around you, until the earth meets the sky in the distance. When I came up here the day after we arrived, it was the view that made me believe it had really happened, more than the welcome and the promise of safety. For a moment I was back at home, and a girl again.”

“You will truly be back at home someday. As soon as I can make it happen.”

“Do not rush your training for me. Guy is dead, but
another will take his place. Take the time to prepare yourself well. As I said, I am contented enough here.”

“Too contented, perhaps.”

His tone made her turn away from the awesome image of the circling world. He had on his man's face now. He wore the eyes and frown of someone much older than his years.

“Too contented? How so, Mark?”

He drew himself straight, the image of a brother forced to exercise his authority. The week here had only fed his sense of prerogatives. Everyone treated him like the head of the family.

“Too contented because your mason is with you. He should leave.”

“Moira has asked him to stay.”

“You have to end it.”

“It will end soon enough.” Too soon.

“I had hoped that once you were away from London, and that house, that you would see the futility of it. He does, if you do not. You might only have one leg back in your old life, but he can not walk alongside you any further.” His mouth thinned, as if he prepared for an unpleasant task. “I want you to stop visiting his bed.”

“Not yet. Not now.”

“Aye, now, sister. I will make it plain. I do not request this. I demand it.”

“And I defy the demand. I am fully aware of my duty to you and our family. I know what awaits. But I have been given something that I will not put aside until I must.”

“Hell, Joan, the whole castle knows that you lie with a craftsman every night.”

“I do not lie with a craftsman, although he is so skilled that I would be honored to do so. I lie with a man. The man who saved my life.”

“I am grateful to him. Do not think that I am not.

When it is in my power to do so, I will show it. I will give him land or coin or any wealth that he wants. But I will not give him
you
.”

“Nor will he ask you to. Like me, he knows that we enjoy a short reprieve. He understands you and me and the others like us very well. He does not even resent the place that we give him, because his mind and heart are not imprisoned by the world's notions of such things. When he must, he will leave. But I tell you now, brother, that whenever you speak to me of him, you had better do so with respect. Neither of us will know the likes of him again, and there will be times when you are the lord of Brecon when you will curse that you do not have men so true as Rhys beside you.”

“I did not say that he is not a good man, and true. I said that my sister can not be his lover.”

“Punish me if you choose, but unless you demand that Addis lock me away, I will live with Rhys while I can. However, before you make such a demand, remember whom the lord of this keep married.”

“That was different, and even so his own retainers think him half mad because of it.”

“Aye, it was different. I think that you are too young to appreciate how beautifully different it was.”

“I am not so young. Old enough to know the risks that you take. I fear that you will get with child. I must tell you that if you do, it will change nothing. You are mine to give—”

“I am
mine own
to give, and while I can, I give myself to him. If I birth a bastard, he will take the child, and raise him stronger and freer than I ever could. I will not deny you your right to give my hand, in any alliance that reclaiming our family honor requires. But my heart rejects such worldly chains, and wears another by my own choosing.”

“You are half mad yourself. You doom yourself to unhappiness with such notions. And you condemn me to be the agent of your misery.”

“Ah, Mark, you are so ignorant. When I break this, I will not really give up the important things. It did not begin when we made love. It will not end when we stop.” She turned back to the horizon. “Go and prepare. Learn what you must to make our old lives whole again. But until those lives or his tear us apart, I will take what I can get, and give what I have chosen to give.”

Joan had told Mark that she was contented, but in truth she was not. She and Rhys lived out their love under a hanging sword, knowing that one day it would drop and sever them forever.

It made their time bittersweet, and the nightly embrace painfully poignant. Even the pleasure was shadowed by the anticipation of loss. She could not find abandon anymore. She could not lose herself in the present now that the future surrounded her. Too often as she lay in his arms a soulful melancholy overwhelmed her.

Her whole world seemed to share the heavy anticipation. There was a mood in the household that she could not name. A palpable expectation filled the air. It was as if everyone waited for something. It reminded her of those days after the abdication, when her father and Piers and the knights always seemed to be listening for the sounds of an army.

At first she had assumed that it was concern for her that caused it. But when days passed and no riders followed from Westminster in pursuit of the tiler seen with Guy Leighton that day, the mood still persisted. She told herself that she imagined it, and that her own conflicted waiting, her own impatience to finish what had started and her
own prayers that time would stand still for her and Rhys, was the source of it. But it came from the others too. The waiting cloaked Addis, and even Moira.

Then one day it suddenly disappeared. A new mood spread in the household. A silent hum of excitement filled the air.

Mark came in the late evening to tell her that the waiting was over, and that Addis and the King and a few others planned to arrest Mortimer at Nottingham Castle, where Queen Isabella had moved her retinue.

“Isabella and Mortimer have summoned Edward to Nottingham as though he were some servant. They want him to explain rumors they have heard that he plots against them. I say that is damn bold of them. He is the King, not Mortimer. So he will go, but sooner than they expect, and he will settle with them both.”

He paced with excitement, spilling the tale. “I'm to go, too. Not into the castle, but to Nottingham. I will serve as one of Sir Addis's squires, and be nearby so he can present me to the King when it is over.”

“It sounds very risky. Just a few men, you say. They will be very vulnerable.”

“It is brilliant. It will be glorious.”

“It will be a bloodbath. They will be horribly outnumbered inside those walls. Mortimer will order his guard to cut them to pieces. With Edward dead, he will have the barons declare the Queen the official monarch, and continue as he has done.”

“You do not understand warfare.”

“You do not describe a war. You speak of a band of thieves stealing into a home.”

Joan paced around her chamber, imagining this bold scheme easily going awry, agitated by an unpleasant excitement.

“What if they fail? What happens to you then?”

“I will be with Addis's retinue. I will be safe.”

“If Addis is killed, no one in his retinue will be safe.”

“Stop being such a woman. It is Addis and Rhys who face the danger, not me.”

That stopped her pacing. Abruptly.

“Rhys? What has he to do with this?”

Mark looked too much like someone who knew that he had spoken unwisely.

“He is going with you?” Oddly enough, that idea made her calmer, not that a mason could protect Mark better than a band of knights.

“Nay. He departs for Nottingham at dawn. We will wait some days more.”

“Why does he go at all?”

The toes of his boots suddenly fascinated him. “Don't know. Something about a project for the King.”

It made no sense. Any project for the King could wait until after this action.

Mark pivoted and aimed for the door.

She intercepted him. “How much do you know of this plan?”

“What I told you.”

She glared.

“A bit more.”

“Tell me the bit more.
Now
. Why does Rhys go to Nottingham?”

He tried to look mature and superior. She was in no mood to play to his pride. She grabbed his hair the way she used to when he misbehaved as a boy.

“Ow! Damn! Jesus, I'm not a—”

“Then tell me what I ask.”

He disengaged his locks and stepped back, indignant and embarrassed. “I've already told you more than I should. If you want to learn all of it, speak to Addis. As for why Rhys is coming, I expect it is because this was his idea to start.”

He dodged her, and ran out of the chamber before she could make him explain.

She grabbed a lit candle and followed on his heels. She aimed for a chamber in the nearby south tower.

The door was not barred, but the chamber was dark. Her flame shed vague light on a mound of leather sacks heaped against the wall near the threshold.

Silence greeted her, but she knew that Rhys was there. She felt his presence, as solid and strong as the rock that he carved.

The bed where she slept in his arms was empty. She raised the light. It barely penetrated to the far wall, but it found him there. He stood with arms braced on either side of the narrow window, face turned to the moonlight and the cool breezes flowing in.

He wore only his hide work leggings. His pose made the strong muscles of his shoulders and back taut and defined.

He sensed her arrival. It showed in a subtle flexing of his body and a sudden change in the air. He turned and rested against the wall, arms crossed over his chest.

Joan gestured to the sacks. “It looks like you are leaving.”

“Aye. At dawn. I was going to tell you tonight.”

“Where are you going?”

“Away. It is time. We both knew the day would come when we had to part. Where I go when that happens does not matter.”

“It does if you journey to Nottingham. Mark told me what Edward plans to do.”

“The boy still has much to learn if he speaks so freely.”

He was not making it easy. He acted distant, as though he was hiding something. Aye, he had intended to tell her, but not all of it. He had been planning to lie.

“Why do you go to Nottingham now? The King's project can wait until this is over.”

“It can wait, but it does not need to. That is how it is with craftsmen. Knights and kings fight their battles, but we must continue earning our bread.”

“I do not think that you go only to earn your bread.”

“Perhaps you forget who I am. What I am.”

She dripped some wax onto the top of the chamber's lone chest, and pressed the candle in it to stand. “You are a man who helped depose a king. I think that tomorrow you will be a man setting out to depose a usurper. Please tell me what your role will be. I want to know what danger you will face.”

He turned back to the window. “Very little danger. The role is a small one.”

A knot of fear had formed in her chest, and his confirmation only made it thicker. She went to him and embraced him from behind, laying her head on his back. “Tell me. Please.”

He hesitated, then moved to bring her forward under his arm. He still gazed into the night. “There are passageways underground that will permit Edward to approach unseen. Trusted men will be at the inner gate and will let him pass. But once at the keep, he will be vulnerable. I will make a diversion, that is all. Something to distract the guards while Edward reaches the Queen's chambers. It should not be difficult.”

“If the King's plan fails, it will be known that you were involved.”

“Possibly.”

“Certainly. Mark said that this move was your idea. How long have you been scheming with Addis?”

“Not so long.”

“Since before we met?”

He did not answer, but she looked at his profile and knew the truth.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“I expected it to come to nought, and did not want you disappointed. And I was sworn to secrecy. The fewer who know of such things the better.”

He spoke so calmly, as though he did not comprehend his risks. She could think of nothing else but the deadly danger he faced.

He would leave at dawn. The hanging sword would finally fall, and he would be severed from her forever. If this rash plan worked, their worlds would separate. If it failed…

Bile rose to her throat. Images invaded her head, and the old ones that had plagued her for three years transformed into new ones. Ghastly and hideous ones.

Blood in a yard, and bodies twisted in death. A sword falling, and eyes defiant to the end. Rhys's eyes.

Except it might not come so mercifully. A king might lead this action, but a queen would mete the punishment if it failed. Addis might survive, but there would be a terrible death for a common craftsman who dared to plot against a royal person.

An unholy fear took possession of her, turning her limp. A new dread, more terrible and more raw than any she had known these last years, left her cold and shaking.

She had to stop him.

“I do not want you to do this.”

“That is another reason why I did not tell you.”

“I entreat you not to. It is not your—”

“Not my place?”

She would worry about his pride later. “Aye, not your place, nor your battle.”

“I remember a fieryeyed woman telling me that anyone can stand against injustice, even masons. And it is my
battle because of you, if for nothing else. I may not be the champion you sought, but I can do my part.”

Her heart glowed that he loved her enough to risk his life to make it right for her. But fear for him also sliced like knives, shredding her composure. She pressed her face against his shoulder. “Wait a day more. One day only. A little more time …”A little more time to hold him, and make memories to sustain her. A little more time to convince him not to go.