Entreat Me (13 page)

“But hasn’t.”

“Because I protect her.”

He shook his head.  “No, because you taught her well.  She told us you raised her since she was five.  Acknowledge her judgment and credit yourself for strengthening it so she can hold her own without you holding her hand.”

Louvaen bowed her head before meeting Ballard’s gaze.  “I’m not saying you’re right, but I’ll take your words into consideration.”

The familiar tight smile curved his mouth.  “Fair enough.  Besides, I wouldn’t want to be responsible for you bursting into flame because you acknowledged I might be right.”

She harrumphed.  “Very funny.”  The offer to read to him hovered on the tip of her tongue and faded as she watched the black vine that had rested below his eye suddenly move.  It climbed the outer curve of the eyelid, bisected his eyebrow and disappeared into his hairline.  She inhaled a tight breath.

“What’s wrong?”  The creases between Ballard’s brow were of his own making, etched from years of habitual frowning or concentration.  Louvaen focused on them instead of the serpentine scar that moved of its own free will.

“One of those black marks just slid across your face and into your scalp.  You didn’t feel it?”

A hand reached up and touched the spot where her gaze had rested.  “No.”  He shrugged and his grim expression told her this was nothing new.

The markings were grotesque, macabre and Louvaen wondered how Ballard kept from flaying himself in a bid to dig them out of his body.  “They don’t cause you any pain?”

“Not now.”  For the first time since she met him, he turned his face away from her.  “Only during the flux’s high tide.  Then each one makes its presence known.”

She shuddered and fought to suppress the urge to scratch at the crawling sensation that traveled down her arms and legs.   No wonder the man howled in his cell like some poor beast being hacked to bits.

“Now you fear to look at me.”

She had a good view of his profile.  A hard jaw and long nose, the compressed mouth and high curve of his cheekbone, marred by the deep broadhead scars and raised spirals at his temples.  He reminded her of the hermetic monks who lived at Andagora Skete.  Austere, reclusive, he would have made a fine monk.  Louvaen discarded the notion.  The walls of the great hall gleamed from the polished steel of numerous weapons.  At one time this man had been a devotee of war, not prayer.

“I’m not the one who’s looking away.”  She pressed her knees against his.  “May I touch you?”

He visibly jerked in his chair.  “What?”

“May I touch your face?”  She didn’t think he’d be more surprised if she’d asked him permission to fire a barrage of cannon balls into the castle fortifications.  “I promise not to hit you in the nose.”

Her quip didn’t gain her a smile, but Ballard nodded and parted his knees so that she might draw nearer to him.  Louvaen leaned in and he closed his eyes.  She envied his dark lashes, thick and straight.  The black runes and vines twined around his neck and scripted along his hairline.  Louvaen touched the one that slithered.  The scar squirmed beneath her fingertips, icy to the touch.  She crushed the instinct to snatch her hand back and followed the vine’s track across his eyelid and forehead.  Her fingers slid into his hair, noting its suppleness as wavy strands caressed her knuckles.  She mapped the scar where it crossed with another in his scalp and took its path.  Soon both her hands stroked through his hair, over his face and along the rigid tendons in his neck.  A pulse drummed a heavy beat under his jaw.  Though the scars lay like frozen threads under his flesh, the unmarred expanses of skin flared hot beneath her fingers.  He burned as if with fever, and she burned for him.

The sweet tingling from touching his face spread across her body, strongest at her breasts and between her thighs.  She traced one of the runic symbols near the hollow of his throat, her palm curved over his collarbone.  So beguiled was she by her exploration, she hardly noticed the staccato hitch in his breathing.

“I am in hell,” he said in a cracked voice.

Louvaen recoiled, stumbled against her stool and almost fell on her backside before managing to right herself.  The heat of a blush cascaded over her face and chest, washing her in a mortifying fire.  “Forgive me.” Her voice sounded thin to her ears.  “I didn’t mean to take such liberties.”

Ballard sat as still as if hewn from stone.  His hands gripped the chair arms so tight that his black nails had grayed.  He stared at his feet instead of her and spoke in the same strained tones.  “Good night, Mistress Duenda.”

She bowed, dismissed.  “De Sauveterre.”  The urge to run nearly overwhelmed her, but she forced herself to walk at a sedate pace and shut the door behind her.  The stone wall offered only chilly comfort as she leaned against it, gasping for air.  Gods’ knickers, what was wrong with her?  Obsessed with protecting Cinnia’s virtue from Gavin, she’d thrown caution out the window and found herself consumed by an attraction to his father.  “You daft nitwit,” she muttered.  “What were you thinking?”

“Who are you talking to?”

Louvaen nearly leapt out of her shoes.  Cinnia stood before her, holding a candle and bundled in her night clothes and a robe.  “Cinnia,” she hissed.  “You scared me half to death.  Quit sneaking up on me.”

The girl looked less than apologetic.  “I wasn’t sneaking.  You were so busy talking to yourself, you didn’t notice me.  What has you so jumpy?”  She glanced at the solar’s door.  “Anyone still in there?”

Thankful the hall’s dimness hid her blush, Louvaen waved a hand in what she hoped Cinnia took as casual dismissal.  “Only de Sauveterre.  I offered to read to him, but he preferred his solitude.  I was on my way to bed.”

“After you had a conversation with yourself?”  Cinnia gazed at Louvaen as if she were moonstruck.

“I’m just thinking aloud.”  She steered the topic back to Cinnia.  “What are you doing out here in your night rail and robe?”

“Waiting for you.  I have something to show you.”  She practically danced in place.  “I’ve been waiting all day.  You were helping Magda make candles and then churning butter for Clarimond.  You hate churning butter.”

“I’m only here by his lordship’s leave, my love.  I’ll muck out the stables if they ask and not complain.  Now what’s so important that it can’t wait until daylight?”

Cinnia reached for her hand.  “Come see.  I discovered them this morning while I was exploring the castle.”

Louvaen stepped back.  “Them?”

Cinnia captured her anyway and tugged.  “No more questions.  Let’s go.”

“Are you certain we can’t do this in the morning?”

“No.  I don’t think I was supposed to find these.”

Louvaen halted their steps.  “You didn’t enter any rooms forbidden to us, did you?”

“No.  I was walking the corridors waiting for you.  I think this castle must have hundreds of them, and I swear they change directions sometimes.”

Louvaen scowled at the notion but didn’t counter it.  The castle had a strangeness about it—places where torchlight flickered one way while the shadows it cast scampered another; stairs ended in opposite directions without ever turning.  The walls echoed in tight places instead of cavernous ones, and she’d once clearly heard a tapestry in Cinnia’s bower whisper a poem she knew from childhood.

She’d said nothing, first blaming her suspicious nature for seeing treachery and trickery where there was none and then on her sensitivity to sorcery.  Cinnia’s remark validated her impressions but didn’t relieve her mind.  Ketach Tor, saturated in wild magic, twined and bent around them—a living entity itself.

She squeezed Cinnia’s hand.  “Lead on, and let’s make it quick.  It’s colder out here than a warty witch’s kiss in a snowstorm.”

Cinnia choked out a laugh.  “Lou!  Your mother would rise up from her grave and strap you for saying such a thing.”

“Who do you think taught our papa that little gem?”

They laughed together, and Louvaen promised herself she’d be less harsh with the person she loved best in the world.

She followed Cinnia down three corridors, a flight of stairs and a small mezzanine before reaching a short hallway so dark Louvaen couldn’t see anything beyond the corona of Cinnia’s candle.  Cinnia raised the light.  “Look.”

The bottom edge of a framed picture hung just above Louvaen’s eye level.  She took the candle from Cinnia, raising it for a better view.  The flame’s light wavered across a portrait of a young Gavin, no more than nine or ten.  The head-and-shoulder portrait depicted the boy in a white shirt and black doublet of embossed velvet.  Even at that early age, Louvaen saw hints of the fine bone structure beneath the babyish feature.  His hair was almost white, not yet darkened to its current golden color, but the green eyes were as calm and mysterious, looking back at the viewer as if he held all the secrets of the world in his gaze.  She saw nothing of Ballard in him.

“He was a handsome boy then as well.”

“Look at this next one.”  Cinnia pulled her a few steps further down the hall.

Louvaen raised the candle a second time.  Another bust portrait.  Even under a powdery film of dust, the woman portrayed was breathtaking.  Gavin’s resemblance to her was unquestionable, down to the wide cheekbones, straight nose and perfectly curved mouth.  He had inherited his mother’s hair as well but not the eyes.  Her eyes were cerulean, and the artist had somehow managed not only to capture their deep color but also a certain brittleness.  She wore a sumptuous, outdated gown of silk encrusted with jewels and decorated in the finest lace.  The design showed off a graceful neck and smoothly sloped shoulders.  Her headdress, like her gown, reflected a style Louvaen had only seen in ancestral portraits, and she wondered why she’d chosen to pose in such antiquated garb.  The clothes were beautiful, no doubt: a fitting match for the woman who wore them.  She easily matched Cinnia in looks, but where Cinnia possessed a warm beauty, hers lacked any vitality.  She reminded Louvaen of a diamond—cold, glittering, equally hard.

“De Lovet’s mother.”

“I’d bet my favorite ribbons on it.  Gavin told me her name was Isabeau, and she carried the title of most beautiful woman in six kingdoms.”  Cinnia paused.  “I wonder if she was lonely having that kind of fame.”

Louvaen’s heart lurched in her chest at the melancholy notes in Cinnia’s question.  Beauty was not always a blessing.  The candlelight caught and illuminated the corner of another frame and the two moved on.  Louvaen almost dropped their meager light when she saw what it revealed.  “My gods,” she whispered.

“You recognize him?  Who is it?  A king?  A famous knight?”  Cinnia’s voice pitched higher with excitement at her sister’s exclamation.

“De Sauveterre,” she murmured.

Cinnia gasped.  “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”  As dazzled as Cinnia had been by Isabeau’s portrait, so was Louvaen captivated by Ballard’s.

This was Ballard de Sauveterre—of that she had no doubt, but Ballard before the flux, before the strange markings, sunken eyes and pallid skin.  Before the suffering had sculpted the deep crevices and brackets into the corners of his eyes and mouth.  His features were as unyielding then as they were now, but they were painted in the burnished tones of a man who lived in the sun.  Even his hair, more soot than pewter in the painting, gleamed with ruddy highlights.  Unlike the portraits of his wife and child, his was a full length work.  The artist had portrayed him armored, standing in three-quarter view.  He held a sword in one hand and the reins of a lightly barded roan courser in the other.

She’d seen family portraits painted in a similar style in the homes of lesser noblemen.  Those men had experienced more action in a counting house or in the beds of their mistresses than on a battlefield, but it was a popular thing to have oneself painted as a warrior knight of old, dressed in armor with a prancing stallion to take one off to the glories of war.  This portrait had the horse and the warrior, but the similarities ended there.  Instead of a posed stance with green fields or drapes of tapestry spilling over side tables in the background, the artist had painted Ballard as if he were just leaving for battle.  The armor was not the full harness of plate.  Instead he wore a knee length mail hauberk over a padded gambeson with a black and gray partied surcoat over those.  He held a sword in one hand, and Louvaen suspected the blade was no prop but a weapon that had drawn rivers of blood in its wielder’s grip.  Ballard gazed at the viewer as if impatient to be done with such nonsense, and those dark eyes burned with a ruthlessness that told a tale not of war’s glory but of its savagery.

Cinnia shivered.  “Has he changed much from that portrait?”

“The wild magic has altered him some.  Scarred and washed him pale.  He’s younger there, and his hair is darker.  You’d still recognize him though.”

“And he has claws now.”

Louvaen chuckled.  “He has claws, but I’ve done a fine job of trimming them.  Maybe now you can look upon him.”

Cinnia crossed her arms.  “I meant no insult.”

“I know.  So does he.”  Louvaen sensed an unspoken question and used the candle to illuminate her sister’s face.  “What?”

The girl arched an eyebrow.  “I think you’ve grown to like him, Lou.”

Louvaen’s eyes narrowed.  Good gods, the last thing she needed was her sister trying to play matchmaker.  “He’s been a good host to us.”