Never Kiss A Stranger (32 page)

“Hide yourself? In London?” Sybilla sighed. “Alys, this is no gentle city. You’d be set upon by the parasites that prowl the streets, looking for an innocent young girl to feed upon. You’d be dead by sunrise—or wishing you were!”

“I’m not a girl,” Alys said calmly. “I’ll go with Ira then, help him find Piers. Piers will protect me.”

“Protect you like he did in the forest? When Judith Angwedd kidnapped you?”

Alys’s face burned.

Sybilla gave her no time to speak. “You couldn’t re-enter the palace alone without revealing your identity. Ira’s not leaving, so he only needs not be caught while within. You are coming
home,
with
me,
right now.” Sybilla began to pull again.

Alys jerked her hands free.
“No, I am not.”

Alys could feel the fury radiating from her sister, and she wanted to step back, but she would not. Sybilla was her sister, and she had come for Alys by herself. They did truly love each other. And, like magic, Alys finally understood the seemingly bottomless depth of that emotion in her sister: Sybilla felt things so deeply, so sincerely, her concern and her protectiveness came out as demands.

“I am risking my life for you at this moment—risking our very home—when it was your childishness that got you into this situation,” Sybilla accused. “I will not further jeopardize Fallstowe, Cecily, or our people because of your girlish fantasies of fated love supposedly blessedby some goddamn ring of stone! Alys, you are so irresponsible—”

“I am not irresponsible!”
Alys shouted, having enough of the listing of her faults. She knew them better now than
Sybilla could ever guess. “I’ve only never had anything to be responsible
for!”

The chamber was silent. Sybilla stared at Alys with no expression.

“Until now,” Alys said quietly. “I know the truth, and my station could lend veracity to Piers’s claim.”

“It will not change the fact that he doesn’t want you, Alys,” Sybilla said, and Alys could see the rare softening of her sister’s eyes. “He wanted you to go home, to Fallstowe. He never meant for you to be captured by Judith Angwedd, but he did mean for you to be found. He knew I had been following you, and he thought it would be me that came upon you at your camp.”

Alys looked to Ira, whose head was tilted slightly to the side, eyeing her with pity. One bony finger combed through the hair on Layla’s arm.

“Ira?” Alys asked. “Is it true? Piers knew Sybilla was following us, and he left me for her to find?”

He nodded once. “He’s always wanted you to go home. I think you already know that though, do you not?”

The truth of it fell upon Alys with the crushing weight of an undermined tower. Since the night they’d met, Piers had done little else but try and persuade her to return to Fallstowe. He had not kept it secret. He had never played her false.

And now, she was ready to risk her family’s home, her own freedom and perhaps even her life, to return to the side of a man who had set her free. In truth, Alys couldn’t even predict whether Judith Angwedd’s threat on her life would persuade Piers to disavow his claim. He had been denied what was rightfully his his entire life and now it was within his reach. Why would he forsake it all for a woman he never wanted in the first place?

Sybilla was right again. But this time, Alys was not
bitter. Perhaps, she thought, it was hard truths like this, the acceptance of them and the pain they brought, that gained a person wisdom. She thought fleetingly of the enormous heartbreak Sybilla must be hiding. And the idea of such untold pain horrified her.

“Alright,” Alys said quietly. “Let’s go then, before Judith Angwedd or Bevan return.”

Sybilla’s eyebrows rose and she drew her head back. Then her eyes narrowed. “Is this some sort of trick? You’ll wait until I’m in the corridor and lock the door behind me, like you did when you were a child?”

Alys smiled at the bittersweet memories that hung between them right then …
when you were a child.
Perhaps at last her sister no longer thought of her in that manner. “No, Sybilla. No tricks this time. Let’s go.” She turned and held out a crooked elbow toward Layla, who still perched on Ira’s shoulder. “We’re off, girl.”

The monkey leaped the distance to Alys’s shoulder, and gained a firm hold by twisting her little fingers in Alys’s hair.

“I wish you well, Ira,” she said to the old man. “Both of you.”

Ira stared hard at her for a long moment. “As I do you. Both of you,” he clarified, his eyes flicking to Sybilla. Then his body seemed to spasm, jerk forward, and Alys realized he was bowing. “Ladies.”

Alys tried to restrain the sob that knotted in her chest. She stepped to the old man quickly, leaned up on tiptoe to press her cheek into his and grasp both of his shoulders with her hands.

“Take care of him,” she choked. “He has been alone for so long.”

His only answer was a quick nod.

“Alys,” Sybilla called gently.

Alys stepped away and swiped at her eyes quickly while
she turned toward her sister. She saw her bag crumpled on the floor near the hearth and swiped it up with one hand.

Atop the deep, reddened grooves on her wrist, she noticed her pomegranate bracelet was gone, and it caused her heart to clench.

She did not look back as she followed Sybilla into the corridor.

He didn’t sleep.

Piers was grateful for the generosity of the stranger, Julian Griffin. If not for his keen eye, and perhaps a bit of intuition, as well, Piers would have been forced to wander the palace grounds, searching for some place to hide away during the night. But the suite of rooms he’d been lent was opulent beyond anything Piers could have ever imagined. He’d been loathe to touch anything for fear that he would break it—and he imagined he would be unable to afford to replace so much as a single thread in the intricate, embroidered coverlet, especially since he would now never see a farthing of Gillwick’s earnings.

So he passed the night on the floor, his back against the bolted door. He lit not one candle, only sat in the pitch blackness, the smell of privilege all around him, cloying and invisible in the night, and thought of Alys. Prayed for her safety. Begged God’s forgiveness for the jeopardy he’d placed her in, because he knew he would never forgive himself.

And he prayed for his own soul, because Piers knew that God knew him, and knew his heart. God knew that
Piers meant to kill Bevan, and now Judith Angwedd, as well, regardless of Edward’s decision. They had wronged him, stolen from him, defamed him, cursed him, beaten him, tried to kill him. And yet before today, they both might have lived.

But not now. No, not now that they had touched Alys. Alys would be happy. Alys would not know fear of them again, for the rest of her long life. Wherever she made her home, wherever she would lay her pretty head down to sleep, she would never again worry that the ones who had taken her, held her, threatened her—all because of Piers—were out in the land somewhere.

Alys had risked her own life to save Piers. It was because of her unselfish heart that he now had Ira. She had sworn to stand by him, even in defiance of the king. When Piers had faith in nothing, no one, Alys had placed all of hers in him, and he had denied her at every turn. His father’s rejection of him at the insistence of Judith Angwedd had ensured that Piers would never know the privileges of his father. His hard labor at Gillwick had labeled him common, just as surely as it had labeled his very body by the scars and calluses and muscles it bore. Piers Mallory was not known for his lands or his title, but for his fists. He was no one. And yet Alys had loved him.

And so now he would sacrifice all that he had or might have had for her. She would never forgive his betrayal of her in the forest, his arrogant stupidity that had placed her in the teeth of danger, but Piers would at least be certain that from this night on, he did everything he could, gave everything he had for Alys.

When the windows behind the still-open draperies began to brighten with gray fog, Piers was dry-eyed and calm. He stood slowly, his body stiff and sore from his travels and his still pose on the hard floor.

He rinsed his mouth and washed carefully in the basin, wincing when the lip of the pitcher trembled against the bowl. He brushed at his tunic with a damp rag, swiped the cloth over the tops of his boots. Piers noticed with irony how he could feel the plush towel through the thin leather. He washed his hands and beneath his fingernails, polished the stone in the signet ring.

Then he went to stand before one of the windows, looking down on a brightening courtyard, quiet and still and bare with winter’s breath. He tried to summon his mother’s face in his mind’s eye, but the best he could muster were dim memories akin to something once sweet on his tongue and the rich smell of hay.

Then, as if someone had called his name, Piers turned suddenly and left the room.

He went purposefully down the wide flights of stairs, passing servants bearing trays and candle snuffers and stacks of folded linens. He bid each good morn, and most gave him a started look before returning the greeting, adding “milord” to the end.

No one of station had ever deigned speak to Piers outside of a barked command before. He had been part of the invisible machinery that enabled Gillwick to prosper, much as these servants did for the king’s home, and Piers wanted to acknowledge them as he had never been acknowledged.

He reached the grand receiving hall, and was surprised to see a crowd of people already gathered around the gilded double doors at the far end. Some sort of commotion was being raised, and Piers heard a man’s shouts from the center of the crowd.

“I’ve had many a year to dream of the day you’d receive your comeuppance, and thanks be to God that day is nigh!”

Piers’s footsteps faltered when the old man’s statement was met with a female’s gay laugh. Then Piers charged, his heart galloping to match his footfalls. He met the wall of the crowd and muscled to its center forcefully, pulling people out of his way by their arms like scarves from a basket, while the old man still invisible to him continued.

“Laugh now, heifer! I’ll be drinkin’ to your tears with me supper!”

“Ira,” Piers said, as he at last reached the center of the crowd and stood a pair of steps from his grandfather, as well as the same distance from Judith Angwedd and Bevan. “What are you doing here? How did you—?”

“Piers!” Ira shouted and rushed to him, gripping his arm with one bony hand. The old man continued to speak, but Piers heard him not, his eyes having locked on to Bevan’s.

Red, boiling, bloody hate swelled up in Piers’s veins. It burned beneath his skin, caused his muscles to twitch, his teeth to grind. Bevan was smirking below his red-lined nose and the dark circles beneath his small eyes. But Piers could only see the man’s thick neck, his adam’s apple bulging grotesquely. Piers fantasized briefly at the gristly cracking noise it would make when he crushed it in his fist.

“Alys,” was Piers’s only word.

“Dunno, mate,” Bevan snorted, then after another deep smirk, he shrugged his big, dumb shoulders. “Alys who?”

“Where. Is she?” Piers enunciated, slightly louder.

“Yes, who is this Alys you speak of?” Judith Angwedd asked stridently, and then gave another cawing laugh. “I vow I have no idea who you mean. A scullery maid you’re fond of, mayhap?”

Piers heard a growling, and only faintly realized the sound was coming from his own throat. His eyes never
left Bevan. He felt his back tense, the muscles bunch. He couldn’t wait.

“Piers. Piers!” Ira was shaking his arm. “They don’t have her! Listen to me—Alys is safe.”

His grandfather’s words were slowly penetrating the haze of rage that had enveloped Piers’s head. He turned his head minutely, listening.

“Me and”—Ira glanced toward Judith Angwedd—
“a friend
freed her last night. She’s gone home, Piers. She’s safe.”

Now Piers did let his eyes flick to his grandfather’s face. “You’re certain?”

Ira nodded once and then leaned in, whispering harshly. “They want you to attack—don’t! Stand firm! Let the king be your witness, lad.”

Piers had no comment to Ira’s advice, although he recognized the wisdom of the old man’s words. Alys was
free.
Piers could now do his best to strip the pair of Gillwick before the king, but then—
then
…

Bevan snorted again. “Fine boots you have there,
Lord Piers.”

Piers let his eyes bore into Bevan’s, and he hoped even a fraction of the hatred he felt was evident. When he spoke, his voice was low and deadly. “Enjoy the air you now breathe, Bevan. Savor it. You shall not be earthly witness to another sunrise.”

“Oh!” Judith Angwedd screeched, seizing Bevan’s arm and pulling him toward the doors that were now opening. “Did you all hear that? He threatened my son’s life! You … you base criminal! Thief! Liar!” she continued to shout as she slipped into the king’s private court.

Bevan held Piers’s eyes as he was dragged along by his mother. “A fine piece of ass she was too,” Bevan said and then waggled his fat tongue at Piers.

Piers lunged and Ira threw all his bony weight onto him.

“No, lad! No, he lies!” The other nobles—their numbers more than tripled in the time since Piers arrived in the receiving hall—swarmed cautiously around and past them into the chamber as Ira held Piers back. “Lady Alys was untouched when we found her. She is safe with Lady Sybilla. She’s safe, Piers! For the love of God, would you concentrate on what you came here to do!”

Piers looked down at Ira, nodded hesitantly. “She must hate me for what I did. Did she … did she ask of me?”

Ira’s brows lowered into a pained looking frown. “She wished you well, my lad. There is no malice in her.”

Piers swallowed and then nodded again, this time more resolutely. “Alright,” he said. He looked to the open doors as if they were a portal to his eternal judgment. In a way, they were just that.

“Let’s go.”

It was yet an hour before the king presented himself to his court, and in that time, Piers let Ira fill his ears and mind with meaningless chatter. Grandfather and grandson stood alone on one side of the narrow room, while Judith Angwedd and her son stood opposite the long center aisle. The nobles gathered together to plea their own claims or simply to witness the goings-on approached neither group, only stared at the individuals with blatant curiosity. And this pleased Piers, because he knew it vexed Judith Angwedd.