Untamed (10 page)

“You can't mean that, Meggie.”

“I can. I do.”

Dominic had no doubt Meg meant every word. He had seen the green fires of spring burning in her
eyes and had felt the unleashed hope of the people of Blackthorne Keep focus on her. To live under that burden of expectation—and then to fail the people's trust—would have destroyed her.

Unsettled by Meg's words, Duncan raked a large hand through his dark brown hair, totally at a loss for words. When she saw his distress, she sighed and touched his arm with gentle fingers.

“I believe you didn't mean for me to be hurt,” she said.

“Thank you,” Duncan said in a low, strained voice. “I…” He shook his head and put his hand over hers. “I wouldn't want to lose you, Meggie. I never meant to put you at risk.”

“I don't blame you,” she said, smiling slightly. “You are very much a man. You are doing only what men have always done.”

“And what is it that men have always done?” Dominic asked coldly, removing Meg's hand from the Scots Hammer's arm.

“Seek land and sons,” she said.

Dominic shrugged. “That is like saying the sun rises and sets.”

“Yes.”

Oddly, Meg's agreement didn't please Dominic. He disliked being put in the same category as John, a man who had outraged Church and king alike in his quest to ensure that his bastard inherited Blackthorne Keep.

“Some things are beneath even ambitious men,” Dominic said.

“Truly?” Meg retorted. “Name just one of them.”

“Spare me the sharp edge of your tongue, wife. I've done nothing to earn it save grant mercy to the men who would have murdered me.”

Meg lowered her eyelashes, screening herself from Dominic's icy gray stare.

“My apologies, husband. I fear the events of the day have unsettled me. I would never place you in the company of merely mortal men.”

“Your apologies are sharper than your insults.”

Duncan snickered, enjoying Dominic's discomfort. Meg's lips quirked in a smile she barely managed to stifle.

“If you will excuse me,” Duncan said to Dominic, “I'll leave you to the business of getting acquainted with your new wife.”

“I think not,” Dominic said instantly.

Startled, Duncan turned back.

“You will go into the great hall with us,” Dominic continued. “I would have all men see that you aren't being restrained by a knife held between your thighs.”

Meg made a startled sound and stared at Duncan. Red tinged his cheeks. He looked distinctly uncomfortable at the memory.

“Give him your arm,” Dominic said to Meg. “And then
never again touch him within my sight
.”

The suppressed violence in Dominic's voice made Meg turn quickly to look at him. What she saw in his eyes chilled her. Saying nothing, she rested her fingertips on Duncan's arm.

Not a word was spoken until the three of them entered the great hall, where fires burned and tapestries glowed in rich colors along the wall. Silver plate and goblets gleamed from every spot on the long trestle tables. Saxon and Norman were interspersed quite carefully along the lower tables. They were watched over by men standing along the walls with the servants. The men, however, weren't fetching and carrying; they were holding fully armed crossbows.

It had a dampening effect on the festivity.

John had been waiting for Meg and Dominic. A
weak yet imperious gesture summoned them to the dais on which the lord's table was elevated above the remainder of the great hall. Three plates of beaten gold gleamed at John's table. At his signal, a server leaped forward to pour wine into a jeweled goblet.

“A toast to the bride and groom,” John said.

Despite his obvious frailty, when John spoke, he pitched his voice to carry throughout the room. Small conversations stilled as knights and their ladies turned toward the dais.

“Behold the great Norman lord,” John said in a voice rich with contempt. “Behold the fool who trusted King Henry and was betrayed by him.”

Gasps and uneasy murmurs rose from the tables.

Dominic smiled wolfishly. “You have great knowledge of betrayal, having practiced it all your life. Tell me, I pray thee, how King Henry betrayed his Sword.”

“Why, 'tis simple, simpleton. Your king didn't love you enough to give you a noble Norman girl to wed.”

Dominic slanted a sideways look at Meg. Her mouth was pale and drawn. He put his hand under her chin and turned her face toward his.

“Nay, my king loved me more,” Dominic said clearly. “He gave me the fairest maiden in all his kingdom to wed.”

“He gave you hell on earth!” John rasped.

“You're ill, old man. Make your toast and let us get on with the feasting.”

John laughed. The sound of madness lying just beneath the laughter made Meg stir in silent protest.

“That I will,” John said. “We shall drink to the king who hated you enough to give you a daughter of Glendruid to wed.”

“No great burden,” Dominic said dryly.

“Ha! You're as ignorant as a stone. It is the greatest curse a man could bear.
Like me, you will have no heirs
.”

The sardonic smile vanished from Dominic's face. “What are you saying? Is your daughter infertile?”

“She is a Glendruid witch,” John spat. “If you take her without pleasing her, there will be no fruit.”

Dominic shrugged. “The same is said of every girl.”

“But in the case of the Glendruids, it is truth!”

Against his will, Dominic was drawn by the combination of madness, despair, and triumph that glittered in John's hazel eyes as he spoke.

“Within living memory, no sons have been born to a daughter of Glendruid,” John said.

A quick glance at Duncan and Meg told Dominic that they accepted as truth what John was saying. So did the knights of the keep. They sat silently, watching Dominic with great interest, wondering what the husband of Lady Margaret would do when he realized how he had been fooled into accepting a marriage that was less than it had seemed.

“All Glendruid unions produced daughters, and precious few of them,” John continued.

“If that is true, why were you so eager to marry your son to Lady Margaret?” Dominic countered.

“It was the only way to give Blackthorne Keep to Duncan. And…” John's voice faded.

Dominic waited.

John gave Meg and Duncan a hooded glance.

“There is affection between the two of them,” John said finally. “There always has been.”

The thought didn't please Dominic.

“So?” he asked in a clipped voice.

“So there was a chance of an heir,” John said simply. “And if not, there are always wenches willing
to bear a great man's bastards. One way or the other, the seed of my loins would have inherited my lands!”

Dominic's eyes narrowed to splinters of ice as he heard his own dream from the lips of a man who hated him.

“But,” continued John, “no man can seduce a witch, for she has little passion in her; and if a rare witch does feel passion, it is for a man other than her husband. The fruit she bears is female, and comes not from her husband's loins!”

A rustling movement went through the room as people glanced carefully at Meg.

“'Tis true,” John said bitterly. “The witch Margaret didn't grow from my seed.”

He turned and pointed a shaking hand at the silver-haired woman who was watching him from the side of the table.

“Tell the Norman bastard what awaits him,” John said. “
Tell him now
.”

Old Gwyn stepped up to the dais with a grace unexpected in a woman her age. She turned to Dominic, facing him unflinchingly despite the savage expression on his face.

“What John says is true,” Gwyn said simply. “My lady was carrying another man's babe when she married.”

Gwyn said no more.

“Tell him!” John shouted. “Tell him what will happen if he forces a Glendruid witch in order to get a babe of his own!”

Gwyn was silent.

“Old woman,” Dominic said with fierce restraint, “it would be best if you told me freely.”

“If you rape Meg in your haste to make heirs, your crops and flocks will fail and your vassals will sicken,” Gwyn said.

Dominic's left eyebrow rose in a silent arch of disbelief.

“If you are skillful enough to give her great pleasure in the marriage bed, you might be granted a girl.”

“Continue,” Dominic said when the silence lengthened.

“It there is great love, there is a chance of a male heir.”

A murmuring went through the gathered people, the same two words repeated over and over.

Glendruid Wolf. Glendruid Wolf. Glendruid Wolf
.

“God rot all Glendruid witches!” John screamed suddenly. “They are as cold as a mountain grave! They never love!”

With the strength of madness, John dragged himself upright and held his goblet in Dominic's face.

“So I give you a toast, enemy mine,” John said with savage satisfaction.

“I give you a life without sons.

“I give you a life in which you cannot beat obedience into your cold wife for fear of your crops and flocks.

“I give you a life in which you cannot set aside your infertile wife for fear that your vassals will quit the land.

“I give you a life in which you will live every minute knowing that your line dies with you.

“
I give you Lady Margaret, witch of Glendruid!
”

John drank swiftly, turned his goblet upside down, and slammed it onto the table. Abruptly he gasped, staggered, and sprawled forward, sending gold plate flying.

When Dominic reached him, John of Cumbriland, Lord of Blackthorne Keep was dead.

And he was smiling.

“W
HAT ARE YOU GOING TO
do?” Simon asked his brother.

Impassively Dominic looked at the wall hangings in the small room that opened off the great hall. Fire guttered in the brazier, warming stone walls still chilled by winter's cold. From the great hall came random noises, but no merriment. The tables had been empty of feasters for some time.

Now servants moved through the echoing hall, clearing away the trestle tables and benches, leaving only the lord's permanent table standing. The remains of the food were being dispersed among the poorest of the vassals. The scraps were being snarled over by Dominic's lean greyhounds.

He wished them good appetite. Certainly no one else had enjoyed the wedding feast.

At least no one had objected when Dominic had coolly decreed there would be no outward signs of mourning until the funeral ten days hence, for the joy of the marriage took precedence over grief at the death of a man long wracked by pain.

“Dominic?” Simon pressed.

“I'll give the whore's spawn a Christian burial, what else?” he said curtly.

“That isn't what I meant.”

There was silence. Slowly Dominic's hand formed into a mail-covered fist. It descended to the table with a force that shook the solid wood.

“I regret not killing the Scots Hammer when I had the excuse,” Dominic said through his teeth.

“Why?” Simon asked, startled. “He left without quarrel, taking his Reevers with him.”

“I'll be forced by custom and courtesy to have him back for the funeral.”

Dominic made a sound that was remarkably like one of his greyhounds.

“But by then your other knights and mercenaries will have arrived,” Simon said. “The keep will be secure against anything but the king himself.”

With an impatient movement Dominic turned away from his view of the great hall and confronted his brother.

“You heard John,” Dominic said coldly. “There is ‘affection' between my wife and that Scots spawn of the Devil. Sweet Jesus, she could be carrying his bastard right now!”

“Aye,” Simon agreed reluctantly. “That is why I ask again: What will you do?”

“I will bide my time before I plant my seed within my fair Glendruid bride.”

“I'd think you would hurry to it,” Simon muttered. “Sounds as though it will be a tiresome process, getting the wench with child.”

“When—or
if
—my wife's monthly bleeding commences,” Dominic said distinctly, “I will know thereafter who is the father of any babe she carries.”

Simon's eyes widened in comprehension.

“Until that first bleeding passes,” Dominic continued, “I will reconnoiter the legendary walled fortress that is my Glendruid wife. I will discover her truths, ferret out her lies, find her secrets, weigh her
weaknesses; and then I will lay siege as I have so many times before.”

“Successfully.”

“Yea and believe it,” Dominic said flatly. “It will bring me great pleasure to have the Glendruid witch on her knees in front of me.
Affection between them
. God's blood!”

Simon smiled rather savagely, feeling better than he had since John had hurled his dying curse at Dominic.

“Almost I feel sorry for the maid,” Simon said.

The lift of Dominic's black, angular eyebrow was the only question he asked, or needed to.

“She knows not what demon she has summoned by challenging you,” Simon explained.

With a shrug, Dominic went back to staring out at the great hall where every knight in the keep had heard his new lord cursed by the old lord.

A dying curse. Not a thing to think upon with ease, even for a man as formidable as Dominic le Sabre.

“Dominic?”

He glanced aside at Simon.

“What if she is breeding Duncan's bastard?” Simon asked bluntly.

Dominic shrugged. “The babe will be fostered in Normandy. And then…”

Simon waited, watching his brother with hard black eyes.

“And then I will teach my wife that, Glendruid witch or no, she will be faithful to me henceforth. If I find otherwise, she will pray to God to release her from the living hell I will make of her life.”

“But what of the Glendruid curse?”

“What of it?” Dominic retorted bitterly.

“The people believe in it, whether or not you do. If you mock her openly…” Simon's voice died.

“If the witch won't give me a son, I will lay waste to the crops and flocks with my own hand,” Dominic said harshly. “Land and wealth serve only to mock a man who has no heirs to accept the fruits of his life's labor.”

Again Dominic's fist descended on the table with a force that made the thick wood shudder.

“God's blood, but I have been savagely used.
To come so close to my dream and then to see it all turn to ashes!
”

In the taut silence that followed Dominic's words, the normal sounds of the keep seemed unnaturally loud. The creak of water being drawn from the well just below, the servants calling back and forth about the best place to store a bench or a platter, or who had neglected the hearth fire and the candles guttering sullenly in their holders. Surrounding all sounds were the thousand sighs of raindrops seeking the earth, a liquid whispering so familiar none noted it save when it stopped.

The fluid sighing reminded Dominic of Meg's breath flowing out at his touch.

Abruptly he straightened and strode away from the room. He took the winding, right-hand turning of the stairs two at a time, heading for Meg's quarters. As Dominic attacked the stairs, he spoke carefully chosen verses of Ecclesiastes to himself, reminding himself that other men had gone before him into life's small battles and large wars, and had emerged holding wisdom in both hands.

Repeating the verses had become a ritual that rarely failed to school the rage that boiled within Dominic. His self-control had been learned at cruel cost in a sultan's prison. The discipline was all that had kept him from going mad. He had learned to accept the cold directions of his intellect rather than the hot violence of the Viking blood that ran through him as
surely as it did through Duncan of Maxwell.

But tonight, Ecclesiastes' stoic enumeration of man's failings and life's inevitable cycles barely controlled Dominic's impatience. Beneath an outward appearance of calm, the rage in him burned with a flame as primal as that which he had seen in Meg's Glendruid eyes.

The visual memory of Meg walking toward him wrapped in silver mist and hidden fire sent a flash of heat through Dominic's loins, hardening his body in a rush that dismayed him. He hadn't realized how thin his self-control was.

Nor had he understood quite how much he wanted the witch.

If Dominic hadn't seen the silent, fierce burning in Meg's eyes, he might have tried threats to bring her to bay—and to bed. But she would no more be dominated by fear than he. She had stood unflinchingly by his side and agreed to be his wife, and all the while she had expected to feel the bite of steel in her flesh no matter whom she betrayed in the church.

There were few men who could have done what Meg had without trembling. Dominic had never known a maid with that kind of courage.

The realization brought him to a halt just short of his wife's room.

Think
, Dominic advised himself harshly.
Which will be more effective against her defenses, a surprise rush or a bitter siege?

Neither
, he told himself brutally.
She is too well defended to take without a cost that would turn brief victory into lifelong defeat
.

Then what? Think!

The best way to take a stronghold is by treachery from within
.

The thought rang within Dominic's mind like thunder. As the last echoes of understanding faded,
the noose that had been tightening around Dominic's chest since the lord's dying curse began to ease minutely.

Treachery
.

From within
.

Aye!

I felt her startled breath and saw the color rise to her cheeks. There is passion in the witch. I will use it for my own ends
.

When Dominic took the remaining steps to Meg's rooms, he was fully in control of himself once more. He was going into battle, and he knew it. The taming and eventual seduction of his Glendruid witch would be the most important and difficult victory of his life.

But first he had to get through her door.

Unlike many of the other chambers opening off the hall, Meg's room had a stout door as well as a curtain that could be drawn across to cut drafts if the door were left open. The door, however, was shut. From the look of its heavy brass hinges, it would take a battle-ax and a stout yeoman to open the door short of the mistress's agreement.

The sound of Dominic's mail-encased fist striking the wood of the door was loud in the empty hallway. Grimacing, he knocked again, but more lightly.

“Who goes?” Eadith called.

“A husband looking for his bride,” Dominic retorted.

Inside the room, Meg flinched subtly, hearing the echoes of buried rage in Dominic's voice.

“Open the door,” Meg said. “Then leave us.”

Eadith looked uncertain.

“It is a husband's right to be with his wife,” Meg said with a serenity she was far from feeling. “Go.”

The handmaiden hesitated before she turned away. She opened the door, nodded to Dominic,
and eased past him. The speed with which she retreated down the hall told Dominic that he wasn't wearing his most reassuring expression.

“Do I frighten your maid?” he asked neutrally, stepping into the room.

“Yes.”

“But not you.”

Meg's lips shaped an uncertain smile. Dressed in hauberk and sword, chain mail glittering as though alive with each movement of his powerful body, Dominic looked like a devil come to life. She glanced down at her hands. They rested with false calmness in her lap. The events of the day had almost numbed her ability to feel anything.

Almost, but not quite. She kept remembering Dominic's exquisite restraint with the peregrine, and the warmth that had made his gray eyes smoky when he had whispered to her of his sword lying within her sheath.

Caught between John's curse and Glendruid hope, the possibility of warmth in Dominic called irresistibly to Meg. She wanted him to seek that same warmth in her, to come to her without the calculation and cold self-control of a tactician planning a battle.

“Your guests have been seen to,” Meg said.

She spoke formally, reporting to her new lord about the state of his keep as she had once reported to John.

“My guests?” Dominic asked silkily. “I wasn't the one who invited Reevers to my wedding.”

“The purser will have accounts for you to check on the morrow,” Meg continued, “unless you wish me to do it for you as I did for my fath—that is, for John.”

Dominic grunted. “I see you've managed quite nicely to quell your grief at his death.”

“There is little to grieve after. He has been in much pain since harvest. Now he is in pain no more.”

“Blackthorne's people seem to feel as you do about their lord's departure. Only Duncan was truly saddened.”

“Aye. Fath—John always was different with Duncan. More kind.” Meg shrugged tightly. “Now I know why.”

Dominic said nothing. For a few moments he simply watched his bride with the unflinching stare of an eagle.

Though Meg said nothing more, it was impossible for her to remain wholly still under her husband's cool regard. Without realizing it, she reached for one of the smooth river pebbles she kept in a dish by her table. The shape and texture and gentle weight of the stone soothed her.

Silently Meg waited for Dominic to speak. As she waited, she let the pebble glide lightly from her palm to her fingertips and back, leaving in its wake cool memories of the hours she had spent listening to the river Blackthorne run clean and bright from its lake in the fells. Through forest and glen to Blackthorne Keep's fields the water sang, and from there it ran on to the mysterious sea.

“What is the sea like, my lord?” Meg asked wistfully.

The unexpected question—and the poignancy of Meg's smile—surprised Dominic.

“Restless,” he said simply. Then, remembering, “Wild. Beautiful. Dangerous.”

Breath came out of Meg in a long sigh. For the first time since Dominic had come into the room, she met his glance.

And for the first time, Dominic realized that Meg was afraid of him despite her brave appearance. He wondered why. There was nothing he could do to
her that wouldn't rebound doubly on himself, his dreams, his hopes. Like a wolf in a snare, no matter which way he turned, the snare only tightened more.

“Do you fear the Glendruid curse won't protect you?” Dominic asked.

The edge in his voice couldn't be entirely concealed.

“Protect me?”

“From rape,” Dominic said bluntly. “From me.”

Meg's hand clenched around the pebble. It was no longer cool and soothing. Slowly she forced her fingers to relax.

“I know my duty as a wife,” she said in a low voice. “You'll not have to beat me until I can't run away.”

“Is that what you expected?”

Again, Meg shrugged tightly. “Yes.”

“Is that what John did to your mother?”

“Once.”

“But no more.”

“Aye. Just once.”

“What happened?” Dominic asked smoothly. “Did lightning cleave the keep in twain?”

“She went into the woods. Shortly afterward, a storm came. Hail destroyed the crops in the field and the forage in the pasture. Because the sheep were hungry, they ate a deadly weed, sickened, and died.”

Dominic grunted. “All because your mother had been soundly beaten for cuckholding her lord?”