“I would have to know where the clothes are kept and I doubt if it will be easy getting in and out of the house. You must swear you will return to the Irials immediately.”
“I do not swear things with the ease that you do. Cilean visited this house a few times when she was a Vatell captive, and I know something about it. You will follow me and—”
“I will not follow you,” he said. “You will remain hidden in the forest until we return.”
“We shall see,” Jura said, smiling.
The stone of the big manor house was silhouetted in the moonlight and the only sounds to be heard were the soft nickers of horses and the clank of a steel sword as a Vatell guard passed.
Rowan and Jura flattened themselves against the wall and waited, and when the guard passed, Jura motioned Rowan to follow her through a small wooden side door into the larder. Here hung ducks and geese and haunches of venison and freshly cooked chickens and meat pies awaiting tomorrow’s dinner.
Jura cautiously opened the door and slipped through into a narrow hallway, at one end of which there was light and the sound of people’s voices. She started toward the light but Rowan grabbed her tunic back. He pointed to a steep, dark, stone circular staircase a few feet away. Holding his sword before him, Rowan started up the stairs.
It was easy to find the master and mistress’s bedchamber as it was the only walled-off room on the second floor. They hid in the shadows once as a maid hurried past, then slipped into the room and went immediately to a large chest against the wall.
The Vatells dressed much like the Irials, with cross-gartered boots, their knees exposed below a heavy tunic. Rowan pulled a blue tunic of lightweight wool from the chest.
“No,” Jura whispered. “That will make your eyes too blue. They show too much as they are.”
“Oh,” Rowan asked with interest, turning to look at her, their noses almost touching. “I had no idea you noticed my eyes.”
“I have a few times,” she murmured.
He seemed to be ready to kiss her when the door latch was raised. As quick as lightning, Jura made a leap inside the big chest and Rowan followed her and closed the lid over their heads. They were pressed together tightly, warm body to warm body and, unfortunately, weapon to weapon. Something was pressing hard into Jura’s ribs and she was sure it was Rowan’s broadax. She did not dare shift for fear of being discovered.
She lay still and listened as the footsteps, one pair, walked all around the room. A maid, she thought, then held her breath as the footsteps came closer. She tensed her muscles to spring.
When the maid lifted the lid of the big oak clothes chest, out sprang two fierce-looking people, both of them going for her throat.
Quite calmly, the woman fainted.
Rowan and Jura, prepared for a fight, looked at the crumpled little woman at their feet and began to laugh. It was the first time they had shared laughter.
Smiling, Jura began to grab garments from the chest. “Here, we take these and we better tie her up and put her in here and give ourselves time to get away.”
They wrapped the maid in one of her mistress’s gowns, stuffed a stocking in her mouth, and Rowan gently laid her in the chest. Her eyes opened and she looked up, frightened, at Rowan.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said, “there’s plenty of air and someone will find you in no time. Someone as pretty as you will be missed. Just rest; you’ll be safe.” He bent and kissed her forehead—and just missed Jura’s slamming the lid on his head. He barely got his fingers out of the way.
“Sorry,” she said. “It slipped. Are you ready to go or do you plan to stay and become a manservant?”
“Ready,” he said, smiling at her. “I’m sure you want to lead.”
“The most able should lead,” she said with a sniff, and went to the door.
They were able to get to the larder without incident and Rowan took two pies on the way out. He was feeling very good after Jura’s womanly little fit upstairs. He had almost given up hope that she would ever show any interest in him.
They made it past the guards and ran, crouching, into the forest, jumped on their horses, and whipped them into a gallop. After an hour, Rowan turned off the road and into the forest, reining his horse into the dense growth. They hid there, their hands on the horses’ noses, and waited silently. It wasn’t long before they heard the noise of many horses and many men riding past them.
When they were gone, Rowan motioned to Jura to follow him and they made their way up the steep embankment to the crest of the hill.
“We can sleep here,” he said, and removed the blankets from his horse.
Before they bedded down, they changed into the Vatell clothes, for the riders would be looking for an Ulten and a beggar.
“You’ll have to wash tomorrow,” Rowan said, looking up at the stars, “or they’ll smell you as an Ulten.”
“Perhaps you should have taken the maid with you and left me behind. She was pretty and sweet smelling.”
Rowan smiled broadly in the darkness. “Jura, no woman alive is prettier than you, and even smelling as you do, you are sweeter than a hundred princesses together.”
Jura’s eyes widened. She didn’t know why she had felt so angry at Rowan’s compliments to the frightened maid or why she had sniped at him like a simpering girl, but it was amazing how pleasant his words were to her. Daire praised her when twelve arrows in a row hit their mark, and Geralt and Thal never complimented her at all. Of course men had said she was pretty but not in this lavish, gentle way. If they had, she would have held her knife to their throats, but tonight she rather liked this man’s words. In fact she wished he would say more.
“You…you handled yourself well tonight,” she said tentatively. “And you got yourself into Vatell territory without being recognized. It was good that you darkened your hair.”
“You thought I wouldn’t?” he snapped. Just like a woman, he thought, you give her a compliment and she insults you. He turned on his side away from her. He’d had about enough of her insinuations that he was incompetent. The woman was emasculating! “Tomorrow you go back to the Irials.”
Jura grimaced and didn’t reply. This Englishman was very strange.
But the next morning they did not have time to argue. Jura woke fully alert, her senses knowing that something was wrong. Slowly, she reached out her hand to Rowan, asleep a few feet from her. He opened his eyes the instant she touched him and read the warning in her eyes.
To her consternation, Rowan leaped to his feet and began to shout. “Damn you, woman, always after me, a man can’t even sleep.”
Jura saw that he grabbed his sword as he stood. She also took hers and aimed it for his throat. “After you?” she yelled up at him. “You are a poor thing for a woman to want. I have had lovers twice your age who were better than you.”
“I shall show you who is the better lover,” he said, and leaped on top of her. “Roll to my right,” he said into her ear. “Hide in the forest and wait. There are two of them.”
When Rowan moved, Jura did indeed roll to his right, but she came up to her feet, her sword held firmly with both hands, and she positioned herself at his back as she had been trained.
Two men, thieves by the look of them, came toward Rowan, knives drawn. They looked hungry and ready to commit any crime to take what little Rowan and Jura carried with them.
“I am your king,” Rowan said, “put down your weapons. I will share what I have with you.”
“You’ll not give my horse away,” Jura said, still behind him, watching the forest for more thieves.
“King?” a thief said, and snorted laughter before he attacked Rowan.
Jura listened to the sounds of battle behind her and kept her head turned a bit so she could see when or if Rowan needed help, but he was a good fighter, very good. And she was surprised to see that he fought like a Lanconian.
One of the thieves fell and Rowan went after the other one while Jura still stayed close to his back.
She had been trained well and they worked together as if they were dancing. When he moved, she moved.
She heard the second thief scream in pain, but she didn’t turn her head because, just as she thought might happen, a third thief came tearing from the forest, a sword raised above his head and coming straight at her. She parried his blow and steel rang against steel.
“Run, Jura, run,” Rowan commanded, and she cursed him for trying to confuse her. She was trained to obey orders but this was a bad order.
She fought the man with all her strength, not even hesitating when his steel cut into her upper arm. The man was frenzied as his sword raised and lowered, and Jura took each blow on her own sword. Then she counterattacked and began to push him back toward the forest with angry, aggressive blows of her own.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Rowan, finished now with his own fight, come toward her, but he stopped and watched instead.
Jura pinned the thief against a tree, ready to ram her sword into his belly.
“No!” Rowan said. “He is Lanconian.”
“He is Vatell,” Jura said, but she hesitated and didn’t kill the man.
“Here,” Rowan said, holding out a heavy meat-filled pie to the man. “Take this and take your friends. They are only wounded. Remember that your lives are a gift from the king. The king of all the Lanconians.”
The thief looked at Rowan the same way Jura felt, as if Rowan were crazy, and it was good to put miles between them. He snatched the pie and ran into the forest while the other two men, groaning, limped off.
The sun was beginning to rise now and Rowan looked at Jura’s bleeding arm then led her to sit on a nearby rock while he brought linen and fresh water from his saddle carriers. Tenderly, he began to wash and bandage her arm. It was a shallow cut.
“I have not seen that before,” he said softly. “I mean the way you stayed by my back. Feilan said nothing to me of women who guard a man’s back.”
“Perhaps he took it for granted. What does an Englishwoman do? If you had been here with your sister, what would she have done?”
“Lora would have hidden in the forest as I told you to do.”
“And she would have been taken by the third thief or he would have killed you when he attacked your back. Together, we made an impenetrable column with eyes all around.”
Rowan was frowning. “I see that but I do not like it. The men should be trained to guard each other’s backs.”
“Men are the stronger fighters, and quite often a woman only guards, she does not fight. It would be wrong to waste a strong arm merely to protect.”
Rowan finished the bandaging but he was still frowning. “I thank you for your protection this time but next time you must—”
Jura kissed him. Her action surprised both of them.
He drew back from her, his eyes dark with longing. “Jura,” he whispered.
She knew what he was going to ask: she was to beg him. Angrily, she stood and went to her horse. “If we are to reach Brita, then we must ride.” Every bit of her fury told in her voice and her manner as she mounted her horse and rode away, not looking to see if he followed.
They were on higher ground now, always traveling up into the mountains that formed the northern borders of the Lanconian territory and the air was cooler and thinner. They were also off the path Cilean had told Jura about and it was taking longer to reach Brita’s fortified city.
Rowan rode beside her but she did not look at him.
“What does this Brita look like?” he asked.
Jura kept her chin up. “I have never seen her and I have never asked anyone about her appearance. She is Daire’s mother, so she is old; she has led armies against Thal and the Fearens. When I was a child, I heard she even attacked the Zernas, so she must be scarred from battles. I do not imagine she is a beauty if that is what you are seeking.”
“Jura, can’t we—” Rowan began, but Jura urged her horse away from him.
She could forgive much of his strangeness because he was an Englishman, but she could not forgive his flirting with a maid one minute and rejecting her a few hours later. At midday they stopped to eat by a stream and Jura looked at her reflection in a still pool of water. She had never been concerned with her looks before, only with her prowess with a weapon, but she had seen the looks in men’s eyes and knew they found her desirable. So why did her English husband reject her? Was it because she wasn’t blonde as his sister was? Did he only like pale-skinned women?
At dusk they camped. They did not light a fire because now they were very close to Brita’s walled city.
“It would be too much to hope that you remain behind tomorrow,” Rowan said, his eyebrows raised in question as he looked at her in the fading light.
“Someone must watch your back,” she answered. “I thought we would ride into the city tomorrow: $$$ believe we can get in without question. It is good you speak our language. We will identify Brita and the first time she rides out, we will take her. There is a peasant’s hut a day’s ride back; we can keep her there while you talk to her. We will have to watch that the peasants do not betray us, though.”
“Is that all the decisions you have made?” Rowan asked in a low voice. “You have not also perhaps decided that I am not allowed to participate? Perhaps I would be too much in your way.”
“You are the one who tells me to stay in the forest,” she said, not understanding what she had done now to make him angry. “Do you have another plan that is better than mine?”
“No,” he said through clenched teeth, “it is the same plan I had except that I was to ride into the city alone but—” He stopped.
“What is the difference whether I say the plan or you do? I think it is good that we agree on something.”
Rowan kicked at a rock with his toe. “You are a woman,” he muttered.
“Not enough of one,” she said under her breath, and turned away. Winning a man seemed to be easy. All she had to do was outwrestle, outshoot, outrun, outjump fifty or so other women, but what in heaven’s name did it take to please a man after one won him?
They slept a few feet apart, and during the night Rowan’s restless tossing woke her. Instinctively, she moved beside him, and in his sleep he reached out for her and pulled her to him, clutching her to him tightly He felt so good to her, so strong, so warm, so right. She snuggled close to him and slept.
In the morning she woke before he did and quickly rolled away from him. She couldn’t bear another of his “beg me” talks.
They rode into Brita’s city as soon as the gates were open. It was not a rich city and it was very different from Escalon. Here were houses and tiny, narrow shops and men and women running to and fro. But there was an air of poverty about the place, the city smelling of excrement that hadn’t been hauled away and rotting meat carcasses. She and Rowan, in their rich clothes, were stared at by raggedy peasants.
They stopped to buy mugs of buttermilk from a street vendor.
“And where does Brita live?” Rowan asked.
“Queen Brita,” Jura said, smiling at the vendor. “We have business with her.”
“There,” the man said, pointing to a stone house butted up against the north side of the stone wall that surrounded the city. It was a large but ordinary house, not nearly as large or as rich as the house where Rowan and Jura had stolen the clothes they wore.
“She hunts today,” the vendor said, “and you may see her ride past with her guard. There! The door opens now and there comes her guard.”
Rowan and Jura nodded thanks to the man and moved into the shadow of a building as they waited for the queen and her guard to pass.
No matter that the Vatell tribe did not own good grazing or cropland, their queen did not skimp on the magnificence of her guard. All twenty men who rode with her were richly dressed in fine blue wool, and their weapons were of high-quality steel that Jura knew had not come from Lanconia. Their horses were tall, spirited, beautiful animals that looked well fed and well exercised
.
But Brita put the men to shame. She rode in the middle of these handsome, erect men and she was like the sun surrounded by twenty moons. She was tall, slim, and absolutely beautiful. She wore a long gown in the English style that fitted about her waist very tightly and it was made of rich, cream-colored wool that set off her dark hair and eyes to advantage.
As she rode past, the city came to a halt as every man, woman and child, and it seemed, every animal, paused to look at her. There was a hush when she had left the gates.
“Old, is she?” Rowan said to Jura. “No wonder men follow her. I might follow her myself.”
Jura glared at him but he was smiling in an insipid way at the gate where Brita had just disappeared. “Are we going to go after her or not?” she hissed at him.
“This is one task I shall love,” he said, grinning idiotically and not seeing Jura’s angry glare.
They mounted their horses and rode out of town to a low ridge where they could look down on the city and the plain below. Brita and her men did not go far from the city walls as they rode into the surrounding forest to begin their hunt.
“I will follow her and—”
“We will follow her,” Jura said. “We will separate her from her men and then take her. I can throw my cloak over her and—”
“You will follow me and do what I tell you. Now come on. We will ride around the east side and watch her, then take her when we can.”
In the end it was Jura who made it possible for Rowan to capture Brita. The queen had separated from most of her men, and with only two guards near her, she was pursuing a big, tusked boar. Jura thought she was ridiculous wearing that white dress while hunting, but Rowan wore an odd expression as he watched her.
“Distract the men,” Jura said to him, “and I will lead the boar away. Brita will follow the animal.”
Jura saw the expression on Brita’s face, that sense of pursuit, the elation of it, the exhilaration. Her guardsmen held back, watchful and listening. Their heads went up when they heard a man’s cry of distress from behind them and all but one of them left their queen to investigate.