‘This is not happening again,’ Nicholas said, trying to sound aggrieved, but he was laughing all the same.
Rhain wanted to gut him, would have, too, but he wanted to strangle Helissent more. It was early in the morning, he’d gotten no sleep and was exhausted. There wasn’t any rain this time, but she stood as stubbornly with his men as before.
Helissent, who was again dressed in everything she owned except there were no bags at her feet. From the look on Carlos’s face, he was the one who tied her bags to his horse. He would address Carlos’s assumptions another day.
Today, it seemed his attention would be taken by a woman he never wanted to forget…and who appeared as though she wouldn’t let him.
‘I’ll need help getting on the horse,’ she said.
Aware of his men’s eyes on him, he said, ‘I thought you were intending to stay.’
‘No. I’d like to travel to York.’
He couldn’t outright deny her. Only Nicholas knew of Reynold, but she didn’t know that, and still she stood here defying him.
He was too soft with her, but he was always too soft with her. The man he was before had been free, forgave easily and was curious. He thought that man was killed upon his mother’s death, upon learning the truth of his past.
One glimpse of Helissent in the inn and he learned that was a lie. He wasn’t dead, only wished he was.
‘Do you have any cakes?’ he said.
She pulled a tiny scroll from her belt. ‘No, but I have a parchment I thought you could read for me?’
He took it from her outstretched hand, twirled it in his fingers as he noted the darkened places where the mud had clung to it when Rudd threw it to the ground.
Then he handed it back to her and hoisted her on his horse.
* * *
They rode for hours, but Helissent didn’t speak and neither did Rhain.
He wasn’t angry this time. She knew what that felt like when she forced herself on the first trip.
No, Rhain’s silence was more powerful than his anger, with a frisson of something like anticipation.
It was more acute than the garden when he’d cupped her jaw, and leaned until his lips were close to hers. He hadn’t kissed her yesterday, but she’d wanted him to. His breath, his lips soft almost a zephyr against hers. Unerringly in that moment, she had intricately folded him into every bit of her like the most substantial of recipes.
She knew she could never extricate herself from him. He’d got too close and she had let him.
Riding with him didn’t help. The way he breathed, slow and steady, each inhale moving her own body until her breaths matched his and she had to force her lungs at a different pace.
But that didn’t separate him from her, not when he’d turn and she’d feel his warm breath against the curve of her ear, or feel the subtle pressure of his legs against the horse to urge it in some direction that somehow urged her, too.
His arms were worse. For though the intention was to cradle her on the horse, the result was they cradled her to him as well.
She hadn’t been held this much, or this close to another person for years, if ever. It had to be that that caused the ache inside her.
He was silent, with emotions she could only guess vibrating between them. The silence would continue if she didn’t break it. If she felt like this now, she didn’t know how much further she could ride…how much further he would let her.
He told her she would not be leaving with them today and she gave him no choice. She owed him an explanation for her demands.
But simply arguing that she needed to go to York wouldn’t be enough. She owed him much more than that. Except she didn’t feel like she had all the answers. She hoped the tiny scroll could help her.
‘Can you read the parchment if I take the reins?’ she said.
‘Of course,’ he said, releasing his entwined fingers from the leather straps and wrapping them around hers. Looser, but she felt the well-worn warmth of the reins, and wanted to hold them that bit closer. Slowly, he unrolled the tiny piece of paper to read the contents.
She barely glanced at it. After staring at it for hours and days, she had it memorized. It was all lines crisscrossed. There were letters next to numbers. Some she understood, most she did not.
Rhain’s thumb systematically brushed across and down the lines. While he spent a lengthy time looking at the small scrap of paper, she waited until the back of her neck prickled and her shoulders tightened with discomfort. Then she held out her hand. ‘I’m sorry, you can give it back, I just thought—’
‘I know how to read, Helissent,’ he interrupted, his tone wry. ‘I’m simply atrocious at reading ledgers.’
‘Ledgers?’
‘This is accounting, plain and simple. Some letters indicating goods, which I can’t decipher because they don’t amount to words, and numbers next to them indicating price. This number here is zero, which means the account was good. Whatever was bartered, it was paid for in full. Nothing was owed in the end.’
The prickling on the back of her neck rushed down her back to her feet. Like a wave of ice water in a cauldron that swamped the contents in the bottom. She felt like those drowning contents.
A ledger. No indication of how she fared as a child, alone and in pain. She knew Agnes was formal and brisk. But she’d expected, wished, for some inkling of caring from John and Anne.
‘This is an accounting of you, isn’t it? It’s what Rudd had that night?’
‘Yes, it’s between Agnes, the healer, and John and Anne from the inn. I…suppose it’s what they paid, or bartered to pay, for her care of me.’
He carefully rolled the parchment and put it away. She didn’t bother with noticing where because it didn’t matter.
It was just more of nothing to her. She shouldn’t be disappointed and yet she couldn’t help it. She was no better or worse than before. It just felt like it.
Gently, he took the reins from her, and she tucked her now-cold hands into her skirts.
‘Well, some of the handwriting on there is theirs at least.’
She almost cried then. Not because her hopes were nothing more than dregs, but because Rhain guessed why she wanted it to be read.
The ledger’s writing all looked the same to her, but it was kind for him to offer her something. He was a good man and owed much more than the trouble she layered on him.
She didn’t have any goods to barter with to make their account zero, but she had one thing she’d never given before.
‘I don’t remember much of my parents,’ she said. ‘I was but eight when the fire happened. My sister was four. My mother and I were hanging laundry. My father and sister were resting. My father was older than my mother. He was tall, lanky. Educated. He had an accent different than my mother’s English; I think he may have been French, but I don’t remember very well.’
Nothing in the way he moved the horse, or the way he breathed, told her he was listening. But she saw his right hand flit along the rein and knew his focus was on her words. It was enough for her to continue.
‘My mother was stern, and constantly waving her spoon around. I was terrified of that spoon. My sister, Aimee, would giggle. Father wasn’t much of a sheep farmer. He had a book. Small, but wrapped in the finest of cloths and positioned on a shelf. No matter how many times he took it down and read us a few of the words, we all held still to listen.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because….’
Something in the way he asked let her know she didn’t have to begin her tale this way. Even if she only told him the end, he wouldn’t care. He didn’t need to know everything, but for some reason she wanted him to.
For him to understand not like the villagers or innkeepers, who were there that day. They knew the facts. She wanted to tell Rhain her story because he had known what that parchment meant to her.
‘Because I owe you. You told me to stay and I’m here again.’
‘So since you have no cakes, you’ll pay me back with an entertaining tale of your horrific childhood.’
Mocking words indicating he didn’t truly think that. Derision in his voice belying that a part of him did.
‘No! You told me of the danger against you.’
‘Ah, a consolation prize for me because I’m a dead man.’
This conversation wasn’t going as she intended. Not that she had specific expectations. After all she never expected to tell the tale at all. Ever. But he had told her he fully expected to die from some powerful man’s sword. Then there was the way he looked for his mother’s pendant.
He told her to stay to protect her. She wanted him to know she listened, but she had her own powerful reasons to go.
‘Please.’ It was all she could say.
Rhain’s right hand clenched, released. Then he gave a sharp whistle that Nicholas turned around for. Whatever was communicated, Rhain slowed their horse and Nicholas kept pace so that soon there was distance between them.
‘You don’t have to,’ he whispered. ‘I’m taking you to York.’
‘I know.’
‘I’m a curious man. I may ask questions I have no right to ask.’
She thought she understood that as well. Except for the part when he said he had no right to hear her story.
In truth, she expected him to ask questions. At the same time, she expected this conversation to cause her pain. But there was another factor, one that she didn’t expect, and it felt like gratefulness. Because this man cared enough to be curious about her.
‘You have questions already?’ she said.
She sensed his quick smile. ‘Yes. Already.’
‘Then ask,’ she said, bracing herself.
‘Why do you not know more of your father?’ he said. ‘Did no one in the town talk to you about your parents?’
That wasn’t the question she expected, but she was thankful for the ease of it nonetheless.
‘No one. I think they thought it was best forgotten. John and Anne told me a little, but they, too, didn’t want to approach it. I don’t know how much they even knew. They were older than my parents. They had three sons and all of them were gone by the time I lived with them. They couldn’t have been close to my family because I don’t remember them from before the fire at all.’
‘But the village must have rallied to help you—’
‘Oh, no. There wasn’t a healer in our village. I was sent away.’ She adjusted in her seat. ‘I don’t remember much after the fire. The pain was excruciating. For weeks, I could only sense someone wrapped and gave me salves. When I could remember, there was a hut attached to caves. A brisk woman, Agnes, with gnarled hands. I remember honey. The taste of it on my lips. Day after day of honey. You’d think I’d be sick of it, but I think my craving for it only increased. It was almost a year later when I returned to the village.
‘John and Anne came for me. At that time, I was wrapped from head to toe in bandages I could change myself and pots of honey with herbs in it were in my sacks.’
Rhain remained quiet now though he’d warned her he’d ask questions. She didn’t know if his silence made it easier or harder to tell what she had to next. But it wasn’t her place to make further demands on him. To request he talk to make things easier for her.
She knew more than most that there was hardship in the world and hers was merely one tale.
‘John and Anne immediately took me to where my old home was,’ she continued. ‘I didn’t ask them; I think it was for me to comprehend that I would be living with them; that my family was truly gone and they would be my family. They were strangers and I hadn’t fully comprehended what they had done for me, what they would become to me. I had thought Agnes was my future. They waited patiently while I searched for trinkets. I may have been searching for hours. I didn’t expect to see my father’s book, but a burnt spoon handle would have done. I wasn’t looking for anything of worth. I thought… I thought everything useful had been used to pay the healer. Until Rudd told me otherwise.
‘Rudd had told me—’
‘I heard Rudd that night,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have let him live.’
Nicholas had said the same.
When Rhain didn’t elaborate, she rushed on. ‘Well, between the innkeepers and…his arrival, my life was good. They were old and I was happy helping them. I learned to bake.’
‘You learned to bake very well,’ Rhain said.
It was a question as much as anything else. ‘I scrounged up any spare ingredients I could find. Sometimes my cakes were tiny and they made barely a bite. But it was enough to keep going.’
‘No one helped you?’
‘John and Anne could cook, but they exchanged food or goods for bread, and I saw a way I could help them.’
‘You spent a lot of time in the kitchen…in the fires.’
‘You’re asking how I could stand it.’ She thought the conversation was going to be easier. ‘At first I couldn’t.’
It wasn’t only the lack of ingredients that caused the cakes to remain small, but also the amount of time she could stay within the kitchens while the fire blazed. She still braced herself before she faced the oven directly to retrieve a loaf. She’d burned herself more times than not, but the innkeepers had saved her and she’d do anything for them.
‘At first, the fires were too much. Yet sometimes there are people we know that are worth the pain,’ she said.
He exhaled a quick breath.
‘Do you know about that?’ she asked.
‘Very much.’
They rode in silence again, but this time, Helissent could feel Rhain’s turbulent thoughts. She had some of her own. Her tale wasn’t done yet. Though she wasn’t prepared to tell him all of the end, that part was between her soul and God, she wanted to tell him most. She wanted to bare part of her shame, if not her cowardice.
‘My mother saw the fire before it consumed the house.’
He made some vital sound and she stopped. Waited, but he stayed in silence, and so did she.
The only sound between them was the horse’s hooves beneath them. Its occasional snort as it pulled on the reins to catch up with the others. The men’s voices wafted around them, but they were far ahead, and she couldn’t follow their words. She and Rhain were alone as much as they’d ever been.
‘It’s enough,’ he said after a while. ‘What you said before. I don’t need to hear any more.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you…need to tell me?’
‘I’ve told no one this before. The villagers and the innkeepers knew the facts.’
‘But travelers, did they never enquire?’
He was curious, he was asking questions. She was glad for them. ‘When I was a child they asked many times,’ she said. ‘I never stayed around to listen.’
‘You wish to tell me otherwise?’
He’d wanted her to stay at Tickhill to protect her. He’d almost kissed her. He had been familiar to her from the beginning, but now it was more. Maybe that something more was what prompted her to say, ‘Very much.’
He did something startling then, he combined the reins in one hand and took one of hers and held it. She hadn’t realized she’d been trembling until he secured her own disfigured hand in his. She didn’t realize she needed that touch until that moment.
Her eyes focused on her hand in his, she said, ‘The fire didn’t look like much from a distance. If my father and sister were resting, then there was still a chance to get them. When they weren’t outside, we ran into the house. There we had to force our way in because the fire was worse inside.
‘My sister was in the main room, mere feet away from the door. My father was nowhere in sight. My mother shouted for me to take my sister out while she went to the back to get my father. I…’ she breathed a shaky breath ‘…never saw my mother again. I grabbed my sister’s hand. Her eyes were big, scared. So relieved to see me. There was a lot of billowing smoke. It burned to breathe; to see. I tripped on something, I don’t know what. I didn’t let go of my sister’s hand and she fell with me. We were scrambling up when part of the ceiling caved in. It pinned us down.
‘I was able to break free, but she was stuck. I knew my mother and father were already dead. The bedroom where my mother fled to was a wall of flames. I was holding my sister’s hand when the smoke overtook me.’
She couldn’t tell him the rest. Not when tears ran down her face and Rhain engulfed both her hands in his.
* * *
Rhain struggled to breath. The weight of her words, the weight of her pain was crushing him. How had she picked herself up afterward; how could she bake cakes? He knew before he asked the question, yet still he asked, ‘Why me, why now?’
She took a shaky breath. ‘Tickhill is wonderful, but it is too efficient. I couldn’t get lost there. I couldn’t find my way. I don’t know if you understand, but I need to be… I don’t know how to explain it.’
He did understand, pain, loneliness, an orphan. Tickhill was a king’s property. Rich, well supplied and prepared. Incompetence and inefficiency wouldn’t be accepted, and it had been running that way for years.
Whereas for the innkeepers, she learned to face the fires, to bake and cook. When they fell ill, she fed and cared for them. They truly needed her and she needed them just as much.
There was another part of her tale he understood as well. How her scars were outside and his were in. But scars were scars as were needs.
And he had them now. Every bit of her tale demanded he protect her, revere her. The halo of blond around her face, the delicate lines of her neck, the wave of her hand. The way she felt in his arms as they rode on and on… All of that was something else indeed. Desire. Lust. Need. All for her.
This brave, beautiful woman he found at this time of his life and he couldn’t give her an answer of why he understood her. For to answer her would be making some acknowledgment of her importance. She couldn’t be important to him.
‘It’ll take us days to reach York.’ His voice sounded hollow over the roaring in his ears. ‘You may live to regret it.’
He already did. More days in her company when his desire for her was undeniable.
More chances for Reynold to discover her, use her…kill her. So strong, brave, more than he could ever guess, but she stood no chance against Reynold’s sword or wrath.
‘I know you wished to protect me from this man after you, but I couldn’t stay at Tickhill.’
How could she still not understand the full truth of why he wanted her to remain at the castle? ‘I didn’t make arrangements for you to stay at Tickhill only to protect you from my enemy. I did it to protect you from me.’