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KNIGHTS
LINDA LAEL MILLER
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Gloriana watched in horror as Kenbrook struck the heavy timber floor with his full weight, and was kneeling beside him before she’d consciously decided to move. She said his name, and he responded with a groan but did not open his eyes.
Panicked, Gloriana called to him again and shook him, but he made no answer, nor did he waken. She scrambled to get water and doused his head, and still he failed to stir. Finally, she tried to drag him across the floor, hoping to hoist him onto the bed, but his inert frame was so heavy that she could not manage even an inch of progress.
Tears burned on her cheeks as she dashed back for a pillow and blanket.
“Dane!” she called, patting his face smartly.
He merely sighed.
Gloriana barely heard the noise at the door at first; then she realized Gareth had returned and was about to enter. She dashed behind the folding screen and wrenched on a plain brown kirtle, not bothering with a chemise.
“Gareth, hurry!” she shouted. “Something is wrong with your brother!”
The ancient lock turned, and when the door opened, two of Gareth’s biggest men entered, looking cautiously from right to left, obviously expecting an ambush. Their eyes fell on Kenbrook, lying prostrate in the middle of the floor, and one of them actually smiled.
“All’s well, your lordship,” the man called over his shoulder. “The trick worked, and Lord Kenbrook is having himself a wee rest.”
Gloriana stood over Dane, her hands bunched into fists, her whole being suffused with rage. It was the wine, she thought, recalling that her husband had taken a deep draft just before collapsing. They’d drugged a portion of it, with an eye to subduing Kenbrook, that they might enter the prison chamber without fear.
Gareth followed close behind the two giants, who kept watchful eyes on Kenbrook despite his insensate condition. Seeing the look on Gloriana’s face and interpreting it accurately, her brother-in-law raised one hand in a bid for silence.
“It will do him no lasting harm,” he said, sparing no more than a glance for his brother. He smiled fondly. “You look well, Gloriana. Are you happy here?”
All that kept Gloriana from flinging herself upon her alleged guardian, snarling and scratching like a she-wolf, was the sure knowledge that he would find such an attack merely irritating—perhaps even amusing.
“How did you know that Dane would take your poisoned wine?” she asked. “If I had been the one to drink it, and he had kept his wits about him, you would be better off closed up in this room with a field bull than with Kenbrook!”
Gareth sighed. Behind him were servants, huffing and blowing, bringing barrels and a large copper bathtub, among other things. “You hardly drink at all,” he replied, “but Dane likes his wine, and I knew he would be ready for the second ewer sooner or later. It was mere good fortune that it happened so quickly.”
“I shall never forgive you for this,” Gloriana said. There was no inflection in her voice, only a cool smoothness.
“On the contrary,” Gareth replied, with the utmost gentleness, “I have every reason to believe you will not only forgive me—in good time, of course—but declare your undying gratitude.” He crouched beside Dane and touched the pulse at the base of his brother’s throat with an almost tender solicitude. Gloriana could not doubt that, however bizarre his means of showing it, Gareth loved Dane in spirit and in truth. “He’ll come round in an hour or so, I trust,” he mused, and rose again to face Gloriana.
The servants Gareth had brought were all over the chamber, it seemed, laying out a meal and fresh garments for both Gloriana and Dane, setting water to heat over a special brazier brought for the purpose. One, a woman Gloriana knew well from the castle, went to the bed and tossed back the rumpled covers.
“Not yet,” the chambermaid said, in answer to her lord’s unspoken question, which had been asked with a mere raising of his eyebrows.
Gloriana’s face burned. “Perhaps,” she muttered bitterly, thinking of a conversation she’d had with Dane the night before, “you will require witnesses.”
Gareth looked away, but when he met Gloriana’s gaze again, she saw purpose and resolve blazing in his blue eyes. She realized then that he was as stubborn as the abbess’s little gray mule and wondered why she had not seen it before. “Do not try my patience,” he snapped. “Nor is it prudent to taunt me with suggestions you would not wish me to enforce!”
She subsided, but only slightly. A new truth was dawning on her in those moments, a soul-shaking surprise that her pride would never allow her to confess, except in her private prayers. She, Gloriana, who treasured her freedom, did not truly wish to leave the tower just yet. She wanted to stay there, alone with Kenbrook, until they’d settled what needed settling, for good or for ill. The outside world held too many distractions.
“What has Edward to say of my disappearance?” she threw out.
Gareth was already turning to leave, but he paused at her question and, with an expression of deep chagrin, replied, “Poor lad. He believes you and Kenbrook have reconciled and gone off to celebrate the resumption of your marriage in the usual way. There’ll be no help from that quarter, if that was what you were hoping for. The boy is heartbroken, I confess, but also resilient, as youths always are. He’s already set himself, our Edward, to the task of consoling the mademoiselle.”
With that, the servants went out, followed by Gareth and, finally, the soldiers. The door was soundly closed and locked behind them.
Gloriana looked round and saw that they had filled the copper tub and set out soap and cloths for drying. She knelt again and shook Dane. “Awake,” she told him, in a voice at once stern and kindly. “If you do not, I shall take your bath for myself, and you will have none.”
Miraculously, Kenbrook opened his eyes. If it hadn’t been for the bewilderment she glimpsed in their blue depths, Gloriana would have suspected him of deliberately feigning unconsciousness all the while Gareth was in the chamber.
“Ah,” he said, levering himself onto an elbow, “but I would see you unclothed.”
Gloriana smiled, more than passing glad that Dane had come around, and was willing to overlook his impudence. Letting his comment pass, she said, in exaggerated tones of sympathy, “You have suffered sorely, my lord, between that lump on your head and your swooning spell.”
Kenbrook gained a sitting position, then stood, wavering. “I did not swoon,” he said pointedly. “I presume this was some trick of Gareth’s—the wine tasted odd, I will say, even for the poor swill that it is.”
“You presume aright,” Gloriana replied. “You were drugged. I suspect your brother arranged the tampering not so much to subdue you, as I first believed, but to ensure that you would not be harmed in a struggle.”
Kenbrook made his unsteady way to the tub, hauled his tunic off over his head before ridding himself of his shirt and breeches and woolen hose, and stepped into the water.
Gloriana watched him, unblinking, the whole while thinking how splendid he was, even though he bore the scars of fierce battles upon his chest and right thigh. He settled into the tub with a lusty sigh.
“We were having a conversation just before you collapsed,” Gloriana reminded him, busying herself at the table, where a basket full of cakes and other delicacies had been left by one of the servants.
Kenbrook made a lengthy enterprise of remembering. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You had just offered yourself to me, as boldly as a tavern wench might do, and I, in my knightly virtue, had set the whole of the chamber between us in order to save you from your own base nature.”
“You are past arrogant,” Gloriana said, biting into one of the little honeycakes from the basket, but there was no venom in her voice.
“Pray, come here and scrub my back, fair Gloriana.”
“Scrub your own back,” Gloriana replied promptly, sitting down at the table. For the moment, she was more interested in the honeycake.
“There was a time,” Kenbrook informed her in long-suffering tones, “when women obeyed their masters. The world is changing.”
Gloriana thought of the airplane that had originally brought her to England, as the child Megan Saunders. “Yes,” she agreed. “You cannot begin to imagine what lies ahead.”
“And you can?”
She did not respond, for the temptation to tell him her strange story was perilously strong. She wondered where her writings were, the bits and scraps of parchment upon which she had so busily scratched out her memories when she was yet a child. She supposed Edwenna had destroyed the scribblings, or hidden them, as she had the doll and clothes. But they had not been in the trunk in the attic of Cyrus’s house, with the other things.
Kenbrook was luxuriating in his tub. If the treated wine had left him with any ill effects, he hid them well. “There is something very unusual about you,” he said, tilting his head sideways to consider her. “You are stronger than most women, and bigger. Your skin is good and your teeth are uncommonly sturdy.”
“You make me sound like a horse to be sold or traded at the fair,” Gloriana commented, without particular concern. She was perishing to know what he’d been about to tell her when the drugged wine had brought him low, but she wasn’t about to ask.
He smiled and sank to his chin. “You know I speak truth,” he said. “You are different from other women. You get odd ideas—the sort an ordinary female would blush to consider, let alone execute.”
“Perhaps I am mad,” she suggested rather blithely, “like the Lady Elaina.”
“Elaina is not mad,” Dane responded, without a hint of reprimand in his voice. “She merely sees and hears more clearly than the rest of us do.”
Gloriana sat very still. She might have spoken, might have told him everything she knew and had guessed about herself, but suddenly the room was filled with a strange whirring sound, as though from a swarm of bees. A blue mist rose all round, blotting out the light, obliterating Dane, moving and changing like a gossamer curtain.
She watched in horrified fascination as the tower room changed before her eyes into a strange version of itself. The floor was different, and the walls were hung with brightly colored paintings. People in strange dress moved about, studying the artwork and talking among themselves in that odd, quick langauge she remembered from earliest childhood. Gloriana was yet seated, but the table had vanished and she had no sense of the chair beneath her. A very little boy in short pants, a shirt, and shoes like the ones hidden away in the attic of the village house was the only one who seemed to see her.
“Lay-dee,” he said, pointing.
Gloriana was terrified that she would be parted from Dane, perhaps forever. She prayed, in frantic silence, to be returned to the thirteenth century, for that was her home.
She did not know how long she remained, suspended, before the vision faded and she was back in the chamber she recognized, with Dane. He was no longer in the tub, but standing beside her, clad only in the tunic he’d discarded earlier. He cupped her chin in his hand and stared deep into her eyes.
“God’s blood, Gloriana, what just happened here?” he demanded in a raw whisper. He was understandably pale and visibly shaken.
“I don’t know,” she managed to reply miserably, after several failed attempts at speech. “What did you see?”
He dragged a chair close and sat upon it, his knees pressing against Gloriana’s. “What sort of trick was that?” he countered. His eyes were narrowed, and he was trembling a little, this brave soldier who had faced the Turks. “I swear, Gloriana, there was something more potent than common sleeping powders in that wine. You vanished, even as I was looking at you.” Dane caught her hands in his, found them cold, and rubbed them absently to restore circulation. “Either my wits have deserted me or you are a sorceress working spells.”
Gloriana shivered, for to be accused of performing magic was a deadly matter. Many unfortunates had perished after such a charge was made, and their punishments had been too terrible to think about. “I am not a witch,” she whispered desperately. “Please—do not utter such blasphemy again!”
“I saw you disappear,” Dane insisted, gripping her shoulders. He wasn’t hurting her, but she couldn’t have escaped his hold on any account.
She lowered her head. “Surely it was the wine,” she said, “and nothing more.”
“Look at me,” he commanded.
Gloriana’s will failed her; she raised her eyes to meet his. “I cannot explain,” she said despondently. “For I myself do not understand. I was here, and then I was … I was still in his room, but in another part of time, I think. There were people, but their clothes were odd….”
Kenbrook was plainly dissatisfied with her answer. His stare, full of wonder and confusion, made her feel like some sort of peculiar specimen found on the underside of a moldy leaf. His voice was raspy. “Has this ever happened before?”
“Once,” Gloriana confessed, barely able to force the word past her lips. “When I was a little girl.”
“What happened?”
She clasped her hands across her middle and bent slightly forward, not sick, but unable to sit still. She didn’t want to tell, could hardly bear to remember. “I was with a group of other children, from Briarwood School. I’d been left there, at the school, I mean, because my mother and father didn’t want me. We—we came to see the village, and the castle, and there was a gate—”
Dane drew Gloriana out of her chair and onto his lap. His arms made a circle of safety around her. “Edwenna, not want you?” he scoffed, in the tenderest way. Moved by her distress, he smoothed her hair with his hands. “Utter nonsense. She adored you—everyone knew she lived to indulge your every wish.”
Gloriana slipped her arms around Kenbrook’s neck. “Edwenna,” she whispered, as though to bring that good woman back by magic. She turned her head and looked deep into her husband’s troubled and bewildered eyes. “Edwenna wasn’t truly my mother.”
“You were a foundling,” Dane said quietly. “I remember that now.”
“This is a snarl and I am caught,” Gloriana whispered. “I wish to tell the truth to at least one living person, my lord, but I am so afraid.”
“What could be so terrible that you would not tell your husband?” Dane’s voice was low and thoughtful, almost coaxing. In attempting to calm her, he had plainly soothed himself as well.
“A husband who wishes to send me to a nunnery, that he might marry someone else,” Gloriana reminded him. Her heart was thudding so hard she feared she would swoon from it, so fast did her blood rush through her veins.
“I started to explain that earlier, before Gareth’s treated wine had its effect. Something has changed for me—I would preserve this marriage. Tell me your dark secret, Gloriana.”
She gnawed at her lower lip for a few moments. “You won’t believe me,” she said. “Not in the beginning, at least. But I can prove some of what I am about to say once we’re free again.”
Kenbrook leaned back in the chair, watching her face, and simply waited for her to go on.
Gloriana plunged her fingers into her hair. “But when I show you evidence of my claim, you will name me witch—”
“I could already do that,” Dane interrupted reasonably, lowering her hands, holding them between his own. “After all, I saw you vanish into the ether just a few moments past.”
She stared at him. “You know what they would do, and I am not evil—I swear I am not!”
“No one is going to hurt you,” Kenbrook insisted. “Besides, I have no plans to tell the world what happened here, if for no more admirable reason than that I do not wish to put my own sanity in question.”
It was true Kenbrook would be thought demented if he told her secret to anyone. He might even be accused along with Gloriana of working the devil’s will. She must tell him now, she knew that, and yet she could not think how to frame the words of her confession. She turned her thoughts within, engaging them in the problem, and Kenbrook was uncommonly patient and did not prod her.
A long time passed before she spoke, and even then, she faltered. “Things are not so simple as they seem, and it would appear, too, that time is not a matter of moment following moment, year following year. Creation is … it has many layers, I think, rather like an onion, or the rings inside a tree trunk. Each is separate, in its way, yet still part of the whole.”
Kenbrook frowned slightly, then nodded for her to continue.
“You and I come from different parts of the tree.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “You’ll have to make it clearer than that, milady. I am a soldier, not a scholar.”
“Imagine history as the trunk of a great oak with many, many rings,” Gloriana said, after a moment or two of hard thought. “Each ring represents a different year.”
“Go on.”
“I was born in a very distant age,” Gloriana said all in a rush, squeezing her eyes shut. “One that has not yet dawned.”
“You are saying that you’ve come to us from some later time.” Dane spoke matter-of-factly, without judgment but also without affirmation.
Gloriana stared at him, amazed that he had spoken so calmly, so reasonably. “Yes.”
“What year?”
“I was a small child at the time,” Gloriana said, watching his face, trying to work out whether he believed her or not. He was clearly fascinated. “I don’t remember the year. Maybe I never knew in the first place.” She couldn’t bear the suspense another moment. “You do believe me, don’t you?”
Kenbrook considered her at length. “I am inclined to think you speak the truth,” he said at last. “If you can disappear—and I trust the testimony of my eyes and my brain, for I am not a fanciful man—it seems possible that you might also travel through time. Surely one feat is no stranger than the other.”
Gloriana was so relieved that she sagged against him, resting her head upon his shoulder and drawing deep, tremulous breaths. “Thank you,” she said.
He stroked her hair. “We will speak of this again, and I shall wish to see this proof you spoke of earlier.” His lips brushed her forehead. “I could not stand it if you were lost to me,” he said, so softly that her heart heard the words more clearly than her ears.
She sat upright again, to look into Dane’s fierce blue eyes. “It would not be honorable,” she reminded him, “to swear your devotion only because you are held captive in a tower and want a pleasant diversion.”
“You are my wife,” he said. “I would claim you.”
A hot flush suffused Gloriana from scalp to toes. “Now?”
“Only if that is your wish.”
She bounded off his lap. It was her wish that their marriage should be real, and that meant consummation. She could not doubt that the experience would be more than pleasant, given the sweetly wicked things he had taught her in the night. So why was she hesitating? Why was her heart pounding, fit to burst through her chest wall?
Dane stood, and the faintest shadow of a smile rested upon his lips. “Perhaps you need time, after all, to accustom yourself to the idea.”
Gloriana was pacing, hands clasped, fingers interlocked. “The sun is high,” she said in a whisper. “Besides, someone might be listening at the door.” A truly horrid thought struck her. “Or looking through the keyhole!”
After retrieving his breeches from the floor next to the bath-tub, Dane crossed the room to the great double doors and hung the garment over the latch, easily obscuring the view. He returned to the table, keeping the width of its surface between them, and purloined a honeycake from the basket. “As for the other part,” he said, after taking a bite and relishing it in a way that roused still other unseemly memories of the night before, “you’ll simply have to be quiet.”
Gloriana raised the fingertips of her right hand to her temple. Things were happening too fast; only minutes earlier, some secret veil had been parted, and she had slipped through—into another time. She had uttered a truth so long and so well hidden that she’d almost forgotten it herself. Now Kenbrook, who had wanted, just yesterday, to put her aside and take another woman for his wife, wished to bed her after all.
She could not stand still, but moved from one part of the tower room to another in her agitation. Dane watched her in amused silence until she wore herself out and slumped down onto a wooden chest.
Kenbrook went to the harp, which stood on the opposite side of the chamber, and strummed the strings, making brief, chaotic music.
“What are you afraid of, Gloriana?” he asked.
She wet her lips nervously. “I fear being used, my lord,” she said truthfully, “and then cast aside. I fear that you merely wish to spend the shock of what I have told you—what you have seen—”
He strummed the harp strings again, perfectly composed and patently unhurried. “There is plenty of time for both of us to get used to the idea,” he replied. “Gareth, damn his eyes, has seen to that.”
Having thus spoken, he found breeches and woolen hose among the garments that had been provided for his captivity and finished dressing. When he returned to the table, in the center of the room, he carried a board and chess pieces, also left by their benign jailers.
Gloriana watched from her perch on the chest, feeling silly, and incredibly shy, and very shaken. “How can you be so calm,” she demanded as he prepared the board for play, “when you saw a woman vanish before your eyes?”
“I have seen other strange sights,” Kenbrook replied without bothering to look up. She had suspected her husband would not be an easy man to surprise, but to witness such a spectacle and be virtually unmoved was incredible. No wonder Dane had a reputation for keeping his head in all manner of situations. “Shades and specters, for instance.”
Gloriana gasped, then lowered her voice to a hushed whisper. “You are baiting me, my lord,” she accused. “You cannot have seen such things!”
He smiled. “There are more ghosts in this pile of stones,” he said, drawing back a chair and inviting her to take it with a grand gesture of one hand, “than in all of London. Hadleigh Castle has its share too.”
“There are always shadows and strange sounds in such old places,” Gloriana said. She rose, however, and walked slowly toward Kenbrook to take the offered chair. He had given her the jade chess pieces, and she turned the board so as to have the ivory ones.
Kenbrook sat across from her, regarded his inanimate troops, and sighed. “After you,” he said.
“Edward used to claim there were Roman soldiers marching these halls,” Gloriana fold him, advancing a pawn. “He only wanted to scare me, as I suspect you are trying to do.”
Her husband moved a corresponding pawn, but only after great deliberation, and she nursed a hope that he might be a passable player. Gareth had never beaten her at the game, nor Edward, nor Cradoc, for all his influence in the spheres of heaven. Eigg, the Scot, had put her king in checkmate once, but that had been five years ago, and he had not managed to best her again.
“If I wanted to frighten you,” Dane said reasonably, watching her move with the intensity of a general assessing the strategy of an enemy, “I would wait until nightfall to tell tales of ghosts and goblins. That way, you might seek safety in my arms.”
Gloriana made another quick, seemingly impetuous move, but she was well aware of the position and potential use of every piece on the board. “There is much to settle between us, Lord Kenbrook.”
He quelled the grin that curved his mouth, but not quickly enough to hide it from Gloriana’s sharp gaze. “I disagree, milady. We have made too much of our differences. It is time we consider our common interests.”
“Which are?”
“Chess, for one,” Kenbrook said, pondering the small, checkered field of battle. He nodded toward the manuscripts stacked on one of the tables; pages enough to provide a year’s reading for both of them. “Poetry and history.” He raised his eyes, at last, to meet hers. She saw laughter in them, and a tender acceptance that pinched her heart. “And pleasure,” he finished.
Gloriana dropped her gaze to the board. “I cannot deny what you say,” she allowed, taking his bishop. “I am very fond of chess.”
Kenbrook laughed. Then, in three moves, he put her king in checkmate.
“Do you love me, Gloriana?” he asked while she was still gasping in disbelief over this swift and utterly unprecedented defeat.
She looked at him steadily. “Yes,” she said.
“Do you wish to be my wife, truly, and bear my children?”
“Yes,” she said again.
“To do those things, you must lie down with me.”
Gloriana regarded him for several moments before answering. “Suppose you find me wanting?”
One side of Kenbrook’s impudent mouth tipped upward in what was almost, but not quite, a grin. “I have already found you most satisfactory,” he said, and held out one hand to her. “You cannot but please me, milady. The question is, shall I please you?”
Gloriana laid her palm across his, felt his fingers close around the fragile bones, and shut her eyes for a breathless moment as he brought her to her feet.
He did not lead her immediately to the bed, as she had both hoped and feared he would do, but instead drew her into his arms and kissed her.
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