by Lynn Kurland
Before she could call to the man and see if he lived, she found herself suddenly pushed into the dungeon and sent sprawling. The door behind her clanged shut and the key was turned. Booted feet ran quickly back up the passageway.
Mary crawled to her knees and felt for the metal bars that now held her captive. She shook them, called for help, then fell silent when she realized the full import of her situation.
She was locked in her father’s dungeon—quite possibly with a man who might throttle her as easily as he might have looked at her.
Damnation, when would she learn to look before she leapt?
She backed away from the bars and flattened herself against the wall. There were, she could readily see, no other avenues of escape. There was a grate on the floor, but she had no hope of lifting it up. Not even her father could have managed it.
She listened frantically for the sound of another’s breathing, for the sound of a footfall, for the whisper of a weapon coming from a sheath. Unfortunately, all she could hear was the endless roar of the sea, something she generally found to be quite pleasing. She was having difficulty enjoying it at present.
She jumped when she heard the scrape of a boot against the stone. She would have given much for a knife, or a sword, or the skill to use either. She took the urge to scream and ruthlessly squelched it. It wouldn’t serve her to show any fear. She folded her arms over her chest—ignoring the fact that it felt more as if she were trying to comfort herself—and stuck her chin out.
“Prisoner,” she said firmly, hoping she sounded much more confident that she felt, “I can slay you with my bare hands if you try to harm me.”
She saw a shape detach itself from the darkness. Her eyes were perhaps of more use than she’d hoped, for she could see his outline well enough. Aye, it was the man from the passageway. He was wearing those odd hose and a tunic that was too short. He was very tall and quite broad and she was an utter fool. If she managed to survive the next quarter hour, she just might throw herself at her father’s feet and tell him that.
She saw the flash of a dagger in the stranger’s hand and she screamed before she could stop herself.
She would have screamed again when his hand came out of the darkness and took hers, but she was too terrified. She could only squeak as he tugged on her. She went with him because she was apparently too pitiful to do anything else. He stopped at the door.
“Less wind here,” he said, his teeth chattering.
It took a moment or two before she realized the import of his words. She gaped at him. “You aren’t going to hurt me?”
He started to fumble with the lock, using a pair of daggers to their best advantage. “Nay.” He worked a bit longer, then dropped one of his blades. He let out an impressive string of curses—in Gaelic, no less—then pulled away from the door. He shoved his other dagger back down his boot and began to blow on his hands.
Mary was so surprised that he wasn’t going to harm her—his chivalry upstairs aside—she could only stand there and look at him stupidly. She shrank back when he reached out, then realized that all he intended was to take her hands in his and rub them to keep them warm.
She let out her breath slowly, but found nothing to say. She had fully expected harm, but instead she had found kindness. All she could do was look at the very faint outline of his form and say nothing. His hands were very cold, but that didn’t seem to deter him. She let him be about his work for several minutes before she attempted to speak.
“Someone locked me in,” she ventured. She said it in her tongue, even though she was able to speak his reasonably well. Keep something in reserve was something her father said constantly to his lads in training and he hadn’t been talking about strength of arm.
“Why?” the man asked, shivering audibly.
“I have no idea,” she managed. “I’m just a, um, an unimportant soul in the household.”
He muttered a curse about the cold, then stomped his feet a time or two before he continued with her hands. “Will someone come?”
“Hopefully,” she said, finding that the cold was now burning her throat.
“Why did you come?”
His French was indeed dreadful, as if he’d learned it from someone who had learned it from someone else who hadn’t spoken it very well. But at least he was attempting it with confidence.
“Why did I come?” she asked, her teeth beginning to chatter. “To rescue you, of course.”
He went still. “Why?”
“Because you protected me above. If we escape here, I will see if I can’t help you out the front gates.”
He bowed his head briefly. “Thank you.”
Mary was pleased with that despite the difficulty she was having not weeping from the cold. If he was going out the gates, then so was she. Just exactly what she’d hoped for.
She hoped for it for a good hour before she saw what she thought might have been a faint lightening of the passageway. She was almost certain it was her imagination until she heard her father’s curses coming very clearly from up the way.
“Help has arrived,” she said gratefully.
Her companion said nothing, but he did stand behind her and block some of the breeze. Mary listened to her father and winced at not only his curses, but his vow to have vengeance on any and all in the area. He caught sight of her, then gestured furiously for one of his guardsmen to unlock the door.
Before she could babble anything but incoherencies—it was very cold, after all—her father had wrenched the door open and yanked her out into the passageway. She fumbled for the stranger’s hand and pulled him along with her, which he seemed inclined not to fight.
Her father opened his mouth—no doubt to spew out more curses—then he froze. He stared in astonishment at the stranger for a handful of moments, then he shut his mouth with a snap.
“Leave us,” he barked at his men. “Sir Ranulf, you stay.”
Mary started to tell her father how kind the stranger had been to her, but before she could her father’s captain had brought the hilt of his sword down against the stranger’s head.
He fell to the ground with a rather unwholesome-sounding crash.
Robin looked at his captain. “Escort my daughter immediately upstairs and see she stays in her bedchamber.”
“Father—”
He shot her a look of such fury that she decided she would be wise to remain silent. For the moment.
“I have been combing this keep for you for the past hour,” he said in a low, tight voice. “I feared the worst. I wouldn’t have thought to look here if Styrr hadn’t said he’d seen you going into the kitchens, so perhaps you can look on him with a friend lier eye. And now, if you don’t want me to lose my temper fully, you’ll go along with Ranulf. Silently.”
Not when her escort out the gates was lying senseless behind her. Mary knew that if she merely left him behind, he would be thrown back into the dungeon and then any hope of putting the sword to Styrr’s plans for her would be finished. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised her to find ’twas Styrr who had locked her in just to try to bring her to her knees. But bring her to the altar?
Never.
She snatched up her Scotsman’s dagger and stood over him. She knew that her father could have disarmed her without bothering to stifle a yawn, but she didn’t care. She pointed the knife toward her father and stuck her chin out to give herself courage.
“Do not hurt him.”
Her sire studied her for a moment, then very deliberately folded his arms over his chest and glared. It was how he often intimidated messengers from other keeps. Unfortunately for him, she’d seen him do it too many times to be terrified.
Well, perhaps that wasn’t completely true. She knew she was treading on dangerous ground. There was a muscle twitching in his jaw. He was holding on to his temper, and that just barely.
“Does this pitiful whelp you’ve decided to champion have a name?” he asked with exaggerated politeness.
“We didn’
t perform introductions. We were too busy freezing.”
He wiggled his jaw, once. “I don’t suppose that since he neglected to tell you his name he told you where he was from, did he?”
“He didn’t,” she said, “though he cursed quite proficiently in Gaelic. I suspect he’s a Scot, though, again, we didn’t manage much speech.”
“Then what, by all the bloody saints, did you do for the past hour!” he shouted.
She lifted her chin a bit more. “He worked on the lock. And he rubbed my hands to keep them warm.”
Her sire’s jaw went slack. “He did what?”
“He kept my hands warm,” she repeated. She watched her father splutter in absolute fury. He was no worse than a terribly misbehaving horse—something she declined to point out—so she took a firmer grip on her fallen champion’s knife and refused to back down. “I don’t want you to hurt him.”
“I’ll kill him—”
“Then you’ll kill me first.”
He looked at her as if he’d never seen her before. Indeed, she had to agree with the sentiment. She had never in her life gainsaid her father in such a fashion. He hadn’t been any sort of tyrant, true, but he had been impossibly stubborn and full of all sorts of expectations where she and her brothers had been concerned. She had been excused from duties in the lists, but in all else she had been expected to make the same efforts that her siblings had. And in all the years she’d lived with her sire, she had always resorted to talking in circles until he threw up his hands and gave in just to be done with listening to her. She had never in her life simply defied him.
Until now.
He scowled fiercely at her, then jerked his head toward the passageway. “Go. I won’t kill him.”
“Don’t hurt him—”
“I won’t hurt him, either!” he bellowed.
She waited for another moment or two, just as she had seen him do countless times when he’d exacted a promise from someone he wasn’t quite sure would keep that promise, then nodded shortly. She handed him the dagger haft-first, then paused again.
“He was kind to me,” she said simply.
He was also going to be the one who helped her get out the front gates, but she supposed her sire didn’t need to know that at present.
She walked up the passageway with her sire’s captain, then paused and looked behind her. Her father had squatted down next to the man and was feeling for a heartbeat. There was no steel in his hands and he didn’t look as if he planned to throttle the man anytime soon. She turned away and followed Sir Ranulf, her hands tingling.
She didn’t think it was from the cold.
Chapter 5
Zachary woke to a pounding headache. Actually, it wasn’t just a headache, it was an ache that encompassed his entire head. He wasn’t quite sure how that was different from a garden-variety throbbing except that the current agony was the sort of pain that came from being clunked on the head twice with the hilt of a sword and a door caressing his nose. He didn’t dare move. Just being awake was enough to make him wish he weren’t. He settled for wiggling his nose briefly. It gave only a mild protest, so perhaps it hadn’t been broken after all, just insulted.
It was indication enough of the day he’d had that that was good news.
He opened his eyes and looked above him. There was light streaming in from a window set high into the wall, revealing a very authentic-looking medieval ceiling. The previous night was something of a blur, but he had no trouble recalling a pair of very unpleasant hours in something that would have passed for a refrigerator in the twenty-first century. He suspected most prisoners incarcerated in that dungeon froze to death out of a sense of self-preservation.
He wondered what had happened to the girl who’d tried to rescue him. He only hoped she wasn’t back in the dungeon, freezing, while he was ... well, he was freezing, too.
Then again, that might have been because he was not wearing any clothes.
He sat up, then clutched his head until it stopped spinning long enough for him to look around. He saw a handful of kitchen lads—they couldn’t have been more than nine or ten—who were watching him with grins. Another handful of kitchen maids were eyeing him with interest.
And there to his right, leaning back comfortably against the wall, was a man Zachary had no doubt was the lord of the castle.
It wasn’t that he was dressed in velvets and sporting heavy rings on his fingers. He just had that look about him, as if he were in charge and needed nothing but his mere presence to make sure everyone else understood that. He was definitely the same man who had opened the dungeon door the night before. He looked no less displeased now than he had then.
Zachary studied him a bit longer. He looked, actually, a great deal like Gideon de Piaget, except for the color of his hair. Zachary considered the genealogy he’d looked at the afternoon before. Was that Rhys, Robin, or even Phillip de Piaget? Or perhaps someone farther down the line? The man was dressed in medieval gear, true, but since Artane was in the north of England, the fashions wouldn’t have changed as swiftly as they might have in another location. Assuming he was still in Artane, it was conceivable that he could have been off by several decades.
That he was familiar enough with the past to know that little detail was something else contributing to his headache.
He wished he’d paid more attention to the names of those Artane lords, but he supposed it was too late for regrets now. He was facing Artane’s lord, whichever one it happened to be, and that was enough to know. He cleared his throat and inclined his head carefully.
“My lord,” he said.
Artane only continued to stare at him.
Zachary was profoundly grateful that at least part of him was covered by a crusty blanket. It could have been worse. He offered his most deferential smile.
“I wonder, my lord,” he said in his best medieval French, “if I might have my clothes back.”
Artane seemed to consider. “I suppose you might wonder that.”
Zachary realized, with a start, that not only was he missing his clothes, he was missing everything else as well. That was a disaster in the making. His dirks had been made in fourteenth-century Scotland and likely wouldn’t have aroused suspicion, but his Levis certainly would. Modern boots would have been the killing blow. He supposed he was fortunate he hadn’t woken to find himself tied to a stake.
Well, at least he would have been warm that way.
But he wasn’t precisely eager to see how warm that sort of fire might get, so he decided to see if he couldn’t find a way to get out the front gates without undue effort. A little visit to the solar upstairs was, he was certain, a complete nonstarter. He wasn’t accustomed to negotiating when he was less-than-adequately dressed, but, as Jamie was wont to say, there was always a new adventure around the next turn of century.
“Perhaps we could start with my boots,” he said, striving to put the right amount of expectation in his tone and hoping that his accent wasn’t so far off that Artane’s lord would burn him just for that, “and my knives.”
“I don’t imagine that you’re in any position to demand anything,” Artane said coolly.
“I wasn’t demanding,” Zachary said politely. “I was asking.”
Artane pushed away from the wall. “You have quite a bit of cheek for a lad with his arse bare to the wind—and one who has no good reason to be in my hall.”
That was indeed the sticking point and one Zachary didn’t want Artane thinking about any more than he likely had already. “I would like to be out of your hall as quickly as possible,” he said without hesitation. “The sooner the better, I’m sure.”
“And if I say you go nowhere?”
Zachary took a deep breath. “Then I’ll go anyway.” He’d done it before, and in more than one century.
“Oh, do you think so?” Artane asked in a very low, very dangerous voice.
“Do you think you can stop me?” was out hanging in the air in the middle of the kitchen befo
re he realized what he’d said.
Damn it, one more thing to fix. Engage brain before opening mouth was definitely going to have to go on his list. Probably at the top.
He was grateful for all the things he’d learned after grad school that had nothing to do with angles and inclines and structural integrity. He leaped to his feet and yanked a long, stout knife out of a boar’s carcass languishing on the work table, then snatched up a fire iron just in time to cross them above him and keep from having his head cleaved in twain as Artane brought his sword down.
It was not a pleasant skirmish. He was less interested in killing the lord of the hall than he was keeping himself alive—but he supposed he shouldn’t have bothered worrying about the first. Artane had an endless supply of energy and a technique that left Zachary wishing desperately for a sword so he might at least stand a chance of not being completely humiliated.
And he was quite uncomfortable fighting in the raw, as it were.
Jamie would have been apoplectic with laughter at the sight.
“Damn you, stop your smirking,” Artane snarled, almost skewering him.
Zachary didn’t have time to explain what he’d been thinking because it was all he could do to keep breathing and continue to keep himself unpierced. The world was beginning to spin wildly and he thought he just might lose the very fine dinner he’d had in Artane’s hall the night before. Well, he’d had that dinner several centuries in the future, actually, but who was counting?
“Robin!”
Zachary let the point of the fire iron drop to the stone floor, then collapsed against the table gratefully as Artane ceased his tortures with the sword. He looked to his left to see a very beautiful blonde standing at the entrance to the kitchen with her hands on her hips, apparently fighting her smile.
“Robin de Piaget, what, by all the blessed saints, are you doing?”
“Keeping myself occupied,” the lord of Artane said with a yawn. “Barely.”
“Your steward awaits you,” she said, “when you’re finished with your exercise here.”