king. He actually grew pale and belched vomit while witnessing the putting out of eyes or the paring of flesh with hot knives. Once, when she had ordered the chest of a murderer split open so that she might hold the warm, beating heart in her hands, Onfroi had swooned away like a virgin.
“Money?” she asked, looking up again.
“As much as you can levy in taxes without cheating John of his due.”
Seeing the faint smile on his lips, Nicolaa’s temper prickled to the surface again. “It will hardly compensate me for all these years of loyalty and compliance.”
Wardieu laughed outright. “You are loyal only unto yourself, Nicolaa. As for being compliant”—his gaze roved down to the voluptuous outline of her breasts—“I do not recall ever having to force you into my bed, nor ever demanding a pledge of faithfulness from you.”
“I was as faithful as I could be under the circumstances,” she said, taking exception to his sarcasm.
“Circumstances that included a groomsman hung like one of his stallions, and a seneschal who makes D’Aeth look like a gamecock?”
Nicolaa moistened her lips. “I was not going to pine away my life waiting upon you to send for me. Furthermore, I do not recall you ever going too long without a maidservant or two clawing at your shoulders.”
“You always had Onfroi.”
“Onfroi? Saints assoil me, a pity the arrow could not have struck lower—at least he would have died with something hard sticking out from between his thighs.”
“Such loving concern,” Wardieu mused. “And him lying so near death the monks have twice annointed him in preparation for the shrouds. Have you no sympathy for his suffering at all?”
“Because the fool lies there spitted like a capon, am I supposed to hover about him wiping away the snot and breathing air befouled by fever and pus? Is it any fault of mine he was shot in your stead? Indeed, perhaps it is you who should be hovering and chanting mea culpas.”
“Perhaps. Although we cannot be certain the arrow was intended for me.”
“Not for you? Then who—me?”
“It is likely, is it not, for my brother to have recruited a few local malefactors to help familiarize him with the forests again? There was a face yesterday … one of the archers he had placed on the abbey walls … it bore a scar on the cheek.”
“A thousand men bear scars,” she retorted dryly.
“Shaped to the initial N by a loving hand?”
Nicolaa turned fully around. The significance of the N was directly related to a quirk of her own vanity; it was the brand normally reserved for women whose beauty was deemed to be a threat in some way.
“Are you implying he numbers women among his archers?”
“Only one that I saw, and then only if mine eyes were not too blinded by the passions of the moment. Is it so entirely outside the bounds of reason to believe a woman could learn to hold a bow as well as a man, or that a woman could have just as much reason to hate as a man? On the other hand, the culprit was using a longbow to keep my ballocks properly shriveled to the saddle; not an easy weapon for a man to master at the best of times.”
“A longbow?” Nicolaa asked, visibly shaken. “You are certain it was a longbow?”
“It is a difficult weapon to mistake for any other,” he commented wryly. “Besides being identical to the one we found in the woods after Onfroi’s tragic mishap—the same one that made you pensive enough to consume two full flagons of wine.”
Nicolaa stared out the window, her eyes clouding with a memory. “There was a master bowyer in Lincoln several years back, the only one skilled in the making and firing of the Welsh weapon. He had a daughter … a daughter whose skill equaled his own …”
Wardieu waited, intrigued to see something that might have been construed as fear flicker across Nicolaa’s face.
“But no—” She snapped out of it and faced him again. “As I recall, they were all arrested—the father, mother, and two other daughters, not so sharp-tongued, but equally guilty of … of plotting insurrection against the crown. They died, the lot of them. It could not be her.”
“Just like it could not be my brother out there in the woods?”
A particularly loud and close crash of thunder sent Nicolaa flinching away from the window.
“All the more reason why you should have ordered your men into the woods,” she said angrily. “The chance to