Wardieu forced himself to take a slow, steadying breath. For a moment there, he had almost thought the impossible. He had almost thought … but no. Despite the nightmares and the premonitions, the dead remained dead.
To cover his brief lapse he asked, almost as an afterthought: “The Lady Servanne … she endured the ordeal well?”
“As well as could be expected, my lord,” De Chesnai answered, his loyalty for his mistress fairly bristling across his skin. “She was frightened, to be sure, but very brave and courageous. I thought she was wont to scratch the outlaw’s face to ribbands when he dared use your name, but she was taken away unharmed, by God’s grace.”
Wardieu accepted this avowal of his betrothed’s courage with a pang of guilt. If his life was dependent upon an answer, he could not have described in detail any given feature belonging to Servanne de Briscourt. The best of his recollections, as he had admitted to Nicolaa, presented her only as a pale shadow he had once glimpsed standing alongside the frail old warhorse, Hubert de Briscourt. It was the land he wanted, not the thrall of a bride. Prince John had already demanded and received an outlandish price for arranging his brother’s seal on the marriage petition, and now, ten thousand marks was a great deal to pay for something he did not want. Unfortunately, there were too many equally rich and powerful men who knew of his hunger for the De Briscourt estates, and he could not afford to trust either Prince John’s greed or an outlaw’s promise to gain control of the lands.
“Unharmed,” he murmured. “Then this”—he held up the blood-stained canvas sack—“does not belong to the Lady Servanne?”
“No, my lord. The wolf’s head took it from one of the dead guards. All he added—and then only after a lengthy debate—was the ring.”
“The ring?” Wardieu loosened the thong and emptied the contents of the sack onto his hand. The finger tumbled out freely enough and was tossed aside into the grass with no further thought. But an object caught up on some of the unraveled threads of jute, needed to be forcibly pulled away from the cloth.
It was a gold ring, and, even before Wardieu had wiped away the clinging bits of dried flesh and blood, he could feel an iron fist close around his heart and begin to squeeze.
The face of the ring was carved in the image of a dragon rampant, the band moulded to resemble scaled claws. A single bloodred ruby marked the eye, and, as it trapped the fading rays of the sun, it seemed to catch fire and reflect shafts of burning flame.
Wardieu’s fingers curled slowly inward. His hand began to tremble and a fine white rim of fury etched itself deeply into the bitter set of his mouth.
“My lord—?”
The stark blue eyes seared through De Chesnai without seeing him. The grizzled knight took an involuntary step back, shocked by the depth of the rage and hatred that was transforming Lord Lucien’s face into a terrible and terrifying mask.
“My lord … your hand!”
Lucien looked down. Forcing his fingers to open, he saw that he had squeezed the carved fangs of the golden dragon into the hollow of his palm, cutting the flesh and causing blood to flow between the clenched fingers. Blood slicked the dragon’s body and shone wetly off the faceted surface of the ruby eye. The sight brought another image crushing into Wardieu’s brain, stretching and swelling the bounds of reason until it verged on madness itself.
The image was of death. Death on the hot desert sands of Palestine. The face of death had dark chestnut hair and piercing gray eyes; it spoke with a curse and a vow to return one day and avenge himself upon the world.
That day was finally here.
Death had come back to England.
8
Servanne slept twelve hours without so much as rolling from one hip to the other. She would have slept even longer if not for the loud blowing of a ram’s horn from somewhere beyond the refectory walls, calling the outlaws to their evening meal. She awoke with a groggy, thick sensation stalling her eyelids, and would have gladly lowered her head to the furs again had she not caught a fleeting glimpse of the nerve-shattering glare Biddy launched at her from across the room.
“Biddy? What is the time? How long have I been sleeping?”
“I am not familiar with the hours these wolverines keep,” Biddy replied archly, her back as stiff