delivered by dead men, only those delivered by enemies upon whom they might still seek revenge.”
The Wolf fell silent. And waited.
“Therefore,” she concluded, “we now have a man who was—or is—of the order; a man who makes vague claims to be engaged in the honourable service of Eleanor of Aquitaine, yet who definitely took a dishonourable foray into kidnapping so that he might … what? Revenge himself upon an old enemy? An enemy he claims has stolen his name and birthright?” Servanne stopped and glanced up in the darkness. “You call this supposed usurper by the none-too-amiable appelation of Dragon. What was he once called … friend?”
The Wolf shook his head slowly, too far into the battle to sound a retreat.
“Worse than that, my lady,” he said with frightening intensity. “He was once called brother.”
9
“Brother?”
“Bastard born, but nonetheless of the same blood.”
Servanne stared. She had expected almost anything but this, and yet … the fact that they were brothers would explain a great deal. It would also present looming gaps in reason and understanding.
“Why?” she whispered. “How …?”
“I told you one of the kidnappers was very cooperative? When pressed into revealing where they were to take the children in England, he indicated a castle in Lincolnshire—a castle on a cliff with a golden-haired dragon as master.”
“Bloodmoor,” she gasped.
“Until that moment, I had no idea Etienne was still alive.” The Wolf paused and plucked a leaf from a nearby vine, then started to tear it into tiny shreds as he continued. “I have not set foot in England for nearly half a lifetime because so far as I knew, the De Gournay titles and estates had been stripped away years ago and dispersed against a charge of high treason.”
“Treason!”
“A charge as false as my brother’s heart,” he said savagely. “But one that went uncontested while my father was deliberately starved to death in a traitor’s cell. I had heard Etienne had died as well, a result of his conniving and greed, and had no reason to question his demise. I welcomed it, in fact, for it freed me to forget who I was and make a new life elsewhere. As it was, I was laid up some twenty months at a stinking desert oasis while these wounds you so expertly assessed healed. Another three years and more were spent gaining back memories the sun and fever had scorched from my brain. By the time I rejoined the living, Normandy had become my home and I was quite content to keep it that way. I sold my services to the kings and queens of Europe. I fought their wars, led their armies into battle, and won a reputation for myself as”—he stopped, seeming to reshape the words in midair before they tripped off his tongue—“as a rogue knight who would sell his sword to anyone with enough gold to pay.”
A mercenary, Servanne thought. Yes. It fit. That much of it, at any rate, for there was no doubt he was a dangerous man, adept at living on cunning and nerve. He was clever, daring, unprincipled. And far too close.
She took what she hoped was an unobtrusive step back. “You called him Etienne?”
“It is his God-given name: Etienne FitzRobert, born to my father’s mistress some three months after my own appearance in the world. It was said we were so alike in size, colouring, and temperament in those early years, we might well have sprung from the same womb. Even later, there could be no mistake we were of the same mould; his hair was lighter, his eyes darker, but all small things. Nothing that could not be altered or overlooked temporarily if one wanted to substitute for the other for a time. Moreover, we were both away five years under the desert sun. So much time spent in the heat, squalor, and stench of blood will alter any man’s appearance, as well as dull the perceptions of those who welcome him home.”
Servanne strained the limits of her powers of recall, trying in vain to conjure a clear picture of the golden-haired knight to whom she had been betrothed. Whether it was a trick of the mind, or simply the influence of the brooding figure in front of her, she could manage to do no more than replace the Wolf’s darker locks with those of honey-gold, his coarsely stubbled, blue-black jaw with that of a clean-shaven mirror image.
Impossible! The whole story was impossible and implausible. How could one man take the place of