he asked in a disbelieving whisper. “Was this your poor idea of a jest, Nicolaa?”
“Was what my idea of a jest? Kidnapping the girl? Good my lord, were it my idea to take her and hold her to ransom, it would not have been her finger I had carved from her!”
“Then tell me … how did he get the ring?”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded archly. “What ring?”
“The ring he gave you as a pledge of his troth.”
Nicolaa caught sharply at her breath. “Onfroi? That miserable circlet of gold he gave me—?”
“The ring, Nicolaa,” Wardieu interrupted ominously. “The one worn by the rightful heir of the Wardieu estates.”
“Lucien,” she gasped. “Are you mad? What are you talking about?”
Wardieu held his rage in check with an effort, but even as he had voiced the accusation, he had known he was grasping at the wind. Such subtleties were not in keeping with Nicolaa’s methods. If she had kept something as damaging as the ring all these years, she would have produced it and used it long before now to bend him to her will.
“I am talking about this,” he said quietly and uncurled the fingers of his fist.
Wary of the threat of violence in his every look and gesture, Nicolaa slowly tore her gaze from his and focused on the ring that lay cradled in his broad palm. The gold sparkled dully and the ruby eye winked in the moonlight, but at first glance, she could see nothing unusual in the design. Dragons, serpents, lions, and other menacing grotesques were commonly worked into rings, crests, and armourial bearings. The craftsmanship in this particular ring was exceptionally good; the beast appeared to be on the verge of a strike, with the scaled jaws gaping and the forked tongue poised to spit flame.
Nicolaa’s heart missed a beat.
She snatched the ring out of Wardieu’s hand and held it up so that the light from the campfires would augment the glow from the moon and stars.
“God spare me,” she whispered.
“God spare us both if you had no hand in this,” he said tautly.
“Me?” She looked up, shocked. “You think I … !”
“If not you, Nicolaa, then who else?”
Her eyes grew rounder, wilder. “No! No, it could not be! There must be some mistake!”
“Look at the ring, Nicolaa. There is no mistake.”
“A duplicate! It must be a duplicate!”
“Look at the ring, Nicolaa. There is no mistake.”
She did not have to obey the command in the ice-blue eyes to know there would be a jagged point of gold marking where the tip of one of the dragon’s ears had been broken off.
“But”—she gripped his arm and her voice became shrill with panic—“it cannot be. How can you believe he survived? Mon Dieu—all these years. He has been dead … forgotten! All these years!”
Wardieu’s fingers pinched her arm cruelly as he led her farther away from the curious eyes and ears of the camp. “Lower your voice, damn you. We have enough problems as it is without drawing a host of others down upon our heads.”
She halted, dragging back on his arm. “A jest,” she cried. “As you suggested, it must be someone’s foul, bloodless idea of a jest!”
“Who else knows enough of the truth to make such a jest?” Wardieu took the ring out of her hand and thrust it up beneath her nose. “Bayard was the only other one—apart from Lackland—who knew more than he should … and Bayard is dead! Killed by someone he recognized; someone who, according to De Chesnai, caused Northumbria to act as if he had seen a ghost!”
Nicolaa’s heart suffered another choking setback. “But you brought him down yourself! You said you saw him die!”
“I said there was no man on earth who could survive such wounds. I did not say I stood there and watched him die. He was my brother! I struck him down, I left him broken and bleeding on that hell of a desert. I could not stand over him and wait for him to die!”
“And for your compassion,” she spat, “he has now come back to take his revenge. God’s blood, he must be insane with hatred. But why has he waited so long? Why has he not come forward before now? And why this elaborate ruse as the Black Wolf of Lincoln?”
Wardieu’s fist closed around the ring again. “He wants me to know he is there, waiting. Watching. He wants me to jump at every shadow, sweat over every morsel of food, challenge every new