gainsay him differently. Not even I could swear by my blood or yours whose seed it was took root and swelled within me.”
“Could you not? Can you not, Nicolaa? Look closer at the living flesh and tell me with all honesty—if you can—that you know not for certain where you have seen those eyes before, or warmed to that smile. Watch his hands, Nicolaa. Your servants did well in breaking him of the habit to favour the left, and I am sure he does not even remember a time when he did not grip a sword or a lance by the right. But the small things betray him. In the end, the small things betray us all.”
Nicolaa was watching Eduard, but in her mind’s eye, she saw only him. She saw him as clearly as if he stood before her now, his gray eyes almost colourless with resentment and disbelief. It was true, she had gone to him to beg forgiveness for her earthly sins and rampant appetite, but he could see nothing through those noble eyes but betrayal and impurity. In disgust she had torn the ring from her thumb and hurled it at him, and he had simply turned away and walked out of her life without so much as a glance back.
“Does it not rankle to see him every day?” Nicolaa asked, flinching from the robust sound of Eduard’s laughter as it drifted past her on the cool night air. “How could you even take him in if you suspected he was sprung from your brother’s seed?”
“The suspicion did not trouble me as much as it troubled you to know I had found him, despite all of your cunning attempts to keep him hidden.”
“I sought only to spare you pain,” she insisted darkly.
“What is pain if not too-perfect pleasure?”
“Was it your pleasure, then, to keep him by your side, flaunting him before my eyes at every turn?”
“It was my pleasure … and my wisdom … that bade me keep a small hold over you, my love.”
“He means nothing to me—nor to you if your treatment of him is any judge.”
“Nothing dead,” Wardieu agreed. “Alive, he serves as a reminder.”
“Reminder of what? That your brother was in my bed first?”
Wardieu laughed suddenly. “Why do you think I pursued you at all, if not because my brother was there first? The fact you betrayed him so eagerly and so … wholeheartedly, even knowing you carried his seed, well, it serves to remind me that things oft repeat themselves in life.”
“I would never betray you!” she insisted. “I …”
Nicolaa caught herself, a breath away from an admission. She could see the incandescent heat was gone from his eyes, replaced once again by the almost insufferable indifference that would have turned any kind of an admission into another weapon he would think nothing of using against her. And, even as she fought to regain her composure, another insufferable intrusion appeared on the crest of the knoll, running toward them with the beetling self-importance of a noisome gnat.
“Good my lord!” Onfroi de la Haye hailed them, an arm raised and flailing the air for attention. “A message from Sir Aubrey de Vere …”
Wardieu’s annoyed gaze flicked to the sheriff … then flicked again as he caught a brief glint of light where no light should have been. It took his superb reflexes only a split second to identify the metallic flash of an arrowhead streaking out of the woods, and he was able to shove Nicolaa out of its path as it hissed toward them, flying straight and true to the point where Nicolaa’s heart would have been.
Wardieu spun around, his sword already halfway out of his scabbard, his eyes searching the blackness for an enemy he could not see.
Behind him, Onfroi de la Haye felt something hot and sharp punch through the quilted velvet of his surcoat. Meeting with very little fleshy resistance, the arrow had enough force behind it to pierce through muscle, gizzard, and tissue, and to exit out the other side a full six inches before the stiff feather fletching snagged on cloth and torn sinew. Onfroi stared down at the protruding feathers and screamed. He gaped uncomprehendingly at his wife, at Lord Lucien, at the shaft of the arrow that had found him by sheer mischance, and he opened his mouth again, screaming until Nicolaa’s bunched fists struck him to the ground.
Less than fifty paces away, concealed by heavy shadow, Gil Golden cursed and swiftly drew another