In the Shadow of Midnight - By Marsha Canham Page 0,140

d’Amboise, the man, the knight, the silver-eyed warrior so calmly reporting the princess’s suggestion of a hasty retreat unless something else had happened. Something so terrible, so horrible, so frightening as to render even his considerable capacity for rage, impotent.

There were ways, Henry knew, of utterly demoralizing and smashing the spirit of captives, making them come to regard their captors as saviors.

“Has the king … done something to her mind?” Henry asked gently.

Naked pain filled the daunting gray eyes, like blood filling an open wound. “If you are asking if he has done something to guarantee she is no longer a threat to his claim on the throne … the answer is yes. Moreover, he has also ensured she is no longer a consideration to anyone’s plans to incite a civil war in her name. If John were to choke on his own guilt, or fall on his own sword a dozen times, and if all other claimants as far removed as a tenth or twentieth bastard cousin suddenly fell ill and died of St. Anthony’s Fire … Eleanor of Brittany would not be the chosen candidate for queen.”

“Why?” Ariel blurted on a soft gasp. “What has the king done?”

Eduard turned back to the fire without answering. His shoulders hunched forward as he lifted his other arm and braced it against the wall, allowing him to hang his head between. There was tension in his jaw, and tension in the veins that rose and throbbed like blue snakes in his throat. Tension enough to cause beads of sweat to form across his brow and temples and to glisten where they ran in a thin trickle down the side of his face.

Ariel’s throat went dry. Without knowing why or how she bade them do so, her feet carried her slowly toward the fireside. He did not look up, although he must have been aware of her presence beside him. Nor did he acknowledge the pale, slender hand that reached out and touched his arm.

“Eduard …? How can we help if we do not know what has happened?”

He bowed his head and squeezed his eyes tightly shut. Henry tried to get his sister’s attention from across the room, but she ignored him. She ignored everything and everyone as she realized, with a shock of incredulity, that the wetness dripping from Eduard’s chin was not all caused by sweat.

She had never seen a grown man cry. Had certainly never imagined she would live to see evidence of such weakness in Eduard FitzRandwulf.

Her own eyes blurred behind a stinging hot liquid and she moved her hand closer to his. “Eduard …? Can you not trust us?”

The long, dark sweep of his lashes remained closed and Ariel could see there were two emotions waging war within him—unmeasurable anguish and boundless fury. The one was causing the uncharacteristic flow of tears; the other had caused him to smash his fists into something hard enough and repeatedly enough to open the flesh on some of his knuckles to the bone.

“My God,” she gasped, touching one ravaged hand with the tip of her fingers. “Eduard … what has happened?”

The heavy fringe of lashes lifted slowly.

“He has blinded her,” Eduard whispered raggedly. “He has had her eyes put out like those of a common beggar.”

Ariel’s shock was complete. Behind her, she could hear Henry’s half-formed exclamation and Robin’s stunned cry, but the best she could manage, locked in the deathlike grip of Eduard’s eyes, was the slow, hot release of her breath.

“He … the king … has blinded her?”

“He had her eyes plucked out and the lids seared shut,” Eduard said harshly, “knowing full well the barons of England, regardless how loyal and sympathetic they might be to her plight, regardless how desperately they might search for a claimant to challenge his power … they would never put a blind, mutilated queen on the throne.”

“My God,” Henry muttered. “We should have suspected something was amiss. He could not have her killed without raising a hue and cry, but by the same token, he could not have let her live as a threat. Is she … otherwise well?”

FitzRandwulf sucked a deep, shaky breath into his lungs and straightened, taking Ariel’s hand into his own without thinking. “She is thinner, as is to be expected. And sadder. But her concerns are for our safety, not her own, showing her courage and spirit are still as strong and true as ever. She is also adamant about not returning to Brittany. She would