To Touch The Knight Read online

  Sir Tancred never carried more than one lance!

  So who was this knight fighting in his place?

  A wave of heat flooded up her throat and she swallowed a mouthful of bitter bile. Sir Tancred had done this without her knowledge, and any change she did not know of was alarming because it could be a threat to her and her people.

  “He sits well in the saddle, Sir Dew of the Moon,” remarked Lady Blanche beside her. Her ladies agreed, whispering and pointing, some giggling behind their hands, and Edith nodded, swallowing a second time. She knew who it would be, and seeing her own favors littered across his broad chest, she suspected why he had done this.

  I refused him a favor and he has gained many, by way of deceit. He has lied! He is no true knight!

  As you are no true princess, Gregory-in-her-memory reminded her. Edith thrust this disconcerting thought aside and leaned forward, squinting through the dazzling sun. She was glad his head was covered; she did not have to look at his smug, victorious face. Deep in her chest came an old ache, one of disappointment.

  Why must men be so petty? He looks like King Arthur returned, grand as a bear and moving with the horse as if he is a centaur. The sun gilds his armor, he carries his sword and lances as easily as if they were flowers. He stands in his stirrups, bowing his head in polite acknowledgment of the cheering crowd and damsels. And all the time he holds my things and clutches them in spiteful glee.

  She had known other men like that. Men who would not accept “no” as an answer. . . .

  “Do not judge,” she murmured, failing to suppress a shiver as other memories roosted in her mind like rooks in a tree. “Adam was, in the end, a good man, and Peter may have been, had he lived.”

  But was this nameless knight?

  Who is he? She would have asked Sir Tancred, but he was no doubt taking his ease in the stranger’s tent and, she hoped, avoiding the sellers of day-old herring pies. Her middling knight was middling for several reasons, one being that he preferred song and poetry to fighting.

  As do I, but this knight of the stream is different.

  He rode with an intent that made her tremble, now without acknowledging others on the field or the good wishes of the spectators but speeding by all, as if he was searching for someone. His intensity, the way he was locked within himself, made her tremble afresh, the more so when she realized he also had Sir Tancred’s new sword, the one she had devised after many hours of careful tourney watching, putting her smithying skills to use for a week in a deserted hamlet where even the animals had fled.

  He has not drawn it yet, but what if he uses it as intended, to drive between a knight’s chain mail? I could give this sword to Tancred, for he is no killer, but this stranger knight is far harder.

  “Princess? Pardon, I mean, my Lady Jade?” Lady Blanche touched her arm, but Edith, rising to her feet so swiftly that her stool and cushion both overturned, scarcely heard or felt anything. She kicked off her shoes, the better to run.

  “He is making for someone,” she breathed, as the knight stood up on his stirrups again and roared out an unintelligible challenge, flinging aside a lance and couching the other, spurring Hector to a speed the warhorse had never tried before.

  “A doughty call to arms,” remarked Lady Blanche, while her ladies burst into applause, but Edith was already hastening for the steps out of the wooden stand. At the far end of the jousting field, scrambling to be ready, she could see a knight dressed as a monk, with a brown cassock over his armor. He was hefting a white shield with a red fist blazoned upon it, raising it desperately to his face as the unknown knight thrust his own lance directly at his opponent’s eyes. Edith was too far away to see, but she could imagine the stark horror on Sir Henry’s face—he carried a white shield with a red fist. Sir Henry, who had been injured and was only now recovered—

  She ran out onto the jousting ground, heedless of the shouts, deftly avoiding the squires who tried to stop her. “Murder!” The word and fear burst from her lips as, at the last moment, the unknown knight lowered his lance, smashing it against Sir Henry’s middle, knocking him off his mount into the dust.

  “Stop, stop!” Edith called out, hearing Sir Henry’s wild cries of “I yield, sir! Mercy, I yield! God’s bones, Sir Tancred—”

  The rest of Sir Henry’s complaint was stopped as the unknown knight launched himself off Hector and kicked Sir Henry savagely in the crotch. While he whimpered and writhed, the stranger knight tore the shield from his twitching arm and began to beat him with it.

  “Like this, do you?” he was roaring. “Like to see how it feels?”

  Edith, closing fast, and skidding aside from a second yelling squire, shouted, “No!” The knight was drawing the sword. She feared the worst. “No!”

  Amazingly, he heard. Looming over the stricken, moaning Sir Henry, the knight stopped and turned his head.

  “Get back, woman.”

  “Stop. Please, stop,” Edith gasped, checking herself within a long-sword’s length of him. She had run so hard she could see lights swimming before her eyes, but the stranger’s face, half hidden by the swathes of gray cloths and his helm, was altogether dark and his eyes were black with rage.

  “One of yours, is he?”

  Edith could hear the contempt in his voice, while at their feet, Sir Henry now coiled onto his side and was copiously sick on the grass. It was worse than a barney on the village green at Warren Hemlet, and as inglorious. She felt ashamed to have witnessed it. “Please,” she said again, hating the way her voice was cracked and her throat as dry as a grave. “As a favor to me, Sir Jade.”

  “You claim me as your husband, do you, Lady Jade?”

  Edith sank to her knees in exhaustion and shock. Scraps of what Sir Tancred had told her in the tent that morning came back to her with the force of hammer blows. She knew who this knight was now. Sir Ranulf of Fredenwyke, who fought in honor of his dead wife.

  “Where is your black armor?” she whispered.

  He scowled, flinging aside the cloth from his helmet, his handsome face revealed to be as dark as his armor.

  “Mercy, for the sake of your wife?” she asked, her head feeling as if it would explode, her heart was beating so hard and fast. “Sir Ranulf?”

  He glared at her as if she had struck him with dung.

  “For that piece of cleverness, madam, and to stop your lips from mentioning my dear wife ever again, I give you this noble knight.” He kicked the pallid Sir Henry on the knee, so harshly that Edith heard the bone beneath grind. The stricken, unfortunate Henry yelled out again.

  “You should spare some of your Eastern care on his page, also,” Sir Ranulf spat out as he strode toward her. “That is, if you can spare the time between your own wanton amusements and sports.”

  “What page is this?” Part of her was furious at the rest of his accusations but she kept that down, stamped on it and hammered it down in her mind, keen to learn about the child. She had not known Sir Henry had any pages in his retinue.

  “One I will take now as my own. Some brutes are not fit to keep a dog, but then, what do you care? Clearly, you judge men by other means.”

  His free hand was in a tight fist, as if he wanted to strike her, but now he straightened his fingers, jabbing toward her bare middle, dismissing her and the costume with that single gesture. He stalked by, passing so close that one of his borrowed ropes of pearls struck her across her face. She flinched at the shock but he kept going, keeping her favors and ignoring the gasps of the spectators as he moved to mount his borrowed horse and to take Sir Henry’s for his own, as a prize.

  “She did not know about the page,” Offa said again. “And she sent her own healer to tend him. The one you sent away.”

  “Leave it, man.” Ranulf had heard enough. Offa had been whining at his ungentle treatment of the princess for the rest of the day’s joust. “Get some rest in the wagon. You have an early start and a long journey ahead of you tomorrow.”

  His steward instantly turned and ma
rched out of his tent without any kind of bow and Ranulf cursed long and heartily. In one corner, Edmund his squire was teaching chess to the new page Gawain, who crouched over the pieces like a shivering little animal. No doubt the poor little lad was convinced that he had come to a worse master.

  “Play well, you two, and do not sit up too late.” Ranulf nodded to the pair and left.

  Knowing he was fit for no one’s company, he did not leave the camp for the castle but took a cold bath in the stream. Once he thought he heard a gasp, issuing from the tree where the little brown maid had been, but only a cat stared back at him from the bushes, and when he lay back in the river the evening was fine and still. He floated on his back, thinking of the cosmos and the wonder of God, of worlds, perhaps, beyond this one, of a time without pestilence, and told himself it was enough.

  Edith draped the clean, dripping washing over the bushes beside her camp in order to dry it. Ranulf of Fredenwyke had almost caught her again by the river. She had thought he would be dancing with the damsels at the castle, not bathing. He had a splendid shape, a handsome body, but watching him lolling in the water, she told herself she had no more desire for him.

  He is a dreamer, besides, and that is nonsense. The world is as it is and we know of nothing else, nothing beyond it. There may be nothing beyond it. Only an idle knight and a simpering damsel can be dreamers; the rest of us must work.

  She had pounded the washing on the stones farther up the river, away from him. It was the wrong time of day for such work, but she had been compelled to do something; she was so annoyed with that man. Now her arms ached and her chest ached and her rough tunic—she had changed to do the washing—was as wet as a fish. She had not gone to the castle because of manners—she always dreaded being seated and trapped at a feast, where the women would see she did not know how to behave.

  But I do not throw kindness in another’s face. He could have accepted my healer for the little lad, if little lad there is. She had not been able to ask Sir Henry and would not: she knew she would get no true answers.

  Still, I can do something. He calls me wanton. He shall know what wanton is.

  She smiled as she pinned the last of the sheet onto the hawthorn, scarcely feeling the prickle of the thorns, she was so deep in thought and planning.

  Chapter 5

  The following day, the theme of the tournament had changed. Damsels were to wear white and the knights black. Sir Tancred had hurried to her tent before dawn, noisy as a blackbird with the news.

  “It is to be a procession of Day and Night, the ladies the day . . .”

  And one has his black armor already, for night.

  “We are to ride in company to the wayside spring of a saint, Saint Loye or Saint Frideswide, I forget which, and the damsels will dip their favors in the sacred waters.”

  Edith quelled a churning rush of panic; she could not ride, not as a lady would. “May I ride with you, Sir Tancred?”

  “Princess! It will be an honor!” His face shone in anticipation. “It will be splendid!”

  Edith smiled and agreed that it was indeed splendid while she uttered her genuine thanks and wondered if they would pass any villages. If they did, would the people there be hale and fed? Her eyes strayed through the open tent flap to the present combat field and that host of tall grass and growing wheat. It was surely wrong to allow that to rot when there were men enough to harvest it, at least the hay. The wheat would not be ready yet.

  Concern for the crops? But you have left that life behind.

  “Peace, my brother,” Edith thought in answer to her head, but the waste irked her.

  “Do the damsels set tasks for the knights today?” she asked Sir Tancred. This had been a feature of Lady Blanche’s tournament so far and she was eager to give Ranulf of Fredenwyke a very particular task, one he would no doubt refuse. Though she still ached to see his expression when she proposed it.

  “That is for tomorrow, after a morning game of hoodman blind.”

  “I see.” Edith itched to say that in her village, a game where one person’s hood was turned so that the “face” of the hood was to the back of the head and the person, blindfolded, was urged to give chase was considered fit for children. She recalled that as a Princess of Cathay she should not know it. “What is hoodman blind, Sir Tancred?”

  Her thoughts drifted as her companion eagerly explained. She would not be taking part in hoodman blind. If caught she would be too easily recognized, or worse, unveiled.

  I will not miss a child’s game, she told herself, wondering even so how it would be to be caught by the black knight himself. He would be gentle, skimming his long fingers lightly across her shoulders, and then her face. When he knew her—as he must at once when he felt the veil—would he wind an arm about her bare middle and scoop her closer to him? Would he thrust her away? Or would he kiss her?

  Edith felt her breath stop and her fingers tremble. Such thoughts were idle folly and she was startled by her own soft-heartedness. It must be lust. You have been too long without a mate. Consider your own pale costume: you must be the most splendid and shocking of the damsels.

  Ranulf spurred his black palfrey to ride alongside Sir Tancred and his pillion, smirking as the princess unpinned yet another scrap from her costume to hand across to another ever-gracious knight.

  “Well met, Sir Dew, Lady Jade,” he said, noting the shield of the latest who had received the saucy wench’s favor, this time a blue heron on a gold background. So far he had counted five favors granted and five warriors he would fight; he meant to best them all and take nothing from them but those irritating bits of silk. Then we shall see if men are quite so eager to ask for them, eh?

  “We are night and day today.” Sir Tancred shook his own black cloak and jutted out his beard. “You will fight in your own armor?”

  “I do. My squire and my page await me at the tourney ground, when we return from the sacred spring.” Ranulf watched the small, pale figure riding behind Sir Tancred as he said “page,” but the hardened princess did not flinch. “Lady Day.” He stood on his stirrups and bowed, hearing the larks in the fields close by and the heady buzz of the damsels’ chatter.

  “Lord Night.”

  She stared off into the distance, so far as he could tell. He guided his palfrey closer still, catching a whiff of her perfume.

  Her costume, the lack of it, was astonishing. Her head and hair were covered and veiled, but as for the rest of her . . .

  He whistled softly, turning the sound quickly into a tune so she would not realize he was disconcerted and yes, frankly impressed.

  Truly she was as opulent, as translucent, as fragrant as a lily. Today he and others could see her long, shapely legs, glimpsed through a series of light-as-air skirts that seemed both white and colorless. He had been ready for her naked waist and belly but the tiny, tight-fitting sleeveless jerkin clung to her breasts like moonlight. He found himself imagining if her nipples were pink or dark and cursed himself for being so easily ensnared.

  Her feet, brushing Sir Tancred’s meaty calves, were narrow, high-arched, and bare.

  He decided it was safe and indeed very pleasing to stare at her dainty little feet. “You do not feel the cold, Lady Day? I have heard the land of Cathay is far warmer than England; some would say as hot as hell.”

  Sir Tancred snorted and his horse danced beneath the pair as he must have tightened his grip on the bridle, but “Lady Day” sighed like a moth moving round a candle and finally fixed her bright eyes on him.

  “I never feel the cold, Lord Night. What do you call those blue flowers in the road?”

  “Speedwell, my lady,” several young squires replied, all at once, but Ranulf smiled at her obvious ploy. He decided to test her some more.

  “I was at a joust once where the ladies gave so much of their sleeves and veils, chemises and mantles, to their jousting knights that they were all but naked by the end of the tournament.”

  “Strange, Lord Night. I was told that
such a fable was from the romance of Perceforest.” She smiled, or at least above the white veil pinned across the lower half of her face her eyes crinkled.

  “I have heard the romance, too, but this time I saw it,” Ranulf went on, determined to have his point. “But you, I note, are already in that state. What will you do, if a knight at the lists asks you for a favor?”

  “Are you asking me, Lord Night?”

  He admired her courage in tilting straight at the heart of the matter. For that reason he chose not to shame her. “Indeed I am, my lady.”

  Her dark brows drew close in a frown. Clearly she had not expected that answer.

  “Nay, I see you puzzled, but do not trouble so, Princess. I will find a way. I do not think you can lose any more cloth.” He grinned and spurred on, cantering to greet Lady Blanche and Giles, who were already kneeling at the spring.

  Chapter 6

  Teodwin scratched his newly trimmed beard and checked that the points of his new shoes were shining. From being the smelliest, most grubby pig-man in Warren Hemlet, he had become the cleanest and most elegant of Edith’s courtiers.

  “Sir Giles is here at the joust,” he now warned.

  “I know.” Part of her dreaded any long meeting they might have, although her former master had strutted past his other villagers without any recognition on his part. “But he seems much taken up with the heiress Maud and is easily avoided.”

  She inhaled slightly, scenting a new savor through the ever-present sweetness of lilies. “What is being cooked?”

  “It is already roasted and presented—a gift of rabbit from Sir Henry. I have already sent him your thanks.”

  Edith nodded, grateful that Teodwin had understood that she was less keen to see the knight since the accusation of Sir Henry being a brute had emerged. But then, who was she to judge? And why should she trust anything Ranulf said?