Mathis, Jolie (4 page)

The woman sobbed and fell at Isabel's feet. "Forgive me, my lady. When the boy heard you he escaped my grasp, and I knew not where to take the others." Around her narrow shoulders she wore only a thin shawl. The children huddled together, their faces gaunt, their eyes wide and fixed on the giants who surrounded them. Most were not dressed to survive the elements. Some wore no shoes.

Realization struck Kol, and with it, an anger so intense, the fires of passion that had so consumed him moments before were summarily doused.

He leveled his gaze upon the princess. "You knew they were here."

Her face shone luminous, her lips black red. Droplets of ice glistened upon her hair like diamonds. Her silence confessed everything. His men waited upon their mounts, quiet and watchful. Behind him his steed snorted and pawed, as if sensing his fury. Wind surged through the trees.

Anger thickened his voice. "You would let them die of cold to spare them from me?" The princess did not look at him as a man, but as a monster.

The princess did not blink. She did not move. She merely stood holding her child like the statue of some long-dead martyr, challenging him with her violet eyes. Almost as if she had witnessed every sin he had ever committed.

He was damn sick of her eyes and the way they judged him. Striding forward he took hold of her arm.

The children cried out. Some of them screamed.

As if he were a bloody-fanged monster, come to eat them alive. He grew more furious. All around, the forest trees pitched and roiled, brandishing their branches as if they, too, protested his hold on her. He heard their whispers.

Unworthy. Unwanted. Soon to be forgotten.

He released her. To Vekell he ordered, "Take the children to the keep."

Kol caught the nearest boy and lifted him by the nape of his tunic into the saddle with Ragi. When he removed his hand he froze. A dark hand print—his own—stained the coarse wool of the boy's garment. He lifted his fingers to his nose. Instantly he recognized the scent. Blood.

He spun around, searching the darkness. The princess had been the only one he had touched. The blood must have come from her. She stood beneath an ash tree sparring with one of his men over possession of her son.

Her voice rang with authority. "You will not touch him." When the warrior stepped toward her she slapped him away.

Taking full advantage of her distraction, Kol approached from behind. Before she could react, he stole the boy from her arms and passed the warm little body to the man. The child, now fast asleep, did not waken. Though the princess tried to pursue, Kol blocked her path.

"Vermin!" Panic tainted her voice. Small-fisted blows jabbed into Kol's chest. He caught her hands.

"I hate you," she hissed, her face a mask of feminine rage.

"Really?" He bent so low, so close, their noses almost touched. "I had not noticed."

Her eyes flew wide in astonishment. For a moment they shared breath. How lovely she was, even pallid from cold and reeking of ditch water.

The sound of horses and men grew faint as the last of me soldiers departed with their small passengers.

Kol released her. She stumbled backward and fell onto her bottom.

"Your wound," he demanded. "Where is it?"

The princess snatched up a stick and hurled it at his head. Had his mood not been so foul, he would have laughed. He caught her weapon midair and cast it to the ground.

Pointing at her, he warned, "Cease your foolishness."

With the intention of helping her rise, he bent but she scooted away like a retreating crab. She sprang to her feet and fled toward the narrow path as if she too intended to gallop the entire distance to Calldarington.

He caught her; gently, given the injury he suspected.

"You bleed." Frowning, he ran his hands over her rigid shoulders. "Tell me where."

So dark was her gunna, he could not perceive any trace of blood or injury and her softly curved lips held their silence. Impatient for an answer, he smoothed his palms over her breasts. The princess jerked back.

"Stop!" The clearing echoed with her shrill command.

He grasped her arm.

"Ow," she yelped. For a moment her face lost its expression of hatred. But in the next breath, her fist almost contacted his jaw.

With her hand held in his, he growled, "I vow if you do that again I will smite you in kind." He wouldn't of course, but his threat achieved the desired effect. Defiance lit her eyes, but she yielded to his touch.

Be gentle,
Kol reminded himself. Admittedly, he had little understanding of the female mind, having grown from child to man in the company of warriors.

With a deliberate lightness of hand, he inspected the princess's arm. He bit down a curse. The night was dark. He could not see. Abandoning his own caution, he grasped her woolen sleeve and ripped it, and the linen beneath, from cuff to shoulder.

She tried to shrug free, but he held her still. Beneath the moonlight her skin gleamed as exquisitely as Quanzhou silk.

At his touch, she gasped. Blood surged to his groin. The sound of the wind in the trees mingled with the rush of blood to his head. Thankfully, his jerkin fell to the tops of his thighs. Doubtless the princess's alarm would grow tenfold if she saw the robust tenting of his braies.

He commanded his attention to her arm and quickly found the source of the blood. A small, perfectly round puncture wound on her forearm, and another just above her elbow.

"Tell me how this occurred."

She glanced at her arm. Again, bewilderment softened her scowl. Had she even been aware of the wounds until this moment? But rather than answering him, she lifted her chin, her lips sealed more tightly than a regent's missive.

Could she not confide a simple fact to him? Irritated, he strode to his mount to retrieve linen to bind the wound.

Upon turning he found himself completely alone. He searched for something to kick, to curse, but there was only the condescending silence of the primeval forest around him.

He swung onto the horse and, with a jab of his heels, set off after her. She had run nearly to the tree line when he sighted her. Leaning low he claimed her by the waist and dragged her into his lap.

The princess sat between his thighs, an effigy of silent disdain. An occasional shiver broke her stillness. Encased in leather, Kol had little warmth to share, but still he pulled her against his chest, and banded his arm beneath her out-thrust breasts. Her garments had hidden the extent of her slenderness. Her rib cage was as delicate as a bird's. Cold-hardened nipples jutted in defiance of her tunic.

Kol closed his eyes. Exhaled through his nose.

Each shift of her thighs along his, each press of her buttocks against him, enticed. Tempted. Deep within his chest, and even more so in his loins, his arousal grew rampant, but he would not allow this impulse to sway him from his course. The extermination of his final enemy could be his only goal.

Isabel shared his enemy's blood. The girl who had once saved his life—who had unknowingly, but valiantly challenged his demons—no longer existed. Perhaps that girl had never truly existed at all.

Ranulf lived. Kol sensed that much in the air about him. He would use the princess to draw the king forth. There could be no more escapes. No more defiance.

Already he held the key to her submission.

Chapter 4

Two winters before

"I cannot have heard you correctly. For a moment I thought you said the princess... was with child." The timber walls of the women's chambers absorbed each of Ranulf's words instantly, leaving the room so silent Isabel wondered—nay, prayed each of its occupants had been swept away to some faraway land. A land where they would lose all memory of what they had just heard.

On the bed she lay, with the furs pulled over her head. She clenched her hands into the bedclothes, and promised to whatever divine being granted wishes, that if she were, indeed, taken to another world she would never shed a tear over not being allowed to say goodbye.

Not to family or friends, not even Merwyn, whom she had not been allowed to visit, not even for a pat on the nose, since—

Since the afternoon the Dane had pulled her from the river.

Cursedly near-deaf, the medicus shouted as if he truly believed Ranulf had not heard his revelation the first time.

"Aye, the babe wilt be born before the first frosts settle upon the fields."

"Shhh!" Berthilde reprimanded sharply. Isabel covered her ears with her hands.

Surely countless other ears strained against the outside of the door. Curious servants hoping to be the first to carry news of the princess's mysterious ailment to the multitude. Isabel pressed her face into the linens. Already there were too many witnesses to her shame.

"Isabel?" Ranulf's hoarse utterance stabbed past the barrier of her flat-pressed hands. She knew he stood at the edge of the bed. For an eternity silence throbbed about her.

"Tell me these are lies!" His shout tore the breath from her.

The fur coverlet flew from her body. She cringed, exposed. Air and light razed her skin but Isabel remained just as she had since the medicus' humiliating examination, curled tight as a sheave. Berthilde's ragged sobs emanated from the corner of the room. Isabel embraced herself even tighter, as if the fragments of her heart could be held together by force alone.

" 'Twas the Dane!" Ranulf raged.

"No," Isabel whispered into her pillow.

Her angel would not have done such a thing. In her mind she had pondered every moment of their togetherness. Despite the black moments, the missing memories, she was sure he had saved her life. That was all.

"You dare champion him?" her brother roared.

Forsooth, the Dane had been a stranger, but somehow she knew—

A sudden weight tilted the mattress. Berthilde cried out. Hands closed on her ankles. Linen bunched at her thighs as Ranulf dragged her from the bed and forced her to kneel before him.

Did he not understand? She wanted only to be still, to mend. Tears scalded her cheeks. Futilely her mindsearched for an explanation for her missed courses, the persistent sickness—but there were no answers.

Yea, the Norseman had come, and he had gone, and now, inexplicably, she found herself with child, but she remained steadfast in her belief he was blameless.

Ranulf's voice broke as he pronounced, " 'Twas no immaculate conception."

Isabel stared upward, stricken by the amalgam of emotion in his eyes. Fury, tenderness—and disappointment. "I would never presume to say it was so."

Tears glazed his eyes, tears she had never before seen in this warrior king who showed no weakness. "And you, naive child. You set him free."

In a blink, Berthilde appeared along the watery edge of Isabel's vision.

"Sire, please," she whispered in a supplicant's voice, her hands pressed together as if in prayer to her king. "She hath been punished enough."

Ranulf paled. He sank to his knees in front of Isabel. Her half brother, the pride of their father, of their long and valiant noble line. Sunlight, waned by the approaching eve, stole through the window to shine off his golden hair.

"This is not what I had intended for you, sister. This is not—" He lifted a hand to touch her cheek.

Isabel could not look at him. Instead she stood and crawled to the center of the bed, where she turned from him and lay down, her arms at her sides. The linens still gave off the faintest bit of warmth.

"Isabel." Against the mattress he grasped her hand.

But another man's words, not Ranulf's, echoed through her mind. "God be with you, Isabel."

With each moment, her memories of her blue-eyed savior grew more faint, more altered. Desperate to remember, desperate to believe, she slid her other hand beneath the pillow. There her fist curled around the relic.

A bloodstained fragment of cloth, snatched from the fire when Berthilde had not been watching. Her only remnant of him.

"I bid you, cease looking at me thusly." The Dane spoke quietly, over his shoulder. He placed another shard of kindling on the fire.

On the far corner of the bed Isabel remained conjoined with the bed pillar, where she had scrambled after he'd deposited her moments before. She watched his every move, his every breath, her muscles tensed for flight. Would he lunge at her and tear her clothing, or would he take pleasure in a slow assault?

He pivoted and sat back upon the low stone hearth, his elbows propped upon his knees.

"As if I were some sort of monster." With a tilt of his head he peered toward her. His voice rumbled up from his throat like an elusive, first thunder before a storm. "My name is Kol. Son of Thorlek."

At her continued silence he frowned. "I thought, mayhap, you would wish to know."

Kol. How long had she wondered?

But she did not wish to give him a name. Monsters did not have names.

Silence screamed between them. Shadows blackened the chamber, save for the fire's meager light.

Somehow the man who sat before her did not concur with the stark, shocking images of a slavering fiend her mind repeatedly produced. Forsooth, his long, dark lashes contradicted everything hard in him. Surely he had been carefully crafted by Satan to beguile unwary women into opening their hearts.

Just as she had done, once before.

From beneath those lashes, he glanced about the room.

Shadows darkened the skin beneath his eyes. He lifted a hand to rub the bridge of his nose.

"These are your chambers, are they not?" He flashed a smile. Isabel glimpsed his white, even teeth. "They smell like you. That is how I know."

Isabel did not so much as blink in response. Eventually his smile faded to bleak neutrality. Lips pursed, he lowered his gaze and found interest in some item near his feet. Her belongings. Unlike the bower belowstairs, her chamber had been left untouched.

Like a nervous bird, Isabel shifted on her roost, her eyes narrowed. He had no right to touch her things.

From a woven basket he lifted a styli. Between his long, blunt-tipped fingers he rolled the delicate instrument, the ivory snow-white against his dark skin. Again he peered into the basket, this time with clear expectancy. The faintest of smiles turned his lip as he retrieved her wax tablet.

Only yesterday she'd written a bit of verse. Not even a verse, just a silly batch of words she'd intended to share with Godric when he grew old enough to understand; to laugh and to see she wasn't the remote, too-old-for-her-days young woman the rest of Calldarington surely saw when they looked at Isabel, youngest daughter of Aldrith, princess of Norsex.

The Dane smoothed his fingertips over her words. Words intended only for her son.

"Put it down." Her voice arose no louder than a rustle of reeds. He looked up.

"As you wish." He returned the styli and tablet to the basket, and stood.

Isabel's heart nearly tore free from her breast. Surely she had angered him. Her gaze veered upward over an endless span of rough-hewn leather boots to thighs surely the thickness of Offa's dykes. Behind him, his shadow blackened the tapestries on the wall.

Slowly he lifted a hand and beckoned. "Come hither." With each word his neck corded powerfully. He moved toward her curtained haven, his boots making nary a sound. For one so large, he moved with unnerving grace. He bent to peer beneath the bed curtains. A strand of hair slid across his cheek. "I would see your wound in the light and tend to its dressing."

"I think not," Isabel whispered.

He lifted his knee, and half knelt upon the bed. The mattress tilted.

"I will not allow you to touch me. Never again," she warned. Her heart slammed against her ribs. She pressed so hard against the post she expected it to splinter against her spine.

Over time, she had found some small comfort in the lack of memories of the assault. Would she be able to retain her sanity if he were to attack her again, here and now, as she endured awake and fully aware?

He leaned toward her, eclipsing the fire's light. "If I intended to do you harm, I would have already done so." Surely his voice, his eyes, cast spells, for she almost believed.

She sprang off the bed. Her damp skirts tangled thickly between her legs. Frantic, her gaze swept the room. A weapon! Though her mother's jeweled dagger lay sheathed in Isabel's trunk, she would never be able to uncover it quickly enough. She saw nothing else. A low moan escaped her throat. From beside the hearth she snatched up a narrow log and whirled.

"Stand away!" She wielded the weapon, however paltry, between them as if it were a sword as worthy as his own. Her shredded sleeve dangled like ribbons from her shoulder. "You may stand larger and stronger than I, but this time I will fight.
This time
I will watch your every filthy sin with my eyes wide open."

He stood exactly where he had been when she'd leapt from the bed. The hilt of his sword glimmered at his hip. "I lose patience with you, little one. Put the stick down."

Her laugh rang harsh. "Is that what you believe? That simply because you order me to surrender, I shall? Nay. This time I have a voice. This time I protest."

Measured steps carried him forward. "My dispute is not with you, but with Ranulf." He stopped, an arm's reach from her.

"Nay, your dispute is with me." Fury cut through her veins.
Mistakenly
she had assumed that once they were alone, face-to-face, his assault of her person two winters ago would be at the forefront of both their minds. Had she been so inconsequential a victim? Isabel tightened her grip on the branch and waggled it threateningly.

Apparently her display of force impressed him not, for his expression remained the same. But oh, how she wanted to intimidate him, just as he intimidated her.

Boldly, insanely, she tapped the branch at the center of his breastplate.
Tap.

Her teeth clenched as tight as a mollusk, she demanded, "What of my dispute with you?"
Tap tap tap.

If Isabel had expected surprise or shame from her attacker in the face of confrontation, Thorleksson gave her neither.

Instead, the Danish warlord glared at the tip of her scrawny weapon, his nostrils flared with annoyance. "I bid you, what dispute have you with me, prior to this day?"

Isabel's mouth fell open. "Knave! Dare you pretend not to know?"

He paced a half circle along the perimeter of her weapon's reach. "I know I saved your life." Slowly, he unfastened his leather baldric.

"Only to destroy it," Isabel cried, her eyes fixed on his hands as, carefully, he set the sword aside. Would he also remove his jerkin? His tunic and braies? She swallowed, nearly ill from the thought of a large, naked, and
hairy
man pursuing her around the chamber. Despite her claims of bravery, she retreated from him until her backside jolted against a wooden cabinet.

He made no effort to remove any of his garments. For the time being, words continued to be his weapon of choice. "As I said, I saved your life. In return you spared mine."

He moved closer. Isabel clutched her makeshift cudgel, raised it between them. His eyes denounced her as strongly as his words. "There are no debts. I owe you naught."

"Nay. Methinks you owe me"—she churned the branch in his face—"you owe me that which can
never
be repaid!"

Anger darkened his features. "You cannot deny my valid claim to vengeance. You saw. I was imprisoned. Beaten unjustly."

"Unjustly," Isabel spat. "So I too once believed! But I was a stupid girl. You deserved each and every lash laid upon your back."

He leaned toward her, the gleam in his eye no longer merely dangerous, but murderous.

"Beast!" She swung. The branch swooshed through the air. Thorleksson stepped back. Her weapon missed his neck by a fingertip. He expelled air through his teeth.

He gritted, "Reveal to me, Princess, why your opinion of me hath changed so greatly since you saw fit to set me free from your brother's pit."

Did he think she did not know of his affront against her?
Must she say the words?
With a curl of her lip she hissed, "Perchance, do you think, it was the realization of your foul transgression against me?"

"Obstinate woman." He shook his head. His dark hair shone like polished jet. "You argue in regress. I intended you no harm. I did not know you were his sister. I did not expect to ever see you again. In truth, I believed you to be a peasant until this very day."

Isabel felt her face go hot and numb, in alternating waves. Rage pricked along her spine. No woman deserved rape, regardless of her status in life. "Would that have stopped you? If you had known who I was?"

"No," he exclaimed with a guttural shout. "You expect me to order my men back to the ships and sail away, simply because I have learned you are that wretch's sister?
Nei!
Nothing will stop me from achieving my due vengeance."

His vengeance?
Was his attack on her as she lay senseless beside the river so meaningless he could not even recognize it as the foremost source of her bitterness? How like a man to think only of himself.