Knight's Lady, page 1
part #1 of Tenebrae Series
Knight's Lady
Tenebrae Book Three
Julianne Lee
www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Edition
May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-257-0
Copyright © 2008 Julianne Lee
Dedication
For my fabulous new agent, Ginger Clark
One
Lady Lindsay MacNeil bolted awake at the landing trumpet and her heart surged to pounding. A sleepy smile touched her lips, and it spread across her face as the thin, tinny notes reporting the arrival repeated, wafted from above by the sea wind. He’d come. Alasdair an Dubhar MacNeil, Earl of Cruachan and Laird of Eilean Aonarach, had returned, recognized by the castle watch who saw the arms painted on his sails. How had she missed the first sighting? She should have heard the trumpet long before now. She sat up in the enormous silk-dressed bed and peered toward the window at the far end of the room, a rectangle of small panes made bluish by the predawn light. Early yet; perhaps there had been no sighting in the darkness, or there had been fog. Perhaps the sentry had been asleep and not sounded the sighting call. Or maybe she herself had slept through the announcement of an approaching boat, and that shamed her.
In any case, she slipped from beneath the heavy bedcovers, hurried to poke the fire to life and feed it a log, then plucked a small, yellow spring wildflower from the arrangement of purple, white, and yellow sitting on the table near the window. She leaned into the deep stone sill and pulled open the glass to look out. It was a far reach across the thickness of wall in the slanted sill, the rough stone cold on her bare belly, and she shivered. But her heart lifted at the view of the barbican and quay below, and when she shivered again it was a thrill of joy.
Her husband’s ships stood at the quay, already unloading men and horses. Two large black dogs, lanky young animals that resembled what would one day be called a Scottish wolfhound, bounded up the steps to the keep at a gangly, playful lope. They were littermates, born the summer before, and had attached themselves to Alex. The earl had named them after his brothers back home: Carl and Pete. They went everywhere with him, had accompanied him to Cruachan, and now announced his presence with their barking and wrestling. His voice called to them, but in spite of their size they were still puppies at heart and they ignored him.
Alex’s figure below, familiar by his build and the way he moved hurrying up the steps to the keep, caught Lindsay’s eye, and she let the flower drop at just the right moment. She made it in time, and it floated gently downward, to land only a few feet ahead of Alex trotting up the steps. He slowed to pick it up, pushed his mail coif back from his head so it lay about his neck in a collar of metal, grinned at her, and put the tiny blossom to his nose. His hair was awry from the coif, and his chin bristled with dark stubble of several days, but his cheeks glowed pink with health. No sickness, no wounds while he’d been gone. Her heart lifted with joy for that. Then he resumed his hurry into the keep, surcoat flapping, spurs and chain mail jingling. Lindsay withdrew to the room, closed the window, and turned to wait for him.
He was but a moment. Alex came straight to the chamber, followed by the dogs, who bounded into the room and settled themselves in their accustomed spot atop sheepskins near the hearth. Pete sniffed and snuffled at the air, and Carl curled up immediately to sleep. Alex bolted the door behind him, a little breathless from the steep climb but his grin bright and steadfast. His eyes shone with the pleasure of seeing her, and she guessed it was because she wore not a stitch and it had been two months since he’d left for his other island, Cruachan. For a moment he regarded her, then said in modern English for the sake of privacy from the servants in the anteroom, “Saucy wench.”
Lindsay thought his American accent mellifluous. Exotic, and she treasured it the more because she was the only one to whom he spoke in it, for she was the only one in the household — and nearly the only human in this century — who could understand it.
She resisted a grin and went wide-eyed with feigned innocence. “O bold knight, you have misjudged me terribly. I am but a poor girl without proper attire—”
“Nor attire of any sort, it would seem.”
“Indeed.” She lowered her head as if ashamed of her situation, then peeked at him from under her eyelashes and continued, “I place myself at your mercy and pray you to be gentle.” Her hands went to the small of her back, and she shook her shoulders so her breasts would sway. His gaze went to them, and his grin widened. He licked his lips, then bit his lower one as he stared. She stepped closer to him. “Please do not ravish me too harshly. You are so large and strong, and I am but weak and mild.”
That brought a snort of amusement, for they both knew she was stronger than most men and might even beat him in a fair fight. She held in laughter of her own, and her chest jiggled with it.
With a theatrical swagger Alex unbuckled his sword belt, set the weapon against the side of the stone hearth, discarded his iron-plated leather gauntlets to the floor, then began untying the opening of his surcoat. It went straight to the floor in a mound of red and black silk.
Lindsay closed the distance between them and slipped her arms around his neck for a kiss. The mail was cold and bumpy against her skin, a hardness that excited her. Alex was warm and breathing inside the hauberk, flesh and blood and bone protected by the mesh of iron rings. He held her tightly, and the rings pinched a little. It gave her goose bumps. She murmured into his ear, “Take care, bold knight.”
“Beware, tender maiden. I cannot make promises, for my lust is too great.” His breaths came heavily with that genuine lust, and he pressed his mouth to her neck.
“Would you take me unfairly?”
“Would you offer yourself, then break your promise?” His eyelids drooped and his lips touched her forehead as she helped him remove his coif and hauberk, then let them slip to the floor. Off came his spurs and boots, and when the belt that held up his trews was unbuckled, they and his drawers also went to the floor, leaving him in nothing but his knee-length linen shirt. He took her in his arms and pressed himself against her, and she slipped her arms around his neck again. Warm and breathing. And whole.
Each time he left the island, each time he donned his sword belt, each time she fought alongside him, she feared for him and prayed for his safety. Today he’d returned to her whole and not bleeding, and that was cause for thanks. Even celebration. She brought her leg up around his waist and gave a hop, and he lifted her to his hips. He was enormous and hard against her as he carried her to the bed.
She lay back, and he climbed onto the bed with her to kiss her hard. Her knees parted and he settled between them. She wanted him inside her, but he dallied, teasing, as he sometimes did to make her beg. His face was at her chest, all bristly stubble and nibbling teeth. The roughness made her gasp. Her voice went thin, but she found it and said, “O...” It gave out for a moment, then she gathered her wits and continued, “O bold knight, I promised myself to you and I am yours. But I tremble at your touch.” She pressed her hips to his belly in a smooth, rocking rhythm. “I quake under your gaze.” A moan escaped her. “I fear you will overwhelm me.” Her fingers raked through his hair. “Despoil me.” Her breaths became panting. “Ruin me for any other man.” She captured his mouth with hers and her knees lay back on the feather mattress, spread in desperate invitation.
Alex broke away and lifted his head, looked into her face, and said, “I will have you, and no argument. I say to you, fair, gentle... demure maiden, lie back, close your eyes” — he grinned and uttered a snort that was nearly a giggle — “and think of England.” Then with one hand he guided himself into her and was home.
England was quite the furthest thing from her mind.
***
Trefor MacNeil stared at the hole in the root-riddled earth ceiling above. It was a tiny circle of light amid the shadows cast by the fires in this chamber, dripping with what Trefor could only surmise was rain from the world above. He’d been down here an awful long while, it seemed. Without the sun to inform him, he only knew time as cycles of tiredness and rest, hunger and satisfaction. And, of course, longing for Morag and getting no satisfaction. If she was around, she was keeping away from him. Or the faeries were keeping her from him. But she was one of them. Sort of. Enough to be in cahoots with them, in any case, and he was coming to learn that might not be such a good thing.
And now he looked at the hole, visible in the ceiling for the first time since he’d fallen through it however many months — or years — or centuries — ago. He knew enough about these guys to know that time had no meaning for them and if he managed to find a way through that hole, there was no telling whether he might find dinosaurs or spaceships. That knowledge made him not so eager to leave. Nevertheless he stood, staring upward, unable to take his eyes off the circle of light. It had appeared a moment ago — what he perceived to be a moment, in any case — and now seemed to mock him, as if it had always been there and there must be something wrong with him that he’d not seen it before. Though he’d looked. Oh, how he’d looked. Searched. Prowled the caverns in this faerie hole, looking for a way out. There it was, and there were enough twisted, winding tree roots along the walls and ceiling for him to climb out.
If he dared.
Brochan came into the chamber, climbing over and around gnarled columns and rises of root and earth, cocky as ever, and cried out, “Are ye praying, then, lad?” Hair askew and tunic raggedy and poor, he made a bad impression as king of his realm. Trefor gathered he was pretty much standard for an Irish pet
Trefor looked at him and asked for the thousandth — or maybe millionth — time, “Where’s Morag?” Though he was conversant in a dozen or so languages, including medieval Gaelic and Middle English, he spoke modern English because he knew it irritated the little faerie.
“She’ll come when you’re ready.” He always said that. “And when she’s ready as well.” He always said that, too.
Trefor scratched an itch on his thigh and tugged at the tunic they’d given him to wear. It was too short, and there were no trews, so he was forever struggling to keep himself covered. Like wearing a hospital gown. A dirty one made of rough, poorly spun linen that itched. “So, when will I be ready?”
“You are now. I dinnae ken where your lady is off to. She should be here.” He glanced around in a show of looking for her. “I’m guessing you’ll be wanting to leave without her, though.”
It took a moment for what the faerie king had said to sink in, and when it did Trefor felt a moment of dizziness. This was too good to be true. “Ready? I’m done here?”
“Prince Trefor of the Bhrochan is ready to greet the world. If he cares to venture out.”
“No more training? No more conjuring the maucht and memorizing the foliage?”
“Are ye disappointed?”
Hardly. That stuff bored him to distraction. But he’d learned it for the sake of one day being released. He had little regard for any of the wee folk except Morag, who was more human than not, in any case. He cared nothing for the magic, for it had always come at a high price for him. Though his pointed ears proved him to be part faerie, and his mother was distantly descended from the Tuatha Dé Danann, the blood was thin in him, and he’d been raised in twenty-first-century Tennessee, far from these small Bhrochan folk who now called him “prince.” Whatever that meant to them. What it meant to him was that the things he’d learned here seemed to make it all easier. Magic wasn’t such a mystery as it had been, and there were fewer surprises from these psychotic leprechauns. So it wasn’t as if his time here had been a waste. The headaches had stopped as well, and he no longer had to weigh so much pain against working the craft. “I would move on with my life if you don’t need me anymore.”
“I never needed you. ’Twas Morag who wanted ye here.”
“Then where is she? What’s going on here?”
“Do ye care? Does it matter to you at all what her purpose is in you?”
Trefor hesitated in his reply. He’d become accustomed to Brochan’s riddle-me-this sort of talk and knew there was always more to it than craziness. The faerie was trying to tell him something, and he would probably do well to know what it was. He admitted, “I care.” Morag had lured him here. Had led him from as far away as twenty-first-century Tennessee and then left him to the mercy of this crazy faerie who was a distant relative of hers. He’d once thought himself in love with her, but these past months had put a question to that. She would be here if she gave a damn.
Brochan stuffed his thumbs into his belt and sat on a handy bulge of tree root, polished by the bottoms of many faeries before him. “Have ye thought much about where she’s been?”
Trefor muttered, “Yeah.”
“Not here, aye?”
“No, not here.”
“Do ye think she’s forsaken you?”
“I wonder.”
“Do ye think she had a purpose in bringing you here?”
“You keep saying she did. You’ve been saying for months that I’m meant to be the prince of this place.” He looked around and knew he wanted nothing more to do with this dank hole in the ground. “I’m supposed to use what I’ve learned here and fulfill a mission of some sort. Is all that nonsense her idea?”
“All that nonsense is your fate. You’re meant to do certain things, and we’ve given you the means to do them. For it would hardly be sporting for us to send you out to the fray without the knowledge required to accomplish your destiny.”
“Fray?”
“Aye. The struggle’s the thing, don’t ye know. I see the spark of concern in your eye; are ye afraid?”
Trefor blinked, then shut his eyes against intrusion from this guy, who always seemed to know too much. “No. I fear nothing.” Not in a long time, anyway. It was as a child he’d lost his sense of safety, and with nothing else to lose there was little anymore that truly frightened him. Losing Morag had once come close, but even that was waning. He looked Brochan in the eye. “So tell me what lies ahead. What’s my destiny?”
The little man laughed, a high, munchkinlike giggle. “Were I to tell you, it couldnae happen. Destiny requires you to learn for yourself what will be.”
“Free will.”
“Nae so free.”
“But that doesn’t make sense.”
“It will.”
Frustration made Trefor snort, and he looked around the room and shifted his weight with impatience. “Okay, how about a hint? If I climb out that hole, where will I find myself? Which way should I go? Is my father still out there, or has he died of old age? Turned to dust, maybe?”
Brochan gave another laugh. “No, the time hasnae flown for you as it might have, for not only are you Danann but you ken the ways of the folk. Alasdair an Dubhar is still there” — he raised a finger of warning — “but not so close as you imagine.”
“He’s not aged any?” More important, had his mother not aged? Last time he’d seen his parents, after being raised apart from them, they’d been less than five years older than himself and his mother had rejected him for it.
The hurt smoldered in his gut, and some nights he lay awake with the pain. He had faeries to thank for that, too, for the Bhrochan had left him with the Tennessee foster system, then brought him to the fourteenth century and deposited him in it three decades too early for comfort. Too much to ask that they consider how they screwed him up with his parents, he supposed.
“They’ve aged no more than you have, young Trefor.”
That was a disappointment. “And what is expected of me when I leave? I don’t imagine you taught me your magic tricks for the fun of it.”
“Och, but it was for fun! If ye think I ever do anything for aught but the fun of it, ye cannae know me very well!”
“But you have an agenda. You’re a man with a plan, and don’t tell me there isn’t something ulterior in everything you do.”
Another giggle, and Brochan said, “Were ye my son, I couldnae be more proud of ye, lad, Danann though ye are! Aye, I must confess I have a wish. And the only thing I’ll tell you of it is to seek out the king, Dagda Mór of the Tuatha Dé Danann.”
“And then what?”
“That’s for you to learn, lad.”
“No hint?”
“I’ve already told ye too much.”
“You’ve told me nothing.”
“Find the king, and all will come clear.”
“And if I choose not to look?”
The bright light of a bird’s eye came to Brochan’s grinning face, and he said, “There is no free will, Trefor MacNeil. Not truly. You cannae not go looking. ’Tis not in you to not look.”
“Watch me.”
“Och, aye, I will. I live for it.”
Trefor’s lips pressed together. “All right, be my guest.”
He looked up at the hole again and figured it was time to go. The sooner the better. He reached for a handhold on one of the tree roots. “See ya later.”
Brochan waved to him. “Hasta la vista, baby.”
Trefor paused and frowned at the crazy faerie, surprised once again at the lack of time-sense in the creature, though he shouldn’t have been. It had been this way since his arrival. Then he began the climb out of the faerie realm and back to the world Brochan had promised would be little changed from when he’d left.
Right, like he could trust what that nutcase would tell him.
***
Alex lay beside Lindsay and knew well why he’d always found it easy to resist the temptation of other women. Okay, maybe not so easy, but worth the effort at least. Whenever he was honest with himself the word “besotted” occurred to him, and even after two years of marriage he took teasing from James Douglas and Hector MacNeil for allowing his wife to own his heart. Certainly neither of them had ever let a woman in where she could do damage.
