Taming The Beast Page 3

  Alan Tornfield addressed the hall once more. “Do we have any other contestants?” After only a breath of a pause: “I should think not, after that stunning, stunning attempt. I would declare Lady—Michaela, is it?—Fortune champion, lest there is any foolish enough to challenge her. No?” he asked, looking over the hall. Then his eyes, crinkling happily much like his daughter’s, found Michaela, and his blond mustache twitched. “I believe you have earned a pair of boons, my lady.” He held forth a long, courteous arm and bowed slightly. “Collect at your discretion.”

  “This is outrageous!”

  Lady Juliette, of course. The woman stepped from the crowd once more with a swish and flounce of her fancy skirts and walked directly up to Michaela. “I’ll grant no boon to a girl who gleans her talents from Satan! That song was clearly devil’s trickery!”

  Michaela felt her eyebrows draw downward and her fingers curl into fists at her sides. She had never before struck another human being, but in that moment she seriously considered it.

  “Now, Lady Juliette,” Lord Tornfield said mildly. “Certainly you knew the identity of the woman you challenged before she gave her try, and clearly, it is not Satan who stands before you now. This was all done in good fun, any matter. I’m sure Lady Michaela’s boon will be a reasonable one.” Although his words were friendly and advising, his tone indicated that the matter was not open to debate.

  Lady Juliette’s face glowed ghastly white. “Very well, Miss Devil’s Fortune,” she fairly spat. “What will your wretched prize be? And should you request something ridiculous, be forewarned that I will slap your face.”

  “Oh, my request will be very fair,” Michaela rejoined, and moved even closer to the fuming lady so that her next words would be heard by Lady Juliette alone. “And you be forewarned that, should you dare strike me, I will drag you from this hall by your hair and call down the Hunt to steal your soul,” she hissed, malicious glee filling her at teasing the woman so ruthlessly.

  Devil, indeed. Good heavens.

  “Name your prize, heathen,” Juliette demanded through clenched teeth.

  “Well, then,” Michaela stepped back and looked down upon herself. “Since it is through your fault that my gown is hopelessly stained”—she let her eyes roam over the fine green velvet draping her rival—“I will have the one you are wearing.”

  Juliette laughed. “You’re daft! This gown cost more than what your piddling hold brings to the demesne in a year!”

  Michaela shrugged. “Mayhap you should have considered the value of your own possessions before you set about ruining another’s.”

  “I’ll not do it!” Juliette shrieked, looking to Lord Tornfield. “This is absurd!”

  “It seems reasonable enough to me,” the lord said. “And it was your challenge, Lady Juliette. I’m certain Lady Michaela will accept you sending the gown to her home by messenger. Surely she does not expect you to turn it over this night?” Lord Tornfield raised a questioning eyebrow to Michaela, and her heart pounded.

  “Of course,” Michaela acquiesced. “I shall look for it within the fortnight.”

  Juliette stammered. “I—I—” She stamped her foot and set her mouth in a pinched frown. “Very well, then. You shall have it.” She made no attempt to mask her glare for Michaela. “Now, I’m certain you will understand if I bid you good night.” She spun on her heel and swept from the hall, a few quiet snickers from the other guests escorting her out with her personal servants.

  Lord Tornfield’s commanding voice rang out again. “Have my fair musicians quit me as well? The night is far from over, my good men—let us continue the festivities in earnest! I have much to celebrate!”

  The music immediately bloomed forth once more, and the crowd drifted away to refreshments or more private conversation, while Lord Tornfield beckoned to Michaela to join him and his daughter before the dais.

  Michaela curtsied. “My lord, I am honored by your decision.”

  “Nonsense!” The blond man smiled, still keeping an affectionate hold on his daughter. “You fairly bested any and all—”

  Elizabeth suddenly broke free from her father and threw her slender arms around Michaela’s waist, nearly toppling them both.

  “Oh, my!” Michaela laughed and squeezed the pretty girl, partly out of affection, and partly to keep the pair of them upright. Elizabeth continued to cling and so Michaela let her be. It was nice to be embraced.

  “She seems to have taken to you rather quickly,” Lord Tornfield observed. “How long were the two of you hidden away?”

  “Not long,” Michaela rushed to assure him, and wondered if the little girl was not clinging to her in order to avoid punishment. “I do hope you’ll forgive Lady Elizabeth for disobeying you, my lord.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Beneath Michaela’s forearms, Elizabeth’s shoulders shook.

  “I shall…I shall forfeit my boon if it will prevent her from being reprimanded.”

  “Why on earth would I reprimand Elizabeth?”

  Michaela felt her face heat. Must she always feel the fool?

  “For…ah, attending the feast without your permission?”

  Elizabeth drew away slightly and Michaela saw that the girl was laughing.

  Alan Tornfield frowned at Michaela for a moment and then burst out in his own merry chuckle. “Lady Michaela, it has been my fondest wish for some time now that Elizabeth join the festivities of Tornfield. I assure you, she was hiding away of her own accord. Verily, this is the first time she has shown herself to anyone other than myself or the household staff since her mother passed.”

  Michaela knew she must look like a stunned ninny, but there was nothing for it. “Oh,” was all she could think to say for a moment. “Oh. Well, then, I am pleased that she decided to appear, as well.”

  Elizabeth returned to her father’s side and Alan Tornfield smiled as he drew his arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Now, as for your boon—”

  “My lord, if you please,” Michaela interrupted. “I would request that my father’s hold be granted some sort of small reprieve. Our harvest was scant last year—our village seems to be shrinking. I’d not ask the whole of our debt be forgiven, of course, but perhaps a small portion? Or an extension for payment in full?”

  Lord Tornfield looked at her thoughtfully. “I am well aware of the state of your parents’ distress, Lady Michaela. Indeed, all the land felt the pinch of Magnus Cherbon’s rule, myself included. We were granted an unexpected reprieve by his passing, but now that Lord Roderick has returned, I do wonder for how long.”

  “I see,” Michaela said, hearing the man’s answer in his tone, if not his words.

  “But perhaps we can reach some sort of arrangement,” Lord Tornfield said suddenly, his thoughtful gaze flicking to his daughter. He looked back to Michaela’s face and his eyes sparkled. “I am not an unreasonable man, after all.”

  Michaela didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. After a moment, Lord Tornfield spoke again.

  “Perhaps you would consider taking a position in my household, in lieu of your parents’ debt,” he suggested slowly, and Michaela thought she might have seen Alan Tornfield’s eyes take a quick appraisal of her body. Her stomach fluttered. “As Elizabeth’s companion, of course,” he added quickly. “I would not wish your reputation harmed.”

  Michaela wanted to laugh. Her reputation could be no further tarnished were she to walk through the streets of London stark naked. But then the essence of Lord Tornfield’s suggestion struck home.

  “My lord, are you proposing that the whole of my parents’ debt would be forgiven, only for my companionship for Elizabeth?”

  “I think…I think, yes. Yes.” His words grew surer. “Lady Michaela, my daughter’s happiness is most important to me. If she has some sort of quick affection for you, if you can draw her out of her shell—perhaps even coax her to speak once more—it is worth all the tithes in my holding.” With these last words, Michaela saw the lord’s throa
t constrict. “For each quarter that you reside at Tornfield Manor as Elizabeth’s companion, the Fortune tithe will be dismissed. I know it is terribly boorish of me to reap favor from a boon that is yours, but will you accept?”

  Michaela wanted to weep. Instead, she let a shaky smile curl over her face as she suddenly realized how terribly handsome Lord Alan Tornfield was. At his side, Elizabeth’s face turned toward Michaela, hopefully expectant.

  “I will,” Michaela breathed.

  Chapter Two

  He was home.

  Roderick’s heart thudded in his chest like a war drum as Cherbon came into his view by way of the gatehouse. He reined his mount to a halt to collect himself, and leaned onto his right thigh to give his screaming left knee and hip a moment of rest from gripping the horse’s side. Hugh Gilbert drew his horse even with Roderick’s and stopped, the misshapen bundle bound to Hugh’s back by lengths of wide, fine linen crisscrossed over his chest giving him a hunched appearance.

  “This is it, is it?” Hugh said, and looked to Roderick with his usual sardonic grin. “Likely enough, I suppose.”

  During the long, long months of Roderick’s recovery, the Hugh Gilbert Roderick had first met before Heraclea had slowly changed into a different man. Although to be fair, Roderick guessed that Hugh likely hadn’t changed at all. The man he knew after the battle had been a desperate man, a guilty man—qualities taken on in a time of trial. The Hugh Gilbert who sat the horse next to Roderick’s side was the true man. The man he had been before his pilgrimage and the man he was now. And although in those early days of sickness, Roderick would have never guessed that their lives would become so closely entwined, he liked the man Hugh Gilbert was, owed him a great deal, despite Hugh’s protests.

  And Roderick was glad that Hugh accompanied him now to his home. Roderick would have not admitted it under threat of death, but the sight of the soaring gatehouse of Cherbon Castle struck old, cold, weary fear into him. Even though he knew the Cherbon Devil was dead and buried more than a year past, Magnus’s ghost seemed to reach out to Roderick from the mortar between the rough stone with bony, pointing fingers, and his deep, menacing voice seemed to ring in the ears of his son.

  Failure. Failure!

  Worthless, useless cripple!

  You should have died instead of me.

  But Roderick had not died, much to his own surprise, instead drawing morbid, determined strength from the news that Magnus Cherbon had met his own final judgment halfway around the world, ironically within the formidable and decadent walls of Cherbon. And now the Cherbon demesne was Roderick’s—the Cherbon Devil reincarnated, in his own bitter mind, but for different reasons. Once, a desperate lifetime ago it seemed, this fortress had housed a frightened and cowed young boy, then a rebellious and angry young man. Now it welcomed an injured and embittered lord back into its cold arms. Roderick was home again, and unlike his hasty and solitary departure, he had not made the long return journey alone.

  The bundle strapped to Hugh’s back squirmed and gave a cross squawk.

  “Yes, yes, Bottomless Pit,” Hugh said over his shoulder. “Nearly there. I vow you’ve wet me through to my front side.”

  The wind gusted, whipping the ragged remains of the Cherbon standards topping either side of the gatehouse tower into snapping strips. Ivy had laid siege to the imposing fortress and been left to run its mad reign unchecked, giving the walls stretching away to the north and east an abandoned, dangerous, wild appearance. The drawbridge was lowered, but there was no fanfare, no bustling serfs attending the castle’s business either on foot or in cart. In the cloud-covered gloom of that rainy and cold afternoon, no harker so much as called out a warning.

  Not even the sound of a footstep could be heard from beyond the curtain wall. Only the lonely wind, skimming the gray stones.

  Roderick adjusted in his saddle onto his screaming left hip once more and clucked his weary horse over the drawbridge, wordlessly prompting Hugh to follow. Young Leo began to cry in earnest as they passed into the barbican.

  The inner bailey of Cherbon was more derelict than its exterior. Vines ran their wicked, tangled maze here, as well, almost like a plague of vegetation had been visited upon the castle, and the old, crackling growth seemed a carpet of despair. Strewn about the ground were bits of broken furniture, barrels that had burst their staves as if dropped and left to lay where they had vomited their contents, now long picked over by scavengers. Shattered jugs and wedges of pottery—Roderick saw a jagged piece with the Cherbon crest cleaved where it had broken. He saw a length of once-costly and now weather-faded cloth—perhaps a piece of the drapery belonging behind the lord’s table in the great hall.

  Roderick walked his horse through the crackling, crunching litter of the bailey, around the great tower of the keep toward the entrance of the hall. He stopped and put his back to the south wall, also covered in choking vines to the battlements and wallwalk above. Over the keep, between where Roderick stood and the hidden inner courtyard, a gossamer finger of wood smoke struggled to scratch at the low blanket of sky. A crow cawed. Roderick let the reins fall from his hands and grasped his left leg below his knee. Using his right fist, he beat his boot backward out of the stirrup, and prepared to lift his leg over the pommel.

  Hugh was off his own horse in a blink, and Roderick felt a familiar pinch of jealousy at the man’s ease of movement, even with stout little Leo strapped to his back.

  “One moment, Rick. I’ll get—”

  “I can do it,” Roderick growled.

  “Don’t be an ass,” Hugh snapped, searching beneath the vines for a chunk of discarded firewood, left to rot where it had been dropped. He wrested it away from the greedy vines, Leo now silent, and brought it to Roderick’s right side, where he stood the wide length on its end. “We’ve been astride all the day. With as stiff as you are upon dismounting, you’d break your only good leg. And then where would you be, I ask?”

  Roderick had no reply, for of course, Hugh was right. He grasped Hugh’s shoulder and stepped onto the wobbly wooden pylon. Holding his nearly useless leg aloft, he made the short hop to the ground, pain shooting up the muscles of his buttocks and to either side of his spine, all the same. Then, for naught but petulant spite, Roderick kicked the wood length over with his left boot and bit back the painful cry it elicited in his knee.

  Roderick pulled the walking stick from the sheath that at one time had held his broadsword and extended it. Leaning heavily, he snatched up the horse’s reins with wide, awkward sweeps of his free arm and tugged his mount toward the bailey well. Once there, he found that the bucket was missing several planks and the hemp rope had rotted nearly in two.

  Roderick threw the useless garbage to the vines with a crash and a growl, where it splintered completely. He turned and jerked the horse toward the doorway of the hall, his stomach in painful knots.

  He told himself it was not fear he felt. Only anticipation. Relief for the end of their long, long journey.

  “Going in now, are we?” Hugh called as Roderick ducked through the doorway, pulling his horse onto the cobbled floors after him.

  The hall was darker and, oddly enough, colder than the bailey, although a pitiful fire burned in the giant, square stone-lined pit near the end of the room. A remnant of the meters-long swags of drapery that had once ran the course of both long walls hung in one pitiful scrap there near the door, replaced with long swoops of cobwebs, gossamer threads of dirt, and crumbling vines straggling over the painted plaster murals set near the beamed ceiling. The floor was only marginally clearer than the bailey he’d left behind, the intricate pattern of stonework hidden beneath a thick layer of dirt and dead vines and broken furnishings.

  Only the lord’s table still stood aright, a lumpy pile of what looked like discarded cloth resting on its center. Whoever had built the fire had likely left it, Roderick thought, and he wondered if the person in residence was of Cherbon or just some wanderer who had stumbled upon the deserted castle in a spot of luck.


  Behind him, Roderick’s horse stamped and blew quietly, shaking him from the scene of destruction before his eyes. His eyes sought the doorway at the opposite end of the room, leading to the kitchens and the interior well within, and was readying to limp in that direction when the pile of cloth on the table stirred.

  “Harliss!” the lump of clothing shouted, and Roderick stopped. He knew that voice. “Roderick? Is that you, my son?”

  Roderick wanted no one to ever address him as “son” again in that room, not even Friar Cope, but he limped around in a circle all the same. “Yes, Friar.”

  The older, rotund man immediately reached for the jug at his elbow. After a long swallow, he stood. “I’m glad you’ve returned,” he said, as if Roderick had just come back from a day of hunting in the wood beyond Cherbon’s walls. “Glory be to God. But, my son, your father is dead.”

  “Good.”

  The friar nodded. “Cherbon is yours.”

  “I know,” Roderick said with a touch of impatience. “My horse thirsts.” He turned back toward the kitchen doorway and was met by yet another ghost from his past, the ghost of the woman Friar Cope had called out for in the midst of his stupor, and the source of the knot in Roderick’s stomach.

  “Good day, Roderick,” Harliss said in her thin, stingy-gray voice.

  Before him was the woman who had sought to take the place of his mother, the nurse who had cared for him and reared him under Magnus’s orders. Perhaps more skeletal, more gray, than when he’d left Cherbon, but still the same severe coif, the same dire gray gown and apron, the same permanent, disapproving frown. Her hands were clenched before her waist. How many times had those hands struck him?