Page 45 of The Captive Knight
A week or two sounded like an eternity, but he supposed patience was necessary to earn her trust. “I’ll send a message. In the meantime, take your brother out of hiding. I would meet this boy you care about so much.”
Her face softened in relief.
He added, “Esquival will follow my orders about holding his tongue. Will your maidservant do the same?”
She bobbed her head.
“I warn you, Aliénor.” He leaned over to place his hands on her narrow shoulders. “You’re still sleeping here.”
She cupped his face. “I wouldn’t miss a single night.”
***
Jehan bounded down the tower steps, feeling lighter on his feet and more expansive of heart than he’d felt since long before the viscount’s attack. He breathed in the life in the donjon around him, noticing the fresh rush lights in the wall sconces, the servants chattering in the rooms he passed as they swept out ashes in the hearths and laid wood for later fires. He paused at the gallery, gripping the railing as he perused the mead hall and the men-at-arms scattered below, honing their swords, cleaning the links of their chain mail, mending their small clothes and hose, and sharing slices of veined cheese and thick, dark bread spread upon the trestle table.
All this was his, and Aliénor, as well, and for a moment—this moment—he stood inside the glamour of his own ambitions.
Then he caught the steady gaze of a certain white-haired knight in the mead hall below. Thibaud had taken to him from the moment Jehan had given him the freedom of the castle keep. The knight had made a point to sit beside him at table and regale him with stories, as if he were trying to make up for the viscount’s earlier violence with fresh courtesy. Still, a reflexive kick of guilt drove Jehan to re-examine the events of the morning.
Jehan was sure Aliénor hadn’t been seen when she left the upper room. Esquival and presumably Aliénor’s maidservant had been sworn to silence. And none of the men in the mead hall were waggling their brows in his direction or giving him a single leering wink. He was imagining things.
Nonetheless, Jehan put more gravity in his stride as he descended to the lower floor. He came upon Aliénor’s great-uncle leaning against a wooden gallery-post in deference to his wounded leg.
Thibaud thrust out a cup of wine. “You’ve lain abed.”
“A fine greeting, that.”
“Conqueror’s prerogative, I suppose.”
Jehan seized the cup and took a long sip, hoping Thibaud would assume it was from thirst and not an effort to hide his face while he remembered the conqueror’s prerogative he’d spent the night enjoying. When he lowered the cup, he gestured to the clean linen wrapping around the knight’s leg. “It pains you still?”
“It’s a scratch.” Thibaud slapped the wrappings with the back of his hand. “But this wound woke up an older one I received at Crécy.”
Crécy was a town in the north of France where, ten years prior, the English had crippled the French army, giving the English King Edward III his first real victory in this war.
“Yes, Crécy,” Thibaud said to his unspoken question. “I was there. Survived it, obviously.”
“Yet all the stories I’ve heard from you have been about your forays into the Italian states, fighting for Florence with the viscount.”
“Is it so hard to believe I fought proudly in King Phillip’s personal guard?”
“You’ve been holding back on me, Thibaud.” And not just by conveniently omitting any information about a certain grand-nephew hiding in the chapel. “So you were truly a king’s man.”
Thibaud shrugged a shoulder. “If I told you, you’d have the prince requesting ransom from the crown.”
“I may still.”
“It’d be a fool’s errand.” The older knight waved a hand. “My king has been dead for nearly five years.”
“King Jean has obligations to all his father’s knights.”
“King Jean as a boy saw me beg his father to be released from his service, which he might interpret as nullifying all obligations.”
Jehan narrowed his eyes. There must be a reason why Thibaud was telling him all this while blocking his route to the food his belly was rumbling for.
“Are you not curious?” the older knight said. “How I could go from fighting alongside the flower of French chivalry to fighting petty border wars for rich Italians?”
Jehan shrugged. “I know very well how a knight of good name and family can end up selling his sword to the highest bidder.”
