Page 6 of The Captive Knight
She shook her head.
Men.
She threaded her silver needle in preparation for stitching his head wound. He twitched at the first piercing. Fresh blood dripped and she knew from the tautness of his body she was causing him pain. She shouldn’t care. For the trouble he’d caused her, she should enjoy every bit of agony she inflicted on him. Yet she found herself working swiftly, finishing just as Hugo returned with more wine.
“It’s done,” she said, as she secured a clean linen strip around his head. “Now let me see your hand.”
Grudgingly, he presented it to her. She probed the swelling around his wrist. She felt no broken bones but suspected his wrist was sprained. There wasn’t much she could do but wrap it up.
When she was done, she gave his chain-mail shirt a tug. “Do you still fear I’ll plunge a dagger into your heart?”
He waved his good hand. She couldn’t help but notice it was shaking. Alarmed, she made short work with the buckles and then, with Hugo’s help, she pulled the chain mail off his shoulders. A padded doublet followed. While she dragged the heavy chain mail and the doublet to the pile with his other armor, Hugo helped wrestle the knight out of his bloody shift. When she turned around, Sir Jehan was naked from the waist up.
Her throat went dry. The knight didn’t need padding and plates for protection. Surely any sword would deflect off the iron-hard sweep of his shoulders and the sculptured planes and ripples of his torso. Her gaze fell to his abdomen, tacky with dried blood, and the odd thoughts fled.
“Tell me, daughter of Tournan,” he said. “Doesthislook like the result of a fair fight between knights?”
She held her tongue, for the pallor of his face and the quaver in his voice suggested she was running out of time. Dropping to her knees beside him again, she swiped a wet linen over the swollen ripples of his abdomen to expose the skin beneath, searching for open bleeding, preparing to stanch it. But beneath her hand, the sheen of dried blood gave way to nothing but an abdomen discolored with bruises. For all her efforts, she couldn’t find any wound deeper than a scratch.
She paused, baffled, the wet linen dripping in her hand. A blow of a spiked mace atop chain mail could cause bruising, or a blow of a mailed fist, but that didn’t explain the source of the blood in which he and his clothes were covered.
“No words from the loyal daughter?” He was breathing fast, staring at her like she was his only grip on consciousness.
“I’ll tend to your leg and be on my way.” She tossed the linen aside and reached for her needle. “I’ll leave the food. I don’t know when I can return.”
“Not a single question? No curiosity as to whose blood I’m bathed in?”
She wanted to ask. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“Ask your father,” the thief persisted. “Ask him why he battled a knight who’d offered up his sword.”
“Enough.”
“Ask him,” he persisted, “why he butchered three of my men before my eyes, as well as an innocent, unarmed squire.”
***
The next morning, Aliénor caught up with her brother, sprawled on the bottom stair of the castle steps. After last night’s troubling confession from Sir Jehan—one that kept her awake most of the night—Aliénor was determined to turn her mind to the more solvable problem of the fifteen-year-old Laurent de Tournan.
She sank onto the stairs beside him. “Father is still off hunting then?”
“He left before dawn,” her brother said, shrugging. “He still hasn’t asked to see me.”
“Good.”
Her father’s inattention was a small reprieve, but it would not last for long. Sometime today she was sure he would summon his only remaining male heir into his presence, and then Laurent would face the usual reckoning.
She glanced at Laurent’s saddled horse standing nearby. “I see Thibaud has arranged for practice.”
“Always the optimist, our uncle.” With a wry smile, he turned over in his hand a small block of oak on which he was carving the face of a saint. “He thinks that playing at knights’ games will turn me from my intentions.”
She gave him a narrow look. “Thibaud thinks training you as a knight will keep our father in better humor.”
“A fool’s errand.”
“Don’t poke the beast, Laurent, not today.” She dipped down, forcing her brother to meet her eyes. “On the madness scale, our father is well past St. Stephen’s Day and nearly at Epiphany.”
“Skipping straight past Christmas?”
