Page 57 of The Captive Knight
Chapter Fifteen
Aliénor kept blinking to clear her sight. Laurent’s arrival must be a cruel trick of her mind, an image conjured up from months of worry and anguish and dwindling hope. But no matter how many times she rubbed her eyes, Laurent was still there, approaching the bridge to the village.
Relief flooded over her like a spring melt. She leaned into Jehan and filled her lungs with the scent of smoke, iron, and leather rising from the fibers of his surcoat. “I was so afraid I’d never see him again.”
Laurent’s disappearance had been the one cloud in her heart these past months, the only blot on her happiness.
“Thibaud,” Jehan shouted above her head. “Greet them and find out what they want.”
Something in Jehan’s voice gave her pause. She pulled away to look up at him, his jaw stony, his expression dark.
“You’ll pay the ransom,” she said. “You promised.”
“I would pay any ransom,couret.” He looked at her with a knot between his brows. “If your brother were indeed a prisoner of those men.”
“Of course he is.”
“A prisoner doesn’t ride ahead of his captors.”
His words gave her pause. She’d been so happy to see Laurent’s familiar silhouette that she hadn’t given a thought to anything else. Now she realized how odd it was that he was riding in the lead, and carrying the Tournan pennant, as well.
An impossible thought passed through her mind but she dismissed it as foolishness.
“My brother must have been ordered to ride in front so you would recognize him,” she argued. “Otherwise, you might shoot the sell-swords full of arrows at their approach.”
“A prisoner doesn’t bear his own standard.”
“Again,” she said, her heart doing a little skip-dance against her ribs, “they made him carry it so you would recognize—”
“—the army behind him,” Jehan interrupted softly. “Following in his wake.”
“That’s no army.” She could no longer see the mounted men, presumably already on the cliff side path up to the castle. “I saw only a small band of men armed with pikes—”
“Men-at-arms,” he corrected. “Some wearing chain mail, others boiled leather jerkins.”
“Like many a sell-sword wanting ransom for a noble prisoner.”
“Aliénor.”
“This isLaurent, Jehan. My saintly brother, bound for the monastery. What else could this be about?”
His hands were like ice where they touched her cheek. She met those stark blue eyes, sharp with concern, willing him to see sense.
“He’ll be greeted at the gate,” Jehan said, “and asked his business. Pray, Aliénor, he hasn’t done anything foolish.”
Those cold hands were gone and so was Jehan. He’d turned on a heel to stride the dozen yards to the ramparts of the front of the castle, where, by the sound of horses and men, the contingent had just emerged over the rise into the clearing. A sudden squeal of rope and gears spurred her into action, and she joined Jehan above the portal just as the drawbridge was lowered.
Her brother kicked his mount close without hesitation. He wore no helmet and the wind tossed his shock of dark hair. The winter had frozen the softness off him—his cheeks were lean, and his surcoat stretched tight across a chest wider than she remembered. That surcoat bore an approximation of the Tournan eagle, probably sewn with his own clumsy hand. Despite all the confusion, her heart soared to see him healthy, when for months she’d been imagining him abused and beaten by brigands or thieves, half-starved on the hillsides.
Yet, at the same time, the ease at which he pulled his horse to a stop in the middle of the field, while his men formed a semicircle behind him, made her ribs squeeze tight.
The portcullis creaked open. She look down to see the top of Thibaud’s spun-wool head as her great-uncle rode across the drawbridge to meet her brother. She pressed her body between the crenellations, straining to catch fragments of the conversation, but all she saw was Laurent shaking his head with a strange calm and Thibaud speaking strong words with ever-rising animation.
In the midst of Thibaud’s rant, her brother lifted his face. It was no longer as pale as the moon, that face. It had been darkened by sunshine and chapped by wind and there were hollows around his eyes. Yet this was unmistakably Laurent, her little brother, and the half-smile he gave her was rueful, sad.
Her stomach tightened and began to churn. She didn’t understand what was going on. Why did the armed men stand in a semicircle at a distance, eyeballing the ramparts? Why didn’t Laurent dismount from his horse and embrace his great-uncle as he should? Where was the leader of these brigands, stepping forward, asking for ransom? And why was Jehan standing beside her as still as a stone statue, frowning at it all?
Her mind balked at the only justification she could conceive. There must be another explanation.
