Page 77 of The Captive Knight
The regent’s smile dimmed. “She has a brother?”
“A crippled one,” Thibaud said. “Long disowned by his father—”
“But yet still living.”
“Bound by honor to join a monastery,” Thibaud added, “and no threat to the claims of his sister. Yet this boy was the agent of a great victory—”
“Impossible.” The regent cut a glance to one of the knights behind the throne. “I’m told victories no longer occur in France.”
Thibaud stood up from his kneel. “If you but give me a moment of your time, Your Grace, I shall tell a tale of valor and virtue unlike any you’ve ever heard.”
***
“Come sit with me, Blanche.” Aliénor slid onto a bench at the far end of the great hall in the castle outside Meaux, a little town about twenty-five miles northeast of Paris. “If we’re talking together, maybe all these courtiers will leave us alone.”
“My dear,” the woman said, adjusting her voluminous skirts as she sat on the bench beside her, “no man in the room is likely to leaveyoualone.”
“Flatterer.”
“But I’ll sit with you anyway, in the hopes of catching a leftover.”
“Blanche, stop. You deserve better than a ‘leftover.’”
“Duckling, wearethe leftovers, remember?”
Aliénor pulled a face at her friend. She’d met this forty-year-old, irrepressible widow on the first night she and Thibaud had dined at court, when they were seated together far, far below the salt. The court swarmed with the dispossessed, eating freely of the regent’s generous bounty, and she and Blanche were only two ladies out of hundreds now under the regent’s care.
“Ah,” Blanche said, with a sudden edge in her voice. “Look there. Your great-uncle is making a fool of himself again.”
Aliénor turned her attention to the blur of dancing. Thibaud was among the dancers, his back military-straight, saying something to make his partner laugh. Aliénor marveled at her kinsman. For a man who’d spent most of his time pacing the ramparts of Castelnau and sparring on the training field, he moved among these ladies and courtiers as if he’d been born with royal blood. In the weeks since they’d joined the French court, Thibaud had spun gold out of his dusty old stories and made more friends than she could keep up with.
“That uncle of yours,” Blanche continued, “should spend less time dancing and more time seeing to your welfare.”
“He would say he’s doing just that, making influential friends and connections.” For reasons Aliénor didn’t quite understand, Thibaud and the widow had been at odds since they’d met. “In any case, right now he’s far too busy with the regent to worry about matchmaking.”
And that’s just fine by me.
“Your uncle is doing nothing but spinning fanciful yarns for the regent’s pleasure. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took the fool Mitton’s place in the regent’s affections.”
“Blanche, please, he’s my kinsman.”
“All the more reason why he should see you settled. He’s not getting any younger.”
“So quick to marry me off, are you?”
“What’s the alternative, my dear? Staying here, suffering a lifetime of listening to the whining of the regent’s wife?”
“Have pity on the duchess, she’s hugely pregnant.”
“And she makes sure we all remember it every time she’s loaded into another carriage and the entire court is dragged to yet another provincial castle on the regent’s whim.”
Hardly on the regent’s whim, but Aliénor didn’t want to argue the point. She wouldn’t soon forget the day last month when an angry mob of peasants had broken into the royal palace in Paris and killed two marshals right before the regent’s eyes. Since then, the whole court had been traveling from fortress to fortress in a wide circle around Paris so the young regent could fortify them before returning to take the rebellious city by storm.
The city of Paris, it seemed, was as unsettled as her own heart.
“Pardon my interruption,” came a voice from above, “but do I have the honor of speaking to Aliénor de Tournan?”
The words were polite and courtly but it was the Gascon accent that slipped beneath her defenses. The slide of the man’s vowels raised memories of the bright silver ribbon of the Arrats, the warmth of the rock slope beneath her feet, the scent of ripe grapes on the autumn wind, the ducks waddling in the muddy courtyard. She glanced up, hopes rising for a familiar face, but the man was a tall, young stranger who looped a thumb under his low-slung baldric as he gazed upon her with deference.
