Hawk sidestepped against Gian's mount, shoving, his bulk compelling the other horse to scramble for footing as Ruck forced Gian's arm overhead. Like a slow ram, the destrier impelled the lighter horse to move, to lurch and falter in the stream. Gian wrenched free and threw himself toward Ruck, driving the dagger at his face as the rouncy went down with a floundering splash.
Heavy drops sprayed over Melanthe as her mount shied back. The ladies screamed, clinging to their reins and their bating hawks. Amid a flail of hooves and water Gian was half-trapped, his leg beneath the horse, but the animal rolled and heaved forward, struggling upright in a glistening sheet.
Frantically Melanthe scanned Ruck's face, dreading to see a poisoned scratch within the shadow of his helmet. But there was no blood, only the forbidding set of his mouth as he met her eyes.
It was this he had wanted from the start, she saw. Not his command to her to go with him—but Gian, dripping and humiliated beyond human bearing, shamed into challenge and combat.
"She is my wife," he said, looking on Gian as the downed man groped to his feet in the middle of the stream. "You will not touch her or see her again."
"You're an open liar and false knave." Gian's leg gave beneath him, and he went to one knee, but even his soaked velvet did not diminish the proud savagery of his response. "I'll have your contemptible life."
"Name the occasion. And come armed."
Gian drove himself to his feet. "You'll receive my messenger."
"I await him. The Ospridge at Colnbrook." Ruck tossed Gian's dagger into the water. He turned Hawk, reining the destrier up onto the bank, and halted beside Melanthe. "For courtesy, I do not compel my lady's grace to attend me at a common inn."
"Mary, I would not attend you at Westminster Palace, you poor deluded churl." Her rouncy pirouetted. "Begone. Gian, your little sperverhawk has taken a stand in that oak—" She spurred her horse, gesturing urgently at the sparviters who had held the spaniels and gaped all through the scene. "Come quickly, we must retrieve her before she escapes!"
He hated her, with a fine relentless hate, a cold will down to his heart and sinew.
For a fortnight Ruck had sat in taverns and listened to the talk of clerks and squires, of knights in waiting at Windsor. He'd heard it all—how this Italian lord would wed her, what terms he bought and how he bought them in his dealings with the king's ravenous mistress and her favorites, where he resorted, and how often he attended the Lady Melanthe at her bury hall of Merlesden.
Warm air, smelling of dust off the street, flowed into the upstairs window of the inn. Ruck sat with his feet propped on the sill. He could see Merlesden from his chamber, an admirable court hall of pale stone on a wooded hillside across the water meadows, the sun sparkling from its many windows.
He hated it, too.
Navona kept his own lodging three miles off, in the town hard by the castle. If he'd not, Ruck thought, he would already be dead.
Ruck would not endure her to make mock of him. To discount him, as if he did not exist. How long she must have planned it, he couldn't fathom—she had deceived and wiled, and he'd been so besotted and glad that he hadn't pressed her. Or perhaps she'd never planned it, but only heard that her great love had come for her, this Dan Gian, this Italian lord—father of her lap-dog lover; vice beyond conjecture—and she forgot all else but to warn Ruck not to presume on her for shame of him.
He swung his legs down and stood, pacing the width of the private bedchamber as he had walked the towers of Wolfscar. She'd called him mad, and he had gone near mad in truth, silent ferocity, a violence locked up inside himself, so that he could not speak even when he heard common voices talking to him.
He was out of his right mind yet, he knew. She would have her way, he didn't doubt: he wouldn't have her back—nor wanted her. She hadn't even looked as he remembered. Ever the witch, she had changed herself again: thinner, delicate and narrow like a phantom spirit clothed in richness, her eyes deep and dead when she gazed upon him. Her flowers were a jesting mock, virgin's blossoms to adorn a whore.
He leaned his hands on the painted boards and put his forehead to the wall. He listened to the sound of his own breathing.
Ruck wanted to slay her as she slayed him, but he could only kill the oiled and painted carpet knight. By the church or by the challenge, he would deprive her of that connection. In his madness to prevent her, he was blessed with detached reason, as if he were two men, one who burned and one who was ice.
He had hired counsel in canon law. He made his case to the bishop, giving solemn oath of his truth—so perhaps her foreign lord's great preparations for a feast would be gone to waste. Ruck had even found his green tournament plate, stolen in the Wyrale and ransomed back from an armorer in Chester, missing the emerald, yes, but fit for use. He'd chosen his place and time with perfect care—to speak before witnesses who would put the word about court and countryside swift as gossip's wing could carry it.
If they dared to carry on with their betrothal, Ruck intended to sour the wine in their mouths.
The canon clerk had advised him to assert that she could not speak freely for fear of someone near her, a trick to counter her foregone denial. That Melanthe had ever feared anything, even unto Hell itself, Ruck greatly doubted, but he could see the usefulness of the pretense. He had also given a hoard to the clerk's safekeeping, in case they should try to have him arrested on charges of deceit and falsehood, and set down names of men who would give bond for his surety. He trusted her as he would trust a viper in his bed.
He lifted his head at the sound of a horse coming fast in the road. Two days he'd waited for Navona's agent. He turned eagerly, to hear if the rider came to a halt, but the hoofbeats did not slow. The horse rushed beneath the window.
A pale object flew through the open glass, startling him. It thumped on the floor, a small white sack, while the horse passed on without a pause.
He swept it up, yanked open the string, and poured pebbles from inside. A folded paper fell after them into his hand.
For an instant his whole heart changed—he pressed open the folds with a hope that lasted only long enough to see that it was French. She would not write him in French, not if she meant well. Neither her name nor her sign marked the paper.
"Be on guard," it said only. "The wine."
He held the paper, rubbing it between his fingers. There was no hint—but it must be her, to warn him of this wine. Who else...
Comprehension came to him. He had seen Desmond here, at a distance, loitering with Allegreto and a crowd of honey-fly gallants and laughing ladies, dressed in a short coat with delicate embroidery and fur tips. Desmond, too, she had perverted, but this much faith the boy must have left, to forewarn Ruck—in French no less—that his wife or her lover tried to poison him.
He made a small laugh, tearing the parchment and flicking the pieces away. And when Navona's agent came at last, bearing a flask of wine and news that Dan Gian, his ankle broken in the fall beneath his horse, would have a champion in his place rather than delay their reckoning, Ruck did not drink to seal the arrangement.
A champion. But let him cower behind tainted wine and champions, the fisting cur. He would not have her.
Ruck gave the wine flask to the landlady and told her to poison rats with it—for which she thanked him in the morning and said that it had done very well.
The champion was to be imported from Flanders. Ruck learned of it when he went to the jousting ground in search of exercise, and found no dearth of offers.
He fought in the lists all morning. He did not usually encounter so many who wished to trade spars with him, but he was glad enough for the fierce activity. He knocked a squire clear from his saddle with a wooden waster sword when he thought of Navona's face.