Then she was straddling him, moving down his back, kissing along his spine, drawing the covers down with her torso, and his whole body was instantly awake, on fire. He couldn’t take it; he twisted beneath her, and she was neither heavy nor strong enough to stop him.
“Lady,” he gasped, trying to keep his eyes averted. She still wore her gown, but it was pulled up around her waist, and he could see the ivory skin of her thighs above her stockings. And of course her breasts were there, lily and rose…
“Hush,” she said. “Part of the treatment.”
He held up his hands. “Look at me, Lady Gramme,” he pleaded. “I am a cripple.”
“I should think you might call me Ambria under the circumstances,” she replied. “And you seem to be functional in the parts and territories that interest me.” She leaned down and kissed him with a warm, familiar, very practiced kiss. “This is not love, Leovigild, and it is not charity. It is something between—a gift for what you have done for Mery, if you wish. And to deny it would make you uncharitable indeed.”
She kissed him again, then on the chin, the throat. She rose up and after a bit of bustling was suddenly all flesh upon him, and he certainly couldn’t protest anymore. He tried to be active, to be a man, but she gently guided him away from everything but experiencing her.
It was slow, and mostly quiet, and very good indeed. Ambria Gramme wasn’t the first woman he’d been with, but this was far beyond anything he’d ever experienced, and he suddenly understood something about her that he never had imagined before. What he could do with music, she could do with her body.
For the first time he understood that love could be art, and a lover an artist.
For that insight he would be grateful for however many days he had left in the lands of fate.
And so he felt a bit of guilt when, at his most helpless moment, it was Areana’s face he saw and not Ambria’s.
When they were done, she poured them wine and reclined, still nude, against a pillow. She had seemed tall when he first met her, but she really wasn’t. She was quite small—almost as narrow-waisted as she appeared in a corset—but her body curved luxuriously, and he could just make out the tiger-stripe marks on her belly from bearing William’s children.
“And now you feel better, don’t you?” she said.
“I admit it,” he replied.
She reached over and shuttered the flame so that she became an alabaster goddess in the shaft of moonlight seeping in the window. She finished the wine and crawled under the covers, turning him so she was spooned against his back.
“In three days,” she whispered into his ear. “Three nights from now, at midnight. You will meet me in the entrance hall. I will have gathered up Mery and Areana. Be prepared.”
“I will,” Leoff said. He thought for a moment. “Should you—will you be discovered here?”
“I will be safer here for the next few hours than anywhere I can imagine,” she said. “Unless you want me to leave.”
“No,” Leoff said. “I don’t.”
Her warmth against him was pleasant, still sexual but in a subdued mode that allowed him to drift off into an agreeable, comforting sleep.
When he awoke again, he wasn’t sure why, but he looked up at a faint sound. At first he thought it was Ambria again, looking down at him in the darkness, but Ambria was still nestled against his back.
And then, even in the feeble light, he recognized Areana, tears glistening.
Before he could think of anything to say, she hurried away in her stocking feet.
10
Gobelin Court
Cazio thought he understood what was going on pretty well, until Anne stood up in her stirrups, flourished a short sword, and shouted, “I am your Born Queen! I shall avenge my father and sisters; I shall have my kingdom back!”
For one thing, the sword she brandished was so silly; he’d rather fight with a piece of stale bread. But then again, she wasn’t fighting with it; she was leading with it.
Men in surcoats who didn’t look friendly were pouring into the square, and Anne didn’t seem surprised. From his point of view, she ought to be surprised, and if she wasn’t, by Lord Mamres, he ought to know why.
Had this been her plan all along, to be ambushed in a public square? It wasn’t a plan that made a lot of sense.
“What shall we do?” he shouted.
“You stay close to me,” Anne replied, then, raising her voice, gestured toward the men entering the square. “Keep them back!”
Forty of the fifty men in Anne’s company responded by charging across the square toward the city guard, or Robert’s guard, or whatever it was. It was a messy business right away, as the plaza was full of people, and though they were trying to clear the way between the two armed forces, there was a good deal of pushing and tripping and falling down.
Anne’s remaining guardians clumped around her as she dismounted and strode toward the actors. Taken by surprise, Cazio dismounted so quickly, he nearly fell.
As his feet hit the square, he was suddenly very pleased to have cobbles under them again. Not grass, not tilled land or wild forest floor or a lord-forsaken beaten desert of a track in the middle of nowhere, but a city street. He nearly laughed with joy.
He realized then that he had mistaken Anne’s target. It wasn’t the actors but Sir Clement, who had leapt from his horse and run to stand by the patir, arming himself with a sword from one of the churchman’s guards. The other Church soldiers lowered their spears into a hedge around the patir, keeping their swords in reserve.
But Clement, their betrayer, was a knight, so he would prefer a sword.
Cazio sprinted to put himself between Anne and the knight.
“Allow me, Highness,” he said, noticing the somewhat unnatural look in Anne’s eye, not unlike her aspect that evening in Dunmrogh. He realized he was doing Clement a favor.
She nodded curtly, and Cazio drew his steel as Clement rushed at him.
It wasn’t Caspator, but Acredo, the rapier he’d taken from the Sefry dessrator. It felt unfamiliar, too light, oddly balanced.
“Zo dessrator, nip zo chiado,” he reminded his opponent. “The swordsman, not the sword.”
Clement ignored him and came on.
To Cazio’s delight, the fight wasn’t as simple as it might have been. Knights, Cazio had discovered, were extraordinarily hard to fight when they were in armor, but that had nothing to do with their swordplay, which was uniformly clumsy and boring to the point of tears. Part of it was the weapons they used, which were really more like flattened steel clubs with edges.
The sword Clement bore was a little lighter and thinner than most he had seen since leaving Vitellio, but it was still essentially the same sort of cutting tool. What was really different was the way the fellow held his blade. Knights in armor tended to cock their weapons back, to swing from the shoulder and hips. They didn’t fear the swift stop-thrust to the hand, wrist, or breast since they were usually sheathed in iron.
But Sir Clement dropped into a crabwise stance not so different from that of a dessrator, although he put a little more weight on his back leg than Cazio would recommend. The sword he held in front of him, arm extended toward Cazio’s head, so that he was looking straight at the knights knuckles, while the tip of the sword slanted curiously down, aimed roughly at Cazio’s knees.
Curious, Cazio lunged for the exposed top of the hand. Moving the sword far faster than Cazio would have guessed was possible, Clement merely flipped his wrist, with only a slight motion of his forearm and none from his shoulder at all. That quick, simple turn brought the forte of his blade up to intersect Cazio’s thrust. The tip came up, too, and sliced quickly down along Cazio’s rapier, forcing it away and exposing his wrist to a cut that would have arrived if Cazio hadn’t been ready to take a step back.