The nun finished her laugh and she and the knight met each other’s eyes. ‘I can handle myself on the road,’ she said.
‘By Saint George, you are the Bonne Soeur Sauvage!’ he said. ‘Sister Amicia?’
She curtsied. ‘The very same.’
He laughed. ‘Sweet wounds of the risen Christ, Helewise, you don’t need me here. This good sister has probably slain more boggles than all the knights west of the Albin.’ He smiled at the nun. ‘I have a package for you, back in the Donjon. I’ll send it on to you.’
‘A package?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘Arrived a month ago, by messenger from the east. Sent from the Inn of Dorling.’
She flushed.
The knight went on, ‘At any rate, if you plan to ride my roads, I’d appreciate knowing what you find. The Wild is still out there – closer, I would say, than they were a year ago. These ladies are lucky to have you, ma soeur. They won’t need me!’
Phillippa wanted her dinner, so she and Jenny Rose swarmed down the ladder to the ground and they missed Mistress Helewise saying, very softly, ‘Some of us need you, ser knight.’
Ticondaga Castle on the Wall – The Earl of the Westwall and Ghause Muriens
She looked into her silver mirror for far too long.
And sighed.
Her blond hair remained as nearly white-gold as artifice and phantasm could make it, and it fell down her back to the rise of the swell in her buttocks. Her breasts were full and firm, the envy of women half her age.
What do I care? she thought. I am so much more than the sum of my breasts and the length of my legs. I am me!
But she cared deeply. She wanted to be all that she was and continue to beguile any man she wanted.
She picked up a fur-lined robe. The morning chill was rising, the fires weren’t lit, and a rash of goose-bumps was not going to enhance her beauty. Nor was a bad cough.
She pulled the robe around her and, on impulse, cupped her breasts with her hands, and heard the movement-
‘Not now, you fool!’ she hissed at her husband, the Earl, but he had the neck of her gown in his hand, lifted her effortlessly and threw her on the bed, pinned her to it with a strong hand and shrugged out of his own heavy robe.
‘I’m – Stop!’ she said, as his weight came atop her.
He put his mouth over hers.
She writhed under him. ‘You oaf! I’m rising! Can’t you knock?’
‘If you will preen that marvellous body of yours in front of an open door, you get what you deserve,’ he breathed into her ear.
His feet were cold – he never would wear slippers. But his insistence had its own charm – his strong hands had many skills – and when his knee went to part hers, she locked his arm and rolled him over like a wrestler, and sat on his chest – leaned back and caught his prick with her hand, and he groaned.
She flicked him with a practised nail and impaled herself, and his eyes widened to have their roles so quickly reversed. He took her breasts in his hands. ‘Happy birthday, you faithless bitch,’ he growled into her throat.
‘What did you get me, you great fool?’ she asked as he sought to throw her over and get atop her again. She caught an arm and kept him pinned, and threw her hair over his face so he couldn’t see. She was laughing – he was laughing, but he got one of his iron-hard arms across her back, ran it down and down, and she moaned-
– and then he was atop her, grinning like the beast he was. But he kept his hand under her, and raised her – with one hand – cradling her on his hand as they rutted so that all the muscles in her back were stretched. She locked her legs over the back of his knees and bit his shoulder as hard as she could, her teeth drawing blood. His nails bit into her back. She wriggled, clenched her knees on his sides, and moved her head – he leaned forward to fasten his mouth on her left breast-
They fell off the bed slowly, the bed-hangings holding their weight for three long heartbeats and then tearing – she caught the floor under her right foot and then she was atop him and his back was to the cold stone floor, his head was lifted to hers. He tasted the blood on her lips, and she tasted her own salt-
There was a moment when they merged with the Wild. She flooded him with potentia. His back arched so hard that she almost came off him.
And then they were done.
‘Christ and his saints, bitch, you nigh broke my head,’ he said.
She licked his lips. ‘I own you,’ she said. ‘I rode you like a horse. A big warhorse.’
He smacked her naked arse hard enough to draw a cry. ‘I came to tell you there’s a letter,’ he said. ‘But there you were cupping your boobies with your hands and you looked good enough to eat.’ He passed a hand over his left shoulder and it came away bloody, and he laughed. ‘Jesus wept, it’s me who got ate. How to you do it, you witch? Yer as old as a crone, and I want no other.’
‘Fifty today,’ she said. She ran her hand over his shoulder and put a tiny working into it and it closed.
He stood and ran a hand up her leg from the bottom and she purred.
‘The letter will wait,’ he growled, pushing her backwards.
‘Aren’t you too old for this sort of thing?’ she asked.
An hour later, they sat on heavy chairs in the castle’s Great Hall. She wore a heavy gown of blue wool as fine as velvet, spangled with gold stars embroidered by her ladies, and he wore the blue and yellow livery of the Muriens in Morean satin. They were of an age, and he had more grey than dark brown in his hair and beard. He looked like a rapacious eagle, and she looked like the eagle’s mate. Their eyes met often, and their hands touched constantly, two people who’d just made love and couldn’t quite let go.
Ticondaga was one of the great castles of Alba – the key to the Wall, the strongest rock against the Wild. Rising four hundred feet above the forest floor, commanding a bay on the lake with access to the Great River, Ticondaga was reckoned impregnable by Man and Wild alike. But the cold granite walls sixty feet high, the massive gatehouse, the three concentric rings of walls and the gargantuan donjon, the lower floor carved from the living rock of the mountain, while militarily magnificent, made the living uncomfortable most of the year and downright harsh in mid-winter. Late summer was merely cold in the morning. Everyone wore wool at Ticondaga.
The Great Hall seated the entire garrison for meals – sixty knights and four hundred soldiers and their wives, paramours, lemans, or whores. It was the Earl’s view that seeing his men eat three times a day kept them loyal, and thirty-five years in the saddle of the greatest and most dangerous demesne in Alba hadn’t changed his views. So breakfast was served to almost five hundred people – porridge, tea, scones and clotted cream and preserves and cider. When he had noble visitors, he’d serve fancier foods, but the Earl of the Westwall liked plain food in massive quantities, and he was famous as far away as Galle as a generous lord. His people ate well.
Once there had been six great castles on the Wall, and six lords in the north. Before that, they had been legates of a distant emperor. In the distant past, when the stones of the hall’s foundations were new, the Empress herself had sat in this hall.
Times had changed, and the Earl’s ancestors had sought dominion over the north, on both sides of the Wall. More, as the Wall mouldered it lost its value as either fortification or boundary. In the last hundred years, the Muriens had built their lordship at the expense of the Southern Huran across the river and the lordships to the east and west who were nominally allies and near relations.
The Earl himself had completed the job, vanquishing the Orleys in a series of pitched battles in the woods and a climactic siege of Saint Jean, once the mightiest fortress on the Wall. Young and full of vigour, sorcerously aided by his wife, the Earl had toppled the Orleys, taken Saint Jean and razed it; throwing the bodies of each and every Orley, their children, their women, and their servants into the blaze. It was a victory so total that the old King hadn’t bothered to declare him forfeit, and the young King was his wife’s brother and not inclined to make trouble. The old King had fought the great fight at Chevins with no help from the Muriens and died soon after, and the young King had never attempted to make his writ felt in the north.