LITMIR.BIZ

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I dream for you! Jean? Jean, can you hear me? I am so far away—in another world entirely—yet so close. Oh, so very close! You are more than—a hand and dagger. You are!”

      During her mad outcries, Alix of Bar wondered if she sought to justify her pleasure by making him more than he was, so that her surrender might be symbolical of something other than temporary lust. She did not know the truth. All she did was ask the question. Only Jean of Orleans and time itself might known the answer. . . .

      Dawn was a red sky beyond the river Aisne as Jean dressed and moved to the recessed stone window. The rope he had hung from the tower merlons yesterday afternoon, after gaining entrance to the Château disguised as a wandering mendicant, was close to his hand as he leaned out.

      Lady Alix said, “If a guard sees you, you’ll be killed.”

      “Little risk, little gain—and I’ve gained much tonight.” He drew her against him for a last kiss.

      “Was it more than just revenge?”

      He pinched a bared buttock and laughed, then caught the rope in his hands and stepped from the stone window. The moat lay two hundred feet below, dank with reeds, beginning to reflect the brightening light of day in its smooth surface. Jean could see himself in those waters like a spider crawling down its web. It would be the hour of primes very soon now, and the guard would be changing on the wall walks. Thirty feet above the moat he loosed his grip on the rope and fell.

      The cold moat waters closed down over his head. He sank like a stone, waiting until his lungs seemed about to burst before swimming as swiftly as he could for the shelter of the drawbridge overhang. The dark wooden boards protected him from all eyes but those at a windowslit in the east wall, and that chance of discovery he would have to risk. He popped to the surface gasping, clinging to a rusty ringbolt until he was breathing normally once again.

      He swam across the moat, underwater, and pulled himself up over the stone abutment. Without looking back he set off southward toward the forest of Compiègne. Last night he had tethered his black gelding to an oak tree in the forest. Momentarily he expected a crossbow quarrel to thud between his shoulder blades; he walked with his head held high, but behind his belt his insides were as weak as mush. Only when he reached the first stand of elm trees did he dare to turn and look back at the Château Neussy.

      Something white fluttered in the tower window.

      His arm lifted and waved back at the Lady Alix.

      Then he was plunging between the thick boles of mighty oaks and chestnuts, smelling the fragrance of blooming hyacinth in this springtime of the year, tramping over clustering trilliums and hepaticas. Alix of Bar had said her husband was traveling the Rouen road, which ran through the forest of Compiègne. Jean le Bâtard did not want to be caught within chasing distance of the Château Neussy by Raoul d’Anquetonville.

      Relief touched him when he saw the black gelding cropping grass at the end of its long tether. The horse lifted its head, as he approached, and whinnied. Jean grinned and clapped a hand to the shiny rump.

      “Ha, mon fidele! You like the grasses of Compiègne? Bien! Then feast quickly, for we won’t be here much longer.”

      He put his toe in the wooden stirrup and swung upward into the saddle, a plain wooden hull covered with black leather. His longsword dangled from a strap at the pommel. A coat of mail, tied by leather thongs and fastened tightly to his unadorned helmet, was thrown over the crupper, which held leather bags containing some extra clothes and a small sack of golden livres tournois.

      Everything he owned in the world he carried on the gelding, or so he liked to feel. It gave him a sense of freedom to know there was no one dependent on him for his or her happiness or livelihood. Sometimes at night the thought came to him that he might be shirking a duty, but he put this notion aside hastily, for he was filled only with a sense of urgency to accomplish the task of revenge he had set himself.

      He rode through the early morning sunlight, with the chirp of sparrows sounding from the berry bushes on either side of the wide dirt road. His belly was empty, but his heart and mind were alive with the knowledge that he had avenged himself on his greatest living enemy, Raoul d’Anquetonville. The old Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless—he who had ordered his father cut down with cold steel—had been dead five years now, slain on the Montereaufault-Yonne bridge, with the Dauphin looking on, and so removed from the touch of the hunting knife at Jean’s belt.

      All he had left to his blade were four men.

      His fingers counted them off—first there was Raoul d’Anquetonville, then Gaudry of Angers, Robert de Berri and Etienne Aymon. Three others were dead by his hand—François of Anjou and Guillaume the Fleming in alleyway duels, Roland of Uisel during a knife fight at an inn in Troyes.

      Now D’Anquetonville was a cuckold.

      Jean whistled the tune of a popular balada. Too bad those others had no wives as sensual as Alix of Bar. Ma foi, but the night had been well spent. She had been a revelation, the D’Anquetonville woman. It would be pleasant indeed to revenge himself upon those others as he had on old Raoul.

      For a little while shame rode the saddle with him. I’m no better than a sneak thief skulking behind merchant’s stalk or street door recesses to snatch a purse when a man’s not looking! No, he must not begin thinking like that. His whole life was wrapped around his vengeance. If he had mo such goal to sustain him, he would be no more than the villein laboring in the fields to produce turnips and wheat for the manor table—or even less, for the villein had a purpose in life, no matter how ignoble.

      The dust rose in little puffs behind the clopping hoofs of his horse, and the sunlight was warm on his back. He drowsed a little in the high-peaked saddle, promising himself he would stop at the next wayside inn for cheese and bread and chilled wine.

      A distant cry woke him to the moment.

      The forest was thinning here, and rolling meadows lay like long green carpets on the land. A stone fence made a twisting path along a field of barley, and beyond this a thin line of poplars formed a windbreak to a field whose furrows sprouted beans and cabbages, lettuce and cucumbers. The blue spring sky was filled with fleecy clouds, and a lazy breeze made the yellow bellworts sway by the roadside.

      Yet his eyes saw none of these.

      His gaze was fastened instead on a thin black plume of smoke lifting upward beyond the tilled fields. An instant later he caught the red lick of flames at a distant haystack.

      “Brigands,” he muttered, and drove his toes into the gelding.

      He went at a fast gallop across the meadow. The black soared over the low stone fence as Jean put a hand on the braided handle of his longsword, yanking it free of its scabbard. He could see several horses in the farmyard and two men struggling with a third. Again he heard the scream that had roused him from his reverie, as a woman appeared briefly in the open doorway of the hut before being dragged back into the interior.

      The two men looked around at the sound of pounding hoofbeats. They yelled hoarsely to their fellow inside the hut and released the peasant they were restraining. Drawing their swords, they ran to meet the oncoming rider. Free of his captors, the peasant whirled and made for the low doorway of his hut.

      Jean came down on the bandits at a headlong pace. His long blade glinted in the sunlight as he swung it in an overhand blow at the first man. Its edge went deep into a shoulder even as the gelding hit the second bandit and threw him offstride. Jean reined in and turned. The unwounded brigand was standing on spraddled legs, indecision written on his loutish face.

      Then the gelding was looming above the bandit, who struck at the rider with flailing sword. Jean turned its edge and almost in the same motion brought his own blade around in a savage sideswipe. The steel caught the man at the base of the neck and sheared deep. He stood a moment, dead on his feet, eyes white and staring before he began to topple.

      Jean leaped from the saddle and ran for the hut.

      A red-headed man came into the doorway and stood grinning at him,

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