The Unveiling by Tamara Leigh (beach read book .TXT) 📖

bits of blue sky, but Garr could not have said if it was the horse’s speed that melded the colors or his straining consciousness.

Blood wet him shoulder to fingers, and though he knew the wound should be tended, his anger—that which his father had many times warned would send him young to the grave—would not be quieted. He would have Annyn and her Rowan.

Shortly, he glimpsed white among the green of the wood. There they rode, the tunic he had given Annyn visible beneath the short mantle flying from her shoulders.

As he pushed the horse harder, his consciousness dipped. Grinding his teeth, he drew deep breaths and pushed on. Though his men could bring them down, he would do it himself and return ten-fold the wrong done him.

Topping a rise, he reined in, all the while keeping his prey in sight as they rushed the wood below.

“My lord?” one of his knights asked as he halted his horse alongside.

Garr nocked an arrow, lifted the bow, and grunted as he forced his arm to pull the string as it cried it could not do. But it did, and trembled for it. He sighted Rowan.

And if his quaking muscles caused him to strike Annyn?

Then he would nock another arrow!

With a growl, he swung the bow ahead of his quarry and released. Without pausing to see if he made his mark, he pulled another arrow and let it fly. There was no time for a third. Fortunately, both buried themselves deep in the chosen tree. Would their combined strength—one tight alongside the other—suffice?

A moment later, the protruding shafts caught Rowan high in the chest and knocked him and Annyn off the horse’s backside.

“Never have I seen such!” one of his men exclaimed.

Garr lowered the bow and eyed the two where they sprawled. Consciousness receding, turning his breath shallow, he nudged the horse forward and down the rise. He wanted to see their faces, for them to see his and know the dire mistake made in seeking his death. His consideration to allow them to escape was no more, but both understood revenge—except where it was and was not warranted. That Garr understood.

With his approach, Annyn roused, sprang to her knees, and bent over her man. “Rowan!” She shook his shoulders.

He was not dead. Garr was sure of it. Had he wished an immediate death, he would have aimed higher on the tree so the arrows would collapse Rowan’s throat. The breath was merely knocked from him.

As Garr neared, Rowan convulsed and wheezed. Annyn murmured something, looked up, and slowly straightened.

Though, previously, Garr had only glimpsed her fear, it now filled her eyes. Never had he read a woman more clearly. But then, never had one elicited more emotion from him. Gesturing for his men to halt their advance, he continued to where Annyn stood.

She looked to his shoulder. If not that she had tried to murder him, he might have said it was concern on her bruised face.

Garr stiffened to counter the sway that threatened to unhorse him. As he had earlier warned Lavonne to tend his wound, so must he. An instant later, he was struck by the bitter irony that he and the baron should both suffer injury over this woman. However, Garr had not sought to harm her. Too, his injury was more serious than Lavonne’s. His sword arm was nearly all that he was, and if he left it much longer, it might mean his death. He should never have touched her.

“Again I have you, Annyn Bretanne, and now your man, Rowan.” He glanced at the knight who was struggling to sit upright. “I shall take pleasure in meting out judgment.”

She stepped toward him. “I am to blame. Rowan did not wish me to come to Wulfen.”

Darkness dragged at Garr. “Did he not? ’Twas he who put an arrow through me though I yielded what he asked. Your man is without honor, Annyn Bretanne—unworthy, and for that he shall pay in kind.”

“Murderer!” Rowan spat, a hand to his chest where he had crossed the arrow’s path. As he bent forward and coughed, Annyn dropped to her knees alongside him.

Garr stared at the two and struggled to pull himself out of the grey light that was expanding to black. He had given too much blood.

Hearing Abel’s shout, he looked to the blur riding toward him. It seemed his brother had taken another’s horse—his destrier, Garr realized as he slid sideways and crashed to the floor of the wood.

All he could think as he lay bleeding was what his father had said of women—that they turned a man from his purpose and made him vulnerable. And so he bled out his life for one taste of a woman no man should want. And still he tasted her.

Annyn stared at where Wulfrith lay with eyes closed, face devoid of color, and the sleeve of his tunic bled through.

Vengeance is not yours, she heard the lesson she knew Jonas had taken from Wulfrith. And here was the reason vengeance belonged to God. With a cry strangled by the din that rose from Wulfrith’s men, she scrambled around to his side. “Wulfrith!” Lord, what is his Christian name?

He was still, as if no longer of this world.

“Stand back!” Sir Abel shouted.

She pressed a hand to Wulfrith’s chest, seeking the beat of his heart. It was there.

Feeling Rowan’s hard, accusing gaze, she looked to Wulfrith’s wound. The blood must be stanched. She swept up the hem of the tunic he had given her and tore a strip from it.

Dear Lord, do not let him die, she silently pleaded as she reached to his shoulder. Deliver him. I ask it in Your holy name.

When she had first come to Wulfen, never would she have believed such a prayer would cross her heart. Nor would Rowan have believed it. When he had shot Garr and she had cried out, his eyes had looked through her as if she were no longer known to him.

Hardly had Annyn begun to wrap Wulfrith’s wound than she was dragged upright.

“I said stand back!” Sir Abel bit. Gone was the good humor that had set him apart from his older brothers. Before her now was a distant, hard-hearted Wulfrith. But then, his brother had been injured, perhaps mortally. And she was to blame.

He shoved her back. “If he dies, so shall both of you.” He dropped down beside his brother. “Squire Charles, Squire Warren, I give these two into your care to be bound and kept full in your sight until we arrive at Stern.”

“Aye, my lord.”

For the first time, Annyn looked to those gathered around. Wrath stared at her—hatred for what had been done to their lord.

As Squire Charles advanced with a rope, Rowan rose and glared at her. “Never would I have believed you would betray,” he rasped.

She cringed at his condemnation. She could not blame him, though, for she would feel the same if she had not known Wulfrith as she had this day. “This I know.” She turned to Squire Charles.

He despised her, and as she could not fault Rowan, neither could she fault this young man. She put her wrists together. While he bound her, so tightly she would surely lose feeling, Squire Warren seized Rowan’s sword and dagger.

Annyn turned and watched as Abel wrapped his brother’s wound with the linen of her tunic. Would Wulfrith make it to Stern? How many leagues?

The pound of hooves announced the arrival of the remainder of Wulfrith’s men, and at their head was Sir Merrick. He drew near, looked upon Wulfrith, then met Annyn’s gaze. But the anger she expected was not there. Sorrow, regret, and something else, but not anger.

Why? What set him apart from those who looked at her as if they longed to do to her as Lavonne had done? Merrick was loyal to Wulfrith, she did not doubt, and yet it was as if he was divided. By what? Between whom? And what did it have to do with her?

She frowned. Perhaps it had nothing to do with her and all to do with Jonas. He had squired with her brother. Her breath caught. Could it have been he—

Nay, but perhaps he knew who.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Only as a young boy longing for home had Stern seemed so distant.

Garr meandered in and out of consciousness, never long enough to more than bring the speeding ground to sight and revive his anger with remembrance of who had turned him from his purpose. Where was she? If his men allowed her to escape...

As he was lifted and carried, torchlight pried at his lids. Passing through the doors of Stern’s great hall, he opened his eyes and saw his mother, Isobel, dressed entirely in black as she had dressed every day since wedding Drogo thirty years ago. Yet for all that dark, she smelled of roses. She hurried alongside him, her anxious face aging her years beyond the last time he had seen her.

“Garr,” she gasped when she saw he had returned to consciousness.

He closed his eyes and opened them again. “Where is she?”

His mother shook her head.

Abel leaned into sight, showing it was he who bore Garr’s upper body. “She and her man are imprisoned in the outer tower.”

That dark, filthy ramble of cells that—

“Of whom do you speak?” Isobel asked, her voice softly rolled with accent.

“Once Garr is put to bed,” Abel said, “I shall tell you all of it, Mother.”

Isobel bit her lip and nodded. “The solar. He shall have my bed.”

“What of the physician?” Abel asked as they repositioned Garr to convey him up the winding stairs.

Isobel stepped back to allow them to precede her. “I sent for him when your messenger arrived an hour past. He ought to return soon.”

As they began the climb, Garr looked to his shoulder. It was bound with linen, the blood on it dried. He would not die as his brother feared, he told himself, his training of men proving time and again the power of belief. He had lost a goodly amount of blood, but it was stemmed. However, that did not mean he would regain full use of his arm to wield a sword as all Wulfriths must do.

The strength of his anger dimming his consciousness, he once more succumbed to darkness.

Annyn tucked her legs tighter beneath her. Under cover of her mantle, she flexed her hands that were slow to regain feeling from Squire Charles’s rope. Of course, the terrible dank and chill of this place did not help.

She swept her gaze around the dim that the single torch in the corridor outside the grated cell failed to light. Rowan sat in the opposite corner. Though she could barely see his shadow, she knew he watched her. What to say now that they were alone? Was there anything?

Aye, but would he believe it? For years they had blamed Jonas’s death on Wulfrith, but now...

“Why did you not kill him in the wood?” Rowan’s voice shot across the cell.

He spoke of yesterday when they had tracked the deer. “The time was not right.”

“Not right?” She heard him lurch to his feet. “I was there—waited for you to do what you vowed you would do. And you did not!”

She huddled deeper in her corner, but pulled away when the moisture weeping the walls penetrated her clothes. “’Twas simply not right.”

“Did you lie with him?”

“I did not! He thought