Page 25 of The Captive Knight
Jehan resisted the urge to contradict him. The prince wouldn’t suffer sitting around waiting to starve out the inhabitants of some small castle. The prince certainly hadn’t done that for the bastide of Seissan, a walled village that should have been able to hold off an army for months at a time. This English prince liked to win his battles by boldness, burning, and extreme force—and frequently in ways few warriors expected.
“To avoid a siege,” Rostand said, “I can think of only one solution: If you escape, there’ll be no need for a conflict.”
At the wordescapethe world opened up before Jehan’s eyes, as if the walls themselves dissolved around him to reveal the rolling sweep of land and the great vineyards beyond, and for a moment it was as if he were on a racing steed flying free from here, free from the viscount, with Aliénor’s blonde hair streaming across his face.
No.
Impossible.
“Decide quickly,” Sir Rostand urged, “before we are discovered.”
“What price for this freedom?”
“A promise to ward off your prince,” he said. “Ask him to spare the village, the fields, this castle and all within it. With you returned alive and healthy, your English prince can go off and seek easier quarry because he will have already won what he came here for.”
Jehan’s chest constricted so he felt the soreness of every bruise. Vengeance was not an easy thing to surrender when he’d had so much time to nurture it in a cold dungeon cell.
“Lady Aliénor saved your life,” Sir Rostand reminded him. “If you will not do this for me and my fellows, then at least do it for her.”
Jehan breathed hard, his fists flexing, imagining the prince’s army pouring over the ramparts, into the courtyard, into her room.
“I’ll ask the prince,” he said, as doubt crept along the edges of his determination. “But I cannot promise you he will listen.”
“If you do not try, then there’s no hope at all.”
***
He’d escaped!
With Hugo’s help, Aliénor fumbled to roll out a new wine cask, an excuse to do something other than wince at the shouts and raised voices coming from the great hall. She’d herded all the servants inside the buttery to get them away from the hail of cups, jugs, serving trays, and food her father flung about in his inchoate rage. Now she could only hope Sir Rostand had enough strength left in him to ward off her father’s fury, for when the big knight had come stumbling, bloody and half-conscious, into the hall, the look her father had lain upon him had made her blood go cold.
Escaped!
She should be furious, she thought, as she wrestled the wooden bung from the cask of wine with trembling hands. Jehan had seen the defenses of the castle and knew the extent of their preparations. Setting the tap, she picked up a hand-mallet and fixed it firm with a few double-handed hits. Maybe Jehan had played her for a fool as he’d squired her around the courtyard, no doubt taking count of men-at-arms while distracting her with conversation. Maybe from the very first he’d meant to escape without ever surrendering her castle at all.
I saw a bright future within my grasp so I seized it with both hands.
Yes, he’d seized an opportunity, and for that she should be despairing. But she didn’t dare put a label on these strong, shivering feelings coursing through her—as if she herself were escaping to freedom along with him, her heart like a kestrel cut free of its jesses.
Bewildered, she turned her mind to the easier task at hand. “Heft the cask into the rack, Hugo,” she ordered. The boy-man lifted the wine cask like it was a pillow, then, once the barrel was settled, she turned the tap and caught the golden flow in a jug. She was halfway through filling the second jug when she noticed the silence.
Closing the tap, she set both jugs upon the table and hurried to peek into the mead hall, flinging out a hand to keep the servants from tumbling into the room. Except for the furious swirling of dust motes in the light streaming from the narrow windows, the hall was completely empty.
She strode across the hall, kicking chunks of meat and splattering through puddles of wine, glancing up to meet the stares of the villagers now leaning against the wooden rails of the gallery, where they’d laid pallets for what might be a very long night. She flung the door open to the courtyard, not knowing what to expect.
She splayed her hand against her stomach as if to stop its turning. There her father was, sitting on his restless horse in the middle of the courtyard, sword raised, ordering her great-uncle to raise the portcullis and Sir Rostand to lower the drawbridge while many of his other knights saddled around him. There was her father, shouting in red-faced fury that once St. Simon was found, he’d put his head on a spike for the Prince of Wales to see.
Her brother came up beside her with the sound of his dragging foot. “Is he leading a search party for the prisoner?”
“Yes.”
“Father shouldn’t leave,” Laurent said. “He’s taking too many men out of the castle.”
“I know.”
“We need those men here,” Laurent insisted. “In case the prince and his army come.”
From her perch at the top of the stairs, she swept the ramparts with her gaze to assess how many men-at-arms her father had left behind to defend the castle. Her heart dropped as she finished the count too quickly.
