Page 59 of Never Love a Lord
He had tricked her. Tricked her into letting him in, telling him what he wanted to know. Tricked her into his bed. Tricked her into loving him.
And the entire time, he was stealing Fallstowe out from under her.
Sybilla stood slowly, calmly. “Thank you for that information, Oliver,” she said coolly. She felt she had come back to herself suddenly, as if she had been away for weeks and weeks, and had now come home. The coldness, the lack of emotion, the betrayal: old friends, all. And she was once again in familiar surroundings inside her own icy heart.
“I’m sure you understand that I must be away immediately. I have some things to tend to at the keep.”
“Sybilla,” Cecily said, stepping toward her with her hands out. “Don’t leave now. At least stay the night here at Bellemont. Give yourself time to think, to plan what you will do. You’re in no state to make the journey back now.”
“I will not have him in my house,” Sybilla said, and her voice was low, guttural, spoken between clenched teeth.
Piers stood now. “Cecily is right; you’re in no shape to ride now, Sybilla. It’s too dangerous.”
From behind her on the bench, Alys reached up to grasp her hand. “Please don’t go, Sybilla,” she said, weeping softly. “I’m so afraid for you.”
“Stay here, where we can protect you,” Oliver offered.
“I don’t need your protection,” Sybilla said quietly.
Cecily stomped her foot. “You are not going! I won’t allow it!”
Sybilla let her eyes flick to the double doors of the hall, and they blew open with a great crash, as if on a mighty gust of wind. All heads turned to look at the calamity just as the sounds of heavy hooves clomping on stone echoed in the hall.
In moments, Octavian’s great, grey, muscled body pulled itself through the doors after his charging hooves. He clattered surely down the stairs and galloped toward Sybilla, his mane flowing out behind him.
Cecily screamed as Oliver jerked her out of the path of the horse and Octavian whirled to a stop before Sybilla, standing between her and the people gathered there, his breaths whooshing out of him, stirring and heating the air.
In a blink, she had pulled herself into the saddle and fished up the reins. She turned Octavian in a tight circle, looking down on her sisters clinging to their husbands.
“I love you all very much,” she said, and she realized that her frigid tone belied her warm words. “You will know when it’s over.”
Then she kicked Octavian’s sides, and the warhorse lurched forward once more toward the doors of the great hall even as her sisters shouted protests. The horse devoured the stairs in two leaps, and the two little serf girls, who had come to stare through the doors in amazement, leapt away from the opening just as Sybilla and Octavian burst from the keep.
She urged him through the bailey toward the solid, closed gates, faster, faster, leaning over his neck and driving him.
“Go, boy,” she whispered. “Go!”
A high-pitched squeal rang out through the bailey as Sybilla and her horse drew ever nearer the gates. Then the wooden slabs bulged, shuddered, and seemed to fall from their hinges as one, sending up a great storm of dust as the king’s soldiers scattered and Sybilla and Octavian thundered over the breached gates.
Octavian had never run so fast—perhaps no horse ever had, or ever would again. But the king’s soldiers would later report seeing nothing more than a cloud of dust and then a sparkling white light race down the road away from Bellemont, like a shooting star.
A dying star, bright with its own fate as it raced to bury itself in the earth.
Julian spent the rest of the day in Sybilla’s solar with Lucy. He dismissed the temporary nursemaid, and tended his daughter himself all the day. He fed her, played with her, tucked her into the deep cushions of the couch when she wished to sleep. He wandered about the room, considering each furnishing in great detail: the shield and crossed swords over the fire, once belonging to Morys Foxe; the hammered and oiled urns; the carved arms of the chairs; the tapestries of a million threads in a hundred different shades; the rugs—dense, bright costly; even the fine panes of expensive glass set in lead squares. Items that had surrounded Sybilla the whole of her life. He took no luncheon, and only picked at the supper tray that was sent.
The nursemaid finally came for Lucy, suggesting gently that the hour grew late, and perhaps ’twould be best if the wee lady retired for the evening. Julian relented, shocked at the blackness outside the window, barely recalling that a servant had come hours ago to lay a considerable fire in the hearth. He kissed his daughter, held her close despite her indignant squawk, and then turned her over to the kind-eyed matron.
When he was alone, he stood before the warming blaze, his hands clasped behind his back as he stared at Morys Foxe’s intimidating weaponry suspended over the mantel, which held a collection of delicate-looking, fired and glazed vases. The irony was not lost on him. Sybilla Foxe—so beautiful, so cunning, so capable—was a traitor to the Crown. Once Edward found out, Sybilla would be put to death, Julian was certain of it. It would not matter to the king that Sybilla had been unaware, at the time, of the gravity of the crime she was committing. It would not touch his heart that the only man Sybilla had ever known as father lost his life in the battle that followed her treason. A crime had been committed, a most serious offense, and the perpetrator would be held accountable.
And Julian would be lauded as a hero of England, awarded the spoils of Fallstowe, where he could raise Lucy in the manner befitting a princess.
Julian picked up the vase in the middle of the mantel, directly under the shield, and admired it, turning its smooth surface in his palm. It was quite valuable, beautiful. Unique. And then he hurled it into the fire, enjoying the smashing sound it made on the stones, the shower of dangerous sparks sent rolling from the white-hot logs.
He would not do it. He would not sentence the woman he loved to certain death. The woman who he knew somehow in his heart would pour out more love upon his daughter than even he could summon. The woman who had changed the course of the history of a nation, thwarted a king, played a man’s game better than any man, and lived through it all with her heart still intact.
At least, Julian hoped it was still intact.
How foolish he had been not to have heeded her warnings that he could not help her. How prideful he was to think that he could somehow right whatever it was that was wrong in her life. He could not protect her from the dead; from the past, which was even now reaching up like hands from a grave to grasp at her ankles.
