Page 1 of Never Love a Lord
Chapter 1
April 1277
Fallstowe Castle, England
With one step, it would all be over.
Sybilla Foxe swayed with the stiff breeze that shoved its way between the battlements where she stood more than one hundred feet above the ground.
Beneath her, six hundred of King Edward’s finest were readying to make war against her, their torches and bale-fires blooming in the night, the creaking of wooden beams and the clanging of metal wafting up to her as discordant notes from a demonic orchestra. The conductor of the affair had only just arrived in an ornate carriage, driven to the fore of the company and rocking to a stop. As of yet, no one had emerged.
To either side of Sybilla—indeed, around the whole of the castle’s impressive topmost perimeter—Fallstowe’s soldiers crouched behind the protective stone merlons of the castle’s tallest turret, their own torches snuffed. They were one with the shadows cast by the bone-white moon, round and glaring down on them.
Save for Sybilla, who stood in an embrasure, her arms outstretched so that her palms held her fast within the teeth of the battlement. She knew that her silhouette would be visible to anyone with a keen eye who looked in just the right spot. The wind came again, pushing her, buffeting Sybilla so that her spine bowed, her palms scraped against the stone. She was like the mainsail of a ship filled with a seaborne tempest, her rigging straining where it was lashed to landlocked Fallstowe. Her hair blew forward around both sides of her face, catching in the seam of her mouth. If she but loosed her stays, the wind would rip her away from the turret into the night, wildly, silently, without remorse.
Sybilla closed her eyes and tilted her face up. Now she was the carved figurehead on the bow of the ship, so free and fearless. She could feel the grit beneath her slippers rolling as her feet slid almost imperceptibly nearer the abyss.
With one step, it could all be over . . .
“Madam?”
The wind relented, and Sybilla sagged back between the merlons. Disappointment prickled along her jaw, causing her chin to tremble, her eyes to sting. She forced her reluctant arms to fold, stepping backward and down from the battlement and onto a mantlet, the large wooden shield ready to be put into service at a moment’s notice. Sybilla turned calmly to face her most faithful friend—Fallstowe’s aged steward—properly.
“Yes, Graves?”
In that instant, the air before Sybilla’s face went white hot and flames flashed before her eyes with a blindingwhoosh. A solid-soundingthunkechoed in the soles of her feet and both Sybilla and Graves looked down at the flaming arrow stuck in the thick wood of the mantlet, a hand’s-breadth before her right foot. A parchment was tied to its shaft.
Sybilla looked up at Fallstowe’s steward in the same instant that he, too, raised his eyes.
“Shall I fetch that for you?”
Sybilla forced herself to swallow. She had been closer to death than she’d realized.
Without waiting for her answer, Graves reached out one long, thin arm and jerked the now sputtering missile free before snapping the shaft in half and tossing the glowing ash of the fletching to the stones. The only sounds atop the turret were the wind, the barely discernible rustle of armor covering the backs of impatient soldiers, and the scratching of Graves’s fingernails against stiff parchment.
Sybilla could scarcely hear them above the blood pounding in her ears.
At last Graves handed the missive to her. Sybilla held the curled ends in her hands, turning the page toward the bright moonlight. The page was covered with thin, scrawling characters, undecipherable in the night, but the ornate preface as well as the thick, heavy seal under her thumb were clear enough that Sybilla understood without reading the royal proclamation.
Edward I had come for her. The king meant to take Fallstowe, this night.
As if she had not already ascertained that fact by the six hundred armed men arriving by moonlight to camp beyond her moat.
She sighed and dropped the hand holding the missive to her side. “Thank you, Oliver,” she muttered. Certainly Edward would have come for her eventually, but the king had no doubt been prompted to act by the message recently sent by Sybilla’s newly acquired brother-in-law, Oliver Bellecote.
Sybilla hoped her younger sister, Cecily, was enjoying her wedding night more than was Sybilla.
Only a handful of months ago, the king himself had warned the youngest of the Foxe sisters, Alys, at his own court. Alys was now safely ensconced at bucolic Gillwick, with her husband, Piers.
It will come down to you, Sybilla. She heard the phrase in her mind, spoken to her so many times by her mother. She could still picture Amicia vividly, lying in the bed that was now Sybilla’s, her useless right side both bolstered and half-hidden by pillows.
And it will end with you.
Sybilla wondered who the king had sent to lead the siege against her, and she called to mind the ornate carriage she’d seen arrive below. She turned her face toward the battlements again, just as another flaming arrow whooshed over the crenellation and sank into the wood at her feet.
Sybilla gasped this time, and she felt her brows draw together as she saw another parchment tied to this arrow’s staff. She was becoming slightly irritated with this particular method of correspondence. The murmur of soldiers’ armor was more insistent this time, and Sybilla knew they were anxious to act.
“My lady?” Her general rose from his position, obviously waiting for her to give the signal to return fire. His drawing hand hung at his hip, the exposed fingers in his glove catching the ivory moonlight as they clenched and unfurled.
