Page 52 of Never Love a Lord
“Not really, no.” Julian watched the still man closely, and drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “Did Amicia Foxe commit treason by leading Simon de Montfort’s men to the king’s soldiers at Lewes?”
“Would you believe me if I told you the answer was no?”
“That’s impossible,” Julian spat. “All the evidence I have points to her. Witness accounts, descriptions, timing of events, opportunity, Amicia’s fondness for the de Montforts, her indebtedness to Simon himself. Rumor is always based at least some small part of it on truth. It could be no one else.”
“Lord Griffin,” Graves began slowly, carefully, “what do you suppose would have been Lady Foxe’s fate had it been she who traveled in the dark of night to the barons’ camp, betrayed her king, and then was apprehended?”
Julian held his palm up. “De Montfort would have given her up, certainly. Her past would have been discovered. She would have been definitively outed. Stripped of her title, humiliated, likely put to a common traitor’s death.”
Graves nodded. “And after all that she had already risked, the great and awesome ruse that she had perpetrated, the spoils and respect she had won; after all that you have come to learn of her character to this point, do you think it likely that she would so blatantly and fearlessly wager her life—the lives of her entire family, Fallstowe itself—in such a brazen undertaking?”
“The evidence I have, Graves—it could be no one else.”
“Couldn’t it?”
Julian was becoming frustrated. He was getting no answers. “Listen, old man—I have taken it apart piece by piece and then put it back together again, a hundred times—a thousand. A young, beautiful, raven-haired woman who was obviously known and trusted by de Montfort was seen at the enemy camp, seemingly instructing a small group of generals over a map. It is common knowledge that Amicia Foxe was Morys’s junior by a score of years, and tales of her handsomeness were widespread even at the time of their marriage. That night, she was dressed in common garb and would have been taken as nothing more than a camp follower, save the one anomaly that set her apart from a common prostitute: the jeweled dagger she carried under her cloak. She wielded it before a pair of soldiers who approached her as she was leaving the camp, supposedly offering to see her safely away. But I presume it was more likely that they were seeking to enjoy her charms before battle. Amicia did nothing more than brandish her weapon and warn them away with words, but both men reportedly died on the trail that night from mysterious internal injuries. It marked the woman in the soldiers’ minds as a sorceress, and thus the legend was born.”
Graves had nodded throughout Julian’s rapid-fire condensing of the facts he held. “Let’s review, shall we? You say it was a handsome, young, dark-haired woman, carrying a jeweled dagger, on a desperate mission, who very swiftly and mysteriously dispatched a pair of ne’erdo-wells who threatened violation of her person?”
Julian frowned. “Yes.”
“How young do you think Lady Foxe would have been at that time, Lord Griffin?”
“Do you mean Amicia?”
“Do I?”
Julian opened his mouth to insist that, yes, of course, that’s who he meant, but no words came to him. His heartbeat slowed, slowed, nearly stopped as the evidence towering above him tilted, swayed, and then came down around his heart.
He didn’t want to hear the next question Graves posed to him, quietly, emphatically.
“Have you not heard how closely Madam resembles her mother?”
Sybilla, on the night Julian arrived at Fallstowe, the jeweled dagger at her hip.
Her knowledge of warfare, the ways of the king, and her knack for thwarting him.
Her assertion that Julian could not save her, that she could not save herself. That Amicia was not a traitor.
The odd happenings in her bedchamber, the way she had seemingly thrown Julian against a wall without so much as touching him.
Are you a witch, Sybilla?
Perhaps I am.
Julian tried to shove his way through the roiling implications in his mind to reconcile the dates, the years past.
“She could have been no more than fifteen,” Julian managed to choke out. “No—no, that’s . . . it’s not possible.”
“Why?” Graves asked, and then turned to face Julian. “Why is it not possible that a girl, so desperate to please her mother—naively convinced that she would be aiding her father, her country—would not visit a family friend to give him assistance?”
“Sybilla . . .” Julian swallowed, all his grand ambition for bringing the truth to light before the king, in the faith that good would triumph, crumbling like a grand statue that was revealed to be formed from nothing more than old, dried mud. An illusion. A crude rendering of the truth.
Julian felt as though a crushing weight had descended upon his chest. “Sybilla is the traitor.”
So shocked by this remolding of facts was Julian that he didn’t notice Graves had come back across the room until the old steward was standing near the door.
“Is there anything else you wish to ask me at present, Lord Griffin?”
