Seventeen

THE ACHE IN her legs mercifully passed, a deep numbness taking its place. Long before then, she had lost all sensation in her feet, finally deadened by the icy water in which she stood. No longer able to feel anything, she could only imagine what was crawling around her ankles, clinging to her skirts. But this time even terror had its limits, and finally she drifted into an almost trancelike state, retreating from hell by removing herself from her body, physically aware only of her fingers curled around the steel ring, holding her upright. When they lifted the trap door, she could not move, and they had to reach down and prise her cramped fingers loose before hauling her up into the light.

Her legs would not hold her, and she crumpled in the passage, uncaring. One of the men-at-arms picked her up without comment and she lay limply in his hold, her mind and spirit still somehow floating above her inert bodily shape.

It was full daylight, and she closed her eyes tightly against a brightness that yesterday she had found dim and gloomy. She heard Zoe’s cries before they reached the chamber, and abruptly mind and body became one again. With the fusion came the resurgence of fear and the dread knowledge that she could not preserve her reason through another such period of incarceration. Following instinct, she gave no indication of her return to full awareness and stayed limp and unresponsive in her bearer’s arms. When he carried her into the chamber, she remained inert.

Sister Therese was holding Zoe, rocking her back and forth in a futile effort to still the frantic screams, so piercing they seemed to go straight through one’s head. No one else was in the room.

The trooper set Magdalen on her feet, and deliberately she crumpled to the ground again.

“Put her on the bed,” the nun said. “She has to feed the child.”

They picked her up and put her on the bed, where she lay unmoving. Sister Therese put the screaming Zoe into her lap and hastily pulled up the pillows behind her. “Sit up, now,” the nun said with anxious impatience. “Your child is hungry.”

With a supreme effort of will, Magdalen made no attempt to soothe Zoe, but lay as if she still inhabited the trancelike world of her imprisonment, her eyes closed.

The troopers left the chamber, and the nun stood looking down at the immobile woman and the screeching baby. Then with an almost imperceptible shrug, as if to say she had done all she could, she turned and left the chamber.

Magdalen heard the heavy wooden bar fall into place with a dull thud. She lay still for a further minute, then caught the child to her breast. Zoe was not impressed with her mother’s desperate kisses and nuzzled frantically. Magdalen unfastened her bodice, the screams died on a gulping sob, and a deep quiet entered the dim chamber.

Magdalen found that her mind had a bell-like clarity. As the blood returned to her feet, the pain was excruciating. The muscles in her legs cramped violently with the renewal of sensation, but the pain served to concentrate her mind. If, apart from feeding Zoe, she preserved the appearance of one physically and spiritually broken by the oubliette, then surely nothing would be gained by returning her there. The last two periods had been punitive as well as coercive, she was in no doubt, but if her cousin saw her in this broken state, he would surely feel adequately avenged for the raking marks of her nails. And for as long as she remained apparently physically incapable of anything but feeding the child, the matter of her compliance would have to be postponed.

She would not be able to convince them for long, but it would buy her some time, and at the moment, she could only think ahead an hour or two at a time. She was abruptly overtaken by an invincible weariness, like a great black blanket dropping over her. Her eyes closed while she still held the child at her breast.

Sister Therese, coming in an hour later, found the woman still asleep and the baby lying placidly at her side. She had brought a tray of food and bent to wake the sleeping woman, who she knew had not eaten since the previous midmorning.

Magdalen woke but turned her head from the food. She refused to speak, but staggered off the bed to wash and change Zoe, put the child in her cradle, and drag herself to the latrine behind the garderobe. She exaggerated the pain and effort of her movements, and finally tumbled back on the bed, closing her eyes. Uneasy, but uncertain what else she should do, the nun left her.

Alone again, Magdalen ate a little of the venison pasty on the tray and drank some of the wine. She was feeling much stronger, although she dared not let her mind return to the timeless terror of her imprisonment. She knew only that she could not endure more of it. Curiously, she did not entertain the obvious means of avoiding further coercion. She would not yield.

She slept fitfully throughout the day, closing her eyes tightly whenever she heard the door open as it did several times. The visitor did not come into the room, however, merely checked on its occupant and left again. She looked after Zoe but deliberately left herself unwashed and uncombed.

Charles d’Auriac came in at the end of the afternoon. He had planned to leave her alone all day, alone to recover her strength and to allow herself to feel that her ordeal was finished. The shock of being taken down again, to spend the hours of the night in the oubliette, would be so much the greater after the day’s respite that he had every expectation of achieving her submission by first light on the morrow.

He was not prepared for what he found, however. She lay on the bed exactly as she had been brought up that morning, the filth of the dungeon on her clothes, her hair matted, her face streaked. Her eyes looked blankly at him, almost through him.

“Sweet Jesus! Why have you not cleaned yourself?”

She made no response, not even a flicker of an eyelid. He crossed to the bed and took her chin between thumb and forefinger, staring down into her face. The blankness of her eyes did not alter. Had he miscalculated? Believed her stronger than she was? There came a point, he knew, when physical coercion ceased to be fruitful, a point when the victim withdrew from the pain into a private world of illusion and thus from the power of the interrogator. But it could not have happened so soon. He went to the door and bellowed for Sister Therese.

“How long has she been like this?”

“Since they brought her back this morning. She has fed the child, but little else.”

“Has she spoken?”

“No, my lord.”

He turned back to the bed. It was as if she did not know they were talking about her . . . as if she did not know they were in the room. “Get her cleaned up,” he said. “I will return later.”

Magdalen offered neither resistance nor assistance as the nun and a serving wench took off her filth-encrusted clothes. She let them wash her, comb out the matted tangles of her hair, dress her in a linen shift and a loose robe. She gave no indication of her relief at being thus rid of the reek and mire of the dungeon. They encouraged her into a chair beside the empty hearth, brought her the baby, offered her broth and wine. Passively, silently, she submitted.

It was dark when her cousin returned. She was still sitting in the chair, her hands clasped loosely in her lap, the candles unlit upon the table. It was as if she were unaware of the darkness.

He struck flint, and light flared from the candles. She did not look toward the light or acknowledge his presence in the slightest way.

“So, cousin,” he said, approaching her, holding the candle high so that its light fell upon her face, as desirable in its pale stillness as ever it was in the glowing vibrancy of health and happiness. “I wonder how you will respond to my kiss tonight.” He held her face with one hand and brought his lips to hers. She endured, still and cold as a marble effigy. Abruptly, he released her and went to the door.

“Take her down!”

Scalding terror filled her. She had failed. But she somehow remained immobile, her eyes fixed on a dip in the flagstones at her feet. Her neck ached unbearably with the strain.

He looked at her closely for some sign that his instruction to the two troopers had pierced her absorption. He could detect no change in posture or expression. As the two men moved toward her, he gestured to them to stop. If it was genuine, her present state of mind bordered on madness, and if he had her confined again so soon, she might well slip over the edge. She would be no good to them then, and he could not afford to risk all by being overzealous.

“Get out.”

The men left, and he put the candle on the table again. “In the morning I will have your submission, cousin, and you will give your allegiance to Bertrand. If I do not have it, you will rot in the oubliette, and your child with you.” She gave no indication that she had heard him, and with a wash of frustration he caught her under the arms and pulled her to her feet. “Do you hear me, cousin? You and the child.”

She must not respond. She would not respond. Over and over in her head she said the words until the internal chant obscured all else. She fell back in the chair as he pushed her away from him, and she let herself fall and lie as limp as any doll.

The door banged on his departure and she began to shake, but she had won herself a night’s respite.

GUY DE GERVAIS LOOKED up at the sky. It was heavy and overcast, the air sultry, as if a summer storm were brewing over the Pyrenees. But the lack of moon or starshine couldn’t be better for their purpose.

“Do you think she is asleep?” Edmund’s voice came softly through the darkness. “Do you think they have harmed her?”

Guy turned, making out the dark bulk of the other man. Like himself, Edmund wore chainmail and carried his great sword and shield. Their suits of full plate armor would not be needed until the fighting began. First they would parley. “Do not think about Magdalen,” he counseled, as he had counseled himself countless times during the weeks of their pursuit. “You cannot serve her by worrying over her.”

“But she has such fear of her cousin.”

“Fear will not kill her,” Guy said shortly. “She has courage and nimble wits.” But the thought of her alone and afraid at times tormented him beyond endurance.

“All is ready.” Courtney Durand loomed out of the shadows. “The town watchtower has been taken, and there’ll be none to sound the tocsin.” There was no intensity in his voice or expression. He had no interest beyond amusement and coin in the present enterprise. Any interest he might have had in the Lady Magdalen was surpassed by too many men, he realized, for it to be worth pursuing. “We will leave the fires and torches burning in the camp so all looks undisturbed, and we will be in position by first light.”

Through the dark, shadowed, sleeping town, forty lancers moved almost soundlessly, horses’ hooves muffled with sacking on the cobbles, only an occasional jingle of a bridle to betray them. Behind them came pikers and archers, troopers bearing great bundles of faggots and the long siege ladders. Those townsmen who heard them cowered behind their shuttered windows. In the absence of the tocsin, the only sensible course was to mind one’s own business and be thankful that the armed men showed no interest in the town or its inhabitants.

The town streets lapped the fortress walls, and the men had moved from the shadows of the former and under the overhang of the latter without venturing into the open. The watchmen at the fortress towers looked outward to the distant horizon for threat. They saw the dark huddle of the brigand encampment, the usual nighttime flares glowing in the dark, just as they had done for the last several days, since the brigand chieftain had delivered his captive to the fortress. They did not look immediately beneath them because they had no reason to do so. If the town had been threatened, the tocsin would have sounded. So they did not see the stealthy, creeping menace moving into position, preparing to bridge the moat and assail the fortress walls with their bombards, obscuring fires, and siege ladders.

But as the first faint lightening appeared over the mountains, the air was rent with the insolence of a dozen bugles, like so many barnyard cockerels throwing their challenge to the day. The pennons of the knights banneret were raised at the moment that the standards of Bresse, Gervais, and Lancaster lifted to a gust of dawn wind from the mountains. The heralds blew their note again.

Within the fortress, there was utter confusion. Men ran to the battlements, staring down at the armed force massed at the walls. Bertrand de Beauregard was hauled from sleep by a white-faced squire—white-faced because of how his lord would react to what must have been someone’s incompetence.

The knight commander of the garrison followed hard on the heels of the squire and, as Bertrand was strapped into his armor, told him whose standards flew in challenge at their gates.

“God’s nails. You say the standard of Bresse flies?” Bertrand cursed his squire as he struggled with the steel greaves of his armor. “Fetch d’Auriac!”

Charles was already there, pale but resolute, as yet unarmored. “My lord.”

“You guaranteed his death!” his uncle spat.

“I still guarantee it,” Charles said steadily. “This time by my own hand.”

Bertrand looked at him, then shook his head impatiently. “The man has more lives than a cat!” He strode past his nephew into the outer ward of the fortress, and up to the battlements. “Call for identification and for the purpose of this challenge.” As if he didn’t know it!

The herald blew his note, and they watched as a herald from the opposing side rode up to the lifted drawbridge. His voice rose clear in the dawn: “The Lord de Bresse is come for his wife, the Lady Magdalen. The Lord de Gervais is come, as representative of John, Duke of Lancaster, for Lancaster’s daughter, the Lady Magdalen.”

Bertrand took the jeweled cup of wine proffered by his page and drained the contents before replying. “Tell them we will have an answer for them in an hour.”

The herald relayed the message, and Bertrand left the battlements. His sons and his nephew were gathered in the outer ward. “Come,” he instructed curtly. “We must take counsel.” They followed him to the bastion room, where the early sun showed fingers of dust on the scarred table. Pages scurried with jugs of wine but were curtly dismissed.

“Well?” Bertrand said. “I await an explanation.”

All eyes turned to Charles d’Auriac. He was still a little pale but otherwise seemed unmoved. “It seems I was in error,” he said slowly.

“The woman was right, you mean,” Bertrand said. “If you had had the sense to do the job yourself . . . if your cousin had had the sense to do the job himself . . .” Here he glared at Gerard, who had been feeling a certain satisfaction that his cousin had also failed in his set task.

“This time I will,” Charles said again.

“Of course, you want the woman for yourself,” Marc said with a sly smile. “That is a powerful incentive, cousin.”

“So is pride,” Charles snapped back. “I do not fail.”

“So what do you suggest?” Bertrand sounded suddenly genial, as if this squabbling pleased him. He poured wine. “We have an army laying siege at our gates over a woman and a baby.”

“Durand is with them,” Philippe remarked. “The mind of the mercenary is most curious.”

“Hardly curious,” Bertrand said. “He has a nose to sniff out coin and cares not who pays or for what.”

“But can we withstand such a siege?” asked Gerard. “It is the devil’s own luck that we should all be gathered here together. There is none outside to bring reinforcements.”

“They are well equipped for assault,” Bertrand said. “And Durand has no difficulty in raising fresh troops whenever he needs them. We will be outnumbered soon enough, however heavy the losses we may inflict upon them.”

“There is no need to withstand a siege.” It was Charles who spoke. Absently, he poured himself wine and spoke directly to his uncle. “We will use the woman. It will be her first task for her family.” He smiled. “She will bring her husband and her lover to their deaths.”

“You have broken her?” Bertrand frowned. “You believe she will obey you in this so soon? You believe you can compel her to betray de Gervais and de Bresse?” He shook his head. “You are overly optimistic, my friend. It is a fault of yours.”

But Charles continued to smile. “You forget the child. If the child’s life is in danger, she will betray anyone.” He stroked his chin. “I do not know why I did not think of it before.”

“But we want the child, too,” Marc said. “She will grow to be a de Beauregard more completely than the mother ever will be.”

“True enough, which is why I didn’t consider it before,” Charles agreed. “But in this instance, I believe the sacrifice will be worthwhile . . . not that I think for one minute we shall be obliged to make the sacrifice.”

Bertrand nodded. “Continue.”

“She will go out to them, and she must bring them within the fortress to parley. How she does so will be up to her, but she must be convinced that the child dies if she fails . . . She will not fail,” he concluded with quiet conviction. “I have seen her with the child.”

“Then I suggest we present our kinswoman with the alternatives without delay.”

Magdalen had heard the bugles’ challenge but could see nothing of the outside from the high slitted window. But the sound sent the blood coursing through her veins, embodying hope although she did not know why. It was always possible that if something beyond the walls was occupying her family, they would leave her alone for a while longer. She had not forgotten her cousin’s threat of the previous evening, and the long hours of the night had failed to bring a new plan to mind.

Sister Therese came in, and for once her face showed some expression. “Come, you must hurry and dress,” she said. “You and the child are to go to the battlements.”

Magdalen made no response. Her performance of the previous day had worked well enough then and it was still all she had at the moment. She remained listless and silent, but offered no resistance to putting on the clothes thrust at her. Defiance must be saved for great matters. Taking up the wakeful Zoe, she followed Sister Therese from the chamber. The thought of fresh air and sunshine encouraged a spring to her step, and she had difficulty maintaining a dragging pace and lowered head as they emerged from the bleak gloom of the donjon into the inner ward. She looked up to where the standard of Beauregard fluttered with the lilies of France from the topmost rampart of the keep. Who was challenging that standard?

Her uncle and cousins were gathered on the outer battlements. Archers ranged along the ramparts, long-bowmen with arrows already to their bows, crossbow-men laboriously cranking the unwieldy bolts. Men were bringing pails of water to line the walls, ready to be poured upon the fires that the besiegers would light to provide smoke cover for the scaling ladders.

Magdalen recognized all these signs of a fortress preparing to withstand an assault. She had ordered the same herself a few weeks ago. But who would be attacking the de Beauregard stronghold of Carcassonne? Again a tiny spark of hope flickered crazily.

She climbed the steps, preserving a lethargic passivity of face and step, and walked toward the group waiting on the battlement. Zoe was waving her arms around and gurgling with pleasure in the balmy morning, the swooping rooks, the fluttering flags.

At the edge of the ramparts, Magdalen looked down. Her legs almost gave way beneath her. She could see Guy, astride his massive war horse, his red-gold head bare, his standard snapping. Joyous love, overwhelming relief that he was alive, safe, that he had come for her, flowed sweetly in her veins. All appearance of passivity vanished. She wanted to call out to him; she wanted to shout her love to the bright blue skies. She saw Edmund just behind him, and her relief at his safety was no less piercing. That they were both here, had both come for her, could only mean that some agreement had been reached between them. She would not be responsible for the death of one or both. Their blood would not be in her hand. In that moment, she knew that in gratitude for God’s mercy, she would put Guy de Gervais from her as all but a memory to lighten the soul’s darkness, and she would embrace her husband with what love she had left to give.

“Yes, cousin. It would seem your champions are come.” Charles spoke, dryly sardonic, shattering the intensity of her thoughts. “I see you have recovered your senses. That is fortunate because we have work for you to do.”

All her joy seeped away from her with the certainty that she was about to face a further ordeal. Her mother’s family was not going to yield her up without a fight.

“Stand up here and show yourself. Let them see what they have come for.” Bertrand indicated a step in the parapet. “No, do not take the child up there. It is dangerous.”

Somehow, she found she had relinquished Zoe to her cousin Philippe, whose hands took the child before she had time to think beyond her eagerness to see more clearly over the parapet. A hand went under her elbow, and she was standing on the step, exposed well above the rampart.

Guy saw her and, despite the distance between them, some spirit flew between them, joined them in a moment of intense communion. Her hair was unbound, held back from her face by a simple wooden fillet at her brow, and the wind sent the rich sable mass swirling around her shoulders as it flattened her gown against the lissom lines of her body.

“Magdalen!” Edmund, less restrained than Guy, couldn’t resist calling to her, but the wind snatched at his voice. “Is she unharmed?” he said in desperate anxiety to his companion.

“I believe so,” Guy returned quietly. In that moment of communion he had felt that she was whole, but he had also felt something else, and he could not control his unease as she stood so exposed upon the parapet. He had felt her fear.

“You may stand down now.” Bertrand spoke behind her, and she stepped backward to the flat broad solidity of the battlement. She turned to take Zoe, but Philippe held the child away from her.

“Give her to me,” she said, trying to still the panic rushing dizzily to her head.

“No. You have a task to complete first,” Bertrand said. “When it is done to our satisfaction, the child will be returned to you.”

“What do you mean?” She now knew terror greater than that of the oubliette and a moan escaped her, her hands reached pathetically for her child.

“Charles will explain.”

She turned to d’Auriac, who was smiling his thin smile. “You will go to your husband and your lover, and you will invite them into the fortress to parley. When they pass through the gate, the child will be returned to you. If you fail. . . .” He reached over and touched the baby’s cheek with a negligent forefinger. “If you fail, she will die . . . A pike thrust, and you may fish her body out of the moat.”

“No! You could not—” But she knew they could. Her hand plucked at her throat. “Please . . .”

“Bring them within the fortress,” Charles said.

“And you will kill them?”

“Them or the child. The choice is yours.”

This was the abyss. She had been drawing ever closer to it, but each time she had thought she had reached it, she had been wrong. Now, she was there.

“How?” She could barely form the word. Her throat was as dry as leather, and there seemed to be no breath in her lungs.

Charles shrugged. “My dear cousin, that is for you to decide. You will know what arguments will serve best. You know those men, after all.” He was softly insulting. “Let us go down.”

They all left the battlement. In the court below, Sister Therese still stood. She accepted the child without surprise. “Take her away and keep her with you at all times,” Bertrand said. “Her mother has work to do.”

Magdalen watched, enwrapped in blackest despair, as the nun carried the child back to the donjon. If she could save them all with her own death, she knew at that minute that she would do so. But she had not been given that choice. She must entice Edmund and Guy to their deaths.

She must go to them with loving eyes and open arms, words of promise and appeal on her lips. She must call to the love they both bore her, and they would do what she asked. She would bring them to their deaths with the vow of love, just as her mother had condemned so many enemies of the de Beauregards. She was her mother’s daughter; she had her mother’s power.

Without a word, she began to walk toward the outer ward and the arched gate of the fortress.

“You have one hour, cousin,” Charles called softly, and she felt his words on her back like a knife in the night.

They let her out through the postern gate and lowered the drawbridge. She walked slowly across it, aware of the eyes of archers and pikers on the battlements, aware of the eyes of her mother’s family, watching her every step. Guy and Edmund had dismounted and stood at the edge of the drawbridge as she came forward. They made no attempt to step upon it, governed as they were by the rules of chivalry ensuring that during parley no advantage must be taken of an enemy’s dropped defenses.

She stepped off the drawbridge onto the cool green grass of the bank along the moat. The two men stood very still. Oh, how she needed Guy’s arms around her at this moment! How she yearned for his body against hers, enfolding her with his love and his passion and his strength. And oh, how she felt Edmund’s burning need for her to turn to him, to take those things from him.

So she went to neither of them.

She held out her hands in a gesture of mute supplication, her face deathly white under the sun, her eyes haunted with her terror.

“What is it?” Guy said softly. “What have they done to you?”

“I am to bring you both within the castle, or they will murder our child,” she said, knowing now that she could never have told him anything but the truth.

He looked up toward the watchers lining the battlements, then he turned away. “Come with me.” The instruction was curt, masking the depths of fury threatening to chase all reason from his brain. “You too, Edmund.”

They followed him out of the sunshine, into the first shadowed street of the town. There he stopped and turned to them. His eyes ran over them, assessing, and he knew Edmund could do nothing for Magdalen at the moment. It wasn’t a lover she needed with a lover’s needs to obscure her own. So he opened his arms to her. “Come here, pippin.”

She fell against him with an incoherent sob and he stroked her hair, gently soothing, as if she were again the little girl he had comforted and reassured. And she gave way to the terror, dropping her defenses for the first time since they had parted in the chapel at Bresse and he had ridden away from her.

Edmund, from his own horror at what she had told them, watched without jealousy. He knew he could not give her what she was receiving from the other man, and the knowledge brought him sorrow but now no sense of betrayal.

“Enough,” Guy said finally, when her dreadful, wracking grief had yielded to gulping sobs. “Plantagenets do not give in or give up. Remember who you are, Magdalen of Lancaster.”

She raised her tear-streaked face from his chest. The faintest indentation of his mailshirt beneath the tunic showed on her cheek, so tightly had she been pressed against him. “I am the daughter of a whore, sent to do a whore’s work.”

Edmund exclaimed and Guy’s face darkened, but he said no words of denial. There were none. “How long have they given you to do this work?”

She was not hurt by the lack of denial. She had simply stated the truth, and the pain was her own. “One hour,” she said. Her tears had dried, and her body seemed to be emptied of all emotion, even fear. Only a cool, dark void remained within her.

“It’s not long enough,” Guy said, turning to Courtney Durand, who had been standing in the shadows, drawing his own conclusions from the scene. “What do you think, Durand?”

The brigand chieftain said nothing for a minute, wondering why, now they’d got the woman, they didn’t simply leave the place. Children were expendable, and that one was so young anything could happen to it in the next few years. But he hadn’t been paid to advance what he sensed would be an unpopular viewpoint, so he said finally, “The lady must parley for more time.”

“I do not know if I can,” she said.

“You must.”

“Magdalen?” Edmund spoke her name hesitantly.

She remembered that moment on the battlement when she had sworn to give her husband all she had to give, and she realized that in her desperate need for Guy’s strength she had not yet acknowledged Edmund. She went quickly toward him, her hands outstretched. “Forgive me.”

He gripped her hands, remembering painfully the violence of their last time together. “Forgive me for what I did to you,” he said in a low voice. “I have regretted it every minute—”

She shook her head in vigorous denial. “I have not thought of it . . . will never think of it.”

He longed to take her in his arms, but he could not, not here, so he just held her hands and devoured her face with his eyes. “I have been so afraid for you.”

“Edmund . . . Magdalen.” Guy’s voice called them to him softly. He and Durand had been talking to Olivier, who in customary fashion had appeared silently and usefully. “Magdalen, you must return and negotiate a further two hours before we will enter the fortress.”

“They will kill—”

“Be quiet and listen.”

Abashed, she fell silent, aware of the strangest resurgence of strength and optimism under the brusque, commanding tone.

“Olivier knows where the underground corridor is located,” Guy said. All well-constructed castles had them, narrow passages running from the dungeons of the donjon, beneath the walls and the moat to the outside. Only thus could supplies be brought in during a siege and couriers escape unseen. Such corridors could not provide egress for large numbers; they were narrow, low-roofed dirt tunnels, and their location was in general known only to the castle commander. But on one of his spying visits to Carcassonne, Olivier had contrived to discover the whereabouts of this one.

“Comes up in the saddler’s in the town,” Olivier said, picking his teeth. “Starts below the armory in the garrison court.”

“We are going to send a small force through the corridor,” Guy said. “They must have time to get in place within the walls before Edmund and I enter. You will tell the de Beauregards that Edmund and I are prepared to discuss a ransom for you and the child and will come in peace to parley. We will bring our squires and pages and two knights banneret apiece as escort, and we will come in two hours.”

“And if they will not accept that?”

“You must ensure that they do.”

Magdalen absorbed the flat statement.

“Could we not send a herald with the message?” Edmund said tentatively. “Magdalen could stay safely here—”

“They will kill Zoe,” Magdalen interrupted, her voice shaking. “I thought you understood that. If I do not return within the hour, they will kill her. And if you do not enter the fortress, they will kill her.”

“I would not ask it of you,” Guy said gently, “but I can think of no alternative. You must trust that we will come for you both.”

“What else must I do?”

“If it is possible, you must get yourself and the child into the outer ward. We will raise the portcullis from within as soon as we are able, to admit reinforcements. When it is raised, you must leave immediately. You are not to concern yourself about anything that is happening within the courts. You are simply to save yourself and Zoe.”

“I will tell them that you have made it a condition of parley that you see both the child and myself on the parapet, unharmed, in an hour,” she said, a slight tremor still in her voice but her mind now clear and resolute. “That way, they must give Zoe back to me, and I will ensure they do not take her from me again.”

Guy nodded. “Return now, pippin. You must be strong for just a little longer.”

She paused, shaking her head infinitesimally. Her voice very low, she said, “No, Guy, you are mistaken. I must be strong for a lifetime.”

He knew what she meant, the final, absolute relinquishment of love. “And I also,” he said as quietly. “Go now.”

They escorted her back to the drawbridge. She crossed without a backward glance and slipped through the postern gate. The drawbridge was pulled up behind her. Her uncle and cousins awaited her in the place d’armes.

“Well?” Bertrand demanded.

“I will tell you in a minute.” Magdalen put up her chin. “I have not broken my fast this day, my lord, and I am faint for lack of food.”

“By the Holy Rood, you are your mother’s daughter,” Bertrand said into the stunned silence. He gave a sharp crack of laughter. “Many times I have seen Isolde put up her chin in just that manner.”

“I am also a Plantagenet,” Magdalen said, thinking of all the minutes she was using up in this exchange. But she must not go too far. “May I eat?” She put the request in a conciliatory tone.

“They will come?” It was Charles who spoke the harsh question, and she turned to look at him, reading to her surprise a hint of anxiety in his voice, as if there was something personal riding on the success of this betrayal. She hid her satisfaction and dropped her eyes. Her voice was low, with a note of defeated submission.

“They will come. But there are conditions.”

“Come, there is no reason to discuss this in the open court.” Bertrand swung on his heel and strode to the donjon. “Bring meat and drink to the bastion room,” he instructed a page trotting at his heels.

Magdalen tried to eat as if she had not had a decent meal in weeks, thinking all the time of the men crawling beneath the earth to shoot up where they were least expected, like the unruly suckers of a giant oak. But she could not procrastinate for long and finally told them of the conditions, making the telling long-winded and disjointed, as if the evidence of her success in this evil had to be dragged from her.

“You told them we wished to discuss ransom?” Bertrand cut a thick slice from the sirloin on the table. “A good enough invention, I daresay.”

“But they will not come if they do not see me and the child on the parapet first,” she said, trying to keep her desperate anxiety from her voice. She had to have Zoe again in her arms; without the child none of this was worth anything.

“What has the child to do with it?” Charles demanded.

Bertrand waved him down as he chewed solidly for a few minutes, and Magdalen waited, her eyes on the table lest they read her dreadful apprehension. “I see no reason why not,” her uncle pronounced finally. “A reasonable man would see that what he wished to ransom was ransomable. It simply indicates that he comes in good faith. Let her have the bratling. We can take it from her any time we choose, if it’s necessary to punish her failure or again compel her obedience.”

Cold dread at this calm statement was followed immediately by sweet relief. The two emotions turned her joints to butter, her gut to water, and she had to hold unobtrusively to the edge of the table until the weakness left her legs and belly.

“Why would they wait two hours?” Marc asked. “They are positioned outside the gates. They could ride in without such delay.”

“I think they wished the priests to celebrate a mass,” Magdalen improvised. “Lord de Gervais does little without prayer beforehand.”

Bertrand grunted. It was common enough. “Very well. You and the child will show yourselves upon the ramparts.”

“And when they ride in,” Charles said softly, “you will be in the place d’armes to welcome them, cousin. So that you may see the welcome we accord them.”

She shuddered. They would force her to watch as the two men she had betrayed were cut to pieces under the flag of parley. They all saw her shudder, and the horror in her eyes was genuine enough to encourage the belief that she did not doubt such an outcome.

DURAND, WITH THIRTY men, followed the agile, speedy Olivier through the earth corridor. They carried no light. The fire of a torch would have been impossible to carry, bent double as they were, and would have reduced what little air they had. They were armed only with knives and wore only leather gambesons as protection against whatever weapons they might face when the fighting began. But there was no choice for a man who must make his approach on his hands and knees.

Outside the walls, Durand’s brigands in flat-brimmed siege hats, hide shields strapped to their backs as protection against missiles and arrows from the ramparts above, milled around in apparent idleness, yet they were prepared to run to the walls and light their faggot fires once the call to arms was blown from within. The men on the ramparts watched impassively. In the present state of parley, neither side would make overtly aggressive moves, but each was ready for the moment when, or if, they were called for.

Guy and Edmund sat their war horses, waiting to ride to the drawbridge. They were now in full ceremonial armor, lances fixed in the sockets to the right of their breastplates, visors up for the moment. Their escort, also armed, squires carrying the standards, gathered around, horses shifting on the moat’s narrow bank, scenting the possibility of battle. They all knew the trap into which they were about to ride. Guy watched the sun, waiting for the second hour to be up. The great ball of midmorning heat lifted above the far rampart. He signaled, and the herald raised his trumpet and blew the note of parley.

They dropped their visors and rode forward as the portcullis was lifted, the drawbridge lowered. Within the place d’armes, Charles d’Auriac let his hand rest on his great sword. His uncle and cousins, also fully armed and mounted, did the same. A troop of pikers circled the court. Magdalen, holding the baby, began to step by inches into the sheltering darkness beneath the walls. So intently were they all watching and waiting, the small steps passed unnoticed.

A deep hush enveloped the court, as deep as the shadows cast by the fortress walls. Beyond the walls, sun shone and ordinary things were happening. Within, there was only the expectant hush before treachery. The clanging drop of the portcullis behind the entering men signaled the end both of silence and of waiting. Charles d’Auriac drew his sword with a great cry of challenge, but Guy de Gervais had his lance poised in the same moment and rode at him with his own war cry, savage and exultant, bursting from his lips. The lance hit true, toppling d’Auriac from his horse. His squires were hauling him to his feet as confusion erupted. Thirty men leaped from the shadows of the garrison court, knives in hand, their challenging cries mingling now with the clash of steel as the armed men in the center of the court engaged in combat. Guy was off his horse now, intending to pursue d’Auriac with sword and on foot, but before he could do so, Philippe was riding down upon him.

Magdalen screamed and Charles turned. He had pushed up his visor, and there was murder in his eyes as he saw her with the baby, clinging to the shadows. He came toward her, a hulking armored figure, sword gripped in his two hands, raised to cleave her in two.

“Treacherous whore!” The accusation rang out above the battle noise, a mad, wild fury behind it. For precious seconds Magdalen was paralyzed by the sight of that great cleaving blade. Zoe was screaming against her ear. Then she turned and ran. Tripping over the cobbles, stumbling against the wall, clutching the child, she ran frantically as the massive figure lumbered behind her. She ran for the battlement steps, not thinking beyond the need to escape the clamorous murky confines of the court, up into air and space and sunlight.

She could hear him behind her, could see the huge shadow of the raised sword on the steps above her. Her breath came in gasping sobs, and the child in her arms continued her dreadful, terrified screaming. She stumbled on the top step, lost her footing for one petrifying moment, could almost hear his breath behind her, recovered, staggering upright, leaping away from the steps as he rose, massive in his steel plating behind her. There was smoke everywhere. The men at the foot of the walls outside had lit their fires at the first sound of steel. The archers were firing down upon them, hurling rocks and pails of water to put out the fires. Black smoke rose, choking, obscuring. Magdalen found herself backed against a low break in the ramparts. She could feel the wall against her thighs, and the sense of the drop behind her left her back icily exposed as she stared at death in the shape of her cousin bearing down upon her, his gray eyes as cold and murderous as the steel upraised in his two hands. He ran at her, and she ducked sideways. The sword came down in an almighty sweep, meeting only air. Unbalanced, he tottered at the edge of the parapet, fighting the great cumbersome weight of his armor. Then, as she watched, numbed, he toppled very, very slowly over the edge, his sword pulling him down it seemed, down into the choking smoke, his cry lost in the deafening clamor around her.

“Holy mother, sweet Jesus.” She was murmuring the incantations over and over, standing immobile, holding the screaming child, then she was running back to the steps, her only thought to get down to the court, to discover Guy and Edmund alive in all that death-dealing clamor. At first, she could make out nothing, identify no one. They were all on foot now, the huge war horses pulled aside by squires, where they blew through their great nostrils and pawed the earth, tossing their caparisoned heads.

There was fierce fighting at the gatehouse as Durand’s men fought for control of the portcullis. She knew she should somehow make her way around the fighting to the gates. Possibly the postern gate would be untended, and she and Zoe could slip out of this murderous havoc. But she did not do it. She stood, straining her eyes, desperately seeking the blue and silver standard of Gervais.

She saw him finally, hand to hand now with Bertrand, the dreadful clash of sword on sword resounding, so heavy it seemed impossible they could remain upright whether giving or receiving the blows. She felt sick and cursed her weakness, fighting the wash of nausea, standing rooted in dreadful apprehension as the two men, both massive-framed, both skilled and experienced at this horrendous art of murderous combat, battered each other with deadly ferocity. There was a moment when Guy seemed to stagger, unbalanced. Bertrand raised his mace with a cry of exultant savagery. The wickedly spiked ball came hurtling down. Magdalen could hear her own voice screaming incoherent incantations with a lunatic fervency, resounding in her ears, filling her head. Then miraculously Guy seemed to recover, to sidestep the brutal death embodied in the mace, and it was Bertrand who went down to the cobbles, his head at an odd angle, crimson blood pumping from his neck. Guy ignored his fallen enemy and simply turned back to the fray, and Magdalen realized on the periphery of her intelligence that his apparent stumble had been a feint, intended to catch Bertrand off guard, his shield lowered.

The urge to vomit threatened to overwhelm her in the weakness of relief, and only the need to hold tight to the still screaming Zoe kept her on her feet. She was shaking, her hair damp with the sweat of fear, when a triumphant shout came from the gates as the portcullis was raised and into the place d’armes poured the rest of Durand’s men. Her heart lifted with a sudden surge of exaltation as powerful as the terror that had gone before, matching the crowing of the invading herald’s trumpet. Arrows flew, and the archers on the ramparts turned from the besiegers outside to the intruders in the place d’armes, pouring down a hailstorm of feathered death . . .

Indiscriminate feathered death . . . One of those arrows found its way between the links of Edmund de Bresse’s gorget as he raised his head. Magdalen watched, disbelieving in this moment of triumph, as the black and gold jupon crumpled to the ground. Then she was running through the death and the arrows and the swords and the sweating, bleeding, screaming men to where he lay. She fell on her knees beside him, still holding the child. His page and squires were there, and somehow they managed to pull him to the side of the court, out of the melee.

“We have to get the arrow out, my lady,” the squire said, pushing up the wounded man’s visor. “Raymond must pull it while I hold his shoulders.”

Edmund’s eyes flickered, rolled up in his head, but he was still breathing. Magdalen began feverishly to unbuckle his armor, but she was still holding Zoe, and it was almost impossible to perform such a task with one hand. The squire had grasped his shoulders now, and Raymond, twelve years old and come to manhood that day in the blood-drenched courts of Carcassonne, seized the feathered arrow and pulled. It came out with a spurt of blood, and Edmund’s breath became a choked scream.

“Ah, no . . . not Edmund!” Guy was there beside them, his voice a low moan of sorrow. “Quickly, we have to unbuckle him, then I can carry him out of here.” With the help of the other two, he went swiftly to work, and Magdalen knelt at Edmund’s head, her finger over the hole in his throat as if she could close the wound. But the blood pulsed against her finger, welled over the dike.

“He still lives,” she said, over and over, as if the constant repetition would ensure the continued state.

Around them the fighting continued, but Durand’s men were in the ascendancy, and the five of them seemed to occupy a space that had nothing to do with what was going on around them. At last they had Edmund out of the iron cocoon, and Guy was able to lift him. Magdalen had to take her finger from the wound, and she watched in despair as his lifeblood spurted forth.

Guy carried him out of the fortress and down through the silent, deserted streets of the town. The townspeople had fled their homes at the first fighting and were streaming across the plain, well aware of the carnage and plunder that would ensue if the brigands won the day.

In the encampment only the apothecaries, the priests, and the lads caring for the pack animals remained. Guy laid his burden gently upon the ground, and Magdalen set the baby down and again put her finger over the wound. The page ran for the apothecary, but Guy called swiftly, “Bring a priest, first, Raymond.”

“He still lives,” Magdalen said again.

Edmund’s eyes opened, and for a minute there was recognition in them. He tried to speak, but his voice was so faint she had to bend her ear to his mouth.

“I loved you,” he said.

“I know.” She clutched his hand. “And I loved you as I was able. Forgive me that it was not enough.”

Edmund’s eyes frantically sought Guy, who bent his head to catch the thread of breath that formed the words. “It is right . . . right . . .” Magdalen wiped a trickle of blood from his mouth and tried to hush him, but he continued with a desperate effort. “Right that you . . . you have each other now.” Then his head fell back as the final effort took the last breath of his strength.

The priest was there, murmuring the words of absolution over the dying man. Magdalen held his hand as her tears poured heedlessly, uselessly. Then she felt the moment when Edmund’s spirit left him. She looked up at Guy and saw his own eyes filled with tears. Gently, she laid Edmund’s hands upon his breast and bent to kiss his cold face.

“Requiescat in pace.” There was such finality in the priest’s benediction.

She picked up Zoe, who had fallen asleep on the grass, still sobbing in her confused fear, and she walked away, leaving Guy to his own vigil.