Crown of Passion Read online

  It was the king’s law that when an heiress was orphaned, the king stood guardian to her. As a vassal was liege to his king, the heiress was bound by the same law as her father. Gwyn was, therefore, a valuable piece of property belonging to the king, whose right to dispose of her or her estates was undisputed. To touch Gwyn would be to snatch part of the king’s treasure out of his hands, a rash act indeed, and one that carried dire and swift penalty.

  Rainault gentled his hound Wolf with one hand. He moved purposefully across the circle and stopped a yard away from Gwyn. “Indeed, where is the Saxon girl?” he said with quiet menace. “I warn you, my men and I will not be balked of our prey. The wench was tracked to this very place —”

  He broke off, surprised by the actions of Wolf. The hound nosed around Gwyn’s foot. From the corner of her eye Gwyn saw the other two hunters now approaching, standing a little behind their leader. But Wolf lived up to his reputation. He sniffed at her other foot, and then, satisfied that he had found the answer to the riddle his master had set, dropped back on his great haunches and lifted his narrow wolf muzzle to the sky.

  Baying, he announced to the world that he had, in fact, found the quarry he was expected to track. One word from his master now and he would set himself to destroying the object he had so nearly lost. He stood again and waited, quivering in anticipation, his scarlet tongue lolling from his mammoth jaws, his sharp teeth gleaming white in the dark cavernous mouth. She thought there must be wolf blood in the great hound, a feral strain of uncontrollable savagery.

  Rainault dropped his hand to the great hound’s head. “Easy, Wolf. You’ve done well, and your reward is to come.” The Norman beast seemed, for an odd moment, at one with the hound. The air reeked with foreboding, chilling hints of outrage to come, of gore and ferocious destruction.

  Gwyn watched the Norman unblinkingly, unable to look away, like a bird hypnotized by a serpent.

  “This very place,” he repeated. “Give up the wench to us.”

  With his arrogant words, the spell was broken. She was Norman as well as he, and her pride came back to her. She was in dire peril, but she would do no man’s bidding.

  “You are such poor men that you dare not hunt the stag?” she said, filling her voice with scorn. “Nor the wild boar?”

  “Where is the wench?” repeated Rainault.

  “You do not know? Such superior knights you are! You search out only a prey that cannot fight back! Find her yourselves!”

  “We have,” said Valdemar, surprisingly. “The hound’s nose is infallible. Those are Saxon sandals. I doubt not that you have exchanged footwear with the foolish maid.”

  “Foolish?” cried Gwyn in fury.

  “She ran,” explained Rainault equably. “Of course the dogs followed her, as they would any running animal.”

  Her eyes glittered in helpless rage. “You belie yourself,” she said icily. “A wager, you said. This hound against all others.” She gestured toward Wolf. It was a mistake, for the great hound growled deep in his throat and took a step toward her. “A wager fit for knights, I am sure. But now you say the beast followed a girl who ran. A girl fearful for her honor, her very life —”

  “What is the girl to you?”

  “A fellow Christian,” stormed Gwyn, firmly ignoring the first invocations of the girl to her Saxon deities, “and that, I assume, is more than you would understand.”

  Falsworth edged away. “Rainault, let us go. There are other wenches. Besides, my loins have unaccountably cooled.”

  Rainault laughed sharply. “You’ve been at the court too long, Falsworth. You’re unmanned!”

  “Not I!” cried Falsworth, dropping his hand to the hilt of his short dagger.

  Rainault shrugged his shoulders. “So be it. But I’ve won my wager and I expect my boon.”

  She cried out, “Your wager has naught to do with me!”

  She might as well not have spoken, for all the heed they paid her. Valdemar’s voice rumbled in his barrel chest. “I give you that, Rainault. Your hound bests ours.”

  Falsworth objected. “I don’t agree. I may not have a nose to track, but eyes I do own. And I wonder that she does not look the same. I thought, Rainault, the slave had yellow hair? And this — the color of a raven wing! Does your dog track leather, then, or prey?” He stood, hands on hips, challenging Rainault.

  “The Saxon is a witch,” muttered Valdemar. “First she is yellow-haired with a bouncing shape a man could drown in, and now — she’s turned herself into a slat-shaped, sour-faced vixen —”

  “Not vixen,” countered Rainault smoothly. “Human. And that’s all we need.”

  Falsworth muttered, “Human, yes. But I misdoubt this Saxon witch.”

  Gwyn’s quick ears caught the words, and she spat out, “I am no more Saxon than you!”

  “Saxon or not, I begin to lose my patience.” Rainault turned to his companions. “I take her first, it is agreed? I won the wager, and I claim my rights!”

  “You have no rights with me!” raged Gwyn.

  Valdemar said, moistening his lips, “You go first. If she doesn’t turn you into a horse, or a frog, then I’ll chance it.”

  “If I could, I’d turn you into the vermin you are!” she railed.

  Rainault’s eyes lit up. “Falsworth? Your scar has healed enough to try again another Saxon? Wait till I tame her!”

  Falsworth warned, “Take care, Rainault, lest she turn into a red vixen —”

  “No vixen!” said Rainault. “A human. A luscious piece.”

  He strode toward her, turning back to speak to Wolf. “Stay, Wolf. Your sport comes later.”

  “Human?” sneered Gwyn rashly. “I wonder you know the meaning of the word. More like wild animals you are, than two-legged men.”

  Rainault laughed, the sound of genuine amusement ringing around the glade and returning to its source. “You doubt we’re men?” he said with silken threat “You’ll change that opinion very soon, I promise you!”

  He loosened his sword belt and let it drop. His icy blue eyes bored into hers, chilling her to the bone. She had left it too late. His lust was driving him, and she could not stay it.

  Stealthily, she let her hand slide up from her thigh to rest in a casual fashion upon her hip, closer to her dagger hilt. Her gray cloak slipped from its silver brooch-fastening and, unnoticed, fell to the ground.

  “I do not know your name, sir,” she said with considerable dignity, “but I will long remember your face. And I tell you now, you will be advised well if you take your men and your hounds and return to the court from whence you came. For I am a ward of King William, and you well know the penalties for interfering with the king’s possessions.”

  “Can you believe that?” said Falsworth, agape. “I have not seen her about the court.”

  Gwyn turned to him. Shrewdly, she judged him the weakest of the three men. She set herself to alienate him from his fellows. “Do you see all the wards of the king at the court? I have heard such tales that I wonder not that you do not recognize a Norman lady when you see one.”

  “If you are a royal ward, then what is your name?” said Rainault, frowning skeptically.

  “I am Gwynllion Ramsey,” she told him loftily, proudly.

  Recognition flickered in his cold eyes. But he lied. “I have never heard that name. I must salute you for having the most original argument I have yet heard for thwarting your betters. I wonder sometimes that you Saxons ever lost your country with sharp minds like yours.”

  “I am not Saxon,” she repeated doggedly.

  She recognized the direction his thoughts were taking. If he pretended to believe she was Saxon, then whatever happened to her could, in time, be explained away. But even Norman knights would suffer for lifting a finger against a Norman noblewoman …

  “Why are you not at Winchester?” objected Valdemar. “The king has been there since Easter.”

  “Quiet!” shouted Rainault. “Why do we parley with the wench, as though to ask he
r favor? Have done with this.” With one step, quicker than thought, he was before her, his hands on the neck of her pelisson. “Let us see what is under this! I misdoubt as swelling a bounty as the one that got away, but the pleasure at hand is better than naught!”

  The sour smell of raw wine came to her then, and she recognized with a sinking feeling that the men before her were more than passing drunk. Normans had hard heads, and their physical bodies could soak up liquor by the tun, but sometimes their brains addled with the fumes.

  This was true fear, she knew now — the dread feeling that crept on cold feet up her spine, that made her soft flesh cringe of its own volition against the inevitable ravagement. Real terror, born of the certainty that the sunset, now fast approaching, would find her torn and rent body flung in a heap and left like carrion for the crows.

  For Rainault knew who she was. And it made no difference.

  Almost lazily, her tormentor lifted his fingers from the folds of the pelisson, where it encircled her throat, and with a sudden hooking motion pulled sharply at it. The sound of rending fabric rose like a wordless scream, and she felt the cold wind sharp on her breasts.

  “First the pelisson,” said Rainault, dreamily, in the throes of his growing ardor, “then this green thing —”

  The violet silk fell around his feet. He stooped to pick it up and tossed it carelessly behind him. Valdemar caught it Suddenly his sharp voice shouted, “Rainault! This is no Saxon homespun. What if she’s right? The king’s ward? By my soul, this shrinks my manhood! I’ve no wish to lose it, either, for poaching on his property!”

  There was no question whom he referred to. He could mean none other than King William Rufus, who would beyond doubt fall into an unsurpassed fury if his knights despoiled one of the great heiresses whose royal wardship, just begun, would bring riches into his coffers.

  The devil king, as her father had called him, feared neither church nor demon, and no man took from him what was his without regretting it. Valdemar’s fear of castration was genuine, and justified.

  “But how are we to know?” challenged Rainault, a new and disturbing light in his dancing eyes. “The Saxon maid we all saw. The hounds tracked her to this place. And what is one wench more than another — something to ease our bodies upon! Who looks at a face? Or listens to the prattle of a silly wench?”

  “You had better listen!” screamed Gwyn. “I am who I say I am, a royal ward! You will bitterly regret —”

  “A simple mistake!” said Rainault, taking a step toward her. “One which Rufus cannot punish if he learns we have gone to France!”

  To rape her could not be worth such trouble, she thought, and if she could just escape, just get out of sight, they would not pursue her. The wine fumes must be dissipating in their heads now, and the lust of the chase was dying …

  Rainault’s hands moved down to her small breasts; the heels of his palms pressed heavily on her. The trunk of the tree behind her held her prisoner. She kicked at him. The surprise of her blow took him aback, and he slammed her against the tree. He stepped away and rubbed his shin, cursing the while, and then straightened.

  Quick as the tongue of an adder, her dagger was in her hand and pointed directly at Rainault’s chest. A deadly quiet dropped upon them, heavy and silent as a blanket from heaven. She said in a low tone of real menace, “This dagger’s steel was forged in Toledo, and it holds a fine edge. Enough to penetrate even link mail —”

  “The maid has more fire than I thought!” said Rainault, in deceptive indolence.

  “Take care it does not consume you to ashes!”

  The dagger’s point did not waver. His face darkened, touched by shadows, and his eyes grew steely as he started toward her. Involuntarily she took a step sideways.

  The sandals betrayed her. Ill-fitting, they crumpled under her and threw her off balance. She clutched automatically for support, but there was none. She fell with her whole weight upon the ground, but her cry of dismay was for the realization that her dagger had flown from her hand.

  She was now unarmed, and totally vulnerable.

  2

  Rainault dropped to his knees astride her, looming menacingly above her small body. He reached for her. The hard edge of his surcoat tore her green silk bliaut, and impatiently he ripped the fragile shreds away, baring her hips. She stared up in horror as his driving lust coarsened his features, and his feral desire blazed from his eyes.

  His knees tightened convulsively on her and his hands sought — as though they had a life and passion of their own — to rend asunder her snowy linen shift.

  The sound of the tearing of her last covering rang like an alarm bell in her frantic mind. She squirmed upward, away from the clutching hands, the imprisoning legs, and was free — for the moment.

  The dagger! she thought, feeling a scream form at the back of her mind. She crouched swiftly, searching the tall grass, groping in the beech mast for her lost weapon.

  From the corner of her eye she saw, almost too late, her attacker launching himself from his knees at her. She leaped up, not even feeling the three-cornered beech nuts under her bare feet.

  “Can’t any sense penetrate your thick skull? The king will kill you!” she raged, forgetting that she could well be dead before she reached the king’s ear.

  “By all the saints, I’ll have you!”

  Her dagger still lost, she fenced with jeering words. “You will? And then what? The king has a long arm, I’ve heard! You might even have to go to Jerusalem! But fighting’s more than you can stomach, so it seems. You’re not even a match for the infidel women!”

  Rainault was swift as a sword thrust. He was on her, toppling her to the ground, before she could slither away.

  Holding her savagely with cruel clawed fingers, he pulled himself forward until he pressed full length upon her. His ponderous weight flattened the breath from her lungs. She fought for air. She was dimly aware that beneath the leather hauberk he wore a shirt of link mail.

  There was no escape possible. Even her arms by ill chance were caught beneath her as she fell, and she could only move fruitlessly from side to side, until he thrust away the shredded shift with both hands, and his hips moved heavily, slowly rhythmical, crushing her, and she could only lie motionless, sobbing her anguish.

  She heard, as though far away, the others cheering Rainault on. “Don’t tame the wench too much! Leave some for us!”

  There was pain, as his hands kneaded her, as his bearded lips forced open her own. And yet — there was a gathering sensation of storm within her, that demanded to be heard and felt. Shamed, she revolted abruptly against her own betrayal. She would hot tolerate this — this enemy invasion of her!

  She tried to twist her head away from his hot, wine-sour breath, but his arm pinned her to the ground by one long black braid. His left hand held her face rigidly to his, his right hand fumbled to lower his chausses. To aid his struggle, he momentarily lifted himself from her.

  She brought her knee up sharply, between his thighs, with no clear intent. But she succeeded beyond her hopes. Her assaulter fell to one side, gasping. And she was clear of him before the cheers of the men died into shocked silence.

  He gasped fiercely and glared at her, the naked desire in his eyes slowly replaced by a dark red glow of hate. She had attacked his manhood, denied his pounding release.

  And she would pay. She read as much in his revenge-shadowed expression.

  The other men moved in to enclose them, ringing them watchfully. Far now from waiting their turn in patience, they panted like hounds kept from their kill.

  Rainault did not rise for an unmeasured time. His breath had been knocked out of him, that was sure. And his eyes were still glazed with ebbing pain.

  But the pause had given him time to think of consequences, of the results of what after all must be a very rash act. And he was not quite sure of the undivided loyalty of his companions. For a reward one of them might easily inform the king of Rainault’s rashness. Valdemar for one
— he had laid covetous eyes before now on the manors that Rainault held, by the king’s grace.

  Besides, to deflower the she-devil was not nearly sufficient punishment for what she had done to him. He watched, almost casually, as she dodged beyond the great tree and found her cloak, still in one piece. The gray squirrel fur at throat and hem told him unmistakably that she was what she claimed to be — a Norman lady of high birth.

  He groaned involuntarily as he tried to stand. The wench would pay! But she knew who he was, and he had no doubt that by tomorrow’s sunset King William himself would be apprised of their attack on her. He must think of a way to give her the lie …

  The lady herself gave him the answer. “If I were a man!” she railed helplessly, her hands curling into claws.

  Rainault, standing now and master of himself once more, took up the challenge. “If you were a man,” he repeated heavily, a wicked light in his eyes. “All right, we will make you a man.”

  Her green eyes wide with dawning apprehension, she backed away. What could he mean? What kind of bestial maiming could he have in mind for her?

  “Come on now,” he coaxed, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “I’ll believe that,” she spat at him, “when rooks nest in the water reeds!”

  “I give you my word of honor,” he said, suddenly chuckling, “that I will not rape you.”

  Caught by surprise, she stiffened. She did not trust him, not for an inch, but she could not outrun all of them, not with the dogs. She must keep her wits about her and watch for the barest chance of escape.

  “Honor!” she snorted. “Drunken sot, what would you know of honor?”

  “Nay, don’t try me too hard, wench.” Rainault showed no signs now of drunkenness, unless in the slow movement of his hands and the quick collapse of his desire. “What say you,” he added, turning to his companions, “if we take the wench back with us, dressed in our clothes — and introduce her to the court. As the man she wishes she were —”

  “She wishes to be a man!” repeated Valdemar. “I wish I had tasted that flesh — she’d be glad enough to be what she is!”