Belmaine looked at their joined hands as his mouth flattened.
Amelia bit into the honey cake. It was sweet, sticky, and entirely inappropriate for a scene involving abduction, forged documents, attempted murder, and royal law.
She looked at Sir Roger Belmaine and smiled.
He didn’t smile back.
Which was, all things considered, the best thing that had happened all day.
THOMAS
By the time they brought Belmaine back to Ashcombe, the rain was coming down in long silver sheets. It ran from the edge of Thomas’s mail, soaked through the torn place in his sleeve, gathered along his jaw, and dripped from his chin into the mud. Every inch of him ached from the ride, the fight, the fury he had not spent, and the terror that had only just begun loosening its claws from his ribs.
Galahad moved beneath him with the steady, offended patience of a warhorse who had carried his master through worse.
Amelia rode before him. Not because propriety approved. Propriety could go drown itself in the ditch.
She sat sideways across the saddle, wrapped in his cloak, one hand curled in the wet wool near his wrist and the other tucked against her middle. Her hair had come loose almost entirely, red curls escaping from beneath her ruined wimple in damp, wild spirals. The linen had slipped sideways, the pins gone or useless, and one bright curl clung to her throat like a little banner of rebellion. Mud streaked the hem of her gown. Rain darkened the green wool until it looked nearly black. A bruise marked one cheek where Belmaine had put his hand on her.
Every time Thomas saw it, something inside him went quiet and dangerous.
He should have killed Belmaine.
Behind them came the prisoners under guard. Belmaine rode with his hands bound before him, his fine cloak dark with rain, his face set in a mask of insulted nobility that fooled no one who had watched that mask crack in the orchard.
Edmund Crale rode between two of Hob’s men, hunched in the saddle and pale as old milk. Osric had been lashed belly-down over a packhorse for the first mile after trying to spit at Hob. He had since been permitted to sit upright, though Hob had tied his reins short and kept him near enough to regret breathing too loudly.
Master Pickering rode ahead with Sir Aymon, Walter, and Friar Huck, the escheator’s clerks clustered miserably behind them, trying to shield wax tablets and parchment beneath their cloaks. The road from Belmaine’s house to Ashcombe had turned to muck. Hooves sank deep. Cart ruts brimmed with brown water. The hedges dripped. Somewhere in the distance, the bell at Ashcombe’s chapel tolled Vespers, the sound slow and muffled by rain, as if even God had pulled his cloak up around his ears.
Amelia shifted in front of him. Thomas tightened his arm around her without meaning to. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s not mortally wounded, which feels like an important distinction.”
His jaw flexed. “Do not jest.”
“I’m not jesting. I’m triaging.”
“I don’t know that word.”
“It means organizing the damage so I don’t think about it all at once.”
He had no answer to that as the rain slid down his face. He wanted to put his mouth against her hair, close his eyes, andbreathe until the fact that she was alive settled into his bones. He wanted to wrap both arms around her and hold on until his heart remembered its proper work. Instead he kept one hand on the reins, the other around her, and watched the road for trouble, because wanting comfort had never stopped the world from drawing a blade.
Her fingers tightened briefly on his cloak. “I know why you let them take me.”
Thomas stared over Galahad’s ears at the slick brown ribbon of road. “Do you?”
“Because if you’d drawn steel in the yard, Belmaine would’ve had exactly what he wanted. A rebel baron stealing another man’s alleged wife in front of the crown’s clerk.”
“Alleged.”
“That’s the important word.”
“I should’ve found another way before he took you beyond the gate.”
“You did find one.”
“Too late.”
