Chapter 8

Phillip caught her as she fell.

He had seen the sword coming toward her, shouted for her to move, then bolted across the courtyard to try to jerk her out of the way. He’d managed to spare her dashing her head against the stone of the stairs, but perhaps that was cold comfort when she was going to have a knot on her forehead the size of an apple.

She looked at him blearily, then her eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted.

He turned to find the captain of Haemesburgh’s guard standing behind him. He stared at Sir Neill until the man put up the sword he’d retrieved from where it had fallen from the sky by way of a woman’s forehead. Neill shifted uncomfortably.

“That wasn’t intentional,” he said defensively.

“No doubt,” Phillip said. “Where is her bedchamber?”

Neill blinked at him as if Phillip had asked him a question he simply couldn’t fathom. “Ah, milord—”

“The lady of the hall’s bedchamber,” Phillip said crisply. “Surely you can at least tell me where to find it.”

Neill looked at him with an expression that could only have been properly termed consternation, but he seemingly chose to bite back anything he might have planned to say. He shrugged, then nodded for Phillip to follow him into the great hall.

Phillip entered the hall, but warily. If a pair of his own lads followed hard on his heels, who could blame him? He would have been mad to walk into a tight space with the unconscious lady of the hall in his arms and not expect someone to protest.

He followed Neill across a disgustingly filthy great hall and up a set of truly perilous steps to the upper floor. Neill paused before a door, then turned and made Phillip a slight bow.

“Here ye are,” he said, as if he’d just paused in front of a cell designed to house him for the rest of his life. “As ye requested.”

Phillip looked at the man pointedly. Neill looked no less enthusiastic than before, but he did open the door. He stepped back quickly, as if he expected something untoward to happen to him. Phillip wasn’t surprised to find one of his own men joining Neill on the far side of the door, though he suspected it wasn’t to keep Neill company.

He looked inside the chamber, then stopped himself just before he allowed his jaw to slide south. He had expected to see many things in Heather’s bedchamber: bedbugs, weapons, perhaps even a pile of things she had collected to throw over the walls at him should he dare show his face anywhere near her home. What he hadn’t expected was to find a lad standing in front of a smokey peat fire in a brazier, a lad wearing skirts.

“What are you doing in my bedchamber?” the boy demanded.

Phillip struggled to find a response to that, but couldn’t latch on to a damned thing.

“And who are you to think to do such a thing?”

“Phillip de Piaget,” Phillip managed, “and I daresay I think quite a few things you wouldn’t care for. Who are you?”

“The lady Heather,” the young man said, brushing at a filthy wimple, “as you can plainly see.”

Had he stumbled into a foul dream? He reaffirmed his vow to be more careful at a witch’s fire in the future, then studied the lad standing there in front of him, patting the hair under his veil into place. By the saints, how long had that one been at the current ruse? Was it possible that was the soul who had been flinging chamber pot contents over the walls at him all this time?

He could scarce bring himself to consider such a possibility, but he knew he had to. For all he knew, he had never actually seen Lady Heather herself. ’Twas possible she was nothing more than a figment of her father’s imagination and he had gotten himself betrothed to a woman who never existed. After all, it wasn’t as if he’d actually stood in front of a priest with her. When he’d come to put his hand to the letter of promise her sire had demanded, she had been indisposed.

Had she been of an indisposition that was closer to death than pains in her head?

The thought of that left him wanting to find either a seat or an ale keg, neither of which would serve him at the moment. He glanced at the bed and decided abruptly that he wouldn’t have put an ancient steed to rest on that nasty bit of business. He would have to find another place to lay the woman in his arms.

The woman who apparently wasn’t Heather of Haemesburgh.

But if she wasn’t Heather, who was she?

The circles his poor mind was going in were dizzying. He would have to sort them all at some point, but he would see to the woman he was carrying first. He looked at Neill.

“How are the stables?” Phillip asked.

“As ye might expect, milord. I wouldn’t put a woman there.”

“Yet you’ve allowed the lady Heather to sleep here,” Phillip said in disgust. “Or whoever that is there.”

“She’s made of stern stuff.”

No doubt. Phillip had wanted to avoid killing any of Haemesburgh’s men-at-arms, but he had the sinking feeling things were not going to go well with the man standing in front of him.

“The stables,” Phillip said. He glanced at the lad still standing there fiddling with his wimple and decided he would see to that one later. One mystery at a time.

He could scarce believe what he’d just seen. Even if Lord Robert were dead, surely he would have made it clear how things were to proceed. They had initially signed the betrothal agreement seven years earlier. That seen to, Phillip had turned his mind to other things. That wasn’t to say that he hadn’t arrived now and again at the gates in the style of a dedicated suitor, bearing gifts and delicacies designed to curry his future bride’s favor.

The parleys had never gone very well, but Lord Robert had always been too busy to engage in anything but the most banal of speech about the weather, generally held out in front of his gates in the weather. Phillip had been determined not to be as rude as his own sire would have been in similar straits—Robin would have stormed the keep and made himself at home in the lord’s chair with his feet up on the table at the first sign of reticence—but perhaps he had been more patient than he should have been.

Patient or stupid; he wasn’t sure which.

If he hadn’t wanted the hall so badly, at the moment he might have been tempted to label the whole thing a horrible failure, gather up his family and guardsmen, and simply walk away. But there were the politics of the place’s location to be considered, as well as the land attached to the keep. He wasn’t one to grow misty-eyed over the sight of rolling hills of heather and flocks of sheep trotting happily over bucolic greenswards, but he had to admit the surroundings were spectacular.

For something that wasn’t Artane, of course.

The hair on the back of his neck stood up suddenly. He didn’t look, but felt one of his men step up more closely behind him and the one in front of him pause briefly to close the distance between them. It was something those two had done countless times for as long as he could remember. His men were not cast-offs from his father’s garrison, but men he had acquired on his own and only accepted after having watched them over an extended period of time. These two were truly the most ruthless of the lot. If he’d been entirely honest with himself, he would have said they made him nervous.

They definitely made his captain nervous, but that situation was complicated. Sir Cederic was one of his father’s men who had become head of Phillip’s own garrison by virtue of his experience and character. He was a good, solid soldier and properly cautious, but in a fight, Phillip had to admit he preferred the pair paving his way and bringing up the rear.

Sir Myles glanced over his shoulder briefly, met Phillip’s eyes, then looked past him at the knight behind him, Sir Wiscard. Phillip didn’t like the feel of the hall and he knew they didn’t either. He sincerely hoped he wouldn’t be fighting his way out of it with an unconscious woman in his arms.

He glanced over at the high table and swore, just on principle. The sword was gone. His sword was gone. Robert’s eldest son, also named Robert, had taken great pleasure at sending word several years ago that Phillip’s sword was residing behind the lord’s chair in the great hall. He had intimated it was occasionally used to hang cloaks upon when the hall grew uncomfortably close, but Phillip had supposed he had said that merely to be an arse. The only satisfaction now came from realizing there was no sword there to use as a pole, though that was cold comfort indeed and left him with another unpleasant mystery to solve.

Where the hell was his grandfather’s sword?

He left the great hall, cursing under his breath. He had anticipated trouble, but assumed it would come at him in a straightforward manner and be easily managed with steel. He was in a courtyard full of men who were not his and whose loyalty was to the saints only knew whom. Robert the elder was obviously dead, Heather was nothing more than a lad hiding upstairs in skirts, and her brother Robert the younger was nowhere to be found.

And he was holding on to a woman he had never seen before.

He gained the stables and was relieved to see that at least the horseflesh was being well cared for. Given the things he’d found inside the walls already, he was perhaps more relieved about that than he should have been. He left Myles and Wiscard to securing the area and looked for a likely place to put his burden.

Theo and Sam popped up from behind a half wall, making him jump a little in surprise. He cursed them briefly before putting them to use spreading clean straw on the floor of a stall, then covering it with a horse blanket. He lay the woman who couldn’t possibly be Heather on that blanket, then jerked his head toward the stall door to send his young cousins scampering. They went willingly, which left him perfectly confident that they wouldn’t go far enough to give him any hope of privacy.

He took off his cloak and covered the woman in front of him with it. That seen to, he sat back on his heels and looked at a woman who couldn’t possibly be his betrothed.

Who the hell was she?

He took a deep breath, then pulled her cloak aside as discreetly as possible, just to see if her gear might give him any clues to her identity. Her clothing was such as he’d never seen before in his life. Scandalous, truly, those hose with that long tunic made of stuff he began to think he shouldn’t be looking at. He recovered her and supposed he had gotten what he deserved. Perhaps she was a noblewoman from the north who had been waylaid at Haemesburgh. She could have been trying to escape as the drawbridge had been going up.

He stared at her thoughtfully. That was possible, he supposed, and he wondered why he hadn’t considered it before. After all, why else would a woman be in such a place without a guard about her? And it certainly wasn’t as if she’d been trying to impersonate the lady of the keep. That silly lad inside had been proof enough of that.

Her eyelids twitched, then she opened her eyes and looked at him. Phillip leaned forward to talk to her.

“My lady—”

“I’m going to be sick.”

He wasn’t surprised. One didn’t take a blow to the head such as she had without feeling the effects of it. A bucket was shoved into his hands before she vomited all over the both of them. He felt a little queasy himself, but ignored it. The bucket was taken away, water was provided—he could only hope it hadn’t been drawn from the horse trough—and he suddenly found himself with a stall full of help. Lads fell all over themselves to offer aid, cool damp cloths, and advice on how best to tend a woman who had just heaved the rest of her guts all over one of the little twins. Sam bore the insult manfully and excused himself to go have a wash. Phillip spared a kind thought for his aunts’ efforts to teach their children manners, then pointedly invited the rest of his cousins to leave. They did so, though reluctantly. He suspected they wouldn’t go far.

Once they had gone, he turned his attentions back to the woman in question. He had just decided that perhaps he would begin with proper introductions when she seemed to recover somewhat. Before he could trot out his best manners, she had found her tongue.

“Listen, buster, if you don’t get me back to Edinburgh right now and cut out this reality crap, I am going to kick your—” She stopped speaking briefly, then seemed to regroup for another go. “I’ll kick something all the way to Sunday, damn it anyway.”

He thought it might be impolite to gape at her, so he kept his mouth shut and tried to make sense of her words. He groped for the memory of where he’d heard that accent before, but he supposed that might take more time than he had at present.

“Ah, your name, lady?” he asked, because it was the first thing that came to mind.

“Imogen Maxwell,” she said, waving a shaking finger at him.

And then she was off, babbling things he simply couldn’t understand. Or, rather, things that he didn’t want to understand.

The unfortunate truth was, he had a very long memory. He would admit that there were several things over the course of his years that he chose not to remember. His sire called them paranormal oddities. As a child, Phillip had decided never to ask what those might be.

That resolve had been tested sorely during his time spent squiring for his uncle Montgomery, for there were strange and unusual happenings associated with his uncle’s wooing and winning of his bride, Persephone. But he’d eventually left them to their bliss and gone on to pass the rest of his youth either at Artane or spending the occasional stretch of time with this uncle or that aunt. He hadn’t noticed anything untoward.

Though that might have been because he’d made a concentrated effort to keep his head down and his thoughts to himself.

It was true that he’d watched his aunts and uncles do peculiar things from time to time, but he’d supposed that was how all families in England conducted themselves. It had only been as he’d begun to travel about more and watched others come and go in various keeps that he began to see that what he’d considered normal might not be quite so normal.

Damn it anyway.

He’d heard words pronounced in just that way, though he most definitely didn’t want to think about where. He had to take a bracing breath, which he rarely needed to do. He tried muttering a few of the words that woman there had babbled. They were strange upon the tongue—

He flinched in spite of himself when he realized Imogen Maxwell was groping for his hand. He took hers in both his own, surprised at how hard she was trembling. If he hadn’t known better, he would have suspected she was afraid.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“Phillip,” he said. “Phillip de Piaget.”

She let out a deep, shuddering breath. “I want to go home.”

Aye, that was definitely fear in her voice. He opened his mouth to tell her that she had no reason to be afraid, not when he was there to aid her, but he realized the words would be lost on her. She had taken a deep, shuddering breath, then fainted. He sat there, holding her hand, and found himself without a single useful thing to think, he who always knew what to do and how to do it.

I want to go home.

He understood her words. He didn’t want to think about why or how. He could only hope that he was the only one to have heard them—

He realized quite suddenly that he wasn’t alone. He looked to his left to find his cousin Jackson leaning on the stall door, watching him. He forced himself to remain still and give no indication that he was at all affected by the sight of someone who came from a family where paranormal happenings were not exactly unusual.

“Been there long?” he asked in as offhanded a manner as possible.

“For a bit,” Jackson answered.

Phillip nodded toward the woman lying in the hay. “She took a blow to the head.”

“Aye, Phillip, I was there and saw the whole thing.”

“She’s babbling.”

“So she is.”

Phillip would have shifted, but he never shifted. It was something he’d learned from his sire. Robin de Piaget could stare at a miscreant, unmoving and unblinking, until the poor whoreson dropped to his knees and blurted out anything to end the torment.

He had to admit that he admired his sire to the depths of his soul, damn the immortal rogue.

“What’s her name?” Jackson asked very quietly.

Phillip supposed there was no reason not to be honest. There were several people in his life he trusted completely. His mother and father, of course. Kendrick, surprisingly enough. He trusted Rose with the matters of his heart and his schemes both.

He also trusted Jackson Alexander Kilchurn, the Fifth.

He had wondered, as he’d watched his younger cousin grow to manhood, why the hell they’d saddled him with a name better fit for a king. He’d never found a good reason for it, but he’d also discovered that he hadn’t needed a reason. Jackson was a vault, truly, a repository of all manner of things he held in absolute silence and never revealed. Phillip knew this because he’d watched Jackson be pressed past the point where he himself might have been able to bear the strain. Jackson never budged even a hair’s breadth.

Phillip looked at his cousin. “Her name isn’t Heather.”

Jackson lifted his eyebrows briefly, then contemplated the woman lying there senseless. “Any thoughts on what it might be instead?”

Phillip looked at him evenly. “She said her name was Imogen Maxwell and if I didn’t get her back to Edinburgh right away, she was going to kick my arse seven ways to Sunday.” He paused. “Or words to that effect.”

Jackson let out his breath slowly. “Interesting.”

“Do you think so?”

Jackson shrugged. “I think many things. Whether or not they’re useful for anything but keeping me distracted from other things, I wouldn’t presume to say.”

Phillip studied his cousin for a moment or two, then looked back at Imogen, who was obviously not the lady of Haemesburgh. Why was she dressed so strangely and why did she think threatening him with text was something he would take seriously? Why did he find her words so familiar?

Why was she still clutching his hands even whilst senseless?

He would have asked Jackson, but something made him hesitate. Good sense, hopefully. The truth was, he had spent possibly more time with Jackson and Rose than he had the rest of his cousins combined. Jackson was every bit as driven as he himself was, and Rose had her own demons that she was continually outrunning. He had never been quite sure that his parents and theirs hadn’t spent their evenings closeted in Artane’s solar discussing ways to keep the three of them in check. He supposed he could safely say the only soul who knew him better than Rose and her younger brother was Kendrick. But even so, there were things they’d all seen that they simply didn’t discuss.

He looked at his cousin. “I loathe mysteries.”

“And you think I love them?”

“I think you’re surrounded by them, and that makes me uneasy.”

Jackson rolled his eyes. “You’re daft. Come find me when you’ve regained some semblance of good sense.”

Phillip hoped that would be sooner rather than later, but with the way his day had proceeded so far, he didn’t hold out any hope for it.

Before he could contemplate that for any length of time he found Jackson’s post taken up by a different cousin. Connor of Wyckham stood there, looking far too at ease for Phillip’s peace of mind. Then again, Connor was one of ten terrifying spawn. Perhaps if someone wasn’t trying to light his tunic on fire, he considered life to be just too dull to get worked up over.

Connor leaned on the stall door. “Lovely place you have here.”

“The keep or the stables?”

Connor smiled. “I have no complaints about the stables.”

“And the rest should likely be razed,” Phillip finished for him. “’Tis tempting.”

“Oh, I imagine you’ll tidy it up soon enough.” He gestured to the woman lying senseless there in the hay. “What are you going to do with her?”

Phillip looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Exactly what you think I mean, cousin,” Connor said seriously. “I’ve been making this pilgrimage with you for seven years now, since that notable occasional when I first put my wee hands in yours and pledged you my squirely fealty. Did you think I’ve been napping the entire time? I don’t have a clue who that wench there is, but I can hazard a fairly good guess as to who she isn’t. I was wondering, given who she isn’t, what you were going to do with her.”

“Hell.”

“Well, you could use that to describe the state of your future home, but perhaps not much else.” He nodded toward Imogen. “Who is she?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“I don’t think the lads in the keep know either, which makes them very nervous. You’ll want to see to that sooner rather than later, I suspect.”

Phillip sighed. “What are they saying?”

“The usual rubbish any suspicious lot would say. It doesn’t help that you’ve arrived at about the same time. They’re connecting you with her, but the thread they’re using is very knotty.”

“Thank you for that.” He looked at his cousin. “I don’t believe in witches. Or odd happenings that can’t be explained away easily.”

Connor smiled. “Did I claim you did? Now, what do you need?”

Phillip supposed there would come a time when he would have to take himself off in private and bawl like a babe over the generosity of those who never hesitated to surround him. He wondered, given the expression on Imogen Maxwell’s face when she’d talked about going home, if she had never enjoyed that luxury.

“And it grows dark, in case you hadn’t looked,” Connor said seriously. “I’m not sure the lads here are organized enough to do anything then, but I suppose I wouldn’t put it past them. Do you want to remain inside the walls or take our chances in the forest?”

“Where is Cederic?” Phillip asked. His captain generally spent his time instilling fear and loathing into whatever collection of ruffians they intended to fight, but with the way things had gone so far that day, Phillip didn’t dare hope for anything useful from him.

“He’s terrorizing the keep’s garrison, as you might expect. I didn’t suggest we not accept any offers of supper because I thought that should come from you, but I don’t think any of our lads would be interested in that. If what you truly want to know is if we’ll survive till dawn, I think our chances are good. Better inside than out, at least.”

Phillip nodded. “Then we’ll stay and see what the morning brings.”

“I’ll take my turn here, if you want to see things for yourself.”

Phillip nodded, disentangled his hands from Imogen’s, then traded places with his cousin. He paused at the stall door and looked back at her. He supposed if he’d had any sense at all, he would have rummaged through the rucksack she’d been wearing on her back, but perhaps later, after he’d seen to the safety of his company. She might be awake then and able to answer his questions. Or perhaps he would do the chivalrous thing, refrain from vexing her, and simply see her back to wherever she’d come from. Surely it couldn’t be that far nor that difficult to escort her back to her home, then be about his own business.

And to think he had endlessly boasted that chivalry was always convenient.

He hoped he wouldn’t come to regret having said as much.