“Would youshut up?Please? Yes, I do see him.Constantine!”
He turned his head slowly and looked up to find Theodora Rosemont’s gamine face looking at him through the tall window.
“All right down there?” she asked, as if they were perfectly ordinary activities the two were engaged in.
He nodded dumbly. “Yes,” he called up, realizing she might not see the movement from such a height. And then he appreciated that she was thirty feet above him. He wasn’t actually surprised at her appearance—he was beginning to suspect Theodora Rosemont usually got what she set out for. But he was curious. He cleared his throat. “How are you up there?”
“Jeremy stole a ladder from the village,” she said and then turned her head to look behind her. “It doesn’t belong to you, does it? Fine.” She looked back down at Constantine. “Heborroweda ladder. It shall be growing dark soon, my lord—do you think you might want to come out now?” He could tell she had tried to make the statement matter-of-fact, but Constantine could hear the gentleness of her tone, a quality he’d not noticed in her voice before.
He thought of the crucifix atop the rubble.
Constantine gained his feet with a groan and rested his hands on his hips as he glanced up toward the collapsed doorway through which he’d entered. He was surprised at the indigo shadows that indeed now painted the inside of the keep. He looked back to where Theodora Rosemont watched him from the window.
“I don’t think I can return the way I came,” he said. “And there are no handholds to reach the window.”
“All right,” she said with a shrug. “Never mind, then. Good night.” Then she actually grinned at him before she threw down a long coil of rope that unfurled and swung and slapped against the stones.
He wasn’t certain which he needed most in that moment—her levity or the rope—but he suspected both.
“Shall I stay to cheer you on?” she teased.
Constantine looked back to the pathetic progress he’d made.I’ll be back on the morrow, he vowed silently, realizing with a glad heart that Theodora Rosemont had supplied the means of ingress and egress for him to return.
Then he dusted his hands together and limped over the broken rubble toward the rope. He stood at the bottom and looked up at the window, where Theodora rested her forearms and leaned over to look down at him.
“It’s a long climb,” he admitted, his hands on his hips once more, thinking of the weariness in his arms, the pain in his knee.
“Sooner begun . . .”
He gave a sharp nod. “Right.” Constantine approached the rope, reached up with both hands, and gave it a jerk. “What’s it tied off to?”
“The most substantial thing in the ward—Jeremy.”
Constantine thought he heard a muffled bit of words on the wind, but Theodora only glanced over her shoulder with a grin before looking back down at Constantine.
“Pardon me—muscular.” Her expression became pointed. “Lord Gerard, my slippers are thin and the rungs are hard.”
Constantine grasped the rope firmly and stepped the bottoms of his boots onto the wall.
* * *
Dori knew something was wrong before Constantine was even halfway up the wall. Each time he placed his right leg higher to move his left, his grimace grew deeper, his strides shorter.
He must be injured.
Now his right foot slipped altogether and the tawny-haired man gave a growl of pain as he placed his boot back against the stones forcefully. He paused to look up at her, and she saw that sweat ran down his face.
“My knee,” he explained.
Dori knew a shiver of unease. She licked her lips and leaned farther into the opening of the window, making a show of looking beyond him to the shadows that were now roiling like a dark ocean along the rubble of the keep.
“It’s half of it, either way you go,” she said matter-of-factly. “But if you don’t move soon, you’ll likely have the decision made for you when you fall.”
He gave a guttural shout and adjusted his feet on the wall. She could see the seams of his tunic over his biceps straining and she thought about how tired he must be physically after his exertions; how tired mentally the chore had made him. He was a strong man, true, but even the strongest men had breaking points, and most of the time they were not failures of their bodies.
“You’re wasting time, Constantine,” she said sharply. “Move!”
He tried to raise his right leg again, but this time, it fell from beneath him, causing his left boot, too, to lose its grip. Constantine’s body went vertical to the wall, swinging out, spinning and then returning to collide with the stones.
