“I am!” she tried to call after him angrily, but her voice had given out again, allowing only a creaky rasp to escape her throat. The carriage disappeared into the black, its jingle and rumble already fading. “I am a good mother,” she croaked, and now the wetness that came from her eyes welled from the sorrow she was still trying so desperately to suppress. “I would be. I will be.”
“Help me, boy,” Father Simon called out from beyond the cusp of the road, his voice breaking as if he struggled physically. “My arm—I think it’s broken. Boy? Boy, are you there?”
In an instant, Dori’s despair turned into a hard pebble of determination, dropped from the night sky into the storm-tossed sea of her broken heart, endless glittering, concentric ripples of rage radiating from it. She glared toward the chasm, feeling heat pour from her eyes as surely as any rays of light from the sun that would not shine for hours and hours on this cold, dark road.
Perhaps, for Dori, it would never shine again.
She began backing away down the road once more, ignoring the pulling in her abdomen, the freshened wetness on her thighs, the void that consumed not only her body but also her soul.
Theodora Rosemont would get her son back, no matter what she had to do. And she would see those who helped take him from her—who stole her very life—pay dearly.
Especially her husband, Glayer Felsteppe.
Chapter 2
Constantine left the road some distance before the village, choosing instead to navigate the steeply rounded hill on the edge of the wood, slick with new grass and dewy in the setting sun. April had turned the land to green velvet, and the familiar smell of the heavy, cool air teased his nostrils and twisted his heart. He’d sold the black horse upon which he’d ridden away from Melk long ago, but he was glad he wasn’t now sitting up high on a mount, forced to look around and ahead at what was one of the largest and wealthiest estates south of London, gazing out across Kent toward the sea.
He was glad, because the breeze carried no sounds of busy planting, no rumble of cart wheels on the road or jingle of harness in a frantic, last-minute rush to get in another quarter hour’s work before the sun set. Nay, the squares of fields around Benningsgate lay tousled and wild with many winters’ growth. There was no one left to plant for, and so those who planted had gone. Most of them any matter; as Constantine hitched around the mound of the village he heard the occasional bark of a lonely dog, the shout of a woman calling someone to supper. He wondered for a moment if he knew any of the stragglers who had remained in the village, but then he decided it didn’t really matter. He wasn’t anyone’s lord anymore. He wasn’t anyone at all. He kept his gaze downward, his rough hood pulled over his head, delaying the first sight of what was left of his home for as long as possible.
His boots seemed to find their way back around to the road on the far side of the village on their own, and soon Constantine walked in the grassy ruts where once hard-packed earth had marked the way to the castle. No carts or riders came beyond the village now. There was no reason to. And so the road was little more than shallow, parallel ditches up the slope. It would curve to the right soon—yes, just here. His feet followed the path, his legs marched in a steady rhythm, his breath hissed and shushed in and out of his nostrils. The sun setting through the blooming trees to his left cast a crackle of black shadows across his route, as if the land had been broken, shattered.
Just like Constantine’s heart, his life.
It was four months since he’d left Melk in the night. Four months without the three men who had become like brothers to him at his side. Not an evening passed that he didn’t think of Roman Berg and pray for his safe return from the Holy Land. Constantine had heard no rumors on his journey of the king of Jerusalem’s murder, and so he hoped the huge stonemason had not sacrificed his own life to save Baldwin.
He thought of Adrian and was glad for the softening of his heart upon marrying Maisie. He wondered if Aid was still content at the abbey, with his duties and his studies.
He thought of Valentine and pondered how long the wily Spaniard would withstand such a mundane life, even with the beautiful Lady Mary and little Valentina to think of. Piracy ran in his blood after all.
God, he missed them all so much. They had become like family when he had still thought to one day return to his own wife and son. And then they had become his only family, because Patrice and Christian were dead.
His feet seemed to stop of their own accord as the ditches flattened and the new grass now poked up through gravel. Constantine stared at it, noticing with fear and dread how the wide apron of the approach to the castle was no longer comprised of only round, gray stone but interspersed with jagged pieces of honey-colored rock, many of the shards charred at their edges. That rock had been carted in from the north more than a hundred years before specifically to construct the tall, square keep Constantine might see if he would only look up. But he couldn’t—not yet.
All the bits of rock were pushed down level with the firm mud, trampled by so many feet—feet fleeing Benningsgate that fateful night? Looters going to and fro on the road after the tragedy?
The fantasy of seeing his son running to greet him on this very road upon his homecoming had been the only thing that had kept Constantine sane those years he served King Baldwin at Chastellet, and then after the siege, during his imprisonment and torture in Saladin’s dungeon. Had mourners walked this road in funeral procession with the bodies of his wife and son? How long had it been since Christian’s little feet had traveled over—
His vision blurred and Constantine crouched down. He swiped at his nose with the back of his hand while he sniffed and then reached out to pry one of the smooth pieces of fine gravel from the mud. He picked the little blades of grass from it, turned it before his eyes and then dropped it into his left palm to roll it around. He swallowed hard as his fingers closed over it, and Constantine at last raised his eyes.
He gasped through his nose even as a strangled whimper escaped his chest. Constantine wobbled on the balls of his feet and then threw his hands behind him as he fell backward on the road, as if the sight before him had reached out with malevolent fingers and shoved him. His satchel slid from his shoulder as he caught himself, its mundane contents clanging loudly in offense.
The keep was no longer a slim, four-cornered tower reaching high into the sky but a thin, jagged triangle of stone. The honey-colored rock was now lashed with black—the remnants of the fire that had consumed Benningsgate—and the once sweet shade glowed scar red in the dying rays of the sun. The wide arch of the entry to the barbican was barely visible behind the piled rock that had fallen from the wall higher up the slope and around the keep, and Constantine could see that the tunnel itself had mostly collapsed. It looked as though the top of the keep had exploded, and he wondered with horror how hot the interior of the dwelling had been to have destroyed walls eleven feet thick at their bases.
A solitary opening remained in the sliver of keep, and he knew by its telltale arch that it was the east window of the great hall, looking out over the wall walk leading around the enclosure on the sloping side of the grounds. The grandest hall south of the king’s home, once. Plastered and muraled. If Constantine closed his eyes, he could see the feasts they’d held in that hall; could hear the music wafting up to swirl around the beams in the high ceiling.
Now there was no ceiling, no floor. Nothing to look over from the east window save crumbled walls and sturdy weeds that were quickly becoming trees, nothing to hear save the birdsong surrounding what was left of Benningsgate Castle.
Christian was dead. He had died here. In the one place under heaven that he was supposed to be safe. Each beat of Constantine’s heart was a stabbing pain in his chest and the sobs bubbled up from the wellspring of misery that was his soul to shake his physical body.
“My boy,” he whispered through gritted teeth, squeezing his eyes shut and raising his face to the sky. His hood fell back and he felt hot tears track into his hairline above his ears. His inhalation was a jagged gasp. “My boy.”
Constantine sat up on the overgrown road, raising both knees and laying his forearms atop them. He buried his face in the worn, poor sleeves of the only tunic he now owned and wept.
* * *
Dori watched the man sitting on the road below for a very long time, wondering what he was doing at the ruin, who he was, what he was hoping to find. He was a poor man, as evidenced by his rough, drab clothing and his lack of a mount. His tunic was long-sleeved and came to his knees, belted around his waist. His boots appeared to be leather, though, and he wore a hooded cape. She assumed he was a foreigner by the manner in which he wore his hair—in a long, burnished plait that now dangled over his shoulder. He appeared to be resting with his head on his knees, but Dori had heard his sobs.
Perhaps the man had heard of the great estate of Benningsgate and had traveled here hoping for work. Perhaps he had sacrificed every penny he had, left behind loved ones, traveled who knew how far and for how long to come to this place only to find a charred ruin. Even the village was largely abandoned. Surely he had noticed the obvious state of the castle before he came so close.
