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“If I do, will you help me free Marcus?”
Ice glinted in his eyes. “What in hell’s name do you think I am doing here, Arianne? Julian’s men will have my head on a platter if they find me. Yet I’m here. You ought to be clever enough to figure out why.”
“I’ll have your word on it before I speak.”
Mockery curled his lip. “Since when does the word of a banished scoundrel mean anything?” he asked sardonically.
“Marcus believes in you,” she replied stiffly. “I suppose I must do the same.”
He turned away from her. He began to pace back and forth around the small confines of the cottage, looking far too large and strong for such a feeble dwelling. At length he turned back to her, and suddenly Arianne felt a vise tightening around her heart as she saw his face.
Bitterness filled it, a resigned and hopeless bitterness imprinted so clearly upon the strong, handsome features that it tore at her soul.
“You have my word,” he told her grimly. “My solemn oath. I will free Marcus from the castle dungeon or die. Is that good enough for you, Lady Arianne?”
She nodded, too stunned by the bleak emotions that she read in him to speak.
“Then we must act quickly. I know only bits and pieces. Tell me all that has happened in Dinadan and Galeron since my father’s death.” His tone was heavy. “By tomorrow we must devise a plan and begin at once, for if my information is correct, Marcus is to be hanged in three days’ time.”
“That is correct,” she whispered.
He heard the catch in her voice and fixed those implacable gray eyes upon her. “By all that is holy, my girl, it will not happen.”
There was no tenderness in his tone, no concern or kindness. Only flint. The hard, fine-edged flint of a man not to be swayed from his purpose.
“Lord Nicholas, thank you.” She spoke formally, suddenly overcome with relief, and with a whole range of emotions, among them, finally, the faint stirrings of hope. “I…I believe in you.”
“Then you and Marcus are the only two souls on this earth who do,” he muttered with a quick, harsh smile. “So talk, Arianne. Quickly. There is no time to lose.”
3
The wind roaredlike a wild beast all through the night. With their cloaks spread on the dirt floor beneath them, Nicholas and Arianne huddled before the fire, and she told him of all that had happened since Archduke Armand had died.
“At first there were murmurings in Dinadan over Marcus being crowned archduke. He was never popular with the people, you know. Many prayed for your return—some even dared to call for it.”
This remark was greeted by silence. She bit her lip, knowing that when Armand had banished his son, he’d decreed that Nicholas should never succeed him as ruler of Dinadan. She’d never discovered what had transpired between the archduke and Nicholas to cause his banishment, and if her father or Marcus had known the reason, neither had shared it with her. It must have been something horrible indeed for Armand to turn against his firstborn son with such finality.
“Continue,” Nicholas ordered, his eyes hard as agates as she hesitated.
She inched closer to the fire, her hair drifting forward across her cheeks. “Immediately after the coronation, Julian had all the nobles who’d spoken publicly against him locked away. Then rumors reached us in Galeron that he was preparing for war, making plans to overrun his neighbors’ lands.”
“Didn’t wait long, did he?”
“Scarcely a sennight.” Arianne shivered despite the lovely blaze of heat from the fire. She was no longer drowsy; the story stirred her blood with fresh zeal against the man who had imprisoned Marcus.
“It started with border raids to the south, in Ruanwald,” she told him with a quick, flashing glance. “Duke Edmund realized that he didn’t stand a chance against Dinadan’s army, so he quickly offered his daughter, Katerine, in marriage as a means of securing peace with Julian.”
She frowned into the fire, remembering how shocked she had been by this event, for it had seemed to her, the last time she’d seen Katerine of Ruanwald at Midwinter Festival last year, that she and Marcus had been quite taken with one another. Indeed, when Marcus had heard of Katerine’s being bartered off to Dinadan in order to keep the peace, he’d gone white as a bone.
“Marcus saw then that if he didn’t face Julian directly and at once, our own land would be next under attack,” she told Nicholas with a sigh.
“What of your father?” Turning to look at her, Nicholas saw the glisten of sadness in her brilliant eyes.
Arianne steadied herself and explained how first her mother had died four years earlier of a fever and then scarcely a year later her father’s heart had given out after a hard day of hunting and riding.
“I am sorry to hear of it.”
“Thank you. So you see, Marcus is the Count of Galeron now.”