Malden’s heart stopped beating for a moment. “You saw her kiss me.”
Croy couldn’t seem to speak.
This might be the moment, Malden thought, when he tells me he’s going to have to kill me. He considered which way he would run.
But Croy lived by a code of honor. And that meant he had to give a man a chance to defend himself. “Why did she do it?” he asked.
The thief licked his lips. What he said next was going to have to be very carefully worded. Cythera had said she would tell Croy everything when they returned to Ness. Implicit in that was that he shouldn’t tell Croy himself. He couldn’t tell Croy that he and Cythera loved each other. That the betrothal between the knight and Cythera was already broken.
There was good reason for that silence. Still, Malden burned to have it all out in the open. It would make life so much simpler. In all likelihood, it would also make his life much shorter. Yet he found he couldn’t quite lie. “Allow me to explain. At that moment—the moment of that kiss—I was moments from certain death. The assassin, Prestwicke, was going to kill me. I was a condemned man and I had no hope of survival. I begged her for that kiss, as the last request of a dying man. In such a case, what woman could refuse?”
Croy’s eyes were wide and his face had turned bright red. He was embarrassed, Malden realized, to even have to ask. If another man had caught Malden kissing his betrothed, a lesser man than Croy he doubted that explanation would have sufficed. Yet Malden saw other emotions in Croy’s face. Gratitude. Relief. Croy had wanted so badly for there to be a simple, innocent explanation that he probably would have accepted anything Malden said. Anything other than the full truth.
“Surely you don’t doubt her constancy,” Malden insisted. “Her honor—”
“Her honor is my honor, and I would die to defend it. And you’re right, she could not refuse you in a moment like that. She is such a compassionate woman. You see why I love her? Do you understand the strength of my feelings?”
“I think I do,” Malden said, softly.
“But that very quality I love makes her vulnerable. Men can be schemers. They can take advantage of woman’s gentler nature, and women aren’t always wise enough to resist their charms.”
Not for the first time Malden remembered that Croy had never spent much time around women. Malden, who had been raised by harlots, thought he might know the female mind a little better. He also knew just how well women could resist men’s charms—when they chose to. He decided not to share this knowledge, just then.
“Someone else, someone with a less noble heart than yours, Malden, might have taken advantage of that situation. They might have asked for more than a kiss. If she were in a situation where she had to compromise herself, she might question the promise she made to me.”
“Put these thoughts from your mind! Croy, you have enough to worry about!”
Croy shook his head. “I need to ask your aid, Malden, and please, don’t refuse this. I need you to watch her. Make sure she stays safe. And … and pure. I—” Croy let out a little gasp. His fists were clenched before him. “I would die, my soul would shrivel, if I ever learned she did not love me any longer. It would pain me more than arrows through my vitals, Malden!”
“I swear this, Croy,” he said. “No new lover will come near her. I won’t so much as let her be alone with any man but me.”
There were tears in Croy’s eyes when he grasped Malden in a crushing embrace. “You are my friend, after all. I doubted it sometimes—but you are my true friend.”
“Put all your trust in me,” Malden told him. And for the first time in his life, he felt the pangs of conscience for deceiving someone. But he knew he would feel pangs of another sort—the sort one feels with two feet of steel shoved through one’s belly—should Croy ever learn the truth.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He made a point of saying no more until they reached the churchyard.
It was a gloomy place for men to sleep, even thieves. Yet the conscripts would have been disconsolate even if they’d been billeted in the courtly homes of the inner bailey. To a man they looked beaten and exhausted. While Malden had been brought to his audience with the king, these men had spent the day training. Shouting serjeants had put them through endless paces, teaching them the basics of how to use a bill hook as a weapon or how to march and even run in heavy leather harness. The reward for all that hard work was that now they were chained together in groups of six so they could not run away, given a bowl of thin pottage each to eat, and then utterly ignored by their captors.
Malden supposed it was better than being hanged in a public square. He wondered how many of the groaning men would agree. Well, at least for one of them the future held a little more promise. He scanned the crowd among the graves until he found Velmont, his friend from his own previous confinement.
“That one,” he told Croy.
They approached the chained men and Velmont looked up with half a smile when he saw Malden. Then he glanced down at the sword on Malden’s belt and his face fell. Malden realized he must be wondering if the man he’d spoken to while chained up in the banquet hall had in fact been an informer for the kingsmen. He had to admit to himself that if their positions were reversed he would have a hard time of trusting Velmont. “Just keep quiet, and this will go well for you,” he whispered.
“You had me good, didn’t you?” Velmont asked, ignoring what Malden had said. “All that talk o’ being brothers in the trade.”
“Be of good cheer, Velmont,” Malden told the man. “I’m not here to do you any harm.”
“You’re no thief, are you?” Velmont asked. He spat into the weeds between two graves. “What is it you want now, more o’ our secrets?”
“These others with you—are they part of your crew?” Malden asked.
“You want me to start giving up names? You’ll have to beat ’em out of me.”
“Listen to my proposal before you reject it,” Malden told him. He put his hand on the iron collar fastened around Velmont’s neck, but the thief jerked away from him. “I’m going to free you, you fool!”
“Oh, aye, free me from me mortal station, I’d reckon. With all I told ye … I gave out plenty enough to end up swingin’ from a rope.”
Croy bent to study the chains holding Velmont, and drew his belt knife to break the lock. Malden looked up and saw they’d been observed. The guards set to watch the conscripts had been huddled around a fire near the church, but now a serjeant in a rusted kettle hat came running toward them. He had a green and yellow ribbon wound around the brim of his helmet, and a thick truncheon in his hand.
“Saving your grace, sir knight,” the man said, addressing Croy, “but may I ask exactly what you think you’re doing here?”
Malden’s hand dropped toward the hilt of Acidtongue, but Croy stepped in front of him and leaned close to the serjeant’s face. “The king’s work,” he said. His voice was hard—harder than Malden had ever heard it before. “I’ve been sent on this fool’s errand by Sir Hew himself, the Captain of the Guard. I want it done quickly so I can get back to more important things. Now, release these men.”
“But—they’re criminals!” the serjeant protested.
“They’re wanted at the keep for a special detail. We need laborers to oil and clean every piece of iron in the armory before morning. Of course, if you’d prefer, I can take you and your men instead.”
Malden’s jaw dropped. He’d