‘Help me, Aelric.’
Her voice sounded distant and dreamlike in her ears and her legs began to shake. She felt herself slipping away from the world, floating to the ground. Felt his arms seize her before she hit the track. The last sight she saw was his eyes; wide, disbelieving and filling her vision, before blackness consumed her.
* * *
The man who called himself Caddoc looked down into the ashen face of the woman he held in his arms. He had caught her instinctively when she began to fall, though after the many attempts she had made to run or fight he could not discount that this was yet another escape attempt.
He blew on her cheeks. She gave no indication she felt his breath. Her head lolled to the side like a recently slaughtered lamb and when Caddoc pulled back one eyelid with a fingertip he saw her pupil had rolled back. This was a true faint and the comparison he had drawn turned his stomach. He lowered her gently to the ground, stepping back carefully.
‘She called you Aelric,’ Osgood said, his voice thick and muffled from clutching his swollen nose. ‘Why did she call you that?’
Caddoc felt his stomach clench. The name was not one he had heard spoken aloud for over seven years. One he had buried deep inside himself. There was no one other than Ulf from his present that would know it and few people from his past were alive to identify him.
‘I asked who she was,’ he said indifferently. ‘Perhaps the name is hers.’
He didn’t expect the men to believe his feeble excuse and sure enough Osgood grimaced. Ulf looked up scornfully from where he knelt binding the hands of the remaining guard.
‘Aelric?’ Osgood scoffed. ‘That’s not a woman’s name. It’s not even a Norman name for that matter and she’s definitely that.’
Caddoc bent to pick up the dagger he had wrested from her hand.
A woman.
Guilt coursed through him as he recalled how he had twisted her arm until she yelped. Worse, he had dragged her from the woods and given her a blow to the head. He hadn’t known she was a woman, though, and she’d fought back fiercely enough. She’d even begun the assault on him by throwing the stick under his feet.
A woman who knew his name.
He stared at the unconscious woman, hoping to see some sign of familiarity, but her face was smeared with dirt and her brown hair was dishevelled. Her lips were full and enticingly pink and long lashes framed each closed eye. He crouched on his heels beside her, wondering how he could possibly have mistaken the high cheekbones and delicate features for those of a boy.
Her dagger lay in the grass. Caddoc reached for it and turned it over in his hands. For the second time a blow struck him between the shoulder blades, knocking the breath from him. His hand twitched to his belt and closed around the familiar handle of the dagger that Constance Arnaud had given him on the night she had set him free. The dagger he held bore the same design and engraved initials. The stone in the hilt was the twin of his, only red instead of blue.
The forest and clearing vanished and he was lost in the past, staring at the woman before him. It could be her. The hair was the right colour and years had passed for her as much as for him. For months he had gone to sleep and woken with that face in his mind and name on his lips until he had forced himself to forget the girl from Hamestan.
His mind began travelling down a long untrodden path, waking senses that had slept for years. He caught himself, ashamed that he should be thinking of such things at a time like this.
She had begged him to help her. He bunched his fists. Once he would have protected Constance Arnaud unthinkingly, but she had made her choice when she did not follow him.
‘Wulf was right,’ Ulf muttered, breaking his reverie. ‘It was a bride the Pig was bringing.’
Caddoc flinched and looked at Gerrod who was still cradling his son’s body, oblivious to everything that was happening around him. Wulf’s name was too raw to be spoken without grief drowning him.
The boy had been wrong, though. If this truly was Constance Arnaud she could not possibly be a bride for de Coudray. He couldn’t tell the men that without revealing he knew her identity. He’d worked hard to be accepted in the group and if he revealed himself as a friend to Normans he’d put that in jeopardy.
‘Do you think the baron’s bride would travel in such a manner? This could be anyone,’ he said. ‘Probably the knight’s whore.’
Constance—until it was confirmed otherwise he could not help thinking of her as that—was beginning to stir. A hint of pink was returning to her cheeks, giving them an alluring blush. Caddoc pushed himself to his feet.
‘This changes things,’ Osgood said. ‘She changes things.’
‘It changes nothing,’ Caddoc answered. He frowned at the enormity of the lie. The plan had been simple. They had come for the contents of the box, yet here he stood with two dead bodies, his companion beside himself with grief, and a woman he had never imagined seeing again. The cur that now lay dead had ignored the lady’s plight in preference for saving the strongbox. Whatever it contained must be important to de Coudray if the bodyguard was willing to risk the life of his charge to protect it.
‘We take the box and anything else with us as we planned. Tie the prisoners together. Hurry, there’s no guarantee the road will be empty for long.’
‘Let’s just kill them and be done with it,’ Gerrod snarled.
‘No!’ Caddoc said sharply. ‘I wanted no killing in the first place and I don’t want any more now.’
‘What about her?’ Osgood asked. ‘What do we do with this Norman bitch?’ He glared at Constance, still cradling his nose between his hands in a manner that promised trouble.
Caddoc pursed his lips. He was happy to leave the men to take their chances, but leaving a woman undefended in the forest to whatever might befall her was wrong. Besides, a sister could be as useful an instrument to use against de Coudray as a bride.
‘She might be useful. We’ll take her, too.’
Caddoc.
That was his name now. He had worn it so long that his old one sounded false in his ears and he laid claim to no other. When Constance awoke he would impress that on her. By whatever means it took. He placed Constance’s dagger in his belt alongside the sheath containing his own.
As he expected, his declaration they would be taking her was met with mixed reactions. Ulf began protesting about the dangers of letting an enemy into the camp, Gerrod tore himself from his son’s body and began growling for revenge. Only Osgood showed any approval. He finally let go of his swollen nose and moved his hands to their more usual position between his legs.
‘If that was her man he has no more use for her.’ He grinned, glancing at the corpse of the bodyguard. ‘She can warm our beds instead. Do you think Norman dugs taste as sweet as English when you suckle them? They feel similar enough beneath the fingers.’
Caddoc moved to stand in front of Constance, blocking Osgood’s view.
‘She’ll not be used for that,’ he said sharply.
‘Not by us, you mean.’ Osgood’s expression darkened. ‘I saw the way you looked at her. You want her yourself.’
Caddoc looked behind him to where Constance lay, his eyes roving from her feet to head. The tunic she wore was a man’s, cut to the knee and revealing legs that were shapely inside hose that were bound at the calves with cords. The foot sticking