Medieval 03 - Enchanted

since…”
    Without finishing the sentence, Marie shrugged and
began plying her needle once more with astonishing speed.
    “Since when?” Ariane asked.
    “Since my husband saw Simon sneaking from my
tent, thought he was Dominic, and betrayed Dominic’s band of
knights into a sultan’s ambush.”
    “God’s blood,” breathed
Ariane.
    “More like the knights’ blood,”
Marie said.
    Her small teeth flashed in the candlelight as she
nipped off a thread that had knotted.
    “Most of the knights were captured by the
sultan’s men,” Marie continued, threading a new
needle.
    “Was Simon?”
    “Aye. But none of the captured knights was
the right one.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “The knight whom the sultan dearly wanted and
whom Robert had betrayed wasn’t among the captured
knights,” Marie explained.
    “Dominic le Sabre?” Ariane guessed.
    “Aye.”
    “Why did the sultan particularly want
Dominic?”
    “The sultan had a taste for torture. Dominic
had the name of a very strong, very brave knight who bowed to no
man. The sultan vowed to destroy him.”
    “What happened?”
    “Dominic traded himself for the freedom of
his knights. One of those knights was Simon.”
    “The knights were released?”
    “Aye.”
    “And then Dominic was somehow freed?”
Ariane asked.
    “Aye. After a time.”
    “Then why…?”
    “Why does Simon hate me?” Marie
asked.
    Ariane nodded.
    “Simon was near my husband when Robert was
mortally wounded during the ambush,” Marie said calmly.

“Before Robert died, he confessed to Simon what he had done
to Dominic. And why.”
    “But Simon knew that Dominic was innocent of
any sin.”
    “Aye,” Marie said. “It was Simon
rather than his brother who lay with me after my marriage to
Robert. Since he heard Robert’s dying confession, Simon
hasn’t touched me. He blames himself for what happened to
Dominic.”
    “I thought you said Dominic was
freed.”
    “He was. But only after he was tortured such
as few men have been and survived.”
    Ariane tried to speak. At first nothing came out.
She swallowed and tried again.
    “In the armory,” Ariane said.
“Simon kissed you.”
    Silently Marie shook out her sewing, plucked a
stray thread, and looked up at the woman who was close to her age
in years, yet so far away in experience.
    “Simon didn’t kiss me,” Marie
said. “I kissed Simon. I suspected he was angry enough with
you not to mind angering you in turn, so I kissed him. Simon
hasn’t willingly touched me since he heard Robert’s
confession.”
    “Never?”
    “No.”
    “But the Holy Crusade was years
ago!”
    “Aye. Simon is a man of extraordinary
passion. It will be many more years before he forgets. Or forgives
me.”
    “He loved you,” Ariane said
painfully.
    “Love?”
    Marie laughed and smoothed the embroidered silk she
was sewing. Her mouth was an amused curve as she knotted the
thread, bit it through, and smoothed the knot until it was
invisible. She picked up the needle and threaded it once more.
    “Simon didn’t love me,” Marie
said, sewing quickly. “I was simply the first woman he had
bedded who did much more than lie on her back and think of God. My
sexual skills all but enslaved him for a time.”
    Ariane couldn’t hide her shock at
Marie’s bluntness, which only amused Marie more.
    “You must have had a nun’s
childhood,” Marie said.
    “Far from it. My mother was forced by my
father. It was the only way he could have her. She was a woman of
unusual…gifts.”
    “A witch?”
    “Some called her that. Here, I suspect she
would have been called Learned.”
    “A witch,” Marie said succinctly.
“Did her gifts come to you?”
    “Only for a time.”
    Marie gave Ariane a sharp look, then went back to
her sewing, for a single look had told her that Ariane would speak
no more on the subject of her own missing gifts.
    “As a child I was stolen from my Norman
parents and sold into a seraglio,” Marie said as she sewed.
“By the time Dominic’s knights freed me, I was very
experienced at pleasuring men.”
    “So you repaid the knights by becoming
their…”
    “Whore,” Marie said without
embarrassment. “Aye. ’Tis what I know best. ’Tis
what I have been trained for since I was eight. That, and
sewing.”
    Ariane blinked. “Trained to pleasure men?
Why? I thought that sex was by nature a pleasure for
men.”
    “There is the pleasure of coarse bread and
water to feed hunger and slake thirst, and there is the