Medieval 03 - Enchanted

the realization that he was
going to stand and defend her when he could have outrun them quite
easily.
    “You stayed,” she said simply.
    “What?”
    “You defended me when you would have been
better served if you let the renegades have me.”
    “What kind of a beast do you think I
am?” Simon asked in an icy tone.
    Then, remembering his response to the enthralling
sensuality of the balm, Simon went pale.
    “I may be a beast when it comes to matters of
the bedchamber,” he said tonelessly, “but I am not a
craven to leave a girl to be torn apart by marauding bastards
dressed as knights.”
    “Simon,” Ariane whispered, knowing she
had wounded him without meaning to.
    He looked at the elegant fingers placed in silent
plea on his forearm.
    “Simon, the Loyal,” Ariane said in a
shaking voice. “You stayed, though you knew it would cost
your life. You stayed, when many another man would have betrayed
me.”
    Simon’s breath locked in his throat as he
looked deep into Ariane’s shadowed amethyst eyes.
    “Very few men would have turned their back on
you,” Simon said. “And no knight would have done such a
craven thing.”
    Ariane’s smile was as bleak as her experience
of men.
    “You are wrong, Simon. In the ways of
betrayal, I am wiser than you. I have never known a
man—knight or common serf—who would put my well-being
above his own pleasure.”
    “Ariane, the Betrayed,” Simon
whispered. “Who was it, nightingale? Who betrayed you, and
how?”
    Ariane didn’t acknowledge Simon’s
words. Instead, she tried to explain something to him that she
herself was just now understanding.
    “When I saw you standing across the trail, I
thought instantly that your horse was speedy enough to carry you to
safety.”
    “Your mare wasn’t fleet.”
    “Aye. Thus you stood across the trail,
prepared to spend your life so that I might live.”
    “I stood prepared to kill
renegades.”
    “Who were armored and riding war-horses and
outnumbered you five to—”
    “You should have run when I told you
to,” Simon said, cutting across Ariane’s words.
    “Nay!” she cried, leaning toward him.
“I would rather have died than have lived a single day
knowing that I had betrayed the very man who had been loyal to
me!”
    Simon looked at Ariane’s flushed face and
blazing eyes and wanted nothing so much as to taste the emotion
that was visibly running through her blood.
    “Yet you flinch from my touch,” he
said.
    Ariane closed her eyes.
    “It isn’t you , Simon. It is something that once
happened.”
    “Was it my doing?”
    She shook her head. Strands of loose black hair
slid forward, concealing all but a bit of the pale skin that showed
through her unlaced dress.
    “I…” Her voice cracked.
    Simon put his hand gently over Ariane’s.
Instead of pulling away, she twined her fingers in his and held on
with a power that was surprising in a girl who looked so
slender.
    “Once,” Ariane whispered, “the
daughter of a baron was fostered in a noble house. She was closer
to me than a sister, young, naive…”
    Ariane swallowed convulsively and closed her
eyes.
    Simon kissed the pale fingers that were clenched
around his own.
    “She was to wed a certain knight,”
Ariane said hoarsely. “But her father found a better match
for her, and the knight…”
    Ariane dragged breath into her aching lungs.
Tremors shook her body as though she were a leaf in the wind.
    “Nightingale,” Simon said. “You
can tell me when you’re stronger.”
    “Nay,” she said fiercely. “If I
don’t tell you now, I’ll lack the courage
later.”
    “No girl who gallops bare-handed into combat
with armed knights lacks courage of any kind. Good sense, perhaps,
but not courage.”
    “That was easier to do than this.”
    The clenched tightness of Ariane’s body
radiated through to Simon.
    “The spurned knight,” Ariane said in a
rush, “decided that if he deflowered the girl, the other
knight wouldn’t have her. So he forced himself on her. Then
he went to her father, said that she had seduced him but he would be noble and marry her.”
    Simon said something savage under his breath.
    “The father went to the girl’s room and
found her naked in bed, the blood of her lost virginity and more
besides still drying on her legs, and he didn’t believe her
cries of innocence. He called her a whore and a wanton and turned
his back on her.”
    “She told you this?” Simon asked
softly.
    “She?”
    “The girl.”
    Ariane