For My Lady's Heart Read Free

more gently than he
    might have.
    “Bide ye nought with these hypocrites,” he said. “Come.” She stumbled to
    her feet and stayed near him, uncharacteristically quiet as they made their
    way through the crowds.
    The shadow of the palace fell over them, a massive wall rising sheer
    above the narrow cobbled street, pocked with arrow slits styled in the
    shapes of crosses, the fortifications crowned by defensive crenels.
    Isabelle’s body pressed against him. He put his arm about her, shoving back
    at a stout friar who tried to elbow her aside in passing.
    She felt cool and soft under his hand. He was blistering hot in his chain
    mail and fustian, but dared not leave the armor off and untended as they
    moved from shrine to shrine, kissing saints’ bones and kneeling before
    images of the Virgin, with Isabelle’s tears and cries echoing around the
    sepulchers. Now this new shrinking, her snugging against him, fitting into
    the circle of his arm as she’d been used to do made piety even more
    difficult to maintain.
    He tried to subdue his lustful thoughts. He prayed as they joined the
    stream of supplicants forging up the slope to the palace gate, but he was
    not such a hand at it as Isabelle. She’d always been a chatterer—it was her
    voice that had first caught his attention in the Coventry market, a pretty
    voice and a pretty burgher’s daughter, with a giddy laugh and a smile that
    made his knees weak—he’d felt amazed to win her with nothing to offer but
    the plans and dreams he lived on as if they were meat and bread.
    But there had been only a few sweet weeks of kissing and bedding, with
    Isabelle as loving and eager for it as himself, before the king’s army had
    called him to France. When he’d come back, knighted on the field at Poitiers,
    full of the future, triumphant and appalled and eager to bury himself and
    the bloodshed in the clean tender arms of his wife—he’d come back, and found
    that God had turned her dizzy prattle into prophecy.
    For a sevennight he’d had his way with her, in spite of the weeping, in
    spite of the praying and begging, in spite of the scolds, but when she’d
    taken to screaming, he’d found it more than he could endure. He’d thought he
    ought to beat her; that was her father’s advice, and sure it was that Ruck
    would gladly beat her or mayhap even strangle her when she was in the full
    flow of pious exhortations—but instead she’d beseeched him to take her on
    pilgrimage across the heap of war-torn ruins that was France. And here he
    was, not certain if it was God’s will or a girl’s, certain only that his
    heart was full of lechery and his body seethed with need.
    They entered the palace through an arch beneath two great conical towers,
    passing under them to an immense courtyard, larger than any castle he’d ever
    seen, teeming with beggars and clergy and hooded travelers. The clerics and
    finer folk seemed to know where to go; the plain pilgrims like themselves
    wandered with aimless bafflement, or joined a procession that ran twice
    around the perimeter and ended at a knot of priests and clerks.
    Isabelle began to tremble in his arms. He felt her bones dissolve; she
    sank from his grip to the pavement, with a hundred pairs of feet scuffing
    busily past. As her wail rose above the noise, people began to pause.
    Ruck was growing inured to it. He even began to see the advantages—not a
    quarter hour elapsed before they had a church official escorting them past
    the more mundane supplicants and into a great columned and vaulted chamber
    full of people.
    The echoing roar of discourse stopped his ears. The ceiling arched above,
    studded with brilliant golden stars on a blue field and painted with figures
    bearing scrolls. He recognized Saint John and the Twenty Prophets. His eyes
    kept sliding upward, drawn by the gilded radiance, the vivid color— abruptly
    the clerk pushed him, and he collapsed onto a bench. Isabelle looked back
    over