For My Lady's Heart Read Free Page A

her shoulder at him with her hand outstretched and her mouth open as
    she and her escort were engulfed by the crowd.
    “Isabelle!” Ruck jumped to his feet. He shoved after them. She had been
    named heretic for her sermoning more than once. He had to stay near her,
    explain her to the wary and suspicious. He floundered into a clearing and
    found himself in the midst of a circle of priests in rich vestments. The
    robed and tonsured scribe looked up from the lectern with a scowl, the
    plaintiff ceased his petition and turned, still kneeling before the podium.
    Ruck backed out of the gathered court, bowing hastily. He turned and
    strained to his full height, a head taller than most, looking out over the
    massed assembly, but Isabelle was gone. A guard stopped him at a side door
    and pretended not to understand Ruck’s French, gesturing insolently at the
    benches. He glared back, repeating himself, raising his voice to a shout.
    The guard made an obscene gesture with his finger and jerked his chin again
    toward the benches.
    A shimmer of color sparkled at the corner of Ruck’s eye. He turned his
    head reflexively, as if a mirror had flashed. Space had opened around him.
    At the edge of it, two spears’ length distant, a lady paused.
    She glanced at him and the guard as she might glance at mongrels
    scrapping. A princess—mayhap a queen, from the richness of her dress and
    jewels—surrounded by her attendants, male and female, secluded amid the
    crowd like a glitter of silent prismatic light among shadows.
    Cold. . . and as her look skimmed past him, his whole body caught ice and
    fire.
    He dropped to one knee, bowing his head. When he lifted it, the open
    space had closed, but still he could see her within the radius of her
    courtiers. They appeared to be waiting, like everyone else, conversing among
    themselves. One of the men gave Ruck a brief scornful lift of his brow and
    turned his shoulder eloquently.
    Ruck came to a sense of himself. He sat down on the bench by the guard.
    But he could not keep his gaze away from her. At first he tried, examining
    the pillars and carved animals, the other pilgrims, a passing priest, in
    between surreptitious glances at her, but none in her party looked his way
    again. Concealed among the throng and the figures passing in and out the
    door, he allowed himself to stare.
    She carried a hooded white falcon, as indifferently as if the Pope’s hall
    had been a hunting field. Her throat and shoulders gleamed pale against a
    jade gown fashioned like naught he’d seen in his life—cut low, hugging her
    waist and hips without a concealing cotehardi, embroidered down to her hem
    with silver dragonflies, each one with a pair of jeweled emerald eyes, so
    that the folds sparkled with her every move. A dagger hung on her girdle,
    smooth ivory crusted with malachite and rubies. Lavish silver liripipes,
    worked in a green and silver emblem that he didn’t recognize, draped from
    her elbows to the floor. Green ribbons with the same emblem laced her
    braids, lying against hair as black as the black heavens, coiled smooth as a
    devil’s coronet.
    He watched her hands, because he could not bear to look long at her face
    and did not dare to scan her body for its violent effect on his. The
    gauntlet and the falcon’s hood, bejeweled like all the rest of her,
    glittered with emeralds on silver. She stroked the bird’s breast with white
    fingers, and from four rods away that steady, gentle caress made him bleed
    as if from a mortal wound in his chest.
    She turned to someone, lifting her finger to hold back the gauzy green
    veil that fell from her crown of braids to her shoulder—a feminine gesture,
    a delicacy that commanded and judged and condemned him to an agony of
    desire. He could not tear his look from her hand as it hovered near her
    lips: he saw her slight smile for her ladies—so cold, cold ... she was
    bright cold; he was ferment. He couldn’t comprehend her