The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy) Read Online Free Page B

of lavender tied in her hair.
    He paused in mid-retreat, the light from his lantern looming and diminishing with each gust of wind that swirled through the open arch leading to the barbican.
    The baron would have him beaten if he failed, and what of the comely maid then, when he lay bloody and bruised in a heap by the hearth, nothing but meat for the dogs? What man would press his face into her fragrant bosom then?
    Hugh, no doubt, the cur, a stable boy with no idea of the refinements needed to lay a kitchen wench. The maid deserved better, and hadn’t she smiled at Noll? A mite toothlessly, to be sure, but a smile nonetheless, and what man needed teeth in a woman when her bosom was soft and ripe like peaches in late summer?
    Noll glanced again at the tower stairs running up into darkness, his fear and trembling growing to courage under the impetus of lust. His lord had said fetch, and no serf who valued his life would disobey a baron of the March, one of the land-hungry Norman freebooters who had seized territory in Wales and held it “by the power of their swords and by fortune.”
    With his back to the outside wall, Noll slunk up the spiraling stairs of the Hart Tower, using his feet, his knees, and the one hand not holding the lantern to guide himself. A fainter shade of gloom and wet gusts of air denoted each arrowloop he passed. Halfway up the first full turn, the chiseled steps turned from gray to black. Noll crossed himself again and thought of buxom pleasures, the scent of lavender, and the sweetness of peaches. A quarter turn farther, a step shone creamily white in the lamplight. The next was black, and the one after it white, full warning that he was entering the sorcerer’s domain.
    “Sweet Mary.” The prayer hissed from between his chattering teeth as an oak door set into Druid stone and banded with iron came into view. A gargoyle of the most hideous countenance barred the way, leering at him from the centermost plank with a bronze knocker hanging from its fangs. Rock crystal eyes glowed in the flickering lantern light, first blue, then gold and green.
    Gods! Was nothing what it seemed in this corner of the keep?
    Noll lifted his hand to grasp the knocker, and as he did, the hair rose all along his body, each tiny strand standing up to tremble alone. He knew it was the sorcerer’s power, and the moment his flesh touched metal, a great crack of lightning rent the air with a blaze of white fire and a concussion of thunder.
    Noll sucked in a paralyzing last breath, clutched the knocker with a spastic grip, and fainted dead away.
    Inside the tower, the resulting clang of bronze striking bronze reverberated like a pale echo of the lightning strike. Dain Lavrans turned at the sound, his fingers curling around the large chunk of cinnabar he held in his hand, a fortune in vermilion for scriptorium monks, and a source of mercury for those who—like himself—dabbled in a different faith.
    Behind him, sleet and rain beat on a glazed window. The lightning had struck close, probably the ramparts and, if what he felt was true, one of the metal-headed minions patrolling there, sealing his helmet to his skull. The baron would call for him, as if he could unfry brains roasted in such a manner.
    His upper lip curled in sullen humor. They expected too much, these Norman Marchers, from their Danish sorcerer.
    He put the cinnabar on a high shelf, then crossed the chamber to answer the first summons of the evening, lifting the cowl of his cloak over his head to conceal his face with shadows. The clasp he adjusted to bring the cloak over his worn leather gambeson was his by right of plunder, a garnet-encrusted Celtic scroll with a cabochon of amber on either side. Deer-hide boots covered his feet and were laced to his knees with strips of leather.
    Tonight he did not look like his Norman lord with silk hose, samite tunic, and ermine-trimmed mantle. Tonight Dain was a hunter—and he was not pleased to have his hunt delayed by