Free Count Scar - SA by C. Dale Brittain, Robert A. Bouchard Page A

Duke Argave only smiled. Perhaps that was how young ladies normally greeted special visitors here in the south. I shook my shoulders, thinking I could get used to this quite easily. My sister-in-law, I was sure, had never kissed a special visitor in her life. A laugh I had to suppress fought upwards as I wondered just how many times she had even kissed Guibert.
    "And I wish you to meet Lord Thierri, husband of the late Countess of Peyrefixade." The duke spoke perfectly easily, but his eyes met mine for a second, narrow with a warning to remember all he had told me of this man.
    "I would be in all ways delighted," I said, trying for the same courtly tone but having it come out more awkwardly than I intended. The duke steered me across the room with a hand on my sleeve, the hand with the emerald ring. Around us I could catch scraps of conversation in what sounded like the local Auccitan tongue. I really was going to have to learn it.
    Thierri, no longer Count of Peyreflxade, turned toward us, and the duke performed the introductions. In a court in which almost everyone was dark complexioned, Thierri had hair red as a fox and sharp green eyes. His neck ruff was as wide and as elaborately pleated as the duke's.
    "Really, the new count?" he said with a hint of a drawl as he looked me up and down. "What a fine jest, my lord Duke! I confess you completely took me in. I had thought this one of the beggars from the gate dressed up in silks to entertain us, so what a surprise to discover he is instead a scarred soldier fresh from the uncivilized backwaters of the north. Fell in the fire when he'd drunk too much for his weak head, I'll venture. Is this what you chose to sleep in my bed at Peyrefixade, Argave?"
    All conversation around us came to an abrupt halt, though the musicians kept on playing. I closed my fists slowly, looking at the duke from the corner of my eye. If someone in the emperor's court had insulted me like this, I would have drawn my sword at once—or, if it was someone the emperor didn't want dead, have knocked him down and sat on his chest to pummel him until he begged for mercy. Both of those alternatives seemed out of the question in this elegant hall.
    But he had insulted the duke as well as me, and Argave was waiting to see what I would do. I deliberately pulled out the ridiculous velvet glove I carried instead of my sword and slapped Thierri across the face with it. The music stopped short, and everyone in the hall seemed to draw a sharp breath together. Thierri winced at the blow but did not retaliate—I was almost sorry he didn't.
    "Outside, in the courtyard," I said between my teeth. "There I shall give you one opportunity to withdraw those words."
    Duke Argave stepped briskly between us. "First the ceremony, and then dinner," he said loudly. Everyone else in the room was staring at us. But after only a second the musicians found their place and began again. "I cannot risk losing my new count even before he gives his oaths! But then, if you two hotheads still insist on imperiling the ducal peace of my court, you can walk in the chill of the outside air until your tempers have cooled." But he gave me a quick sideways look, lifting his eyebrows and the corner of his mouth as though very well pleased.
    The ceremony of my allegiance to Duke Argave went smoothly. The duke's capeuanus hovered in the background—his cassock was cut just like Brother Melchior's, though of finer material, and I guessed that he too was of the Order of the Three Kings—but Melchior himself presented me the relics on which I swore. Bruno and the knights who had been mine for only a week all went on their knees at my back as I put my hands in the duke's and promised to be his liege man, giving him good counsel and good aid, thwarting his enemies and never turning against him, forsaking the allegiance of all other lords.
    He drew me up then and kissed me on both cheeks, not flinching from the scar. "Thierri's a coward at heart," he