Free The Last Knight by Candice Proctor Page A

wince, and returnedhis frightened, breathless stare with a deliberately cold, mean look. “Friends or enemies, it matters not what you call them. But make no mistake about this, lordling. Once those men have passed us, you and I are going to have a reckoning.”
They overran the merchants on the far side of the nearest small hamlet.
The company was a large one, Spanish by the looks of it, preceded by a standard-bearer and flanked by crossbowmen and pikemen. An impressive display, Damion thought, as he spurred the Arab past the lumbering line of burdened pack animals and tired men—although one probably intended as much to advertise the value of the shipment as to guard it, since he could see only one knight, a fat, gray-whiskered cavalier dozing in his saddle with his double chin sunk against his hauberk. The man half strangled on a snore, his head jerking up as Damion drew in beside him.
“Good evening,” said Damion with a lazy smile. “You're late on the road.”
The knight sat up straight and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “As are you, my friend.”
Damion stared off into the distance, as if surveying the land. “I was hoping to find an abbey where we might stop. But I've seen no sign of one for hours now.”
The knight shook his head. “Nor will you, in this country. But there is an inn, at the crossroads outside the gates of a small town called Ravel, not too far from here.” A look of wondrous longing crept over the man's mottled face. “They serve the most wonderful, garlic-roasted milk-fed lamb there.”
The knight—who introduced himself as Sir Odo—hadobviously traveled this road often. Damion listened, his expression politely interested, his attention on the road behind them, as the old knight discoursed at length on the quality of the inn's food and wine and then moved on, by natural extension, to the relative merits of the whores who frequented the establishment.
“But if you like your women with big tits,” said Sir Odo, “you'll want to ask for Rose. Now, her face isn't much to look at, I admit. But the things she does to a man with those—”
Out of the corner of his eye, Damion saw the fast-rising dust from the west gradually solidify into five horsemen— three knights and two servants, wearing the livery of the house of Salers.
“She takes them in her hands, see,” Sir Odo was saying, “and squeezes them together. Now remember, they're big. As big as the watermelons of Jerusalem—”
The riders passed the plodding pack horses as Damion had done, at a canter. Watching them come on, Damion caught a brief glimpse of Atticus's dark hair and pale, strained face near a cluster of mules loaded with what looked like bags of alum, but after that, Damion took care not to glance in the boy's direction again.
The unknown horsemen paused several times to speak to various merchants, then spurred on to where Damion and Sir Odo rode at the vanguard of the cavalcade. “I tell you,” Sir Odo was saying, “you've never felt anything like it—”
He broke off as the men approached. Two of the knights were young yet, fair-haired and fresh-faced. They hung back as the third, a dark-haired man with small, sharp eyes and a hawklike beak of a nose over a tight-lipped, hard mouth, drew rein beside Damion and said, “We're lookingfor a gentlewoman. Tall, slender. Brown-haired. Young. Have you seen her on this road?”
“A gentlewoman?” repeated Sir Odo, fingering his wiry gray face whiskers. “No. Don't think so.”
Damion didn't let the surprise he felt show on his face, although the man's words were hardly what he had been expecting. A gentlewoman , he thought. Now what the devil would a monastery-bound youth like Atticus have to do with a gentlewoman—a young gentlewoman—from the house of Salers?
He studied the closed, guarded face of the hawk-nosed knight. The man had obviously been ordered to keep his inquiries short and discreet. But there were ways around that.
“A gentlewoman from the house of Salers has gone missing?”