Free For My Lady's Heart by Laura Kinsale Page B

stallion’s faceplate. The destrier’s eyes
    were hidden behind steel blinders. It blew softly and chewed at the bit as
    the knight attached a silver cord to the bridle, presenting the lead to her
    with another bow of courtesy.
    She had not really expected to be left holding this enormous beast
    herself, but the broken-backed squire moved away to help his master with
    pulling the helm and aventail over the knight’s head, quickly smoothing any
    crimp out of the mailed links that fell over his shoulders. Melanthe
    realized with some surprise that he seemed to have no other servant. He
    pushed up the visor with his fist, keeping a cautious eye on his horse as he
    pulled on his gauntlets.
    The uneasy moment passed without incident. He caught up the looping
    reins, holding them together at the stallion’s shoulder as he stood by the
    stirrup. His plated gauntlets were so thick that his fingers seemed set in
    their half curl, clumsy and skillful at once.
    For the first time he looked directly at Melanthe. He said nothing, but
    there was a level strength in him, something quiet and open, without
    evasion. He seemed to wait, without expectation, with immeasurable steady
    patience in his green eyes. As impenetrable and beckoning as the silent
    shadows of a forest, and yet flickering with hints of secret animation: with
    its own mysterious life and will.
    Unexpectedly Melanthe found she had no ready word, no deceptive smile to
    return. She felt—as if she had been falling ... and under his calm regard
    found herself caught up from the endless drop and placed on solid ground.
    The horse threw its head, ringing bells. She shifted her look, the first
    to break away, and nodded to the knight.
    He turned to mount. His squire took hold of the reins below the bit,
    steadying the destrier. From the block her champion swung up into the
    tourney saddle, adjusting his body against the high curve of the cantle. The
    little squire brought the lance. With a move that held the grace of
    countless repetitions, the hunchback swung the heavy spear aloft in an arc.
    The weapon slapped into the knight’s waiting hand, slipped down against his
    open palm, and couched in the rest. At the spearpoint the bells of
    Gryngolet’s jesses rang their hunter’s music.
    He took up his shield with the image of the hooded falcon upon it and
    looked down upon Melanthe. Sunlight caught the large emerald at the base of
    his green plumes.
    “Say me thy right name,” she said in English, in a low voice.
    She heard herself ask it, heard the intensity of her own voice—standing
    amid the crowd of onlookers, not even knowing herself why she should care to
    know.
    His armor masked him now; all she saw was his shadowed face within the
    helm and visor. She thought he would not answer—he had sworn to be nameless,
    and yet there was no smell of subterfuge about him: an impossible contrast,
    new to her and unsettling in its strangeness. She felt a bizarre rush of
    shyness to have pressed him, and turned her face downward.
    “Ruck,” he said.
    She looked up, uncertain of the English word.
    “As the black ravens call,” he murmured in his own language. His mouth
    lifted with a half-smile. “Ruck, my lady. Be nought such a fair name, as
    yours, but runisch.”
    There was no presumption, no bold arts of love or offers of certain
    delight. Only that half-smile, rare and sweet, and vanished in a moment—but
    Melanthe saw then in him what Allegreto had claimed to see: a man’s hunger
    beneath the reserve.
    He sat mounted with his shield and lance, a warrior geared for combat. An
    uncouth runisch name he might bear, but his armored figure aroused a thought
    in her that was stunning in its novelty.
    She was no longer married. She might take a friend—a lover—if she
    pleased.
    In the same moment that she thought it, she knew the impossibility.
    Nothing had changed. Gian Navona had grown smoothly savage over the years of
    waiting for his prize. He