Dreams of Stardust Read online

  It could happen.

  He took a deep breath and crossed the room to the door. He was feeling great. He would feel even better when he was back in his car and on his way. Maybe he could call the earl of Artane and apologize for the delay and thereby buy himself another couple of days' recuperation in the Boar's Head Inn. He seemed to be sadly lacking in sleep hours of late.

  And he could trace the beginning of that directly back to his father, damn him.

  Jake took a hold of the door handle and pulled. It didn't open. Not good.

  He tried again, to no avail. He then realized that he had been locked in. And for some reason, that was a very unhappy confirmation of his worst fears.

  Fortunately for him, he had collected a wide variety of rather unsavory skills during his long and illustrious career as hunter of gems and other items requiring difficult and semilegal acquisition. Thad, a man whom he had hired as a guide on his first trip into the depths of South America in search of the perfect bit of sapphire, had taught him a few of the more innocuous things he himself had learned in a special operations unit he wouldn't talk about. Jake had been tempted to push Thad for some answers until Thad had given him a password to use while they camped, just in case Jake had to get up and pee in the middle of the night. Apparently, Thad didn't wake up well.

  And his camping buddies didn't wake up at all unless they warned Thad first that they intended to move.

  Jake smiled at the memory now, but at the time he'd wondered just what in the hell he'd gotten himself into, hiring a man with such a short, pointed resume. But he'd gotten his sapphire, he'd earned a very lethal friend, and he'd learned how to pick any lock in front of him silently and with a minimum of tools.

  He wasn't silent now, and it took the liberation of a very rustic shutter hinge to help him, but he got the door open eventually. Too bad Thad hadn't been all that up on medieval-type locks, otherwise Jake might have been able to leave the window-covering intact. At least Thad wasn't around to give Jake that look that said oh-so-clearly what a pansy he was if he couldn't get something open with a wish, a prayer, and a bit of bent, rusty wire.

  Jake stepped out into the hallway. It looked a bit like Seakirk, but this place was definitely in need of a little of Worthington's spit and polish. And some central heat. Jake rubbed his bare arms as he followed his nose to the left. Dinner was that way, and dinner had to mean hosts and that meant an explanation and perhaps some directions to the inn.

  The torches that burned in sconces along the hallway were real, with real flames and very real smoke. Jake shook his head. Cheap was one thing, but this was taking frugality to an entirely new level. What was wrong with a good space heater or two?

  He came to a circular staircase and descended it silently, no mean feat considering his lack of balance at the moment. The stairs widened at the bottom of the flight and then, quite suddenly, he was out into a great hall.

  And out, apparently, into the middle of a costume ball.

  He stood stock still and gaped. He could feel his mouth hanging open, but couldn't do a damn thing about it.

  Massive logs crackled in the fireplaces set into the walls. A long table sat near that fire with mailed knights eating enthusiastically and talking just as animatedly. To his right on the dais was another long table, covered with a cloth and a decent amount of food and boasting a handful of quite impressively carved chairs. Only three of those chairs were occupied at the moment, two by young men and one by a woman.

  That woman.

  The one with the blue eyes.

  Jake retrieved his jaw, but only partway. He tried shaking his head, but that only left him clutching the table to keep his feet. His vision began to blur, but not so much that he didn't notice the two young men leaping to their feet and bellowing in dismay. Before he could ask them to quit shouting, he found himself grabbed by the arms and slammed back against the wall.

  "Hey," he said in irritation, "what the hell—"

  A knife at his throat effectively cut off everything else he had to say. He attempted a brief struggle, but found the knife to be quite sharp, so he ceased.

  This was not good.

  Jake listened to the babbling going on around him and tried to decipher it. It was difficult, but he wondered if some of that might have been due to the blood thundering in his ears. He closed his eyes and listened for several minutes.

  Well, what he could say with certainty was that they were speaking French, or perhaps some dialect of it. Unfortunately his French, despite years of it at Eton and more study of it at Cambridge, was not what it should have been. It was serviceable, however, and he would make use of it, once he had the chance to sit down and listen in peace.

  But that would come after he'd extricated himself from his current less-than-comfortable situation.

  He could have escaped, he supposed. After all, picking locks wasn't all Thad had taught him, in return for a few one-of-a-kind baubles for the wife he adored. But that would mean Jake would hurt the people he liberated himself from, and he wasn't quite ready to do that yet. No, best he wait and see what was up—and where he was.

  It would, of course, give him ample time to look at the woman in front of him and try to catch his breath.

  He opened his eyes and stared at her. Her long, dark hair was held back from her face by a circlet of silver. Whoever she really was probably didn't matter. In the game these people were playing, reenactment or whatever, she was the princess and played the part to within an inch of her life. Her posture was regal, her profile noble. She spoke with authority and in a rich, melodious voice that left him wanting to do something that would require her to speak some more.

  The argument escalated.

  The woman glared at the older man, with the young men standing behind her and nodding, until the older man took a very small step back.

  And then Jake found her turning to him.

  And he lost what breath remained in him.

  He didn't suppose there were words in any of the smattering of languages he knew that could possibly describe her. To call her beautiful just didn't do her justice. She was flawless, like a stone of perfect clarity that had been cut by a master gemsmith at the height of his powers. Jake could only stand and admire her, mesmerized by the facets of her face, her hair, and those eyes that simply defied description.

  She stood several paces away from him, surrounded by the three men she had successfully argued with, and many others. She spoke to him, but he didn't have a clue what she'd just said. If he just could have had a few days to get his ear accustomed to what he was hearing, he wouldn't have had any problems.

  Perhaps another language might work in the meantime. He considered Gaelic, but what she was saying sounded nothing like any of the pithy phrases he'd learned from Alistair or Alistair's testy grandmother, phrases of which from the latter had usually included dire warnings about his state of bachelorhood and more dire warnings about what would happen to a man who plundered her stew pot uninvited one too many times. No, Gaelic would not do here.

  The woman before him asked him several questions.

  He couldn't begin to string two words together in answer.

  The lads flanking the woman, who looked enough like her that he assumed they were brothers—and twins at that—twirled their fingers near their temples in a sign that reached across cultures. He agreed heartily. And just in case he really was losing his mind, he trotted out several possible explanations for his current situation before he lost his remaining brain cells.

  He'd fallen in with a band of gypsies. Maybe that exquisite bit of aquamarine he'd paid pennies for and vowed never to cut into gems really had been hexed and he was suffering the penalties of one who had dared cut it into gems. He'd gotten several stunning pieces out of it and had suffered no regrets, though he had to admit he was beginning to regret it now.

  Alternately, maybe he was being held captive by this woman in order to become her love slave.

  Then again, maybe he really had
rolled his car and he was now in a coma, living out the most outlandish of medieval fantasies.

  He considered the last and found it to be the most realistic. Who knew what kind of drugs they gave you while you were comatose and what kinds of very real hallucinations those drugs produced? After all, hadn't he gone to bed after looking at what had ostensibly been a band of medieval ghosts arguing over the beauty of several medieval ladies? All of that just had to be filtering into his damaged brain. It made perfect sense.

  Of course, there was that quite sharp bit of steel pressing up against his neck, but maybe that was some sort of hospital tube bothering him subconsciously.

  Either that, or he really had been captured by a band of gypsies and heaven only knew what they wanted from him.

  Suddenly, the older man barked out an order. The woman protested, but Jake realized that she just might be overridden when he saw several mailed soldiers rise from one of the tables near the door. He suspected that wasn't to make him feel more at home.

  The time for action had come. He went into Thad mode, as Thad himself modestly termed it, and first slumped to throw his captors off guard before he disabled the two holding him against the wall. Others were either dodged or disabled just as easily, and he honestly tried not to leave any casualties behind him, though he had to admit that the chain mail they were wearing was not within his realm of experience. It was entirely possible that several of the men who tried to stop him would be nursing broken bits of bodies in the next little while.

  Shouts went up behind him as he sprinted across the hay-strewn floor and jerked open the massive front door. He leaped down the steps and was halfway across the courtyard before he felt himself beginning to slow. It was as if someone had suddenly poured molasses into his veins, molasses and a sense of inevitability that sank down into his very bones. He'd never felt anything like it before.

  He slowed to a stop.

  The evening sun was in his face, but that wasn't much trouble because it was what loomed behind him that he had to worry about. He studied the courtyard beneath his feet. It was dirt, though he could see a finely laid cobblestone swath that wandered down toward the barbican a goodly ways off. Whatever castle this was, apparently no expense had been spared in its construction.

  He gathered himself together and turned slowly, looking upward as he did so.

  A castle rose up before him, stark in its simplicity, massive in its proportions, unforgiving in its martial superiority. It was a place of refuge from war, shelter from the elements, comfort for the weary traveler.

  Artane…

  Of course. And he had a nagging suspicion this wasn't the same Artane that the determined tourist might find lurking in the back of the National Trust brochure.

  It figured.

  He looked at the front door. Souls spilled out of it and down the front steps, all watching him as if he'd truly lost his mind. He looked back at them in like manner, because it was for damn sure one group of them had lost its mind and he liked to believe it wasn't him. Unfortunately he seemed to be the one out of his element, so it was probably best to assume he was the one really out there.

  The woman started toward him, the woman whose face could likely change the course of wars.

  "Amanda!" her brothers shouted, before they pulled her back into the crowd.

  Amanda.

  Of course. He found he was even less surprised to discover her identity than he was to realize in which courtyard he stood. No wonder the ghosts had waxed rhapsodic about her. He would have too, if he'd had the wherewithal to do so.

  Fortunately for his unperspicacious tongue, someone clunked him over the head with something very hard and he descended quite happily into oblivion before he had to do any more searching for pithy phrases to describe the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

  * * *

  Chapter 7

  Amanda crept into the shadowy kitchen, wincing at the sound of swearing she could hear wafting up from the dungeons. The dungeons were found, conveniently enough, behind and under the kitchens, in the seaward wall. She supposed that in the height of summer they might be not uncomfortable, for the sea breeze that blew in might be pleasant and perhaps even warm. But a fierce storm raged outside and that dungeon with its opening only protected by iron bars driven deep into the stone had to be less than hospitable. She shivered, from more than just the chill.

  She had the feeling they were making a horrible mistake.

  She hadn't been allowed to watch as the guards tossed their prisoner into the hole. She'd managed to get close enough during the wee hours of the morning to hear him working on the lock that kept him inside his cell, but unfortunately for him, her father's guards were not ones to be caught sleeping at their posts. The man cursed them each time they whacked his questing fingers with whatever they had to hand, until he finally gave up trying to unlock the bolt. He had resorted to merely cursing.

  He'd been cursing for quite some time now.

  The cadence of his cursing didn't sound like that of an uneducated peasant, but the words certainly sounded like a poor imitation of peasant's English. He had cursed in several other languages she hadn't understood, and she was not uneducated. One of her father's garrison knights said some of the words sounded like the Gaelic one of his own father's retainers spoke. Amanda had come to the conclusion, quite early that morning, that the man they had locked up in her father's cellar was no peasant, but perhaps a great Scottish lord who had little interest in the language spoken south of his home.

  Unfortunately, trying to convince her very sleepy brothers of any of this had earned her nothing but more snores. Sir Walter had been likewise unresponsive to her attempts to gain entrance to the garrison hall, where she could confer with him privately.

  All this had left her with only one choice.

  She would have to liberate the man herself.

  Soot from the hearth in her father's solar had covered her face well enough, and John's most patched and stained hose had been her next choice—though in truth she had seriously considered choosing something less disgusting from his trunk. He would have deserved it, the wretch, for having slept through her heartfelt, guilt-ridden recitations on the evils of having imprisoned a man unjustly. John had scratched, belched and rolled over again to descend once more into pleasant slumber. Aye, he deserved whatever was missing from his trunk.

  The final addition to her disguise had been a handful of Nicholas's clothes wrapped around her middle, under her tunic. She might look like a kitchen lad, but she was definitely a well-fed one. Surely, her brother wouldn't begrudge her his clothing. It wasn't his best, but it was serviceable and would certainly keep the prisoner covered.

  All of which had left her about her self-appointed mission, using her best skills of subterfuge and disguise to make her way through the kitchens, past Cook, who only yawned at yet another filthy lad about his morning's labor, and down to the dungeons where her next task was to use the guards' dungeon keys in the most appropriate place.

  The guards jumped to their feet when her foot touched the ground. She assessed them quickly. There was no wine at their elbows, damn them, so she couldn't liberate the keys from their drunken fingers. And the men were frowning, never a good omen.

  She considered what means she might use to convince them she should be obeyed, then decided on a direct command.

  "Give me the keys," she demanded.

  They blinked. She could almost see them considering from whom they might receive the most trouble if they obeyed her—Sir Walter now or her sire when he returned.

  "I am chatelaine here," she announced, then she paused. "Presently," she added, wanting to be truthful. "Until my mother returns."

  They hesitated, then shook their heads, almost as one.

  "Too dangerous," said one.

  "We've firm orders to keep him where he is," said the other.

  Amanda gestured at the cage in frustration. "Does he sound dangerous to you?" she asked. "Nay, he does not. He sounds i
rritated. For all we know, he is a lord from across the border who will bring his equally irritated clansmen down upon us for not treating him with the respect he should have been accorded from the first."

  The guardsman on the right shifted. "Aye, well, I've a cousin who wed with a Scotsman and I must admit that I've heard this man make sounds akin to what that Scot makes when he's all in a snit."

  "See?" Amanda said. "That proves a great deal."

  "But the rest of the time he's blatherin' on in the peasant's tongue," said the other. "And so poorly that not even me, with my fair bit of learning, can make heads or tails of it."

  "All the more reason to see him go," Amanda said firmly. "We'll release him and set him outside the gates. He'll go his way and that will be the end of it."

  The guards hesitated. Amanda walked forward and relieved the one on the left of his keys. When he squeaked in protest, she gave him the look she gave her brothers when they had pushed her too far. The man looked horribly indecisive, which gave her time to turn around and unlock the bolt that kept the bars securely closed. She dropped the lock onto the floor and opened the grillwork—

  And found herself suddenly jerked inside the cell itself with an arm across her neck.

  Damnation, when would she find sense? Perhaps never, now that she was going to die. She was a fool. Beguiled by a handsome face…

  The guards set up a cry. Amanda swore. There would be hell to pay now.

  "You idiot," she said to the man holding onto her, "now we'll both find ourselves locked up. And here I came to free you. Ha."

  "Go home," he said.

  At least that's what she thought he said. By the saints, the man could not manage even a simple phrase without mangling it. Perhaps next time she would listen to her father's steward, her father's garrison knights, and the more logical part of her mind. The man behind her might not have been a starving peasant, but she had serious doubts about his being a lord. Surely even a poorly educated Scottish laird could have mustered up more coherent French when pressed than this one.