Maiden Bride. Deborah Simmons

       Chapter One

      Nicholas de Laci leaned against the wall of the great hall, brooding over a cup of ale. He was not drunk; he never drank too much. It dulled the wits, and he had honed his to a razor sharpness. As if to prove his skills, he lifted his head at a sound from the arched entranceway, his eyes alert for any sign of danger, but it was only his sister, Aisley, and her infant son.

      Hexham would not pass this way again.

      The thought slipped into his mind like a dark phantom, despite his iron-hard discipline, and for just a moment Nicholas let himself dwell upon it. His enemy was dead. The neighbor who had waylaid him in the Holy Land, abandoned him there and returned to try to steal his lands had been cut down in this very hall by Aisley’s husband, Piers, who had deprived him of his revenge in one fell swoop.

      Nicholas glanced toward two heavy chairs near the front of the hall. That was where they said it happened, by Aisley’s seat, but the tiles had long been scrubbed clean, and Hexham’s blood was gone. Forever. Nicholas would never see it spilled, never know the satisfaction of vengeance in the depths of his hungry soul.

      He had tried other killing in the year since, hiring himself out as a soldier, but the deaths of strangers meant as little to him as the coins he received in payment. Nicholas already had great wealth and a prosperous demesne to call his own. Built by his father, Belvry was a modern castle and the envy of his peers, and yet it gave him no pleasure, either. And so he had returned here, to the scene of his bitter disappointment, vainly searching for a respite from the gnawing emptiness that had become his life.

      Nicholas’s fingers tightened around the cup that held his ale. In truth, he found contentment nowhere, for nothing held meaning for him anymore. His sister was so much changed over the five years he had been in the Holy Land that he knew her not, and he resented her husband for taking what he had most wanted: Hexham’s life.

      “Nicholas! I did not see you there against the wall. What are you about this afternoon?” Aisley asked, with that half welcoming, half wary smile that he had grown accustomed to seeing directed toward him. His lovely fair-haired sister was not sure what to make of him, but that hardly surprised him. Nicholas was no longer sure what to make of himself.

      “Nothing,” he answered, brushing her query aside with a flick of his eyes. He nodded toward a long bench, and Aisley sat down, baby in her arms. “Look, Sybil, ‘tis your uncle Nicholas,” she cooed. “Uncle. Uncle Nicholas,” she babbled, crooning in a way Nicholas would never have thought possible.

      The Aisley he had known had been an aloof childwoman, a skilled chatelaine, but certainly not the sort to lavish affection upon anyone. Now, instead of handing the infant over to a nurse, she dragged it around with her most of the time, carrying on over it in a way he found hard to fathom.

      A sound from the entranceway drew his swift attention, and Nicholas saw Piers stride into the hall. A huge man, Aisley’s husband was capable of intimidating others, but rarely did so. Instead, he seemed to take infinite delight in the world around him, from which he had been briefly cut off during a bout with blindness.

      “Piers!” Aisley’s voice rose in excited pleasure. “Look, Sybil, ‘tis your father!” she said, waving the baby’s tiny fist toward the great knight. Perhaps something about the birthing process had damaged her wits, Nicholas wondered, not for the first time during his visit. “Here, go to your uncle while I greet your father,” Aisley cooed.

      To his utter horror, Nicholas found the infant thrust into his arms. It was small and fat and bald, and it smelled, with an odd sort of milky, soapy odor. He had known it to reek more foully. The thought made him rise to his feet and glance down suspiciously. If it soiled his tunic, he might have to strangle it. Cup in one fist, babe in the crook of his arm, he glanced helplessly toward his sister, but she was already beyond his reach.

      With a happy smile, Aisley threw herself at her husband’s tall form, while Nicholas watched in amazement. He would never get used to that behavior. The two of them kissed passionately, just as though they were in their own chamber and not standing amid the rushes of the open hall. Nicholas found the display positively sickening.

      He would have thought that Piers only indulged his daft wife at such moments, but for the fact that the knight sought her out with the same enthusiasm. Perhaps Piers’s sightlessness had left him sadly addled, too.

      “Waaah!” The babe in Nicholas’s arms seemed suddenly to realize where she was and started screaming shrilly in protest. Nicholas’s gut churned in response to the hideous noise, and he wondered if he ought to depart Dunmurrow soon. He felt apart and alien among this strangely happy threesome who made his own life seem even more barren and aimless.

      “Here!” he said, standing abruptly and holding out the child to its mother.

      “There,

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