Knights Read Online Free Page A

passageway, leaning against a wall.
    Dane hid a smile and reached for the latch. So, he was tenacious, as well as swift, this young brother of his. That was surely a good omen. “What is it?” Dane inquired, as smoothly as if they had not had an exchange only moments before.
    Fresh color surged into Edward’s face, and his expression was sulky as he thrust himself away from thewall. He still had a few spots on his face, the marks of tempestuous youth, but he was altogether a finelooking, stalwart lad, and though willful, he would no doubt make a good soldier. “I will not permit you to humiliate Gloriana this way,” he said, after an audible swallow. “She deserves only good things.”
    “Yes,” he said. Dane had no doubt that his erstwhile wife deserved better than him, though whether the improvement would come through entering a convent or taking another husband remained to be seen. Personally, he thought the nunnery an excellent choice.
    He pushed the towering door open, and the smells of mice and mildew filled his nose. As he stepped over the threshold, Edward was directly on his heels.
    The place was dank and swathed in a musty net of shadows and cobwebs. Evidently, he thought, with a rueful half-smile, his esteemed elder brother, Gareth, had not expected him to return to Hadleigh Castle at all.
    “She’s been waiting for you, Gloriana has,” Edward babbled on, and Dane was glad of the gloom in that vast chamber, for it allowed him time to absorb the implications of what his brother was saying without revealing his reactions. Dane had not been expecting to hear that his wife had looked forward to his arrival—she’d been a mere infant when they were bound to each other and probably didn’t even remember him.
    He wrenched down one of the tattered tapestries that had been draped over the windows, then another. “Nonsense,” he said, as welcome light and fresh air streamed into the room. Flecks of dust sparkled in the great shafts of sunshine. “My ’wife’ has not laid eyes on me more than once or twice in all her days, and that from a distance. God’s teeth, will you look at mybed? It appears to have been a nest for every rat in the realm.”
    Edward had calmed down a bit, but anger still emanated from him like heat from a brazier. He’d hoisted himself onto the broad sill of one of the windows, his knees drawn up. “I will spare you the obvious retort,” the boy said.
    “Thank you,” Dane replied, yanking down the last of the tapestries. “I suppose it would be a waste of my time to ask you to go and fetch a handful of servants to put this place to rights?”
    Surprisingly. Edward levered himself down from the sill, making a royal ceremony of dusting off his leggings and tunic. “Not at all,” he answered. “I shall be happy to take my leave of you, my lord.” Green and tender stalk though he was, he crossed the room with the dignity of a much older man, and then he paused in the doorway. “Be gentle in your dealings with Gloriana,” he warned in parting. “You are my brother, blood of my blood and flesh of my flesh, but if you do milady injury of any sort, I shall see you dead for it.”
    With that, Edward went out.
    Dane stood in the center of that time-ravaged room, staring after Edward. He was not afraid of his younger brother or any other mortal soul, and he certainly intended to deal kindly and justly with the current Lady Kenbrook, but he had been forced to take note of something important. Edward was not the boy he remembered, but a man, and one to be reckoned with.
    He smiled, then crossed the room to his bed, pulled off the feather ticking, no doubt infested with fleas as well as mice, and flung it aside. Exhausted, he stretched out on the rope netting beneath and sankinto the brief and vigilant but profound sleep of a soldier.
    There was a tiny courtyard off Gloriana’s chamber, with an arbor of yellow roses on one side and a stone bench on the other. By her order—and she did