Chapter 13
Peaches was having a very bad dream.
She dreamed that she was lying on the ground, trussed up like a Christmas goose, listening to some marginally well-dressed man point at her in a threatening way.
He was speaking French, but in spite of all her years of its study and her recent lovely conversations with Raphaela Preston, she couldn’t understand a bloody word of it.
It wasn’t like those dreams where she found herself standing in a leotard alone on a coffee table where her thighs were just at the right height for everyone to get a perfect look at them.
No, this was much more perilous—and apparently being conducted in a foreign language.
Her stomach growled and her haranguer stopped his diatribe and glared at her. He said something that she couldn’t make out. Then one of the henchmen she hadn’t noticed standing next to him came over and poked her with a stick.
It was then she realized that she wasn’t dreaming.
“Ouch,” she said, trying to move away from the stick.
She realized very quickly that that wasn’t possible because someone else was standing behind her with his foot on her side.
He gave her a shove with that foot, which left her on her stomach with her face in the snow.
She managed to lift her head well enough to breathe, then regretted it because it also allowed her the view of the man drawing his sword.
“But I’m a fairy,” she blurted out in her best French.
It had worked for her younger sister Pippa.
It was odd, though, how what worked for one sister didn’t work for the other.
The announcement that she wasn’t just a nutter escaped from the local loony bin didn’t seem to have impressed her new friends as much as she’d hoped it would.
The conversation that ensued was agitated and unhappy.
She managed to shift a little so she could at least see them as they were probably arguing about what would be the best way to put a fairy to death.
Why hadn’t she said she was a powerful witch who would cast a spell on them if they didn’t back off right away?
She would have given anything for any number of household chemicals that she could have used to amaze and astonish, but she was fresh out of a basic chemistry kit. And it looked like she was fresh out of time to escape.
Mr. Swordwielder had obviously had enough of chatting with his friends over her fate. She would have complimented him on being a man of action, but he was holding on to that sword as if he meant to do business with it.
He started toward her.
She closed her eyes, seeing her life play before her in one long, slow-motion movie.
And then she heard the clang of sword against some other kind of metal.
She would have thought maybe it was the guy’s sword clanging against an as-yet-undetermined piece of armor worn by someone not her, but a quick glance upward revealed that his sword had come to rest abruptly against a rather fancy-looking ornamental-type sword.
That foofy-looking sword was currently being wielded by an absolute nutcase.
She found that the ruffian foot resting in the middle of her back was suddenly no longer there thanks to a kick backward by her—well, she supposed he was her rescuer.
He was at least standing with his back to her and seeing to her attacker. In her book, that made him a good guy.
She managed to roll over onto her side and then struggle to her knees. Her hands were tied behind her back, which made that rather difficult, but she was in a fair bit of peril and that gave her an added bit of inspiration to get herself mobile.
It was only after her head cleared that things took a turn toward weird. And given who her parents were, she knew weird.
She sat back on her heels and watched the guy in front of her, who was dressed rather sportingly in riding clothes and a long, dark coat, continue to fight.
All right, so she was fairly sure she wasn’t dreaming; she wasn’t at all sure she wasn’t having a full-blown, broad-daylight sort of hallucination.
Her rescuer was outnumbered by not only the head guy who had a sword and knew how to use it, but the three thugs she had seen earlier in Kenneworth’s garden before she’d fainted.
She was tempted to pat herself and see if anything untoward had happened to her while she was unconscious, but her hands were currently unavailable so she gave up on that idea.
She did, however, look behind her to see ruffian number four stirring. In fact, he stirred right up to his feet and began to swear.
“Hey,” Peaches squeaked. “Hey.”
She watched as her rescuer turned long enough to plow the hilt of his sword into the face of the guy behind her.
The hilt was, as she had noted earlier, one of those fancy basket types adorned with all kinds of scrollwork and a few gems. One of the gems came off in Thug Number Four’s forehead.
He blinked, then fell backward and landed with a crash. He didn’t move.
Peaches found herself hauled to her feet without ceremony. Her dress made a horrendous rending sound, but she noticed that less than she noticed the fact that she was no longer wearing her shoes. And then she realized something else.
Her rescuer was none other than Stephen de Piaget.
She swayed at that realization, partly because she hadn’t expected to see him where he was and partly because he was displaying swordplay she hadn’t imagined he possessed.
Gone was that rather elegant Mr. Darcy type who knew his way around a library and no doubt had many similar well-dressed academic and nobleman friends.
In his place was a Viking berserker who obviously knew how to use not only a sword, but also his fists and his feet.
If she’d had her hands free, she might have been tempted to put the back of her hand to her brow and indulge in a good, old-fashioned swoon.
And then it occurred to her just what she was seeing: Stephen de Piaget looking a great deal like one of those medieval de Piaget lads she knew. She frowned, but he didn’t notice.
“Hey,” she called.
He was apparently hard of hearing as well.
“Hey, you,” she called, thinking that perhaps he hadn’t realized she was talking to him.
“I’m a little busy right now,” he threw over his shoulder.
“Where did you learn to do all that? I thought you couldn’t do anything with a sword.”
He ignored her a bit more. She actually couldn’t blame him at present because the outnumbering was starting to look a little more serious than it had a few minutes earlier.
Stephen fought the leader of the group, who looked remarkably like a scruffy David Preston, for a moment or two, then punched him full in the face.
Minor Thugs Two and Three were then completely disabled, but in their defense, they had likely never had modern riding boots hit them quite like that under the chin.
She imagined they would awake from their dreamless slumbers to hurry off and tell anyone who would listen about the warlock who had bested them with his magical shoes.
She found Stephen stumbling back into her. More of her skirts pulled away from the bodice as she backed up.
“Are you going to answer my question now?” she asked. He was within earshot. There was no sense in not having a little conversation with him while she could. “You know, the one about why I thought you couldn’t do anything with a sword?”
“Why would you think that?” he asked tightly, fending off the man who just had to be a Kenneworth progenitor.
“Because you weren’t doing a very good job with Montgomery,” she said.
“I lied,” he said with a grunt, sending the first thug off to slumber thanks to a fist under his chin. That left him only the lord of Kenneworth to deal with.
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Why didn’t you admit to what you could do?”
“Because,” he said, dragging his sleeve across his eyes, “my grandmother does not approve of unapproved activities.”
“You have a grandmother?”
The look he shot her over his shoulder left her deciding that perhaps silence was golden.
Well, it did for a bit until her curiosity got the better of her.
It wasn’t all that often that she saw Stephen de Piaget unplugged.
He wasn’t insulting her, she was slightly numb from the cold, and the time seemed to be right for a little light conversation.
“Are you saying your grandmother wouldn’t approve of swordplay?”
“Yes,” he said tightly.
“Where did you learn to do this?”
“From Ian MacLeod.”
“Of course.” She shook her head. “Everyone learns swordplay from Ian MacLeod.”
“And if they don’t, they should.”
“What else doesn’t your grandmother approve of?” she asked. “Things that don’t involve tweed?”
“You know,” he said, backing up and forcing her to back up a bit more, “you could make this easier if you’d stop yammering at me for just one minute.”
“For just one?”
He looked at her in surprise, then he smiled before he turned back to his battle.
Peaches thought she might have to look for somewhere to sit down very soon.
So he’d only smiled at her in a grave and polite way up until that moment.
The smile he had just given her, that small little smile that seemed actually quite friendly, was something else entirely.
She looked behind her, stepped over the man lying there and limped over to a tree.
She had seen ropes worn through by rubbing them against the bark of a tree in movies.
Given that she felt like she was on a set that should have been outlawed as cruel and unusual, she supposed there was no point in not giving a standard cinematic trick a try.
It was more difficult than it looked. That was, she supposed, because she was in a bit of a hurry, hoping that Stephen wouldn’t get himself killed on the end of what looked like a very serviceable sword. His sword, however, looked rather wimpy.
“Is that your sword?” she called.
“Hell, no. And stop—”