Patricia Ryan - [Fairfax Family 01] by Falcons Fire Page B

know almost nothing about you. Only that Rainulf calls you his half-sister, and that you panic when questioned about your family. ‘Twas I who recommended you to the baron as a suitable bride for his son. Your betrothal will be finalized tomorrow. Do you blame me for trying to find out before then whether I’ve misled him somehow?”
    He had been laying a trap for her. Prying into her secrets under the guise of pleasant conversation. Why, if he intended to unearth the truth about her, had he saved her last night from Estrude’s nosy interrogation? The answer came to her in his own words. It was he who had recommended her as a suitable bride for Edmond, presumably for his own advancement. It would serve him ill for her to be found out by everyone before he had the chance to do so himself. He could then, of course, decide whether to expose her or keep her secret, and he would undoubtedly do whatever best served his purposes.
    Suddenly she mistrusted him intensely. If she was not as she seemed, neither was he.
    Walking toward the door, she said, “Rainulf thinks you’ve arranged my marriage out of friendship. I told him it was out of ambition, but he doesn’t believe me. He likes to think that everyone is as good as he is.”
    “I don’t deny or apologize for my ambition. I’ll do whatever it takes to rise above the circumstances of my birth. If I should someday have children, I don’t ever want them to suffer the cruelties of poverty that your kind thinks nothing of imposing on mine. Your marriage does serve my ambition, but it also serves my friendship with your brother, which means more to me than you’ll ever know.”
    “‘Tis a very touching speech,” Martine said, standing in the doorway. “You’ve obviously given a great deal of thought to how my marriage serves your purposes. I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you to consider whether it serves mine.”
    She slammed the door and walked back to the keep.
    *   *   *
    Sausage pie and peas with bacon water constituted the midday meal. Lord Godfrey, Sir Thorne, and Albin were absent from the table. They were flying the falcons, and had taken their dinner with them to eat as they hunted. Lady Geneva, Ailith’s mother, chose not to dine with them, either, but no one offered an explanation for this.
    Martine passed the afternoon exploring the lower levels of the keep with Ailith.
    The first floor was the guardroom, nearly as large as the great hall, but with arrow slits instead of windows, and no place for a fire. There had been no attempt to make this room comfortable or attractive. The wooden floor was bare of rushes, and the walls displayed not hunting trophies, but a dizzying array of weaponry: gleaming broadswords and axes on one wall, and on another, rows of slender spears, javelins, and lances. There were dozens of graceful longbows and even a few of the outlawed crossbows, as well as thousands of arrows and bolts bound into bundles like kindling. To Martine’s way of thinking, the most menacing objects there were the brutally simple maces and throwing clubs, whose destructive power depended on mass and weight rather than finesse.
    She and Ailith descended with a brass lantern to the cellar, a cold, fetid cavern with walls of weeping rock and a floor of beaten earth, in the middle of which had been dug a well. Piled up around the perimeter were pyramids of barrels and stacks of crates.
    Ailith looked around excitedly. “Auntie Felda says there’s a secret passageway down here! If I’m good, she’ll show me where it is someday!” She ran to a barred iron door streaked with rust. “This is where the bad people stay. If I can’t stop bothering Mama, she’s going to have me locked in here.”
    Martine followed her to the door and jimmied aside the plate covering the little peephole, which stuck halfway.
    “Lift me so I can look!” Ailith begged. Martine held her up, and they pressed their heads together to peer into the dark compartment.