Through a Dark Mist Read Online Free PDF Page A

the cavalcade corralled and surrounded in a matter of seconds, with no real or visible targets yet in evidence.
    “Lay down your weapons!”
    The command was shouted from somewhere high up in the trees and Bayard’s gaze shot upward, rewarded by nothing but swaying branches and splintered sunlight.
    “Bows and swords to the ground or you shall all win the privilege of joining your fallen comrades!”
    The breath hissed through Bayard’s teeth with impotent fury. His keen eyes searched the greenwood but he could see nothing—no pale flash of skin or clothing, no movement in the trees or on the ground. A further lightning-quick glance identified the arrows protruding from the chests of the dead soldiers. Slim and deadly, almost three feet long and tipped in steel, they were capable of piercing bullhide or mail breastplates as if they were cutting through cheese. Moreover, the arrows were shot from the taut strings of the Welsh contraptions known as longbows. In the hands of an expert, an arrow shot from a longbow could outdistance the squatter, thicker quarrels fired from a crossbow by a hundred yards or more. Many a train of merchants had been waylaid and fired upon from such a distance that they could not even distinguish their attackers from the trees.
    As was the case now, Bayard thought angrily. He and his men were like ducks on a pond and, unwilling to fall helplessly to a slaughter, he had no choice but to reluctantly give his men the signal to lower their weapons.
    “Who dares to challenge our right of way?” the captain demanded, his voice a low, seething growl. “Who is this dead man? Let him step forward and show his face!”
    A laugh, full and deep-throated, had the same effect on the tension-filled atmosphere as a sudden crack of thunder.
    Servanne de Briscourt, her hand tightly clasped to Biddy’s and her shoulders firmly encircled by the fierce protectiveness of a matronly arm, was startled enough by the unexpected sound to twist her head around and search out the source of the laughter.
    A man had stepped out from behind the screen of hawthorns and had moved to position himself brazenly in the middle of the road. His long legs, clad in skintight deer-hide leggings, were braced wide apart; his massive torso, made more impressive by a jerkin of gleaming black wolf pelts, expanded farther as he insolently planted one hand on his waist and the other on the curved support of the longbow he held casually by his side.
    Standing well over six feet tall, his body was a superb tower of muscle that commanded the eye upward to the coldest, cruelest pair of eyes Servanne had ever seen. Pale blue-gray, they were, twin mirrors of ice and frost, steel and iron. Piercing eyes. Eyes that held more secrets than a soul should want to know, or, if knowing, would live to tell. They were strange eyes for so dark a man—hair, clothing, and weathered complexion all combined to make it so—and it was with the greatest difficulty that Servanne relented to the tugging pressure of Biddy’s hands and turned her face away, burying it against the muffling shield of ponderously soft bosoms.
    “I bid you welcome to my forest, Bayard of Northumbria.” The villain laughed softly again. “Had I known in advance it was you daring to venture across my land, I should have arranged a much warmer welcome.”
    The knight’s eyes narrowed to slits behind the steel nasal of his helm. How, by the Devil’s work, did this outlaw know his identity? And what did he mean by his forest, his land? Most tracts of forest, most measures of land that comprised the vast demesne of Lincolnwoods had been part of the Wardieu holdings since their ancestors had crossed from Normandy with William the Bastard.
    An invisible hand clawed sharply down the length of Bayard’s spine, all but tearing the breath from his body.
    By God’s holy ordinance … it couldn’t be! No! No, it couldn’t be! The man was dead … dead on the hot desert sands of Palestine!