The Dark Knight

She shook her head. “My heart,” she replied, tapping her breast. Then she took her special deck of tarocchi cards from a burgundy velvet bag. Though the thick vellum cards were very old, their gilding still gleamed in the lantern’s light. She shuffled her deck, then laid down the cards in a horseshoe pattern, while she sang to herself under her breath.

Sitting opposite her, Sandor waited patiently, despite his need for haste. Time with Towla was never wasted. When she had placed the spread of cards to her satisfaction, she studied them with deep concentration, adding lines to those the passing years had already etched on her face. The fire hissed in the charcoal brazier.

His grandmother pointed to the first card. “Here you are,” she said with fondness.

Sandor snorted. “Prosto, the Fool? Aye, for I go on a fool’s errand.”

Towla shook her head. “Nay, your journey will be a most important one for you.” Then she pointed to the second card. Two Lovers joined hands under a golden canopy.

Sandor only shook his head with a rueful grin. He was going north to kill, not to fall in love. However, he said nothing lest he insult his grandmother and her tarocchi.

Towla tapped the center card. Sandor sucked in his breath when he saw it was the grim figure of Death.

His grandmother chortled. “It is the card of great change. Does that frighten you, Sandor?”

He fidgeted. “Nothing frightens me except the devil.”

His grandmother only broadened her smile. “You are wise to be wary of change, my son, and yet, do not hide from it.”

He cleared his throat. “What do you see?”

“You will help others who would never help you,” she began.

He snorted. “That describes every gadjo I have ever trained a horse for.”

“You were born lucky in many things, but not in all,” she continued.

Sandor nodded. His parents had died in an outbreak of the sweating sickness when he was a child, yet he had survived unscathed. He had a gift for training horses, almost as if he knew their thoughts, yet now he was commanded to take up his uncle’s employment and become a killer. How was that lucky?

Towla touched the Hermit, the fourth card of the spread. “Your journey will be one inside of you as well as on the road. Use this time wisely to read your soul.”

“And the change that you speak of?” he asked, pointing to the card bearing the black figure holding a scythe.

“Ah!” Towla’s eyes twinkled in the firelight. She pointed to the Lovers. “You will have a friend who is an enemy. You will find life holding hands with death. And—” she tapped the Fool “—you will make a decision that will alter your path forever—if you dare to risk it.”

“Is the risk worth the effort?” he asked, discomforted by her predictions.

She swept up the cards into a neat pile before he had a chance to look at the fifth card in the spread—the one that foretold the outcome. “That is your decision to make, not mine,” she replied. “Come closer and let me kiss you, Sandor, for we never know when we kiss for the last time.”

“Grandmother, your talk is none too cheerful,” he said as he kissed her.

“Then smile for me,” she commanded. “Ah, your smile would beguile the very angels from their clouds.” She kissed him on each cheek. “Baxtalo drom! May your road be lucky.”

“And may I soon return to you,” he whispered. He started to rise, but she put her hand on his sleeve.

“Where does Gheorghe send you?”

He sighed. “To the mountains north of here, to a place called Hawksnest. It is a castle, I think.”

Towla considered his destination. “Sounds cold. Wrap up warmly. Take extra food—and a sheepskin. Methinks you will need them anon, for your journey will be longer than you expect. Whom do you execute for the boy King’s pleasure?”

Sandor cleared his throat. “It is a noblewoman, though why, I do not know.”

A tiny smile curled his grandmother’s lips. “And her name?”

“Lady Gastonia Cavendish.”

Chapter One

Hawksnest Castle in the Pennine Mountains

Tonia Cavendish huddled as close to the dying embers of her cell’s meager fire as she dared. The feeble heat barely warmed her fingers numbed by the icy wind whistling through the tiny arrow slit high in one wall, her only source of daylight. At home in Northumberland, her father would be overseeing the spring planting on the family’s estate. Did Sir Guy Cavendish have any inkling that his eldest daughter was not safely in the little house of prayer she had established near the Scottish border? Instead, Tonia shivered inside a dark prison, high in the mountains that ran like a bony spine down England’s length.

Was it a week ago that she had been brought to this ruined ancient fortress, or ten days? Time seemed to have stood still since the moment she and her band of pious young women had been torn from their prayers, taken by night to York, and tried for the crime of treason against the crown. Tonia would have considered the charges to be ludicrous except for the fact that her stern judges had sentenced her to death.

She had been given no chance to defend herself, or to call upon her family for aid. Within the hour of her sentencing, she had been driven through the streets of York, bound and gagged inside a dark coach. After a day and night of nonstop travel, she found herself here at the end of the earth. Her four guards, rough, swearing men, told her nothing, and they begrudged her the crusts of bread and sticks for her fire. If she was to die, why didn’t they just leave her to starve or freeze to death and be done with it? They said she must wait. So she spent her days and most of her nights in prayer—waiting and shivering.

At the end of the hall, beyond the stone-cold room that was her cell, the men kept a cheerful fire going in the guardroom. Tonia could smell the oak and hickory smoke and see the light of the high flames dance on the wall opposite the barred window in her door. Other savory smells taunted her: meat roasting on the spit and hot chestnuts popping on the hearth just out of sight of her little icy hell.

Tonia tried to forgive her captors as she knew she should, but sometimes the hunger that gnawed her empty stomach sent all her good Christian thoughts flying like the snowflakes that occasionally fluttered through her pathetic window. Huddling deeper in the woolen cloak that the guards had allowed her to keep, she prayed to her patron, Saint Michael, for deliverance.

Tonia shook herself awake; she had dozed off frequently during the past few days. She feared that if she slept, she would freeze to death. Outside, the pewter-gray sky had changed to a darker hue. Then she noticed that the voices in the guardroom spoke in louder and more animated tones. Flexing her aching joints, Tonia rose from her hearthside pallet and crept to the door. Pressing her cheek against the rough wood, she peered through the bars but could see nothing except the stone wall opposite, the turn of the corridor and dim shadows beyond. The voices told her that two, possibly three of her guards were conversing with someone new.

The stranger’s voice, deeper than the others and lower in tone, spoke with a foreign accent, though Tonia could not make out the words he said to the men. A sudden trembling overtook her. She remembered the story she had heard as a child that the late King Henry VIII had sent to France for a special headsman when he had executed his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Had Tonia’s own headsman finally arrived? She pressed her chapped knuckles against her lips to keep her fear from crying out. She would not give those louts at the end of the hall the pleasure of witnessing her distress.

The conversation ceased abruptly with a clatter and several bawdy jests. Then Tonia heard their footsteps recede. The silence that followed frightened her far more than the lewd suggestions and taunts her captors had thrown at her during her captivity. The suffocating stillness engulfed her. Her ears tingled with the strain to hear something—anything. The light of the guards’ fire that mocked her chilled body slowly burned down, leaving the end of the hall in near-darkness for the first time since her arrival.

While there was still a lone spark in her own hearth, Tonia picked her way across the uneven flag-stone floor to her pallet. “Good Saint Michael,” she prayed aloud, not caring if any unfriendly mortal also heard her, “send me your strength for I am very weak and sore afraid.”

The last ember winked out in a thin plume of curling smoke. Tonia pulled her cloak tighter around her. A new thought knifed through her. Suppose the guards had abandoned her! They may have received word to return from whence they came, and to leave Tonia to her fate in the bowels of this isolated mountain fastness. She choked back a sob. She must be strong to the end—and a bitter cold end it was likely to be.

It gave her little comfort to think that she would die a martyr for daring to open a Catholic nunnery within the boundaries of her Protestant homeland, currently racked with religious dissension in the name of the sickly young King Edward VI. Her father had warned her of her folly, but Tonia thought that by living so far from London, she and her followers would be safe from the stern laws against popery. And what of the others who had been arrested with Tonia? Had Lucy, Agatha, Margaret and little Nan suffered the same fate as she? Were their deaths on her soul? “Pray forgive me, sisters,” she whispered into the darkness.

A noise awoke Tonia with a start. Angry with herself for falling to sleep again in the middle of her prayers, she blamed the lack of food for making her light-headed. Again she heard the noise that had disturbed her slumber. Someone had returned to the guards’ room. She was not alone! A sudden gladness overwhelmed her before her common sense prevailed. Whomever was bustling around out there had not come to free her, or he would have done so immediately. This unseen person was either a new jailer, perhaps one skilled in torture—or her executioner.

Through the barred window she saw a light move toward her. Her stomach growled with a bleak anticipation of food. A man’s heavy tread echoed down the narrow corridor; his armament jingled as he walked. Then a dark form blotted out the light on the other side of the door.

Her heart nearly jumping out of her breast in fear, Tonia pulled herself erect. She would face this stranger on her feet rather than huddling on her knees. After all, she was a Cavendish, one of England’s greatest families. She would not dishonor the Cavendish’s sterling reputation for bravery—no matter what the next few moments might bring.

A key rattled in the door’s lock. Tonia’s teeth chattered. Clenching her jaw, she squared her shoulders. She would be bold, like the great wolf that was the Cavendish family emblem. Squealing in protest, the door swung open on its rusty hinges.

Tonia sucked in her breath.

The man in the doorway appeared huge. His dark cape covered his broad shoulders, making him look as if he had just furled two large black wings. He had to duck his head to enter her cell. When he lifted his lantern higher, a small cry welled up inside Tonia. The man wore a black hood over half his face—an executioner’s mask.

Even though her knees shook with terror and weakness from hunger, Tonia dropped a small curtsy before her fate.

“Good evening, my Lord of Death,” she said in a steady voice. “I have been expecting you.”