Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [161]
The large, sea-green eyes sparkled with angry laughter. ‘But he looked so ridiculous drunk.’
‘And you,’ said Lymond coolly, ‘would look equally ridiculous in your petticoat-tails receiving a thrashing. Do it again, and you’ll get one, from me.’
‘From you?’ Erect, glowing with incredulous fury, Joleta stared at her tormentor. ‘I shall do what I like, when I please. If I wish, I shall teach your spying relatives a lesson. Wait till Graham comes! Thrash me! I’d like to see anyone in this beggarly country lay a finger on Graham Malett’s sister!’
‘Would you?’ said Lymond lazily, and in one hard, purposeful stride was on her. As his right hand closed on her arm, Joleta, eyes blazing, bent. In two movements she had snatched the half-strung lute from its chair, smashed the fine wood into a jagged, needle-sharp club and was swinging it as he reached for her other arm. The chair went over with a crash.
It was a magnificent struggle. Jenny kept a large number of ornaments in her tower solar, and porcelain and silver, alabaster, soap-stone and Venetian glassware beaded the carpet as the battle raged in the tiny room, and the small tables rained about. It took a long time, twisting and dodging and keeping his fingers sunk deep in the one arm, for Lymond to tear from her grip the battering lute, and he had more than one gash and a cheekbone well opened by the lashing gut before he had done.
Joleta, her hair in viperish coils round her neck, one sleeve off, and her feet bare and quick as a goat’s, was marked dusky red like a schoolboy where she had sent furniture flying, and where Lymond’s steely fingers, controlling by grip in lieu of breaking her bones, had discoloured the milky flesh. And all the time, her teeth set, she lunged from side to side, seizing what weapons she could. A pewter ale-mug hammered at his near shoulder and, wrenched away, was replaced by a sliver of glass, which slit both their hands before she dropped it. With windy sobbing, possessed by her fury, there was nothing she would not risk to defeat him, even to laying hands on his sword. For Lymond, that was the end. Holding her hard, he spoke sharply. ‘Joleta. Don’t be stupid. I’ll have to hurt you.’
Her flushed face burned like a star. ‘Try!’ she said, and seized the hilt with both hands. His brows level, Lymond knocked her away with the hard edge of his palm, and as she screamed, kicked her legs from under her. Light as she was, she went down like a gravestone, and drew down with her thick dusty skirts all the remaining shorn stumps of the furnishings.
His sword half out, Lymond looked down at her, breathing quickly as she lay in the Sargasso Sea of their wreckage, all the fight for the moment knocked out of her. ‘By God, I ought to thrash you with this!’ he said tartly in the very second that the door behind him heaved in with a crash and Jerott Blyth fell into the room.
He was quick, was Jerott, and trained to a hairsbreadth. Informed demurely below by Lady Jenny where he could find Lymond, he had heard on approaching the sounds of struggle deadened to the household below by the fourteen-feet thickness of wall. Moving fast with the force of his entry he saw the sword flash in Lymond’s hand as he spoke, and below, white and bruised in the dust, the child Joleta, her gown torn, her feet bloodied and bare. Whiter under his tan than the girl, ‘You nasty, lascivious little rat!’ said Jerott in astonishment, and jumped at Lymond, who knocked him down.
‘Hah!’ said Joleta, and scrambling to her knees began, a little shrilly, to laugh.
Jerott, scarlet now, his magnificent eyes narrowed, lunged again and got the flat of Lymond’s foot on his hand. ‘My God. Bring on the eunuchs. Calm down, will you? One adolescent at a time is quite enough.’
Without listening,