The Scot's Oath

by Heather Grothaus

  Padraig turned his head to regard a short, round man with thin, mousy brown hair. He was considerably older than Padraig and was dressed in the fashion of a wealthy lord.

  “Edwin Hood,” the man supplied as an afterthought. “Of Steadport Hall. Your first hunt?”

  “The first one so formal. Padraig Boyd,” Padraig responded. “Of Caedmaray.”

  “I know who you are. Oh, don’t worry,” the man advised a second time, apparently recognizing Padraig’s guarded expression. “I’m not of the same camp as Paget. I simply wished to introduce myself as Hargrave hasn’t seen fit to.” He raised his voice conspicuously. “I couldn’t very well wait around in hopes of Montague doing the propers, now could I?”

  Lucan approached, a steaming mug in each hand, his typically solemn expression lightening as he regarded the rotund gentleman to Padraig’s side.

  “Lord Hood, it’s been too long.” Lucan handed a mug to Padraig.

  “I say it has,” Lord Hood replied. “It seems you have taken on quite the project in Master Boyd, Montague. I’m rather surprised at this alliance, I must confess.”

  “Little to be surprised for, my lord. Nothing more than my duty to the king.”

  Padraig sipped the mulled cider and looked between the two men, his instinct tingling at the undercurrent of information flowing somehow just beyond his comprehension. “The pair of you are long acquainted.”

  “Oh, aye.” Lord Hood laughed. “The pride of English chivalry was yet a babe in swaddling clothes when first I knew him. The old Lord Montague and I were neighbors. How fares your sister, Lucan? Still cloistered away, I assume.”

  Padraig felt his brows raise and he turned his face toward the dark-haired knight, pinning him with an exaggeratedly curious expression.

  “It’s the best place for her,” Lucan allowed, not meeting Padraig’s eyes.

  “Yes, yes. I do concur. With your blessed mother and father gone, it would not do to have you overseeing her care. She likely would have been educated to dust by now, her beauty wasted. Perhaps one day you’ll find that it better suits you both to have her married.”

  “Perhaps,” Lucan said.

  “Well then, fellows,” Lord Hood said, and although his words were lightly spoken, Padraig had the idea that Lord Hood sensed Lucan’s discomfort with the topic of conversation. “I must be off to find my poor mount. If you’ve no objection, I’d ride alongside your party today. There is little chance of me taking any prize save a fine breeze, but it does an old man good to be associated with the victors of the day, and I’m willing to wager the pair of you have more cause than most to champion. At any rate, you’ll be more interesting. I’ll find you.” Lord Hood waddled off in the direction of the marshal and the temporary corral, waving to this person and that as he went.

  Padraig continued to stare at Lucan as he raised the cup to his lips. “What?” the knight said irritably and then sipped.

  “You didna tell me you grew up near Darlyrede,” Padraig accused.

  “Didn’t I?”

  “Or that you had a sister.”

  Lucan shrugged. “It was not relevant.”

  “Did you know my father?”

  “No.” Lucan sighed as if put-out. “My parents did.”

  “Jesus, Lucan! That’s nae relevant? Where did you live?”

  “Castle Dare.”

  “And? Where’s that?” Padraig demanded. He’d never known the loquacious man to be so short of speech. “How far from Darlyrede?”

  Lucan was silent for a long pair of moments, then he gestured with his mug toward a far-off field in the distance, across the river, where the white dots of sheep could be seen like dandelion fluff.

  “That outcrop of rock,” Lucan said, “is where the hold stood. It was destroyed by fire, many years ago.”

  Padraig felt the earth move a little beneath his boots—Lucan Montague’s family lands had been within sight of Darlyrede House. “And now Hargrave’s sheep graze there.” He spoke the revelation aloud, but it was more to himself than to Lucan.

  Lucan nodded solemnly.

  “If your father was the lord, that land belongs to you.”

  “I suppose it still does, yes. But something you will perhaps have opportunity to learn, Master Boyd, is that although one might be of noble birth, one cannot retain a holding with no keep, nor sufficient coin to build one.”

  Padraig narrowed his eyes. “Hargrave retains control of your family lands and yet you raze all of Scotland to persecute my father? To kidnap him away from his home to deliver him to London to be hanged?”

  “I did not kidnap him. He came willingly.” Lucan turned his head to look directly at Padraig. “The crimes I told you he was accused of—one of them was setting the blaze that killed my parents and destroyed Castle Dare. On the night Euphemia Hargrave disappeared.”

  Padraig felt as though he’d been kicked in the gut. “You think my father—you think Tommy Boyd is capable of that? You think he murdered your family? This isna about your duty to your king at all, is it?” he accused. “All yer pretty speeches about justice—it’s all shite. This is personal. Why’d ye really bring me here?”

  “Padraig—”

  “Doona ‘Padraig’ me. I’m nae some simple Scot ye can hold up before ye while ye work yer own plan for revenge—whether ’tis again me da or Hargrave. I came here in good faith.”

  “And I have every intention of aiding you, as I said I would,” Lucan insisted, lowering his voice in answer to Padraig’s raised one.

  “By settin’ me in the midst of a plot to kill me?” Padraig demanded, unable to order his thoughts now that they’d been thrown into chaos by this new information. “I’m supposed to blindly trust you, and yet you doona tell me that you have a grudge against my own father?”

  “I’ll tell you whatever it is you feel you must know,” Lucan said, turning his back to the crowd of nobility who grew increasingly interested in the altercation. “Just not here.”

  Padraig stared at the man. Until that morning, he would have considered the knight his friend. But now he was seeing Lucan Montague in a different light.

  His attention was taken from Lucan, however, by the approach of a rider—a woman sitting sidesaddle, her skirts spread over the rump of the horse like a princess.

  Beryl. Beryl in a crimson-colored gown and a black cape.

  She reined her mount to a halt near them, a fine palfrey, and her presence upon it cast a regal halo about the pair. The mare tossed her gray head and blew out her nose as if in disapproval of Padraig.

  Did every living thing in Northumberland think him unworthy?

  “Beryl,” Lucan said. “Good day.”

  “Good day, gentlemen,” she said stiffly, but her gaze did not quite meet Padraig’s.

  “I must retrieve Agrios,” Lucan said, and then left them.

  Padraig could feel frustration flaring up in him like coals before a bellows, but he was prevented from saying anything further by a trumpet sounding near Hargrave. The hunt master was making an announcement, but Padraig couldn’t concentrate on what the man was saying.

  A page approached with a courser for Padraig. He took the reins and hoisted himself in the saddle. Once he was seated, Beryl walked her horse to stand next to his.

  “Give the hounds a good lead,” she said benignly, as if they were picking up an earlier conversation. “They’ll need to tire out the game before anyone gets a chance at—”

  “Where were you last night?” Padraig interrupted. “You told me you’d return to my chambers. But only an hour later, you were naewhere to be found in yours. Neither at midnight.”

  Beryl met his eyes at last. “I beg your pardon?”

  “What is it with you and Montague? I trap either of you with an uncomfortable question and you drape courtesy before you like a shield,” Padraig accused, trying not to
feel too triumphant at her obvious unease.

  “I was pressed into service by Lady Hargrave. I told you she—”

  “Horse shite,” Padraig interjected. “Caris was still in the hall with the other guests. I know—I looked.”

  “Well, I couldn’t very well push in on you and your guest, now could I?” she shot back.

  Padraig frowned. “Guest? You mean Searrach?”

  “Is a nude woman in your rooms so frequent an encounter for you that you’ve already forgotten which woman it was?”

  Padraig felt his neck heat. “Ye’ve nae fashed to push in to me chamber with yer prissy lessons any other time.”

  “What’s happened to your speech?”

  “My speech is bloody fine.”

  The trumpet sounded again, and the hounds were released with a cacophony of baying mixed in with the shouts of the hunters.

  Beryl’s expression was no longer placid and cool as she tossed him a glare and turned her horse away from Padraig and into the trotting flow of riders.

  “Hah,” Padraig shouted, kicking his mount forward after her.

  The river of hunters flowed over the hill in a torrent, curving and winding up the next rise in unison, swirling to either side of an outcropping of rock as the tide recedes into the ocean. Her shining loops of hair bounced on the glistening cloak, the sunlight sparking copper and gold from its shining depths as Padraig followed her. Beryl made the awkward seat look graceful and effortless as she urged her small palfrey to pace just beyond Padraig’s larger mount.

  Padraig leaned forward to gain on her through the next valley, as was at her side as the hunt circled the wood and then reined to a halt, milling impatiently at the edge of the dark, cold forest.

  “I sent her away,” Padraig said to Beryl, who was again refusing to look at him.

  “Who you choose to entertain is none of my concern, Master Boyd.”

  “Jesus, Beryl. Lucan and yerself could be related, the way you both try to turn the point o’ the sword to suit ye.”

  Her head whipped around now, and her eyes were full of outrage. “I’m not trying to turn the point of anything, and I resent your tone, Master Boyd.”

  “Are you sleeping with him? Is that why neither of you can speak the whole of the truth of anything?” She continued to stare at him, increasing Padraig’s sense of overstep. But he would not back down now. “You can tell me. It’s nae as if the two of us are married. I doona care who you sleep with.”

  A trumpet blared from the blackness of the wood and was answered with a matching tone from a horn in the party. The group sprang into the trees, heading south. Beryl kicked her mount forward without comment, disappearing into the shadows.

  Padraig followed.

  They swerved between trees deeper into the wood, the echoing barks from the dogs rebounding off the trunks and confusing the direction. The group began to splinter as smaller parties decided their strategy, and Padraig heard a faint yelping from his right.

  He pulled his mount to the southwest. Hearing the answering hoof falls behind him, he glanced over his shoulder to see that Beryl and Lucan followed, along with Lord Hood and another pair of riders, one of whom Padraig was surprised to recognize as the obnoxious Lord Paget.

  The faint sounds of barks seemed to be coming from ahead, and so Padraig leaned forward once more, eager to be proven right. He wanted this success, in front of Beryl, in front of Lord Paget and the others. He wanted to be the one to bring back the kill, proving to everyone that this land, this wood, these animals, were his, a part of him and in his blood, no matter that there were so many who were determined that he should fail.

  Mayhap he wished to prove it to himself most of all.

  Over the next crest into an even darker hollow their party flowed, along a tiny ribbon of a stream into a small clearing.

  A strangled shout from behind him prompted him to glance back again, just in time to see Adolphus Paget sailing from the back of his horse. Lord Hood gave a cry of dismay, and the party drew up on their reins.

  Padraig too slowed his mount with a curse. Leave it to one of the nobles to lose his seat. If the man cost Padraig this hunt—

  A piercing heat burst forth in his shoulder, and Padraig swayed in the saddle with a cry. He struggled with the jerking reins of his startled horse to feel his arm, his palm coming away red.

  “What the bloody—?”

  “Padraig!” Beryl shouted.

  Another slicing pain lit across his ribs on his left side, and Padraig saw the offending arrow hit solidly in the tree ahead of him.

  “Get down!” he shouted, sliding from his saddle and staggering out of danger of the stomping hooves. He slapped the courser’s rear and sent it galloping into the wood and then pressed his hand to his side while he crouched low and ran toward Beryl, who had disengaged from her saddle and was sliding down from her horse. He caught her beneath her arms, gritting against the pain in his shoulder and ribs, and then grabbed her hand, pulling her down onto the dry leaves at the base of a wide oak.

  Padraig saw Montague herding Lord Hood to safety behind another tree, but the other rider wheeled his horse and galloped hard to the east, and Adolphus Paget still lay in the open on the forest floor some distance away. The space between the trees was filled with only the rapidly dwindling rumbles of the escaping, panicked horses, and Paget’s anguished groans. The birds had fallen silent.

  “They’re shooting at us!” Beryl cried in a horrified voice. “They must think us game—we have to tell them it is us! Padraig, you’re bleeding!”

  “Shh,” he warned her, and then continued in a whisper. “’Tis nae accident, lass.” He met Lucan’s eyes and then nodded toward Paget. The knight answered with an understanding nod of his own.

  “Stay here,” Padraig said in a low voice. “Doona move. And keep quiet.”

  “Where are you—Padraig!” Beryl hissed, her clutching hands falling away as Padraig rose in a crouch and began running toward Paget. He and Lucan both stooped low on the cold ground near the nobleman’s fine boots.

  “Oh, God,” Paget sobbed. An arrow protruded from his rounded belly, so at odds with his spindly frame. It resembled a banner staked upon a hilltop. “Oh, God.”

  “Grab his foot,” Padraig said to Lucan as he took hold of the boot nearest him. “Pull!”

  Padraig and Lucan began dragging Adolphus Paget toward the nearest tree when two swift thunks to either side of them caused them to stop. An identical pair of arrows quivered in close proximity of Lord Paget’s narrow form.

  “Stay right where you are,” a man’s voice warned from the shadows just out of Padraig’s sight. The crunching of many footfalls could be heard advancing toward them, and suddenly it seemed as though the forest itself had come alive as shapes emerged from the gloomy shadows to ring the small clearing.

  They were dressed in the colors of the bark, the dead leaves; the myriad shades of stone and earthen bank that rimmed the clearing, disguising them as well as any game Padraig had set out to chase. There must have been at least a score of them, all bearing bows with arrows knocked. Some wore leather hoods, concealing the entirety of their features save their eyes.

  “Bloody bandits,” Padraig heard Lord Hood growl behind him.

  “Back away from his lordship,” the voice said again, and this time Padraig could see that it came from a tall man who continued stepping forward. No hood concealed his red hair and beard, but the face of his slighter companion was fully masked. “Slowly,” he added. “Any sudden movements and I’ll be pleased to put one in the both of you. That’s far enough,” he advised.

  Padraig and Lucan stood with their palms raised, halfway between the groaning Lord Paget and the trees where Beryl and Lord Hood crouched.

  “What do you want from us?” Padraig demanded. “This is an allowed hunt on Darlyrede land.”

  “I kno
w very well what you’re about, mate,” the man said with a chuckle. He carefully released the tension from his bowstring and laid the weapon on the ground as he knelt at Lord Paget’s side and reached for the man’s tooled leather purse. “Tsk-tsk. My, but that looks painful.” He cut the straps holding the purse with a knife Padraig hadn’t even seen emerge and opened the pouch as he rose.

  He held it toward the smaller, masked villain. “Perhaps fifty,” he said. “Not enough for what we’ve likely stirred up.”

  “It’s more than enough,” his companion rasped.

  “You must release us,” Beryl said from behind, and Padraig turned his head slightly to look at her. He hoped she could read the expression on his face. “Should he not receive attention immediately, he’ll die. I demand you let us go.”

  The bandits paid her no heed at all, the masked thief gesturing to those remaining in the circle with a wave of the dangerous end of the bow.

  A short, plump man with straight, dark hair worn in the old style cut around his forehead slung his bow over his shoulder and stepped from the perimeter. He opened the flap of the leather satchel he wore across his considerable girth, his long robe flapping with each step of his approach. His face appeared jolly and flushed as he drew near Padraig, not at all like the countenance of a bloodthirsty brigand.

  “Good day, fine sir,” the man said, beaming up at Padraig. He held the open satchel toward him. “Alms for the poor?”

  Padraig frowned down at the strange man. It appeared as though he had shaved off his eyebrows.

  “We’re building a children’s home,” he confided with a wink and a proud grin.

  “You are not!” Lord Hood shouted in disgust.

  The man turned an offended expression toward Edwin Hood. “I say we are!”

  “Thieves, the lot of you,” the nobleman rejoined.

  The robber looked back at Padraig and shook the bag for emphasis. “It’s to have a cockhorse. I built it myself.” He waggled the skin where his eyebrows should have been. “Real horse hair.”