The door shuddered.
The flames cast down burned, smoked, and went out. The oil dripped off the curve of the shield.
The ram thundered against the door.
“Hold! For God’s sake, we will surrender!”
Arryn lifted his visor and looked up. The same fellow who had sworn to burn with them all in hell was the one offering the surrender.
“You protect Lord Darrow’s lady, sir. You would give up so easily?” he queried mockingly.
“You’ve granted mercy to the soldiers in the bailey. I am Tyler Miller, captain of the guard, and I’ve heard, Sir Arryn, that you keep your word. Swear mercy to us and I will open the gates; thus you will have taken a castle you can still defend.”
“Aye, I swear mercy. But I ask again, what of your lady?”
“It is her command that I surrender,” he said, his voice suddenly tremulous. “She, too, must cast herself upon your mercy. We are too few, we have no more oil, no arrows, and we are poorly armed. And …”
He hesitated, looking down. “Sir Arryn, we’ve heard of the fate befallen so many of your people. We humbly beg pardon, and swear we were not among those who attacked your holdings. God help us, we were not. These are Lowlands here, and aye, we’ve English in our blood, but many of us are Scotsmen as well, sworn allegiance to the old lord here, the lady’s good father. Aye, he was an Englishman, but … we’re not all vicious dogs, sir.”
“Open the gates then,” Arryn commanded.
“Your word?”
“I’ve given my word.”
The great gates to the main tower of the fortress creaked open. Arryn nudged his horse forward, only to realize that Jay had ridden behind him. “Take care—it could be a trap.”
“I must lead the way in,” Arryn murmured.
He spurred the bay lightly; the horse pranced prettily and swiftly, making its way across the threshold and into the stone entry. Arryn held his sword at the ready—it still dripped the blood of Englishmen—but the threat was not necessary. The soldiers from the inner courtyard had laid down their weapons. There were only five of them. One stepped forward, helmet in his hand, offering his sword to Arryn. Arryn dismounted from the bay and accepted the sword. Jay came behind him, along with Nathan Fitzhugh and Patrick MacCullough. The other guards turned over their weapons in total surrender.
“Where is the Lady Kyra?” Arryn asked, careful to continue speaking his native Gaelic.
Tyler hesitated, wincing. “In the chapel.”
Arryn dismounted and started to walk past him.
“Sir!” Tyler called.
Arryn paused, looking back.
“You swore mercy.”
“To you, I swore mercy.”
“But—”
“Get these five outside, to the wall with the others,” Arryn commanded Jay.
“Aye, Arryn,” Jay agreed, watching as Arryn strode toward the wielding stairs. “Arryn, there might still be danger.”
“This danger, Jay, I’1l face alone. Secure the fortress.” Arryn continued on up the stairs to the chapel, anxious, his blood racing and burning in a turmoil.
He reached the top of the stairs, and through a short hallway, came to the chapel.
And there, before the main altar, a woman kneeled.
Her head was bowed; she was deep in prayer. But she heard him. He saw her back stiffen. It was a broad back.
“Lady Kyra!”
Slowly she rose. Even more slowly, she turned to him.
She wasn’t repulsive. That would be far too strong.
She was simply … serviceable.
She reminded him of a good draft horse. She was as broad at the shoulders as she was at the back. Her cheekbones were broad. Her jaw was broad. She was …
Broad. Aye, yes, broad.
The fever of fury that had brought him here seemed to momentarily still. His blood seemed to run like ice. No, she was not repulsive. She was as appealing as a solid cow.
Cruel, he told himself. She had her good points. Her eyes were powder blue; her hair was white-blond. Her little lips were quivering away. She didn’t look like the cunning woman who might have made demands upon a man like Lord Darrow, forcing him to heinous and cruel excesses in his bid to gain greater riches beneath King Edward.
No, she did not look the type….
He had come for revenge. She had been party to brutality and tragedy; nothing in life came without a price. She belonged to Darrow—she and her estates. He meant to see that she and her property did not become important additions to Lord Kinsey Darrow’s quest for ever greater power, a power that allowed him to torture and murder the Scots at will.
He removed his helmet and neck defenses, setting them down on a pew.
“So …” he stated, sword sheathed, hands behind his back as he walked toward her. “You are Lady Kyra.”
She was silent, not understanding his Gaelic, he thought.
Approaching her, he felt all the more ill. Seize Darrow’s woman, use her, hurt her, cut into Darrow’s flesh and soul the way that she and Darrow had cut into his….
Could he ever have carried it all through? He had killed often enough in battle. Yet, murder—and the murder of a woman, even if she were guilty of complicity in the most heinous of crimes against humanity—seemed beyond his capabilities.
This would be like slaughtering a shaggy-haired steer.
“No one left to guard you,” he mused, shaking his head. He stared at her flat, expressionless, bovine face again. “Oh, I am sorry, but … ’tis no great wonder! Nevertheless, you’ll have to come with me.”
He started to reach for her. Just as he did so he saw a flying shape—like a shadow of darkness—coming toward him. He spun around just in time to ward off a blow as a figure in a dark cloak came toward him, a knife raised high.
“Ah, a defender at last!” he cried out.
Swift movement had allowed him to ward off the first strike, but the cloaked defender was swiftly at him again, spinning around with supple grace and speed to try to stab a knife into his throat, but again he deflected the blow, seizing the man by the back of the cloak, throwing him forward with impetus to allow himself time to draw his sword once again.
He tried to make out the fellow’s face, but beneath the hood the man wore a faceplate with a helm of mail.
“Surrender yourself!” Arryn commanded, lifting his blade.
The cloaked figure turned.
And from beneath the encompassing garment, he drew his own sword. This defender was well armed, and had no intention of surrendering.
Fine, Arryn thought. To the death let it be.
He advanced, ready for the battle, fury and fire filling his veins once again. He dared not think often of what had happened, horrible things beyond the subjugation of a country, a people. Crimes of man against man, crimes he could not believe that God could sit in heaven and allow.
Crimes that haunted him, day and night, that filled his dreams with the screams of the dying …
Alesandra!
Nay, he would win here. His enemy would surrender, or perish.
With vicious, furious movements, he strode forward, his sword battering every thrust and swing of his opponent’s weapon.
But the fellow was brave. He flew atop a pew, fought from the rim of the altar itself. All the while, the Lady Kyra babbled and blubbered, crying out strange warnings, gasps, screams of panic.
He ignored her.
This was a fight he could fight.
His enemy leapt from the altar to a pew, swinging his sword deftly. Arryn ducked the blow with a split second to spare, as the fellow was giving rise to leap around again with a solid, bone-shattering swing of his sword; once again, Arryn spun to give his weapon impetus.
A smaller man, lean, trim, agile.
But this was a fighter.
Still, strength would win out in the end, Arryn had determined. Strength, and his will to see everything that was Kinsey Darrow’s destroyed.
Step after
step, Arryn battered his enemy with a rain of blows that sent the fellow falling backward again, again—step by step his enemy parried his blows. But he knew his own strength and his fury. His opponent was skilled, but he knew that he was beating the power from the fellow’s arms with every blow. Eventually, as he moved without faltering, he had his enemy against the wall.
His enemy’s sword fell to his side.
“So you do surrender!” Arryn whispered huskily, advancing.
The fellow swiftly lifted his blade, nearly slicing Arryn’s chin. Arryn ducked backward in the nick of time.
Surrender, no …
The fellow sped past him, tearing toward the entry.
Toward escape.
“Nay, my good fellow, nay, I think not!” Arryn cried, and leaping forward, he caught hold of the cloak, giving such a tug upon it that the fellow, a light man, was spun furiously in a circle. As he turned, Arryn stepped forward, tripping him so that the man’s spin finished in a heavy sprawl upon the cold stone floor of the chapel. Oddly enough, they were directly beneath a beautifully carved statue of the Virgin Mary.
“Now do you surrender?”
The cloaked figure shook its head.
The fellow had protected his face and head, but wore no body armor. Arryn raised his sword in a certain threat, lightly placing the tip just above his opponent’s heart.
“Now, my good fellow, speak quickly, for though you’ve been an able combatant, my patience is at a low ebb. Dark deeds have brought me here, and vengeance will be found with the blood of some poor beings!”
“Bastard Scotsman, do it!” the fellow said in a hiss.
Startled, Arryn moved his weapon. “Ah … a sword through the heart would be preferable to a hangman’s noose? Or disembowelment. Castration … a few of the tortures Darrow so enjoys inflicting upon his captured enemies.”
“Do it!”
“No!”
The shriek came from Lady Kyra. Arryn kept his sword against the man’s chest as he turned with surprise toward Darrow’s lady.
His broad lady.
“I should spare this fellow? Is he your lover, by chance, milady? A man far more concerned with your welfare than the lord who left you here?”
The lady went suddenly still, in grave discomfort, so it seemed.
Curious, Arryn raised his sword again, as if he would thrust it through the fallen man’s heart.
“No!” the blue-eyed, broad, and timid Lady Kyra managed to cry again.
“Who is he? Let me see.”
He knelt, wrenching the chain and plate helmet from his fallen enemy.
And there he froze.
For no man gazed up at him, but a woman. Eyes of emerald green fire challenged his in a blaze of hate and fury. A wealth of reddish gold hair tangled around her beautifully formed features. She made a man give pause, forced him to catch his breath.
“Ah!” he muttered, angrily reminding himself to remember his place. “The only man among these English proves to be a woman.” He leaned toward her. “So who are you?”
She didn’t reply. She had lost her sword, but he realized that she carried a knife still, and was ready to spring for him, attack him. Cut his throat.
He caught her wrist and wrenched the weapon from her. “I am Sir Arryn Graham. Do you know me, madam?”
She didn’t reply, but stared stonily at him. He smiled, having no intention of speaking in anything other than Gaelic at the moment. “You will tell me who you are, or I will slice your ears from your head, then your nose from your face. A little trick learned from Lord Darrow.”
The woman didn’t reply. He started to twist the knife in his hands.
“She is the Lady Kyra!” the very broad blond woman suddenly cried out.
Ahh …
Was it true? Yes. He could see it in the flashing emerald eyes of the beauty sprawled before him.
Despite himself, despite hatred, anguish, and revenge, he felt his limbs burn, his blood find fire, his body quicken.
“Lady Kyra!” he said softly. Well, she was not broad, and she certainly appeared intelligent, and with a temper—and courage surpassing that of those who would defend her.
This … this was Darrow’s woman.
No man of flesh and blood could find the need to place a sack over this damsel’s head.
“Aye, indeed!” she spat out, thrusting the knife aside, sitting up, and trying to slide back from him. She smoothed a strand of tangled gold hair from her face. “I am the Lady Kyra. But trust me, sir, I do not know you.”
For a moment, her complete pride and reckless defiance amused him.
He rose, reaching for her hand, wrenching her to her feet. “But you will know me, my lady. You will come to know me very well. Indeed, from this moment onward, you will know no one but me.” All humor and amusement left his eyes. “Indeed, lady, in payment for those so woefully misused and abused in your name, you will know me very, very well.”
CHAPTER TWO
Did she know him? Yes, of course, she did. She had lied.
Yes, of course she had lied. She knew far too much about him, far more than she wanted to know.
She stood now, facing him. He was a tall man, broad and powerful in the rough-hewn and battle-weathered chain and leather armor that adorned his frame. If he had worn a helmet into battle, he had cast it aside now, and she could clearly see his features; like his well-worn armor, they were both oddly striking and weathered. He was a young man with a clean, chiseled face; a hard, squared, and unrelenting jaw; wide-set eyes—large, piercing, and a very deep blue. His hair was as dark as ebony, almost blue-black in its darkness, long to his shoulders, wavy, despite the fact that it was unruly and wild as well. He was clean-shaven, which seemed to make the utter ruthlessness in his eyes and the set of his jaw all the more apparent. Rough, crude, coarse, she told herself. Barbaric, as much a berserker as any of the Vikings who were part of his ancestry, or as brutal as the Picts, the painted men of the north who were equally a part of what made up the Scotsmen of his kind and clan. They were all tribal men, no more civilized than the horses who swept the continent in the dark ages gone by. Not even the Romans had troubled much with them, for they were far too much like animals to be worth the effort.
Yes, this man was definitely …
An animal?
Thus Kinsey had described him—as he described all Scotsman. To Kinsey they were one and the same. Especially the Highlanders. This man, though, was from Stirling, so she had been told, and kin to the Sir John Graham who rode so closely to the rough renegade William Wallace, a man who was little better than the berserkers who had ravaged these coasts not so very long ago.
Yes, she knew of this man, one of the Grahams, a clan of born Lowlanders themselves, who led and fought and died with the heathen Highlanders. They hailed from a southern section of the country, where they should have become far more civilized—more Anglicized—but they chose to be a group of Gaelic-speaking madmen who defied God and law and practiced every manner of barbarism known to the imagination.
So this was to be her salvation! she thought, feeling a new rise of panic grow within her. She had prayed for something to happen to change her life. This! This was God’s jest, God’s irony upon her.
But then, indeed, she had said that she’d gladly meet with Satan himself….
And still, it wasn’t so much what she had been told about him that so frightened her.
It was what had been done to him!
All in the name of justice, all in the name of the king, so Kinsey Darrow had said. But Kinsey gave his loyalty to the English king, while the Scots, both desperately and furiously, were fighting against subjugation to that very king, at least Scots such as this one. Fools, Kinsey often said, for Edward I of England meant to have homage paid to him by Scotland, one way or another.
Killing Scots was not like killing people, Kinsey had boasted in the great hall of this very castle. She must always remember: they were animals, and thus killing them was like kil
ling animals; they should be bled, their throats should be slit. Then they should be gutted. Castrated. Quartered. Burned.
Burned, yes, that was what he had done….
A chill swept through her. Like rays of an ice-sun, the cold streaked out into her limbs as she stood, staring at him, feeling the hard, calculating assessment of his cobalt eyes in return. She gritted her teeth very hard, fighting another wave of panic.
She suddenly realized that she very much wanted to live, though she didn’t want to admit she was afraid to die. And if she was going to be executed, she should meet her new destiny with all the dignity and courage of her rank and station in life—chin high as she walked toward death!
She should know such dignity and pride.
What a pity she was so terrified. It was amazing how much easier it was to be brave and courageous when not facing imminent torture and death.
What else could she be but afraid—very afraid?
The methods used for execution between these enemies were beyond cruel and horrible. If she was tortured, would she suffer in silence?
Most probably not.
God, the way he looked at her was nearly as frightening as knowing what he had decided—and anticipating what was to come.
After what had been done to him….
In the name of Edward I—who wanted to be known as the Hammer of the Scots.
And in her own name, of course, for she was the heiress of an English man, an English lord given dominion in this land. Though her mother had been a Scot, she was an English subject, and subject to the man who would be Hammer of the Scots.
So what awaited her now? Would she be drawn and quartered? Disemboweled? Suffer a fate more fitting the members of her fairer sex, condemned for witchery, heresy, betrayal?
Burning …
God help her, she wouldn’t face the flames. Some kind executioner would strangle her before the fire scorched her flesh, before she felt the pain, and yet this man must want her to know every dreadful second, after what had been …
Her heart thundered. She stared at him, “Sir? Shall you have done with it now? Will you hang me from the rafters in the great hall?”
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