Mary Reed McCall

by Secret Vows

  “I’ll deal with Warton later. But you should keep in mind that he isn’t the only one who will suffer my wrath if you don’t begin to cooperate, Catherine, very soon.” He flicked his gaze with unmistakable meaning to the twins.

  Nausea shot through her, and she swallowed hard against it, forcing herself to concentrate. She licked her lips. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Do?” Eduard cocked his brow and grinned his evil, mocking smile again. “Oh, there’s much that you will do, Catherine. Much you must atone for, I’m afraid. You’ve put me through quite an ordeal, with your little escapade.”

  She felt herself blanch. Old fears and agonizing memories of Eduard’s favorite methods of punishment sprang to mind, but she tried to stand firm as she faced him. “If I agree to your terms, you must promise not to hurt the children. Swear that you’ll leave them alone.”

  “You’re in no position to bargain, woman. Concede now or suffer the consequences, both for yourself and for my darling niece and nephew.”

  She gazed at him helplessly, at his men clustered in the doorway. Beyond them she saw more knights carrying in the limp forms of Sir Payton and Sir Newell. Finally her gaze fell on Alban’s prostrate body, and defeat gouged her with claws of steel. Hands trembling, she unclasped her sword belt, letting it fall heavily to the floor.

  In an instant, Eduard’s men surged forward, responding to his command to take the twins and lock them in the solar for safekeeping. Catherine bit her lips to keep from screaming as her children were picked up and carried from the room, shrieking her name and reaching out to her over the shoulders of the knights who held them. When they’d gone, the last of Eduard’s men lifted Alban, still senseless, and dragged him from the chamber between them like a butchered animal.

  The door closed to resounding silence, leaving her alone with Eduard. Slowly she raised her face to him, meeting his icy stare. He wore a look that she knew too well. The look that told her far more powerfully than words ever could how much she was going to suffer—how much he was going to enjoy making her hurt for her transgressions against him.

  Tearing her gaze from his, she searched the room wildly for something, anything that she might use as a weapon. Anything to keep him at bay. But there was nothing. Her chamber was empty, as always. As he’d ensured it would be.

  Her entire body began to quake with treacherous weakness, with tingling dread as he stepped closer. And closer…until he stood near enough that his breath misted warm on her temple.

  His smile was dark as he reached up and stroked his finger across the delicate, fragile line of her cheekbone. He touched her gently. Softly. Profanely.

  A moan of fear escaped her and her knees threatened to buckle when he leaned a little closer to murmur, “’Tis a fine contrast of sensation is it not, sweet Catherine? To experience such tenderness before such pain…”

  He paused for a moment. Then, with a sudden, savage growl, he raised his arm and backhanded her, sending an explosion of agony rocking deep into her skull. When his fist sank into her belly, she dropped retching and gasping to the floor.

  And then she was lost in a nightmare of violence and torment from which she knew there’d be no escape.

  She hurt. Sweet Jesu, everything hurt so badly.

  Struggling to open her eyes, Catherine tried to get her bearings. She was on the floor of the chamber, her cheek pressed into the cool, hard wood. Pushing herself to a sitting position, she gasped and cried out, sucking in her breath. Tasting blood, she spit it out, swiping the back of her hand across her lips.

  He’d beaten her badly this time. Worse than ever before. He’d wanted to kill her. And he’d have succeeded, too, she knew, if something hadn’t stopped him. If something hadn’t happened, forcing him to cease kicking her after she’d curled herself into a ball on the floor.

  The messenger…

  Wincing, she sat up a little more and closed her eyes, trying to remember what the man had said. Her mind felt enveloped in a fog, paralyzed by the throbbing ache in her skull. She had to think.

  It had been one of Eduard’s knights. He’d come to the door, interrupting the beating. She remembered the man’s brown eyes, thick with sympathy when he’d seen her lying on the floor. But then he’d looked away, clearing his throat and announcing that Lord Camville’s forces had been spotted surging over the hill east of Faegerliegh. He’d arrived several hours earlier than expected, and the men needed Eduard to lead them against him in the battle to come.

  Lord Camville’s forces had been spotted…

  Gray had come! The realization sent a joyful shock through her numbed brain. He’d led his army to Faegerliegh Keep to help her and the twins. She struggled to her feet, ignoring the pain as she stumbled to the door. She had to find her children. Had to try to lead them outside the keep’s walls. Outside to Gray.

  The solar. Eduard had ordered his men to bring Ian and Isabel to the solar for safekeeping. She tried the door, her heart leaping when she realized that it was unlocked. Eduard hadn’t even posted a guard in the corridor. Most likely he’d thought her too weakened to stir from the floor. ’Twas his mistake, and she planned to use it to full advantage.

  Murmuring a prayer of thanksgiving, Catherine limped down the corridor, willing better clarity to her muddled brain and bursts of strength into her weakened legs. With each step, she focused on her purpose, gaining power and resolve. And anger. She felt the welcome burn of it, recalling Gray’s advice to her during their training, to focus her passions and rage into something useful. To work them to her benefit.

  She grimaced, which only made her lip bleed again. Dabbing it gently with her fingers, she stumbled on. Aye, she’d use her anger well. She’d wield every ounce of it against Eduard. She’d been given a second chance to save her children, and she’d get them away from here if it took her last breath.

  Catherine ducked behind a thick curtain as one of the keep’s maidservants came running down the hall. The woman was pale and obviously frightened by the sounds of battle echoing outside the walls. After she passed, Catherine came out of hiding and continued toward the solar.

  She concentrated on the hate she felt for Eduard, and it helped her to keep going, to push through her suffering. Her loathsome brother by marriage had made a great tactical error this day, an error for which he’d pay dearly. He’d underestimated the force of her will to survive and fight his brutality and evil…

  And that, she vowed, jaw clenched as she trudged down the seemingly endless corridor, was going to prove his most deadly mistake of all.

  Isabel squeezed her eyes shut, clasping her hands tight around Lily as she struggled to pray. She felt her own breath misting warm on her chilled fingers, but ’twas difficult to concentrate on talking to God with all of the banging and shouting going on beyond the keep’s walls. There were no windows to see outside the solar. No way to tell what was happening.

  “It sounds like a big fight,” Ian yelled, his breath hanging in white puffs in the air. He hopped from the tabletop to a trunk ten paces beyond it, finally leaping to the massive mantel, where he dangled for a moment like a monkey before dropping to the stone hearth. He clambered up onto the unlit logs inside, standing up so that his head disappeared from view as he peered up the chimney, hoping for a glimpse of the action.

  “Get out of there,” Isabel yelled, getting up from her prayers to yank him from the fireplace.

  Ian coughed and scrubbed his sooty arm across his eyes, leaving black smudges all over his cheeks. “You didn’t have to grab me like that! I was just scouting.” He coughed again and scowled at her. “Now I can’t see, and you made me breathe in a pile of cinders!”

  “Well, look at you!” Isabel scolded, brushing flakes of ash from his blond hair and using her sleeve to wipe his eyes. “What would Mummy say if she saw you, Ian?”

  “Mummy isn’t here.” His lower lip wobbled a little and Isabel sighed, putting her hands on her hips.

  “Well she will be, just as soon as she talks
with Uncle Eduard.”

  “Uncle Eduard doesn’t talk, he hits,” Ian muttered, kicking his toe against the hearth.

  Isabel felt the sick feeling in her stomach too, but she couldn’t show that to her brother. He might get scared again, and if she’d learned anything in the year that they’d fostered away from home, it was that you could pretend yourself into feeling any way you wanted. It worked most of the time, anyway.

  “We need to do something,” she said, pursing her lips and tapping her toe.

  “Like what?”

  “Like getting out of here to find Mummy.”

  “But we can’t! Uncle Eduard told those two men to stay outside our door. If we try to leave they’ll just throw us back in here.”

  “Not if we trick them, they won’t.” Isabel paced slowly to the fireplace again, sticking her head in to look up at the square of blue sky she could see at the top of the chimney.

  “Hey, I thought you told me not to do that!”

  “I’m not doing what you were,” she retorted, leaning her head out to glare at him. “I’m thinking out our plan.”

  “Our plan?” Ian’s face lit up and he clambered back onto the wood next to her. “What is it? Are we going to climb the chimney to freedom?”

  Isabel crossed her arms over her chest and favored her brother with a look of disgust. “And what good would that do? We’d end up stuck on the roof.”

  He shrugged, squinting to peer up at the patch of blue. “Once we were up there we could wave and jump about until someone threw a rope to us.”

  “Or shot us with an arrow.” Shaking her head, Isabel peered up again. “Nay, I think we should reach a stick up there and scrape down the ash.”

  Now Ian screwed up his face with derision. “And why in blazes would we want to do that?”

  “Don’t say blazes—Mummy said ’tis a foul word.”

  She ignored the even more foul sight of Ian’s tongue sticking out at her, instead ducking from the fireplace and pointing at the large chamber pot in the corner. “We could gather the ash in that, then hang it above the door and begin shouting and jumping, as if something was amiss…”

  Ian’s scornful look faded. “And when the guards rush in to see what’s the matter, the ash will fall on their heads and blind them so that we can escape!”

  “Well, the pot might hit the first guard,” Isabel conceded, “but I think we’ll need something else to stop the second one.”

  Ian grabbed a large, knotted walking stick that was propped against the wall near the fireplace. “How about this? I can hide behind the door, and when the second guard comes in I can trip him with it.”

  Isabel frowned, not at all certain that these plans fit in with the virtues that Mummy had always taught them. They were to say their prayers, tell no lies, be good to each other, and treat no other living thing with harm. ’Twas that last part that would be a problem now, Isabel thought, grimacing. But they weren’t really going to harm the men, just trick them so that she and Ian could escape.

  Squeezing her eyes shut, Isabel sent a prayer up to God, asking Him if what they were about to do was bad. She stood very still, waiting for some kind of sign against it, anything to let her know that they should think of something else in order to escape.

  There was no answer.

  She whispered the prayer again, just to be sure.

  Heaven remained quiet.

  That was it, then. God must understand. Perhaps He even approved. With a sigh of contentment, she opened her eyes and gazed at her brother with a look of determination.

  “All right, Ian,” she said firmly. “We’re going to do it. Now let’s get to work.”

  Chapter 19

  Gray swung his blade, hearing men scream and feeling the familiar resistance of flesh beneath his hacking charge. His mind blurred in the heat of killing, and his heart thumped madly. But ’twas not from bloodlust this day. Nay, this was something entirely different. For the first time since that awful day seventeen years ago, he battled his opponents with a sense of panic and desperation.

  He had to get to Catherine.

  Eduard’s men fought well and hard, and there were over three hundred of them to Gray’s nine score. Already the imbalance in numbers had taken its toll; many Ravenslock men lay sprawled, dead or wounded, across the grassy field leading to Faegerliegh Keep. It would take a blessing from on high to turn the tides in his favor.

  Or perhaps a burst of pure will.

  An opening appeared in the thick mass of warriors in front of him. Kneeing his stallion forward, Gray lent his fury to the attack, widening the gap. The path led directly to the gates of the keep, its entrance barred only by an iron portcullis. Whether out of rash complacency or lack of preparation, Eduard had left his defenses weak…and that was going to give Gray the only opportunity he needed.

  “To the gates!” he roared over the din, ramming and slashing his way through Eduard’s knights. His men followed close behind, scrambling up the walls and scaling the tower that housed the gears to the mechanism. Several of them began to fight with the guards there, while three others pulled the lever back, raising the metal gate with a groaning screech.

  A new flood of Eduard’s men stormed the area as Gray and his troops surged into the massive courtyard, filling the enclosure with the violent tumult of warfare. Gray pressed on. He’d almost reached the curved doorway leading into the main keep itself, when one of Montford’s knights caught him with a lance-blow.

  Gray tipped off his stallion, rolling to his side and springing up in time to block the man’s charge and deal a killing strike himself. He watched his opponent fall and then, with one last glance at the battle raging behind him, he ducked through the entry-way and into the cool, dark silence of Faegerliegh Keep’s main corridor.

  Yanking off his helm, he moved down the hall, his weight on the balls of his feet, his sword ready. Catherine hadn’t exaggerated; the hallways were intricate, twisting and turning, with several smaller corridors jutting off at odd angles. He kept to the main gallery, hoping to gain his bearings so that he could more swiftly locate Catherine or her children.

  His ears thrummed in the silence, still numb from the clamor of battle, but he threw open every door as he passed, his eyes straining, searching, desperate. Some of the chambers revealed naught but empty disarray, while others sheltered huddled masses of servants and children, their faces streaked with tears or eyes wide with terror. He resisted the urge to stop and help them. Catherine and the twins needed him more right now. Continuing on, he darted his gaze to the left and right, alert to any movement, any shifting in the shadows.

  Suddenly, the hair prickled at his nape and he stopped mid-stride. Something had moved in the corner of his vision. He was approaching the juncture of another hall; dust motes danced in the stream of sun from the glazed windows, swirling in a pattern that revealed a person hiding in the shadows.

  Gray stepped forward, cautious, alert. As he reached the turn in the corridor, he lifted his blade and swung it toward the man who lay waiting for him in the gloom.

  Only it wasn’t a man. It was a woman…a battered woman, whose hair hung in wild, tangled strands to cover half of her face. Her upraised hands clutched a makeshift weapon, a wooden leg she’d obviously broken from a chair or stool somewhere.

  Sweet Jesu in heaven.

  “Catherine…?”

  She stood there for a mere instant, staring at him, eyes wide with apprehension. Then, with a sobbing cry, she dropped the piece of wood and threw herself into his arms.

  Gray embraced her with a groaning cry that echoed her own, his heart contracting with love and relief. He pressed a kiss to the top of her head before pulling back to cup her face very gently in both of his hands.

  “How did you know?” she asked, her voice thick with tears. “How did you know to come here so quickly?”

  Gray shut his eyes for a moment, wishing that he could spare her the pain of what he was about to tell her. But there was no way around it.
“’Twas Heldred, love,” he said quietly. “He intercepted a spy who was fleeing to Eduard. While trying to stop him, he was wounded. But he fought valiantly and managed to drag himself into the open before ’twas too late, to alert us of the breach.”

  Gray saw Catherine’s eyes widen, fresh tears spilling over as she suddenly grasped the full meaning of what he was saying.

  “Then Heldred is—?”

  She couldn’t finish, and so he just nodded stiffly, holding her close as she cried her grief into his embrace. He wanted to let his love seep into her through his palms, to take away all of the pain she’d already suffered, all the hurt she was suffering now.

  “He was a dear and loyal friend,” she murmured finally, pulling back a little. “I will never forget him.”

  Gray nodded again and smoothed her hair from her brow, breathing in sharply at the bruises he saw along her temple and cheekbone. He clenched his jaw against the renewed flood of rage that swept through him. Beyond her visible injuries, he knew that she must have been hurt in many places that he couldn’t see just by the careful way she held herself in his arms. That bastard. That hell-spawned, treacherous bastard.

  “God, Catherine, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice rough with emotions that threatened to swallow him whole. “I’m so sorry I didn’t get here in time to stop him from doing this to you.”

  “Nay,” she answered softly, shaking her head. “Don’t blame yourself. There was no way to know. I’m just thankful that you’re safe and that you’re here with me now.” She pulled back again to look at him. “But we must hurry, Gray. We need to get the children. Eduard ordered them locked in the solar. I was going to them when you found me.”

  He nodded, still supporting her weight. “Aye. We need to get them out of here.” He looked into the shadows behind her, seeing nothing. “Where’s Alban?”

  “Eduard wounded him when he caught us. The last I saw of him he was being carried from my chamber between two of Eduard’s men. I don’t know where they’ve put him.” She swallowed and added more quietly, “Or if he’s still alive.”