The Virgin's Spy

by Laura Andersen

  They were mostly Flemish, with a few Italians and Germans thrown in. Stephen did not meet the company as a whole, for they had been prudently split into six smaller units to travel swiftly and anonymously and then camped within a day’s ride in various directions around Cahir and Templemore. Stephen was kept busy riding back and forth, using every skill of leadership he’d learned from both his father and Julien to make sure the men would work with him.

  When at Cahir, he spent time with Maisie, poring over her maps and notes and memories of Blackcastle. They also discussed what Dane was likely to do. Maisie was in agreement with Ailis that he would wait for the Kavanaughs to come to him. “It’s his pattern,” she said. “Like a duel on a larger scale—when affronted, he will answer the challenge. We took him prisoner, he answered by killing Liadan. Now it’s our move. But make no mistake, he will be waiting and prepared.”

  “How did a Presbyterian-born, convent-educated, merchant Scots girl learn to read the mind of a villain like Dane?”

  “It’s not reading minds, it’s simply a matter of looking at information in the right way. There are patterns in everything. One has only to order them.”

  “I think you would like my sister Lucette.”

  She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Is she the one who plays chess?”

  “I don’t—” He broke off, then laughed. “You caught that near-slip, did you?”

  “You covered neatly. But by that point I was fairly certain of who you were, so I knew you had siblings. They must be worried about you.”

  Stephen brushed it off, for he was not ready to deal with that emotionally charged subject. “What of your brother, Mariota?” Ever since Liadan’s death, when she’d cried that only her grandfather had called her Mariota, Stephen had continued to do so. “Does he know what you’re up to in Ireland?”

  “Rob? He doesn’t know what his own business partners are up to. Which works out well for me. If he thinks of me at all, which I doubt, I’m sure he imagines me spending my days sewing or some other feminine pursuit. He never did know me very well.”

  Stephen hesitated, not wanting to insult her, but there was a favour he’d been wanting to ask and he didn’t think anyone else in this household would help him. “But you do know how to sew?” he asked awkwardly.

  She furrowed her brow. “You have some shirts that need mending?”

  With a laugh, Stephen said, “No. I was wondering if you would make me a banner and surcoat.”

  “To march with? Are you sure about that? Queen Elizabeth might be able to overlook many things, but she can’t overlook one of her earls raising his banner against another of her men.”

  “I’m sure,” Stephen said grimly. “I want Dane to know who’s coming for him.”

  Four weeks after Liadan Kavanaugh’s murder, her clan marched in force from Cahir Castle. They knew Dane’s spies were watching, but they only had a third of the mercenary company with them at this point, dressed to blend in with the Irish so as not to raise alarms. The point was to let Dane think he knew what he was going to face. They took two days to cover the distance, spies of their own riding ahead to report on the English state of readiness.

  “They’re waiting for us,” was the consensus. “If they wanted, they could lock themselves behind the walls for a siege.”

  “They won’t,” Diarmid said confidently. It was one of the only things upon which he and Stephen agreed—Dane did not want a siege. Dane wanted to punish them for their pride, to crush them, to water the soil with their blood.

  The second night, they camped two miles from Blackcastle. They had timed their arrival for the dark of the moon, and in that darkness the remaining men of Maisie’s mercenary company made their way almost noiselessly to join them. Before dawn they were ready, and when the faintest hint of gray lit the eastern sky, they marched to claim their vengeance.

  The sun had just slipped above the horizon when Blackcastle came into sight. Diarmid and Stephen rode ahead together to survey the field—which Maisie had drawn and mapped with a surprising degree of accuracy—and confirm their areas of command.

  The two of them were watched by Dane’s soldiers on the battlements, but the English did not waste arrows shooting at two men beyond their reach. This was a professional matter, at least for the common soldier. As Diarmid and Stephen made a last sweep of the field before falling back to issue final orders, the banners were lifted on the walls above them.

  Dane’s aggressive boar in red and gold, of course. And it was no great surprise to see the three gold cups quartered with the azure and gold crowns of Thomas Butler. They had known the Earl of Ormond was there, but their reports said with only a few dozen men at the most. In the miserable days of his stay at Kilkenny, Stephen had managed to grasp the fact that Ormond did not care for Oliver Dane. But he was a committed queen’s man, so here he was.

  There was one more banner, at the very end of the battlements, a flash of gold that caught Stephen’s eye. He stilled, and Diarmid followed his stare. The wind stirred the fabric and it unfolded enough for careful eyes to see the red and blue torteaux that were echoed in quartered form on Stephen’s banner.

  “Shit!” Diarmid spat. “They’ve sent your father himself.”

  Stephen knew it wasn’t the fact that Dominic was his father that upset Diarmid—it was the fact that Dominic Courtenay was a better commander with one hand than any other man with two. His own stomach lurched in panic, but his eyes were quicker than his brain and had already caught the slight difference in the coat of arms.

  “No,” he said flatly, turning his horse back toward their own men. “It’s not my father. Did you not mark the bar of cadency that signifies younger sons? It’s my brother, Kit.”

  Damn it, Kit, what the hell are you doing here? An Irish battlefield was no place for his little brother. How was he supposed to focus on Dane when part of him would be instinctively watching to make sure Kit wasn’t hurt?

  Only one thing to do—throw himself into the fighting so fast and furious that Dane would be swept down before anything else. Then he would have to get Kit somewhere safe, for he had no illusions about Diarmid’s men. Maisie’s mercenary company would follow his orders. But the Kavanaughs? They wanted English blood—and they wouldn’t care whose they spilled. Being Stephen’s brother would not be a shield for Kit; it might actually make him a target.

  Stephen swallowed down the peculiar mix of nerves and excitement conjured by the battlefield and offered a silent prayer. Let me kill Dane, and let Kit be safe.

  —

  Right up to the last moment, Kit hoped against hope that everyone was wrong and Stephen would not be with the Irish. When the alert went up shortly after dawn that the Kavanaugh forces were approaching, he dashed up to the battlements to scan the horizon for himself. The Irish were still too far to see clearly, but two of the men detached themselves from the rest and rode forward to survey the ground. They prudently stayed out of reach of arrows but were close enough for Kit to grind his jaw in frustration. He would have known Stephen anywhere, even if his brother wasn’t flaunting a crudely done version of his coat of arms on a surcoat over half-armor.

  Did the idiot want to get himself killed? He was marking himself for Dane, like the red cloaks to the bulls in Spain. Damn, damn, and damn again.

  So caught up was Kit in the personal disaster of it all that he hardly had time to realize that he was about to engage in his first battle. Stephen had been in several light engagements against Scottish reivers on the border even before he’d come to Ireland last year, but Kit had been more sheltered. It was hard to disentangle his emotions, but he thought he was mostly furious with Stephen rather than upset about the imminent prospect of killing men.

  In the three days he’d been at Blackcastle, Kit had taken his own violent dislike to Dane—no surprise—but also had developed a grudging respect for the quality of his command. He had his men split into three groups, two of which moved out in quick but orderly fashion, while the third had ca
mped outside the walls all night. He had tried to order Ormond and Kit to stay within the castle walls, but he could not force Elizabeth’s most powerful Irish earl to obey him. “We’ll keep our own men out of your way,” Ormond had said gruffly, “but they stay under our command.”

  Dane did not come straight out and say that he planned to kill Stephen himself, but he didn’t have to. His contempt was clear. He knew why Kit was here, and Kit would not have been surprised to learn that some of Dane’s men had been told to keep an eye on him and harry him away from Stephen.

  But though Kit had not fought in the field, he had been trained by one of the finest commanders in the last thirty years and had learned to ride under the tutelage not only of his father, but the best masters the English royal court could provide for their princess. And he had under his command men from Tiverton who were prepared—because of his name and his childhood among them—to follow where he led. They had their orders, and Kit waited with pounding heart for the clash to begin.

  At his side, helmed and lightly armored, Julien said, “Remember, this is not a battle—it is a mission. Your only task is to get to Stephen. Our task is to allow that to happen.”

  “If Dane’s men are harrying me too closely,” Kit reminded his brother-in-law, “then Stephen will be your task.”

  Julien flashed that quick, Continental smile that Kit supposed his sister found attractive. “Don’t worry. If anyone’s going to knock Stephen’s head in today, it will be the two of us.”

  There were more than three times the number of men they’d expected to be facing, a fact that became crushingly apparent within minutes. As did the realization that the bulk of the troops were not Irish, but highly trained and deadly mercenaries. And their objective was obvious—to clear a path to Oliver Dane. Stephen was in their midst, and Kit, in the chaos, saw flashes of beauty in the way his brother was leading them.

  Dane’s forces shook under the sheer mass and reckless bravery of the onslaught. They had expected to fight only against swords and axes, but the mercenaries carried guns as well. Kit could not have imagined the noise of battle—clashing steel, grunts of shock, cries suddenly cut off. He set his jaw and his mind on one single purpose, and led his men to the left to come at Stephen from the side.

  It was the hardest thing he’d ever done. His envy of his brother had never been based solely on emotion, but also on the simple fact that Stephen was very gifted. If his brother knew that he was there—and he must know, he’d have seen the banner—Stephen ignored him. Which meant, Kit realized, that he was highly likely to get injured if not killed trying to fight through the mercenaries around his brother.

  Except he wasn’t. When the third soldier veered his horse away, Kit realized Stephen must have given orders to the men not to touch him. Instantly and irrationally, it made the old jealousy flare up. I don’t need your favours, brother.

  Stephen was elusive, but not infallible. The mercenaries nearest to him, in the tight knot cleaving their way through Dane’s forces, didn’t aim to kill Kit or his men, but their blows fell harder the closer they got. Soon enough someone was going to die. “Stephen!” Kit shouted, but if his brother heard him, he paid no mind.

  And then, all at once, there were Irishmen around him, four men surging into Kit’s view, and he knew they would not spare a single soldier on the English side. One of his men went down and Kit wheeled his horse in a tight, frantic circle, deflecting blows. Only one of the Irish was mounted—the other three were using the mounted soldier and his horse as a shield and thrusting pikes into men as though they were tossing hay.

  One thrust caught Kit’s right arm and ripped through cloth into flesh. He was wearing half-armor, but if he lost his seat he would be trampled as easily as speared. Kit swore, but kept his grip on his sword tight. One of the Irish had seen the blow land, and using his pike as a club, the man battered the wound so that Kit’s arm blazed and his fingers went numb. He dropped his sword.

  And then Stephen was there, not fighting the Irish but shoving them aside with his horse and his voice. “Leave him!” he commanded, and Kit had never heard anyone sound so much like their father.

  As there was bloodshed enough to spare, the Irish swept away into another wave of it, leaving the brothers momentarily face-to-face. “Get out of here, Kit.”

  “Not without you.”

  Stephen turned his horse’s head. “Go home.”

  In that brief exchange, Julien had slipped his way in behind with one of Kit’s men. At Kit’s nod, the soldier seized hold of the horse’s harness. Stephen jerked away, but Julien brought the hilt of his sword against Stephen’s helmet. It jarred him enough to drop the reins, and a second carefully aimed blow got him off the horse.

  Kit and Julien dragged him out of the thick of the fight, Stephen half conscious, and into a protective circle of Tiverton men. Kit prepared to remount, in order to make sure Ormond had seen what happened so he could move on with his own part of the plan. But Kit had only one foot in the stirrup when he was tackled hard from the side.

  His skull jarred inside the helmet when he hit the ground and he clawed it off and threw it at his brother. Just as he knew Stephen’s form when riding, he’d been tackled enough by his older brother to know the feel of it in his bones.

  “What the hell are you doing?” they both yelled at the same time.

  Kit scrambled to his feet and Stephen shoved him back. “Let me through!” he ordered.

  “No.”

  And then it was like they were boys again, Kit an eight-year-old who resented his ten-year-old brother’s title and, even more, his calm temperament, which everyone marked was so like their father. No one ever said Kit was like Dominic Courtenay.

  They shoved and punched and wrestled—but they did not draw weapons. Not until Kit landed a heavy blow to Stephen’s face that probably made his head ring and would certainly leave a nasty mark. Then, instinctively, Stephen drew his dagger and pointed it at his opposition.

  Kit couldn’t even swear that Stephen knew who he was anymore, if he could see his little brother or only saw the man who was keeping him from what he wanted. They were going to have to knock Stephen out again and then bind him if they wanted to get him off this battlefield. Julien was moving behind Stephen to do just that when there was a sudden lull in the noise of battle and one of the Tiverton men who’d been wise enough to keep watching outward shouted to Kit, “Ormond’s got him!”

  Kit knocked Stephen’s dagger aside with the back of his hand. “You’re going to want to see this.”

  It was even odds whether Stephen would listen. He did. The men opened a gap in the armed circle and the brothers stepped forward with Julien to look out.

  As hoped and planned, the Earl of Ormond had got his man. The plan had been simple, if not easy. Kit dragged Stephen clear of the field, and Ormond took charge of Oliver Dane. Unlike Stephen, Dane had a long dagger at his throat.

  Ormond had a voice built for carrying. “Draw off,” he commanded equally to both sides. “Send forward your Irish leader and we will discuss terms.”

  Julien stayed behind, but Kit and Stephen strode forward without looking at each other. They were joined by a fiercely unfriendly Irishman who ignored Kit but glared at Stephen as though he’d gladly run him through whatever the cost. No matter that they’d been fighting on the same side.

  They held their parley protected by a knot of Ormond’s men, weapons readied outward to keep any ordinary soldier from disputing their leaders’ discussion.

  Dane’s face was so suffused with furious blood Kit thought he might die of apoplexy on the spot. When he saw Stephen, he instinctively lunged forward. “This is your doing, English bastard!” he snarled.

  Ormond jerked him back, reminding him of the dagger at his neck. “You’re English,” he said to Dane. “And shut up, this isn’t your show any longer.”

  “What makes it yours?” Stephen shot back.

  “I do,” Ormond said grimly. “Now everyone who isn’t Irish b
orn and bred, keep your mouths shut.” He turned to the rebel next to Stephen. “Your name?”

  “Diarmid mac Briain.”

  “Of the Kavanaughs.”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand there has been a crime committed against your clan by Captain Dane. The murder of a young girl.”

  Diarmid spat. “His own daughter.”

  “An Irish whore’s brat—”

  It was Stephen who drove the words back into Dane’s throat with a punch that slipped past Ormond’s dagger. Kit threw himself on his brother and dragged him back.

  “Is everyone here mad?” Ormond shouted. Then, to Diarmid mac Briain, “I am authorized to offer compensation for that crime. The tenancy of Blackcastle itself.”

  There was stunned silence, then Dane shouting, “The castle is mine!”

  “On lease from me,” Ormond said. “The castle and land are rightly the Butlers, and I offer them to the Kavanaughs—including all stores of food inside—if they will clear the field without further bloodshed.”

  “And the stores of weapons?” Diarmid asked shrewdly.

  Ormond shook his head. “You know better. The weapons come with me. But along with the castle, you have my word I will not try to take it back. The lass should not have been so treated.”

  “And you think a castle worth Liadan’s life?” It was, surprisingly, Stephen who objected so furiously. “An eye for an eye—we want Dane’s head.”

  “The best you can hope for is what I’m offering,” Ormond said. “Queen Elizabeth has also authorized me to bring Dane to England. You can both go before her and argue your rights.”

  Dane barked a laugh. “The Courtenays are Elizabeth’s lapdogs. I have little chance of being heard.”

  “If I cut your throat on this battlefield, you have no chance at all.”

  Dane’s colour had gone down and he was clearly weighing options. Finally, he conceded Ormond was right. “Fine,” he ground out. “I’ll call off my men.”