“Because since the beginning of this campaign, there has been no knight as courageous and ferocious as you,” he said. “Falstone may need that should the Scots make it to their walls and I would rather have you in command of a siege more than anyone else.”
He meant it as flattery, but Andreas suspected there was more to it. He could see it in their eyes. He knew he’d been a madman in battle. Perhaps they meant to take him off the line for a time simply to help him regain his control.
As if such a thing was even possible right now.
“Markus, Cassius, Tor, or Will would be just as courageous,” he said. “I am no better than they are, but I do appreciate your faith in me, Uncle Scott. I will not fail.”
Scott smiled faintly. “I know you will not,” he said. “Eat and rest, now. You will be departing at dawn.”
Andreas simply nodded. He forced a smile at his father and his uncle before turning away and heading back out to the hall where there was plentiful food and drink, and perhaps the opportunity not to have his father and half-brothers and family hovering over him, wondering if he was mentally composed.
Wondering if the killer wolf would take a rest.
Troy and Scott, joined by Blayth, watched him depart through the stone-arch doorway.
“He knows,” Blayth muttered.
Scott turned to him. “Knows what?”
“That you gave him that command to get him out of battle before he gets himself killed.”
Troy sighed heavily. “It is for his own good,” he said quietly. “He’s become a monster in battle and, sooner or later, that is going to catch up with him. It would be better if he spent a few weeks at a nice, quiet castle. Mayhap it will calm the fire in his blood.”
Blayth thought on his powerful, brooding nephew. “Would it calm the fire in yours?” he asked. “All Dray has done since he returned from London is look for that woman he’d met there, the one who told him that she lived in Northumberland. He was just starting his search in earnest when these wars cropped up. He has unfinished business of the heart and sending him off to cool his blood will not stop that. It will only delay it for a time.”
Both Blayth and Scott were looking at Troy, who was chewing his lip, pondering his son’s situation. After a moment, he simply shook his head.
“It cannot be helped,” he said. “He has unfinished business – I understand that – but the angst and fury he is displaying in battle is going to get him killed.”
“He’s not been reckless that I’ve seen,” Blayth said.
Troy shook his head. “Not reckless,” he said. “But not exactly cautious, either. I cannot lose him, Blayth. If I did, everything of Helene would be gone and I am not sure I could bear that. I know that sounds strange, given that I love Rhoswyn and we have many children together. We are quite happy. But I was happy with Helene, too, and Andreas is the last vestige of that happiness. It is a part of me that I cannot lose.”
Scott understood. He put his hand on Troy’s shoulder. “I see the same thing in Will and Tor,” he said. “The last remnants of my life with Athena. I see them now and see the men they have become, and I know she would have been so proud. I have a wife I adore and nine children, and I would not trade my life for anything, but I understand when you say that you look at your eldest and see the remnants from a past life. It becomes part of your very aura, part of the air you breathe, and that is why I think sending Dray to Falstone is for the best. It will take him out of the action.”
Troy nodded, but his heart was heavy. “And he knows it, as Blayth said,” he mumbled. “But he’s obeying his orders, like a good knight.”
Before Scott or Blayth could reply, Corey and Reed came flying into the solar, heading for their father.
“Papa!” Corey said breathlessly. “Dray is going to defend a castle and he said we could come! May we, Papa? May we?”
Troy looked at his excitable boys and he started to chuckle. He looked at Scott. “Well?” he said. “Should we send the wild animals with him?”
As Blayth stood back and smirked, Scott was on the spot. Corey and Reed turned their attention to their uncle and nearly bowled the man over in their excitement.
“Uncle Scott,” Corey said, his hands on Scott’s shoulders, grabbing at him. “May we please go and help defend the castle? It would be very good experience for us!”
“Very good!” Reed echoed.
“Please, Uncle Scott!”
Scott was being buffeted between the two of them and he finally put him his hands, pushing them away.
“Very well,” he said, simply to shut them up. “But you listen to Dray. Do everything he tells you. If I hear you have disobeyed the slightest command, I will send you back to Kenilworth and you’ll stay there until you can learn to obey. Is that clear?”
The threat of the master knights of Kenilworth Castle, the premier training castle in England for knights, was a serious threat, indeed. Both Corey and Reed nodded eagerly and Troy grabbed Corey by the arm.
“Tell Dray you may go,” he said. “Ask him what help he needs to prepare and do everything he tells you. If he has nothing for you, then you will take his armor, my armor, and your uncles’ armor and clean it until it shines. You will do this before dawn or you do not go. Is that clear?”
The boys continued to nod, grabbing him and kissing him as he fought them off. Like their uncles, Scott and Blayth, they were kissers. They kissed everyone, something their mother loved but something their father thought was annoying. After sufficiently smooching on their father’s head, they fled the solar, hooting and yelling like barbarians in their excitement. Blayth burst into quiet laughter and even Scott grinned as Troy covered his face.
“My God, what have I done to Dray?” he moaned. “And Rhos – my wife is not going to like that I have sent them away.”
“Rhos is a warrior,” Scott said. “She understands.”
Troy’s hands came away from his face. “Aye, she does, but that doesn’t mean she’ll like it,” he said. Then, he sighed heavily. “But their presence may very well distract Dray from his angst. If he must be responsible for that pair, it may be the help he needs in cooling whatever burns in his blood.”
Scott turned back to his table as some of the other knights began to filter out of the room. “Everybody’s blood is burning these days,” he said, looking back to his map. “The Scots are burning, Dray is burning. Unfortunately, we have to be concerned with both.”
That was quite true. As the room cleared except for Tor and Markus, snoring in front of the fire, Scott and Troy and Blayth took a seat at the table, drinking the watered wine and eating food that had been brought to them, speaking of something other than battle.
Family… friends… they were much more pleasant subjects than the rampaging Scots.
But something told them that this respite would be quite brief.
Tomorrow might bring them more hell than they could handle.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Falstone Castle
“There’s trouble.”
Gavriella paused, looking up from the tally of stores in the vault. A fungus had moved through the turnips they’d had stored for winter and, by the time they caught it, they’d lost half of their supply. She and a pair of servants were in the vaults underneath the keep of Falstone, separating the unsalvageable from the salvageable, when her father’s only knight, the commander of his eight hundred man army, found her.
She found herself looking into Sir Lukas de Dere’s serious face.
“What trouble?” she asked, pushing a stray lock of hair from her face. “More trouble than what we already have here? I am afraid this rot has gotten into other vegetables I simply do not yet see.”
Lukas shook his head. He was a young knight, handsome with intense blue eyes and cropped brown hair, and he was deeply dedicated to his duty. So dedicated, in fact, that when his wife became sickly last year, he’d sent her home to live with her parents so they could tend her and he would not be distracted with it. He thought h
e’d been doing the right thing, but he longed for her every single day, distracted with the memory of her more than he probably would have been with her physical presence.
It was something he had to live with. Just like he had to live with the guilt of not being able to protect his liege’s daughter when she’d been abducted by Nicholas de Soulis last year. He’d been forbidden to retaliate by Merek himself, who had given him a litany of reasons why it was a bad idea.
Lukas didn’t agree with any one of them.
He was a man with many regrets.
“I just received a missive from the commander of the de Wolfe army, Scott de Wolfe,” he said. “Evidently, the Scots are going on a rampage and there is trouble heading out way. A contingent of de Wolfe troops will be arriving today to help us in the event the Scots move against us.”
Gavriella brushed off her hands and stood up. “War is heading in our direction?”
He shrugged his big shoulders. “It is possible,” he said. “We have heard about the trouble to the north.”
Gavriella nodded, but she was clearly anxious. “We have,” she said. “But trouble rarely comes in our direction. We have a good relationship with Clan Johnstone.”
Lukas could see that she was worried. “It sounds as if this goes beyond just Clan Johnstone,” he said. “According to the missive, the entire House of de Wolfe, all the way to Berwick, has been dealing with this clan war. ’Tis clan against clan, and that is never a good thing.”
Gavriella pondered that. “So de Wolfe is sending men to help protect us in case the situation grows worse?”
“Exactly.”
Gavriella took a deep breath, trying to still her anxiety, as she turned to look at the enormous vault and its contents.
“We must be able to feed them,” she said. “I was not expecting to feed an army, Lukas.”
“I know,” he said. “Do what you can. I’ll discuss the situation with the commander when the army arrives. It is the dead of winter, so we cannot harvest anything further.”
Winter hunger was always a serious threat, one always taken seriously and especially now with the arrival of an unexpected army. “I will see what we can spare,” she said. “Did the missive say what time they would be arriving?”
Lukas shook his head. “Nay, but I would plan on feeding them the evening meal.”
Gavriella nodded in resignation. As Lukas headed off to prepare for the incoming army, she returned to the turnips, piled up in two large heaps – the bad ones and the good ones.
She pointed to the pile of rotting ones.
“You heard the man,” she said to the servants. “Lukas said we have an incoming army to feed. We shall have to go through every single turnip and cut away the rotted parts and try to salvage the remaining good. We shall need more help for this. Iva, go into the kitchens and find anyone who can help us. We’ll need baskets to haul up the vegetables to the kitchen yard. Tell the cook we must make a stew to feed two thousand men, so we’ll need the massive iron pot she uses for boiling hide. It needs to be cleaned and put over the fire in the yard. Hurry, now – there is no time to waste.”
Iva, a tiny old woman who moved swiftly, took off running. That left Gavriella with the remaining servant, a woman she had known all her life. She sighed heavily.
“That leaves you and me, Meli,” she said. “Get a knife and let’s start going through these turnips. Cut the mold off completely and save what is left, even if it is just a tiny piece. Every little bit will help.”
Meli, round-cheeked and dedicated, went to work alongside Gavriella, who picked up the knife that Iva had left behind and began cutting out the rot on one turnip at a time. She threw herself into it, as she threw herself into everything these days because it took her mind off the situation at Falstone.
The realities of what her life had become.
The truth was that it had all started last year with that horrible abduction she tried so hard not to think about. But the situation had only gotten worse since her returned from London. Her flight from London had been a confusing, disorienting thing because it had happened so quickly. One moment, she was there and in the next, she was heading home. She did not regret her fight with Aurelia, however. In fact, she really didn’t regret anything, not even the visit to Gomorrah, because she wouldn’t have met Andreas otherwise.
The man who was on her mind every moment of every day.
She was still overcome by memories of the evening she left. Though she’d initially believed that the separation between them had been for the best, increasingly, she was overcome with remorse and longing. Being unable to get word to him had haunted her. All she could think about was Andreas sitting in that tavern, waiting for a woman who would never come. She wondered how long he had waited before he realized that.
She wondered just how much he hated her now.
Being made out to be a liar had been bad enough but, in the end, the inability to tell Andreas exactly why she hadn’t been able to meet him was even worse. Had she known what would have happened on the afternoon she returned to The Asher, then perhaps she would have conducted herself differently.
Perhaps she would have been more obedient and more apologetic to her Aunt Drucilla. She had relived it over and over in her mind a thousand times, but every time she came to the part where Aurelia accused her of wrongdoing, she knew she would have fought back. She couldn’t have stopped herself. Something about Aurelia brought out the fighter in her.
But that fight had cost her everything.
She had to explain the fight when she had returned home, showing up on her father’s doorstep and telling the man that she had been sent home in shame. She knew, at some point, that her father and aunt would speak and that her father would eventually find out just why she had been sent home, so it wouldn’t do any good to lie to the man.
Therefore, she tried not to.
She’d told him, quite frankly, that Aurelia was a vile girl who had forced her to go to a guild called Gomorrah. She told her father of all the horrible things she saw there and how Aurelia and Camilla let strange men kiss them and fondle them. She proceeded to tell her father that she had been trying to get out of the place and became lost when a nice man helped her to find the exit. The man, she explained, had been very proper and polite with her, so much so that she accompanied the man the next day to see entertainment.
Her aunt had taken exception to that.
It was the truth and Gavriella stood behind it. Of course, there was much more to it than her simple explanation, but her father wasn’t going to ask for details and she wasn’t going to tell. At this point, she controlled the narrative of the situation and she was going to leave it at that. If her aunt, at any point in the future, decided to make an issue out of it, Gavriella would deal with it at the appropriate time.
But the truth was that her father had been extremely displeased to see her returned to Falstone Castle. He hadn’t expected to see her anytime soon and he hadn’t really cared why she had come home, only that she had. It was clear that he didn’t want her there and it had made for an awkward few weeks after her arrival.
Merek de Leia had never been an overly affectionate man and his standoffish behavior towards her hadn’t been anything unusual. Gavriella quickly resumed her routine at the castle, resuming her duties as chatelaine and taking over other duties such as becoming more involved in meal preparation and any number of smaller tasks that she had always passed off on the cook.
At that point, she was looking for something to occupy her time.
Anything to make her feel useful.
Now that she had returned, she didn’t want to think about what she’d left behind in London.
It was so strange, really. She had hated London at first, grieved because of why her father had sent her there, but Andreas had quickly changed her mind. The time spent with him had been something that had changed her outlook on life. It had changed her life. Then she’d come home again, home to the terrible memories of the ch
ild that she had given birth to on that stormy morning in April.
It was as if she had never left.
Her child, a son, had been born after just a few hours of labor. Truth be told, it hadn’t been all that difficult to push the baby out, into the waiting hands of two servants and the cook. Her father wouldn’t even call for the physic, nor would he call for a midwife because he didn’t want anyone to know his daughter was pregnant. Even though the village of Deadwater knew about the attack, that was all they knew.
No one knew about the resulting baby.
In fact, the only people who really knew of the pregnancy were Gavriella’s maids and the cook, women she had known her entire life and women who are very protective over her. The little boy was born healthy, screaming at the top of his lungs, and Gavriella was able to hold him and nurse him for a couple of weeks until her father insisted that the child be sent to the foundling home at Edenside.
The permanent reminder of her shame had to be removed.
Her beautiful, perfect son was taken away from her when he was barely two weeks of age, handed over to the nuns who had come from Edenside. They had been quite gentle with the infant, but Gavriella felt as if her heart had been ripped from her body. It was true that child had been conceived in a violent, terrible act, but in Gavriella’s mind, that hadn’t been the baby’s fault. He was innocent, just as she was, and the day she returned home from London was the day she knew she would never be able to forgive her father for what he had done.
He had taken her son away.
A lad named Storm.
Those were the things he had sent her to London to forget, and she had for a short while. At least, she had forgotten the gut-wrenching pain she had felt from being separated from her baby and the horrific shame and anguish from the attack. She knew who had attacked her. She had known that from the beginning when she had identified the brand on one of the horses.
Assaulted by the most hated family on the borders.
And justice would never be served.
For those few brief days that she had been in London, the situation had seemed more distant and she had been better able to deal with it although the anguish hadn’t completely gone away. She wondered if it ever would. It had been Andreas who had shown her something other than that dark and horrific anguish that seemed to follow her around like a fog.
WolfeBlade: de Wolfe Pack Generations Page 23