Return of the Border Warrior

by Blythe Gifford

  But his father had already left the parapet and, in that moment, left his life.

  John shook his head, stood straight and turned his back on the body in the bed. There would be no reconciliation now. ‘I last saw him ten years ago.’

  Shadows and candlelight softened her face, until he believed, for a moment, that she understood.

  Or did he see only pity for a man who did not belong to his family?

  He bristled against it. She was the one who did not belong beside the deathbed. ‘Why are you praying over my father as if he were kin? Where is your own?’

  ‘Dead as yours.’ Whispered, words more vulnerable than any she had yet spoken. ‘At the hand of Scarred Willie Storwick.’

  Now. Only now did he understand. ‘So you picked up his sword and his men and vowed vengeance.’

  She didn’t bother to nod, and when her eyes met his, the woman’s softness was gone and he faced the warrior again. ‘And your king will have no men of ours until I’ve had it.’

  Her words, a vow, chilled him, but hot anger rose to wipe out the feeling. This stubborn woman was his enemy, as much or more so than the Storwicks across the border. ‘The king will have his men, or you’ll wish he had.’

  She sniffed. ‘I’m not afraid of your king.’

  ‘I was not speaking of the king.’

  Her eyes widened and he regretted his threat, but her obstinacy had swamped all his plans of persuasive charm.

  He leaned closer, this time resisting her lips. ‘But the king, too, knows something of revenge. That’s why he’s going to destroy the man who’s held him captive these last few years.’

  ‘If he’s a man who knows revenge, he will know why I need mine.’

  ‘He won’t. Not if it stands in his way.’

  He wanted to best her now, as he’d been unable to do in the yard. ‘So if you’re of the Brunsons, you’ll do as we do. The king will have his men. I am here to make sure of it.’

  ‘Johnnie!’ Bessie stood at the door, the faintest hint of judgement in her voice.

  How long had she stood there, silent as a wraith, watching?

  And what had she seen?

  She did not wait for him to ask. ‘You’ve travelled long today. Get your rest. I’ll sit with him.’

  He walked out, silent, without a backward glance at the bed.

  Or at Cate Gilnock.

  * * *

  ‘Did you see to the dog?’ Bessie moved so silently, it always surprised Cate when she spoke.

  ‘I tied him,’ Cate answered, returning to sit on her stool. ‘With the horses.’

  ‘I’m sorry you must be separated.’

  Silent with surprise, Cate blinked. She thought she had fooled them all, that they judged Belde only a dog, valuable for tracking and nothing more.

  Bessie pulled a stool beside Cate’s and sat, then let her head fall into her hands with sorrow, or fatigue.

  Cate reached out to touch her shoulder, uncertain how to help. ‘Let me get you something.’

  Bessie shook her head without opening her eyes. ‘They’ll be here, coming and going all night.’ Her voice soft, still. Then, she sat up, straightened her shoulders and met Cate’s eyes, coming to herself in a way so similar to her brother’s that Cate blinked. ‘I’ll sleep later.’

  Bessie was the woman every man expected: chaste, quiet, placid and peaceful. One who looked out on the world with an open gaze, as if she knew and was perfectly content with her lot in life.

  And though the two women had shared a room and a bed for near two years, Cate still knew no more of her than that.

  ‘Your brother is not like the others.’ He threatened the defences that had served her so well.

  Bessie nodded, not asking which brother Cate meant. ‘We were close when he was a boy.’

  Cate could see that they would be, both lean with rust-coloured hair, unlike Black Rob, who favoured his mother’s people.

  Then, Bessie smiled, sadness banished. ‘We called him Johnnie Blunkit.’

  ‘Blunkit? Why?’ She could not imagine this angry man dragging a blanket behind him.

  ‘Because of his eyes.’

  ‘Ah.’ Blunkit fabric was a soft blue-grey, remarkably similar to the colour of John Brunson’s eyes. ‘He must have hated that.’

  ‘Later, aye—’ Bessie nodded ‘—he did.’

  Cate shook her head, trying to picture this strong knight as a youth. ‘I don’t remember him.’

  ‘You must have seen him when he was younger.’

  ‘When?’ She would have been no more than ten when he went to court, Bessie even younger.

  ‘A wedding, a year, maybe, before he left. I cannot remember whose, but the tower was full. Everyone had come to celebrate.’

  Cate tried to summon the event and had a dim memory of two lads in the courtyard, crossing swords. The taller—it must have been Rob—had the advantage, but John gave no quarter, fighting harder when he accused his brother of holding back.

  ‘So long ago.’ She was no longer the giggling girl of nine who knew nothing of the world’s horrors and still thought to be a bride one day. ‘I had forgotten.’

  ‘He was not like the others.’ Bessie nodded towards the bed where her father lay. ‘Even then.’

  Cate shook her head. Perhaps Bessie no longer knew her brother. ‘He’s like enough.’

  He was a man. One whose first thought had been to kiss her.

  * * *

  When John returned to the hall, the fire had burned low and the raucous conversations had quieted. Some men dozed.

  He accepted a mug and took a wedge of cheese, the first food he’d had all day. So simple, the things that kept a body bound to the earth.

  Rob sat alone on the stone window seat. He did not move or speak when John joined him.

  He wasn’t sure what drew him back to his silent brother, but he had faced the truth: his father was truly gone. The triumphant return he’d hoped for lay shattered at his feet. There would be no reconciliation.

  It was the king’s favour he must seek now, not that of a family who had never granted it and never would.

  His father, Cate, his brother. Each had judged him and found him wanting. The king would not—not when John brought three hundred Brunson men to fight at his side.

  Cate walked into the hall and another man rose to take her place in the dead man’s room. This stubborn woman, determined to oppose the king’s will, was haunting him more than the things that should have been: his father, the king, his mission.

  She was nothing like the women he had known at court, any of whom seemed ready to flip their skirts for a chance to bed a king’s man. Even those women already wed.

  ‘She’s a skittish one, isn’t she?’ he said to Rob, nodding towards the other side of the hall where she stood with one of her men.

  ‘Cate?’ Rob shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  John took a sip, waiting.

  His brother said nothing more.

  He gritted his teeth. Silence was not the way at court. There was always chatter, even if the words were meaningless.

  Even if they were false.

  He forced another question. ‘Why is that, do you suppose?’

  Another shrug. ‘Not for me to say.’

  ‘Not for you to say or not for me to know?’ Was Rob hiding something? With as few words as the man used, it was hard to tell.

  Then, Rob turned his head to look at John with that familiar expression that needed no words to say Little Johnnie Blunkit. ‘She lost her father to the Storwicks. Do you expect her to be dancing?’

  ‘No,’ he said, refusing to yield, ‘but I don’t expect her to dress like a man and wield a sword, either.’

  Rob shrugged and made no answer, but his face spoke his grief. He had just lost a father. He was not dancing. And if John forced him too soon, he’d not be sending men to the king, either.

  ‘She has no mother?’ John said, cracking the silence.

  ‘Dead. Years before her father.’
r />   ‘Brothers? Sisters?’

  Rob shook his head.

  She had no family, so she stole his. Well, she could have them.

  ‘When did it happen?’ His brother delighted in making him beg for each scrap. ‘Her father’s death?’

  ‘Two years ago.’

  Longer than he had thought. Long enough that she should no longer be in grief’s grip. ‘How?’

  Rob sighed, finally accepting John would ask until he was answered. ‘She said little. It was about this time of year. They were still in the hills with the cattle when Scarred Willie came. Killed everyone but Cate. Took the cattle.’

  Killed everyone. It was not the way of the Borders, such killing. But the woman’s life had been spared, as was right.

  ‘Could you not chase him down?’

  ‘We didn’t find out till weeks after.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She buried them, her father and the others, before she came down from the high land.’

  John studied her again, the woman who could barely keep a blade upright. How had she summoned the strength of body and heart for that? ‘And then?’

  ‘We tried,’ Rob growled, as if John accused him of shirking his duty, ‘but the Storwicks denied his guilt and the English Warden wouldn’t hand him over for trial.’

  The Borders had their own laws, enforced jointly, on occasion, by royally appointed Wardens on both sides of the border.

  ‘And even if he had,’ Rob continued, ‘it would have been his word against hers.’

  ‘So Father promised her the justice the Wardens wouldn’t.’ Suddenly, he saw hope, something that might persuade Rob, persuade all of them, to the king’s side.

  ‘The king has appointed a new Scottish Warden.’ John leaned forwards. ‘I carry the papers with me. This one will insist Storwick is brought to justice.’

  Rob snorted. ‘One Warden’s no different from the next. Scots or English.’

  ‘This one is.’ John’s statement was more emphatic than his certainty. He knew little of the man. ‘You must give him time to prove it.’

  ‘I must?’ Rob near shouted. ‘You left us and now you come back and tell me what I must do?’

  ‘I didn’t leave. Father sent me.’ He lowered his voice, hoping Rob would follow.

  He did not. ‘Well, I didn’t see you running home when you turned one and twenty.’

  ‘And I saw no invitation.’

  ‘You don’t need an invitation to come home, Johnnie.’ All the arrogance of a big brother was in his voice.

  ‘For no better a welcome than I’ve had, I do.’ Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that conversation in the hall had stopped.

  ‘Well, what have you done since you arrived but yammered about what the Brunsons must do because your precious king says so? You might at least have given your father the grace of his burial.’

  His plan to make Rob’s decision easy had already gone well awry. ‘We’ve little time. The king needs our men in East Lothian by mid-October.’

  Realisation reflected in Rob’s eyes. He rose. ‘Well, Johnnie, my father is more important than your king. He, and you, can wait for my decision until we’ve laid Geordie the Red in the ground.’

  Rob turned his back and walked out of the hall.

  And when John looked up, everyone was watching, silent.

  Including Cate Gilnock.

  Chapter Three

  It was no day for a funeral, John thought, as they gathered outside the tower’s walls the next morning. The sun looked downright cheerful to see the man put in the ground.

  To Bessie fell the role of leading the procession to the burial ground, as her mother would have had she been alive. Awed, John watched his sister calmly assume yet another duty. When last he had seen her, she’d been a lass of eight. Now, she seemed a woman who had already seen, and accepted, all the sorrow life could offer.

  His brother stepped up to the coffin, first man to be ready to heft it to his shoulder. John moved to take his place on the other side.

  ‘I’ve five other men already,’ Rob said.

  ‘None of whom is his son,’ John said, warning them back with a glance. Estranged as he might be from his father, from the family, this was his role, his right.

  His duty.

  The others stepped away, not waiting for Black Rob’s permission. In this, John had the right.

  He took his place and at Rob’s nod, they lifted the coffin to their shoulders.

  Bessie led them from the tower, singing of sorrow in a song that needed no words. Cate fell in behind her, ready to lend an arm if she faltered. Next to his sister, Cate, with her cropped hair, loose pants and knee boots, seemed as young as a lad.

  The burden rested heavy on his shoulder as the men found their common step. Arms raised, he steadied it with both hands, feeling as if his father’s weight held him fast to the earth. But he would not be the first to cry off. And in the mile between the tower and the burial ground, they only paused once to let the coffin down.

  The Brunson burial ground perched on the leeward side of a hill beside an empty church. The grave had been prepared beside his mother’s. All there was to do now was to take the body from the coffin and lower it into the ground with ropes.

  Not for them the priest and the prayers, the laying on of hands, the final rites that might have eased his father’s passage. A few years ago, the Archbishop of Glasgow had banned the riding clans from the church and cursed them to eternal damnation with a vengeance that would have made a reiving man proud.

  The priest had left.

  The Brunsons remained.

  So at the end, his father was laid to rest with only his family and the land he belonged to. Perhaps, he thought, as they consigned his father to the earth, this was more fitting.

  John looked out across the valley his father had loved. Grey clouds had gathered atop the hills, shielding the sun, and he felt a stir of unwelcome emotion. This earth, this clay, had made him, too.

  Yet now, he was a stranger to it. His brother and the others who rode it daily could find their way on a moonless night. To him, it was like a woman he had not yet bedded. The soft hills, the surface he could see, beckoned, but he did not know what parts of her body would respond to his touch. Hadn’t found the hidden places.

  He found himself watching Cate, wondering what hid beneath her disguise. She embodied every dilemma he faced: a family who had disowned him, a land that kept its secrets, a way of life at odds with everything he wanted.

  And yet, something about her tugged at him, tempting him to peel back her layers, to discover her secrets. And something about her made him mourn what he had lost.

  The ancestral melody began. Bessie and Rob joined voices to sing the ballad of the Brunsons. The song that had come down from ancestors no longer remembered, except through song.

  This is the story, long been told

  Of the brown-eyed Viking, man of old

  Left on the field by the rest of his clan

  Abandoned for dead was the first Brunson man

  Abandoned for dead was the first Brunson man.

  Left for dead and found alive

  A brown-eyed Viking from the sea

  He lived to found a dynasty.

  There were verses unnumbered, names and stories of the Brunsons since the first, and when the last had been sung, Rob stepped forwards to sing alone.

  I sing today of Geordie the Red;

  A Border rider born and bred

  A man more faithful never found

  Loyal to death and then beyond

  Loyal to death and then beyond.

  The last notes faded. The song had been sung. His father laid to rest and his legacy created. Loyalty. But did Rob sing of loyalty to king or to kin?

  Or was he still struggling to choose?

  They walked back to the tower even more slowly than they had left. Ahead of him, Rob and Bessie leaned towards each other, shoulder to shoulder, eyes on the life ahead of them.

>   A life in which he had no place.

  Cate, to his right, was dry eyed, but none wearing the Brunson brown and blue had more vengeance in their gaze than she. More vengeance, he thought, than sorrow.

  No, Rob would not, could not yield, he feared, as long as Cate held him to his father’s word. She was the key.

  Well, women were changeable. The king’s own mother had sided with the English, the French and the Scots in turn, changing sides as easily as she changed husbands. This Cate would be no more steadfast if he gave her the right persuasion.

  He just had to figure out what persuasion that was.

  * * *

  Last night, the hall had been full of talk, laughter and tears. Today, the guests were gone and only Rob’s and Cate’s men remained. And the silence of sorrow.

  John escaped the tower, even the courtyard, unable to feign regret he did not feel. Outside, in fresh air, he would be able to think clearly on the challenge of Cate Gilnock.

  He did not need her acceptance. He did not need, or want, to touch the woman. He simply needed her to release vengeance he still did not fully understand. He feared, however, that peeling away her layers could be even harder than peeling off her clothes.

  Beyond the tower walls, the Galloway ponies

  dotted the field, left to feed themselves until the coldest weather came.

  Let them find their own forage, his father would say. Makes them strong.

  He paused to pat one of the bays on his broad, sturdy chest and the pony let him, nosing for a treat. John held up empty hands. ‘Not today, boy. Next time.’

  In apology, he swept his hand down the reddish hair of the beast’s back, feeling warmth beneath his palm. When they were boys, Rob used to challenge him to mount a pony bareback and race around the tower. John won often enough that Rob dropped his dare. He beat his brother because he was more flexible, able to communicate with the horse, rather than forcing the creature to his will.