DarkWolfe

by Kathryn Le Veque

  He trailed off, hardly able to continue, and Troy jerked his head in his father’s direction as the man stumbled over his explanation.

  “Because what?” Troy demanded. “Tell me!”

  William sighed again, struggling with his composure. “The soldiers who escorted Athena and Helene to Berwick said that when they reached the River Till, it was very swollen and they were uncomfortable with the bridge crossing. It seemed to them that the strong flow of water had weakened the bridge. When they told the ladies their concerns, their warning was not heeded.”

  Troy stared at him as the realization began to settle. Now, the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. “And they went over the bridge.”

  “They did.”

  The tremble in Troy’s hands grew worse. His eyes widened as he understood, clearly, what had happened.

  “Nay,” he hissed. “Nay! Helene would have listened. She would have heeded such advice. But Athena would have discounted the soldiers because the woman does not listen to anyone, not even to Scott. It was her! She did this!”

  William held up his hands, hastening to calm his son before the situation went from bad to worse. “You will not blame her,” he said firmly. “By all accounts, both the women insisted on proceeding, so you will not blame Athena solely. It was everyone’s fault but no one’s fault. Surely they did not know this would happen.”

  Troy didn’t seem to be listening. “Athena did this! She killed them all!”

  William grabbed the man by the shoulders, trying to shake some sense into him before he went mad with grief. “Casting blame does not bring them back!” he implored. “Would you truly curse the dead, Troy?”

  Troy was nearly incoherent with rage. “That bitch,” he snarled. “My children are dead because of her! My wife is dead because of her!”

  “It is God’s will, Troy,” William said steadily. “You must believe that what happened is…”

  Troy cut him off savagely. “There is no God,” he barked. “God would not have allowed small children to drown while their mother watched and could do nothing to help them. He would not have taken innocent lives so cruelly. Nay, Papa, speak not to be of God. He had nothing to do with this. This is Athena’s fault!”

  William could see that his words weren’t getting through and he was genuinely afraid; afraid of what Troy would do because the man was quick to rage and even quicker to act upon it. He didn’t have the calm that most of William’s sons had. Troy was aggressive and deadly, the first man into battle and the last man to leave. It was a fearsome de Wolfe quality but, in this case, it would do him no good. The man was raging at a dead woman, blaming her for his misery. William was expecting Troy’s brother at any moment and he didn’t want Troy to attack his brother in a fit of insanity. Therefore, he did the only thing he could – he forced Troy to face the object of his rage.

  Yanking the man up by the arm, which was no mean feat considering Troy’s size, he dragged the man towards the lifeless body of Scott’s wife. When Troy dug his heels in to stop his father’s momentum, William grabbed him by the hair and pulled him, hauling him the last few feet until Troy was looking down at Athena and her children. William got a hand in behind Troy’s head and shoved it down, closer to the bodies so he could truly see who he was angry with.

  “There!” William boomed. “There she is! Tell her of your anger, Troy. Tell her how you blame her for the deaths of Helene and the girls. Go on – tell her how stubborn and foolish she is. Tell her you hate her!”

  Troy found himself looking into his sister-in-law’s frozen face. He hadn’t taken a good look at her when he’d entered the solar but now that he was, he could see that she didn’t look as if she were sleeping at all. Her eyes were half-open, the blue orbs dull in death. But the first thing he noticed was the fact that her features seemed to be frozen in a permanent expression of terror. Her mouth was slightly open, the ends downturned, and when Troy managed to look at her arms, stretched over the children, he could see that her nails were broken and dark with blood, as if something or someone had shredded them. Troy had seen that kind of thing before; it occurred to him why.

  My God, he thought, she tried to claw her way out of the cab. She tried to free them!

  His anger turned to shock, and shock to grief. He suddenly fell to his knees beside Athena, putting his hand on her cold head, feeling the sobs coming forth. Or maybe not sobs; something was trying to bubble up from his chest but he wasn’t sure what it was. An explosion of agony the likes of which he’d never experienced before. Biting off a groan, he bent down and kissed her on her wet, dirty head.

  Lurching to his feet, he yanked himself away from his father’s grip and staggered over to his wife and children. His mother was still standing beside them, weeping quietly, but he ignored the woman. In fact, he ignored everything but those three figures lying at his feet. Falling to his knees beside them, he reached down and gathered Helene into his arms, pulling her against his chest and burying his face in her neck.

  Troy thought he might cry but, in truth, what he felt went too deep for tears. It cut through him like a knife, eviscerating him, carving him clean of everything he had ever felt or ever possibly could feel. He felt as if all of his insides had just been sucked out and there was nothing left but a hollow shell. That hollow shell was now holding what was left of the woman he loved.

  He may have been living, but his soul was dead.

  So, he held her and rocked her, unable to do anything else. Time passed, but he was unaware of it. He was locked in his own little world, yet somewhere in the midst of it, Troy heard someone enter the solar to tell William that Scott had arrived. William went to deliver the terrible news to his other son while his wife, the shattered mother and grandmother, remained with Troy. In fact, Troy could feel his mother’s warm and gentle hands on his shoulder but, still, he couldn’t acknowledge her. He couldn’t acknowledge anything but the agony that now filled his hollow insides.

  He rocked and he rocked. Helene’s body felt like so much dead weight. She’d always been so warm and sensual and weightless in his arms that this was completely unnatural. All of it, so unnatural and, at some point, it occurred to him that he couldn’t breathe. He tried, but he couldn’t seem to inhale. Something about that dead weight in his arms wouldn’t allow him to breathe and as the room began to spin, he released Helene and stood up, thinking that he had to leave. He had to get out of that room. Maybe when he wasn’t looking at the vestiges of the life he once knew could he breathe again.

  Blindly, he ran from the solar with his mother behind him, calling softly to him, but he wasn’t listening. He was heading for the open entry door and the bailey beyond. Once outside, the light seemed to blind him. He couldn’t seem to breathe any better. He caught a glimpse of his brother, Scott, as his father stood next to him. He could hear weeping sounds but he wasn’t sure who they were coming from; it seemed that everyone was weeping. He thought, perhaps, it was his mother.

  He never realized that the sounds were coming from him.

  A few feet away from the keep entry, he came to a halt and tumbled onto his knees. Whatever had been bubbling up inside of him came out in a rush, and he vomited all over the mud of the bailey, gagging and choking until nothing more would come. But even still, he hunched over and continued to heave.

  It was all he could do to stay conscious.

  Men were moving around him, speaking softly, and he heard his father call out to his brother repeatedly but he didn’t know why. He didn’t care why. All he knew was that he’d lost his life today, drained from him by the three bodies back in the solar.

  For the rest of the day, Troy remained on his knees in the mud, surrounded by his own vomit, and refusing to move. He simply sat there and stared out into space, unable to move or think, unable to deal with his grief. Somewhere in the madness, his younger brothers, Edward and Thomas, came to stand silent vigil over him. He remained there all night and so did his brothers. But when the morning finally dawned, so d
id Troy’s understanding of what his future would now be.

  Without a wife, without his younger children. It was his cross to bear.

  That morning, Troy de Wolfe’s world became a dark and hopeless place.

  The darkest Wolfe of all.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Year of Our Lord 1272

  September

  Twelve miles southwest of Castle Questing (over the Scots border)

  Whoosh!

  A very large rock had sailed too close to his head and Troy immediately retaliated, managing to uppercut the Scotsman who’d tried to take his head off with a long dagger he’d pulled from a sheath concealed on his hip. It went straight into the Scotsman’s neck, his preferred target, and the man fell heavily into the grassy sod. Blood gushed onto the sweet Scottish earth.

  But Troy didn’t stop there; he was a man of action and little rest, and once his opponent was down, he went after any man he didn’t personally recognize as being English. There was much at stake in this battle, not the least of which was some peace along the Marches where his outpost, Kale Castle, was front and center during these turbulent times. It was an outpost of Castle Questing, his father’s seat, and the first line of defense against the Scots in this area. It was a small but strategic tower castle that sat between Questing and Wolfe’s Lair, his father’s major outpost in the area. The de Wolfe holdings protected perhaps one of the most volatile stretches of the Scottish Marches.

  In fact, that was what this particular skirmish was all about – subduing a particularly bad section of the border that was in rugged and mountainous land. A band of marauding Scots, an amalgamation of a few clans including Murray, Douglas, and Gordon, had been using a pele tower about twelve miles southwest of Castle Questing as a base from which to launch their raids. As far as his father had been able to determine, these reivers were not sanctioned by the clans they represented, but they were doing a great deal of damage and William wanted it stopped.

  William’s order to his armies had been to capture this base, called Monteviot Tower, and hold it for the English. He was tired of losing men and material to these raiders, so he wanted to end it once and for all. He had, therefore, called upon a rather large army to purge Monteviot of her marauders, so men from the castles of Northwood, Kale, Wark, Berwick, Questing, and Wolfe’s Lair had moved on the isolated tower at dawn on a crisp autumn morning.

  The Scots, taken by surprise, had been ill equipped to handle nearly two thousand English soldiers. So as the day neared the nooning hour, there were just a few pockets of holdouts, including the tower itself, where about forty Scots were holed up, keeping the English at bay.

  But that wasn’t going to last. While the younger knights secured the big bailey of Monteviot, the older and more wily – or sneaky – knights were planning the incursion into the tower. Even as Troy concentrated on purging the Scots from a big stone outbuilding that also seemed to be the stable, he could still see his father, his Uncle Paris, his Uncle Kieran, and his Uncle Michael at the base of the tower determining the best course of action to penetrate it.

  It was an auspicious gathering. These men were legendary knights along the border… William de Wolfe… Paris de Norville… Kieran Hage… Michael de Bocage… names that meant something on the Marches because they were the names of the men who had survived decades of skirmishes. They’d fought together for over forty years and even though they were well into their advanced years, it didn’t much slow them down. They still rode with their armies and they still participated in combat, although Troy and his brothers, Patrick and James, tried to keep their father out of heavy fighting while Paris’ older sons, Hector and Apollo, attempted to do the same with their father.

  Kieran had his own sons, Alec and Kevin, who tried to keep their mighty father from getting hurt, which resulted in him being grievously offended sometimes. Even Michael, quite possibly the tallest man on the borders, had three equally tall sons who tried to ease their father’s load. But he, too, was insulted that they would even make the attempt.

  Old knights who didn’t want to be reminded of the younger, stronger generation.

  Troy was the oldest of all the next-generation knights and, by virtue of his age and skill, was always the man in charge of the siege. Therefore, it was Troy who eventually put the older warriors on planning the breach of the tower. As he and Tobias de Bocage, Michael’s eldest son, cleared out the stone outbuilding, Troy could see the elder knights congregating at the base of the tower in conference as they looked up the very tall, rectangular keep with small windows.

  The apertures on the second level were barred with iron, making penetration impossible, but the levels above that – and there were at least two – had small windows for ventilation and light. It was a typical tower house, built for protection more than comfort. There was, however, a roof where the Scots were gathering and throwing projectiles down on the knights. That was where most of the resistance was coming from.

  Troy had been watching that standoff, intermittently, for the last hour. Fortunately, the older knights knew to stay out of the way. At some point, the Scots ran out of ammunition and began to throw things from inside the tower – broken bed frames, pots, stools – anything they could get their hands on. That’s how Troy and the others knew the end was near. Once the Scots started doing that, there was nothing left to fight with or to fight for. They would soon be starved out if their situation didn’t change.

  Then, it became a waiting game.

  With Tobias and a few other knights handling the final purging of the outbuildings, Troy finally broke away and made his way over to the older knights as they congregated below the tower. He flipped up his visor, gazing up at the gray-stoned structure just as the others were.

  “Well?” he said, shielding his eyes from the bright sun overhead. “I have finished my task. The outbuildings are clear. Why haven’t you rushed the tower yet?”

  William glanced at his son; big, muscular, and terrifying when he wanted to be, William was particularly proud of Troy. He had such an easy command presence and was much-loved by the men, mostly because they knew that Troy would fight or die for any one of them without question. A noble heart inspired great loyalty, and that was what Troy had – a heart that was as true as the day was long. But he was also easy to anger, could make rash decisions, would punch a man for looking the wrong way at him, and argumentative. Therefore, William knew the question out of his mouth wasn’t a jest in any way; knowing Troy, the man was serious.

  “We were just discussing the tactics,” he said evenly. Then, he pointed at Paris, standing next to him. “Paris wants to burn them out.”

  Troy glanced at Paris, who was also the father of his deceased wife. Paris de Norville was the commander of Northwood Castle, a tall, blond, arrogant but deeply compassionate man whom Troy had known his entire life. He looked at Paris as a second father. But Paris always thought he knew best, and he liked to question everyone’s decisions, which irked Troy terribly. Even now, he could see an expression on Paris’ face that suggested he didn’t approve of the current command opinion.

  “If you burn it out, you will also have an outpost that no one will be able to use,” Troy pointed out. “It would give the reivers no haven to hide in.”

  “And it would give me an outpost that was nothing more than a burned-out shell.”

  “Then what do you want to do?”

  William pursed his lips in annoyance, in full disdain of Paris. “Determine a better way to remove the men inside. I am not burning it up.”

  He sounded final. Troy sighed pensively as he looked up at the tower again, noticing that Paris and Kieran were now moving closer as if to inspect the tower personally. “I would not do that if I were you,” Troy warned them.

  Kieran and Paris knew better, but they also suffered from an abundance of confidence brought on by years of experience.

  “They cannot drop anything else on us,” Kieran said; a massive mountain of a man, he was still the strongest ma
n Troy knew in spite of his advancing years and bad heart. He was also quite calm and gentle, a great contrast to his fiery Scottish wife. “There is nothing left unless they want to start demolishing the building itself to find material to throw from the windows.”

  Troy didn’t share the man’s opinion. He looked at his father. “It will take one heavy stone to crash on Uncle Kieran’s head and then we will have a grave problem on our hands.”

  William knew that, but he was siding with Paris and Kieran. He’d seen enough of these sieges to know.

  “The Scots would not dare chip away at the stone and weaken the building,” he said, moving away from his son and towards his comrades. He called out to them. “What are you looking at?”

  As Paris and Kieran began to point something out to William, and the older men did exactly what they pleased in spite of the warnings, Troy noticed that his brothers, Patrick and James, had made their way over. He glanced at his brothers as they came to stand on either side of him.

  “There is a contingent of Scots bottled in the keep,” he said as Patrick and James approached. “Father is determining the best course of action as we speak.”

  Both brothers looked up to the very tall tower. “Burn them out,” Patrick said. “What is he waiting for?”

  Troy looked to his brother. Patrick was less than two years younger than he was, an enormous man with black hair and blue eyes, a brilliant knight who was the commander of Berwick Castle. It was a great responsibility but Patrick, known by the childhood nickname of “Atty”, was the perfect commander. Skilled and extremely powerful, he was also wise and fair, and Troy adored him. He also respected his opinion. Before he could speak, however, more knights came to join them.

  “What are they waiting for?” Kevin Hage demanded. A very big and powerful knight like his father, he was also young and with that youth came enthusiasm for destruction. “All we need do is lob flaming projectiles onto the roof platform and start a blaze that will chase them out.”