by Sophia James
Andrew in his usual fashion of quick thinking pulled it back down, shielding the others from such notice. Marc’s blood ran down his hands.
Her options narrowed. If she ran out as one who might heal the wound, would he be safer? Or in more danger? Would Andrew cut his losses and call in death as the certain way to still a wagging tongue despite her earlier heartfelt pleadings? Already she could see Ian circling to one side of the group.
Without breath she counted.
One.
Two.
Three.
Seconds that he was not dead. The soldiers began again to walk and Marc did not falter, his fingers again at the crook of Andrew’s arm, and his lips moving as though he spoke. What did he say? she wondered, as Andrew’s hand stole to the hilt of the knife at his belt.
Undercurrents. Refuge and danger mixed in the face of desperate men who shepherded an enemy towards the inner wall. Once through the barbican he would be lost from view, the horses waiting in the outer bailey. Taking in breath, she held it and felt pain wind its way in a heavy ache right down to the pit of her stomach.
* * *
He still lived! Lord in Heaven, he had expected a knife through his ribs long before he felt the wind from the outside world on his face or the smell of horse flesh in his nostrils. Andrew’s influence probably. When he had gone down against the stone he had not expected to get up again, but then neither had he envisaged seeing the secrets of the layout of the Dalceann keep.
Even the castles in France had not been as secure with their defensive merlons and crenels and thick round concentric walls. Admiration clambered over pain.
He was bleeding badly. His tongue felt the damage to his lip, a soft mass of flesh hanging to one side.
When the portcullis shut behind them, iron chains jangling with the effort, Andrew removed the blindfold and the light flooded in where darkness lingered, hurting his eyes. He squinted against the brightness.
‘We will clean ye up when we get to the valley stream. As it is, you look like you have been in a week-long stramash.’
Marc didn’t speak, his mind taking in all the undulations of the land before the castle. Pits and holes and ditches. For the first time he saw just how close the sea was, cliffs caught at the very edge of the outer wall, and falling to rocks below.
The Firth entrance Isobel had spoken of when she had presumed him unconscious would be there somewhere, too, probably within the small promontory of land jutting from the middle.
Unassailable!
Unless you had some inside knowledge of the place. Perceiving interest from Andrew, he turned and smiled.
‘I was lucky to survive such a sea.’ Any topic to deflect his interest in the fortifications of Ceann Gronna!
‘Here are the horses.’ His captor’s voice held only the frustration of a long ride and Marc was relieved to have been given his own steed so that he was not forced to share the saddle with another.
He wondered what sort of a rider Isobel Dalceann was, shaking away the answer with his own impatience.
She was probably as gifted at the art of horsemanship as she was at swimming.
And kissing!
‘Lord above,’ he muttered as Andrew cut his bindings with a verbal warning to behave. Hoisting himself on his mount, he threaded the reins through his numb-sore hands so that he would maintain his seat even in a gallop.
* * *
Isobel held the ring with the silver marks of David the Second in her palm, the stamp of the smithies who had fashioned the piece written in the smooth inside circle.
Everything the stranger had had on his person was of inordinate value: his clothes, the braided bracelet, the jewel-encrusted dagger and this bauble, with its official royal standard burnished by time.
‘Enough!’ Her voice pierced the silence around her, echoing in the stone as she moved her chest a foot from its normal standing place.
Carefully she pushed in the flagstone behind it and watched it turn on an axis. The few pieces of dust and mortar that fell she wiped up with a wet cloth from the ewer, remembering her husband’s insistence that she always do so.
Behind in the cavity the gold lay, bands of jewels and sturdy goblets stacked on leather.
The French gold with two coins that she had never seen there before balanced on the top!
Fear rose quickly as she perceived the unexpected breach of security. She should never have opened it with someone else in the room, even if she had thought him unconscious at the time. Swearing beneath her breath at the ease in which her safe-keeping had been violated, she looked inside.
What was missing? Sorting through the treasure she saw none was gone and that it had only been added to. Lifting the silver coins, she read the inscriptions in French.
Marc. What else had he known? She remembered the blindfold falling askew when he had tripped and her words with Andrew when she thought him to be unconscious. Perhaps he had over-listened?
She had spoken of the sea entrance and of the sacking of Ceann Gronna.
Clever. Too clever. A man of two kings and the scars of many battles to prove it.
Her finger traced the outline of her lips and she swore. Had he distracted her purposefully with such a sensual assault and had she just let the serpent out of Eden?
Chapter Six
‘If you should want for warmth tonight, Marc, my rooms are only a moment or so from your own.’
The promise in the eyes of the sensual Duchess of Kinburn made him step back.
‘I do not have the inclination to kill your husband should he find out where you have strayed, Lady Anne,’ he said, prying her fingers loose from the fabric of his sleeve. ‘And neither do I have the time. Our king is waiting to speak with me in his chamber.’
‘Ahh, but you have been here in Edinburgh for all of a month, my lord, and alone at nights by the numerous accounts I have heard. Surely there is one woman here who would take your fancy?’ She leaned into him so that the front of her bejewelled kirtle fell low on the line of her generous bosom, her flaxen hair tumbling across alabaster skin.
Beautiful, Marc mused, but the idea of bedding her did not raise his appetite even a little. The thought concerned him as he turned, striding through the
antechambers of the king with purpose.
A month since he had arrived here from the Queen’s Landing ferry. A month since he had seen Isobel Dalceann with terror in her eyes as she had given him the blindfold, her hands shaking with the effort of it.
Marc had kept quiet about his time in the Ceann Gronna keep because in the labyrinth that was politics in Scotland he had discovered the lengths David was prepared to go to in order to quell the barons who would not swear allegiance to the Crown.
As the Dalceann clan had not.
He had only been in the Scottish Court for one hour before he first heard the name of the reviled chatelaine of Ceann Gronna mentioned.
‘Unmarriageable Isobel with the ugly scarred face.’ He wondered how close the person who had circulated this rumour could have got to her, because once you saw the gold in her eyes you understood the depth of everything else that she was and her disfigurement paled into insignificance.
Lord, the anger in him hummed at such vacuousness and he ran his finger down the raised line of flesh on the inside palm of his right hand. An oath of protection given in blood played two ways and he could feel the ghost of her here walking down the corridors of power and laughing. At him and at them, the wind off the sea to her back, lifting her hair into life.
God. She was more real to him in memory than the numerous women at court pushing themselves upon his notice and it worried him.
‘Sir Marc.’ King David sat before him on a chair decorated in gold embroidery. In his hand he held a document that curled down to his lap, scrawled with fine penmanship.
Beside him the Earl of Huntworth and the Lord of Glencoe hovered, both sipping at wine from expensive silver-stained glassware. When he was handed one similar by a passing servant
, he knew the liquid to be Rhenish and very fine.
‘Sire.’ His bow was deep. Kings had their own brand of arrogance, after all, and he had had plenty of practice in knowing that even one who intimated they were a friend needed careful management.
‘I was just telling Glencoe and Huntworth that Feudal Law and Patriarchal Law have their own cause of friction.’
‘As double allegiances are often apt to,’ Marc replied, the rival ownership of land a constant source of conversation amongst a court bent on the rights of a God-ordained king. A worm of worry turned inside him as the Dalceann charter of sovereignty came to mind. Edinburgh had been abuzz with the topic of Isobel Dalceann and her keep since his arrival. The woman was a witch and a sorceress according to some and the taker of men’s minds and will according to others. He had heard of the campaigns mounted against her and of the ineffective sieges laid.
The work of the Underlord, it was whispered, when yet another commander returned home empty handed and broken spirited. Lady Dalceann was in league with the Underworld and with the Forces of Darkness. She had already buried one husband, after all, and it was well known that her father had never been sane. A hag and a hex. An occultist and a necromancer who gained her power from Satan himself. Some said it was the Devil who had marked her in the dead of night, his nails scratching ownership into her cheek as she slept dreaming of him. She wore one of his teeth around her neck, too, it was stated, yellowed with age. Others had told him it was her talisman and her power and if it could be removed nothing of her earthly body would remain. Like smoke, it would disappear back to the realms that had spawned her.
Such information Marc stored, as the woman who had swum through a raging sea at the height of a storm to save lost travellers became explained through the eyes of others.
Dislocated by such wrath and superstition, no wonder Isobel Dalceann was wary and alone. He had said nothing of her to the king.
Lies and secrets.
In Burgundy he had been brought up on such falsity so the hiding of such an omission was not difficult. He could hardly remember a time when he had showed an emotion to another that he had not wished to. He caught his face sometimes in the mirror in passing, a mask of what might be expected from him and reflecting back only that which was expedient and pragmatic. As a youth he had long practised the difficult knack of placing humour both on his lips and in his eyes at will.
His grip tightened around the fragile glass just to the point of breakage. Control again. Seamless and easy.
‘They must be taught a lesson, of course. Forfeiture is the penalty for such rife disobedience.’ David’s face took on the hue of a monarch in high dudgeon.
‘And death,’ Archibald McQuarry said, the taste of revenge darkening his reply.
Marc had heard that the Earl of Huntworth’sbrother had died in the siege of Ceann Gronna two summers prior and realised that there was more at stake than just the enforcement of law.
He placed his drink carefully down on the nearest table.
‘You speak of the Dalceann clan, I presume?’ His voice sounded exactly as he wanted it to.
‘Indeed we do,’ the king replied. ‘The vassals of Ceann Gronna keep cannot be left to their own devices, for the northern barons are restless in their own quests. Any sense of uncertainty or loss of monarchical power here in Edinburgh might incite them to better enforce their own positions.’
Checks and balances. In the Scottish court of David the Second and in the French court of Philip the Sixth, power had a way of dividing some men almost as certainly as it had of uniting others.
Greed, hunger and want.
The universals of the honourable knight? Sometimes Marc thought that it was easy, after all, to allow humour into one’s eyes.
The deep scar on his back ached with the pain of war and the wound still healing on his arm prickled.
A new battle and this time with the name of a weak and desperate monarch at stake. David would make certain that he did not lose and the Dalceann keep would be sacked as a reminder to others of the dangers inherent in any flagrant disobedience to the Crown.
Even the natural contours of Ceann Gronna’s defence would not save it. The trebuchet and mangonels would be numerous in a mission that the Scottish Crown could ill afford to fail at.
‘You will leave in the spring with a contingency of two hundred men. You will lead the army, de Courtenay, and these two shall be your commanders. This is what I wish.’
The sour face of Huntsworth told him that the plan was far from the earl’s liking.
‘Indeed.’ Marc raised his glass to such a venture. ‘To victory, then,’ he toasted.
‘And to the end of the Dalceann witch and her lawless followers,’ McQuarry added.
Emptying his glass, Marc smiled.
* * *
She stood on the high battlement and looked out. Across the water, the silver of the Firth was calm today.
Almost spring. Already the rowan trees around the chapel door budded, and the birches with their lamb’s-tail catkins were light against bared bark.
Another few weeks and they would be here. David’s men. Two hundred of them if the truth of rumour was proved right, the king’s best commanders at their head.
Isobel gritted her teeth so hard that pain shot into the deeper part of her jaw.
Yet Ceann Gronna held its secrets, too, and the preparations for battle had been lengthy and exhaustive. The water supply could never be poisoned, as it ran from far underground, and because of the sea the castle should escape being surrounded. But there were other weaker points that a strong leader might notice. A belfry would allow attackers to make a direct assault on the battlements and the moat could be easily drained with its downward slope.
Even the sea might work against her if any were to guess of the tunnels.
Marc!
It was all her fault that he could even know of them. Had he told? Would he be cognisant of any such plan of siege? Was he still in Scotland or had he left again for his home with Philip the Sixth in Burgundy?
Below her the cries of children reached up, happy in their games with ball and stick. Their mothers would be behind them somewhere, watching, the swell of their stomachs alluding to other Dalceann children needing the care that their name afforded them.
Her care.
Isobel Dalceann. A leader of the Dalceann clan now that her husband had gone and until another could be found to suit.
Marc. Again his name came against her will, crawling into memory. She stamped down on the turn of lust blossoming inside her, tightening her nipples in the wind.
‘Merci aux saints.’ The words were satisfying and she raised one hand before her to feel the cold of the breeze run across her splayed fingers.
Winter had protected them, but it would soon be gone, and in its place danger lurked in the warmth of the longer days.
They would come. She had known that they would come from the south coast to cross the Firth at Queensferry. From there they would strike east towards Largo to Drumeldrie and Kalconquhar to come down into Ceann Gronna standing proud on the promontory before the road wound its way to the sea. And nobody would come to their aid.
Nobody!
They were outcast by the fear of a rampant Crown and an ill-advised disobedience. Her father had been hot tempered and unwise and for years those who peopled the keep had been paying the price of his impolitic judgements. They could not alter it now, for the dissension had gone too far to hope for a mere reprimand and to a certain extent that was her fault, too.
Two years ago when her father and Alisdair had died she might have changed it, might have swayed a clan tired of penalty to raise the flag and surrender, but ruin brought with it a resilience that refused the liability of forfeiture.
All or nothing, her soldiers had roared when the choice had been put to a test and hands had been raised in compliance.
All or nothing.
She was caught.
By winter there would be no
thing left, she was sure of it.
Cradling the coin on a chain at her throat, the silver warmed. His coin. Hidden. Concealed. She had worn it like this since he had left, instructing the smithy to run a hole through the middle. Often she felt it, her fingers touching the words and the numbers and the etching of a king on horseback that was not her own.
‘Help!’ She whispered the word and then added others. ‘Please help me.’
A useless entreaty, but appeasing, her heart aching with all that she could not be, for her clan, for her castle, for the history of the Dalceann name that had inhabited this land since the very beginning of time.
The anger in her was such that she trembled with it.
Her name on the wind had her turning and she watched as Andrew came towards her, his hat jammed down across thinning hair and a bandage thick around his wrist.
‘Angus said that ye would be here watching. He gave me this to bring you for warmth.’
Passing over a woollen blanket, he waited as she wrapped it about her shoulders.
‘Much more of this weather and the Forth will be crossable even for the big war machines.’ She met his dark eyes without flinching, hating the message that was plain in what she said.
‘Cristina, Euen and Donald have prepared me a place above, Isobel. I am more than ready for what will come.’
At the mention of his children and wife, lost in the Greek Fire during the second siege, a new fury surfaced. She wished she might have responded in the same vein, with Alisdair already gone before her and her heart promised into his care, but the silver coin burnt into the flesh at her breast with its own missive of loss.
She had not lain with a man and felt the earth move her. She had not quickened with child or known her breasts swell with milk. She had not travelled west past Dunfermline or taken a boat to a distant far shore.
It was not enough to die yet!
The scar that crossed her cheek smarted with the waste, ticking heavily to its own rhythm. She knew that Andrew would have seen the movement, but had become adept at the art of not noticing. If she had been the sort of woman who enjoyed the touch of others, she might have lain her fingers on his arm in thanks, but she was not that sort of woman. When the agitation settled she began to speak again.
