Blythe Gifford – Return of the Border Warrior (страница 2)
There was little else he remembered of his people. And less that he wanted to.
‘I may not be able to name my great-great-grandfather, but I remember well enough, Black Rob, how you tried to teach me the sword. Your own blade slipped and I’ve still a mark on my rib to show for it.’
Some of the ladies at court had found the scar quite appealing.
Rob’s frown did not ease, but he jerked his head to the guards. The gate opened, creaking.
John rode in, searching for something he might recognise. Was that the corner where he and Rob had practised with dagger and sword? This the spot where he and his sister had buried their toys? It felt no more familiar than any of the succession of castles he and the king had slept in over the years.
And no more welcoming.
A slender young woman with flowing red hair stepped into the courtyard. ‘Johnnie?’
Bessie.
His sister, at least, knew him. When he’d left, she had been eight and they had been the youngest together, united against the world.
Now, she was a woman grown.
He swung off the horse and hugged her, letting her squeeze him back, holding the embrace longer than he would have because it gave him something to do. Time to think. And a moment’s illusion that he still belonged here.
‘Ah, Johnnie, I always told them you would come home.’
He held her away so he could see her eyes. Brown, like all the Brunsons except his, but today, red with tears.
He shook his head. ‘Not for long, Bessie.’ Never again. ‘I’m Sir John now. I ride beside the king.’
Rob, down from the wall, clasped his arm, without warmth.
‘I must talk to you,’ John began. ‘The king wants—’
‘Whatever the king wants, I’ll not hear of it now. It will wait until we’ve sent Red Geordie to rest with our forefolk.’
It was always thus. All work, all life would stop for the ‘dead days’ before burial.
Well, that might be the way of the Borders, but the king had no time to wait.
Still, John held his tongue and followed Bessie into the tower. His heavy armour clanked in protest as they climbed the stairs to the central gathering room.
‘I found him in his bed,’ Bessie said, as if she thought John would care, ‘when he didn’t come to break fast. Died in his sleep he did, with no one to receive his last words.’ She whispered, as if to speak aloud would make her cry. ‘Snatched away without a moment to say farewell.’ Her voice shook. ‘Yet peaceful he looked, like he was still asleep.’
‘No death for a fighting man,’ Rob muttered behind him.
At the door to the gathering hall, Bessie paused. ‘I must make his body ready.’ She gave John another brief hug, then climbed the stairs to the floor beyond, where his father lay dead, hovering above him like an evil angel.
She, at least, mourned Geordie Brunson.
They entered a crowded hall, the yawning hearth half filling the outer wall. But instead of sorrowful mourners, he first faced a table surrounded by half a dozen warriors.
‘This is my brother, John,’ Rob announced, with no acknowledgement of his knighthood and no hint that he might have come for any other reason than to mourn his father.
One by one, the men rose to greet him. Toughened by war and hard living, wearing vests of quilted wool and boots of well-worn leather, each man took his hand, took him in, and gave him trust because he was a Brunson. No other reason given and none needed.
The last one, slender shouldered, sitting with his back turned, rose last. And John saw, astonished, that he faced a woman.
Her brown eyes did not meet his with the warmth of the others.
‘This is Cate,’ Rob said. ‘These men are hers.’ He said the words as if it were no more remarkable than blooming heather.
She was tall and spare and blonde as the brown-eyed Viking who, legend said, was the father of all Brunsons. Nose sharp, chin square, cheeks hollow with more than hunger, neither face nor body showed a woman’s softness.
A woman who refused to be one. How did he treat such a woman?
He thrust his hand to shake hers, as he had the others, but she did not reach out, deigning only a curt nod. He returned it, his hand dropping awkwardly to his side as he suppressed his resentment. Then he broke away from her stare, his gaze falling, without deliberate intent, to search for breasts and hips. He found only edges, no curves. No comfort for a man there.
And based on the expressions of the other men, none sought.
‘Are you a Brunson, then?’ he asked. She looked like some cousin, long forgotten.
She lifted her chin and gave a quick shake of her head, ruffling her cropped hair. ‘I’m a Gilnock.’
The Gilnock family were distant kin, descended from the same brown-eyed, bloodthirsty Norseman as the Brunsons—and the only family on the Border more unforgiving than his own.
‘But she’s under our roof now,’ Rob said. Under Brunson protection, as might happen when a child was orphaned.
With a quick motion, she dismissed her men and moved closer to Rob and John.
‘I must speak with you, Rob,’ she said. Her voice surprised John. It was lower than he expected, the words round and deep and shimmering as if she were whispering secrets in the dark. ‘Your father died with his word unkept. What happens now?’
‘He was not your father,’ John retorted, wondering what had been promised. Yet she seemed more a Brunson than he, as if she had donned men’s clothes in order to usurp his place.
‘He was my headman,’ she answered, looking at the new headman when she answered. ‘Sworn to protect my family.’
‘A Brunson gave you his word,’ Rob said, anger edging his words. ‘It will be kept.’
On the border, a man’s word was good after death. At court, it might not be good after dinner.
‘When?’ she asked.
‘After he’s buried,’ Rob answered. ‘It must wait.’ He looked at John, the glance a warning. ‘As must other things.’
Cate caught the look and turned to John. ‘You do not come because of his death?’ Her eyes, assessing him, seemed ready to judge his answer. Not for this woman the warmth he usually felt from her kind. She seemed as cold and fierce as his brother.
Rob might want him to wait for the burial, but his father was dead and the king alive. And impatient. ‘I bring a summons from the king.’
‘You mean from his uncles or his mother or his stepfather?’ Rob looked no more willing to listen than Cate Gilnock.
John understood his hesitation. James, six years younger than John, had been king since birth, but he’d been under the control of others for the sixteen years since then. ‘From none of those. It’s his personal rule, now. No one else’s.’
They sat, silent, thinking of all this meant.
‘A man with much to prove, then,’ Rob said.
Did Rob speak of the king? Or himself?
Cate’s lips twisted in a smirk. ‘So what message is so important that your bairn king would send you here, all dressed in armour, to tell us?’
The harness and badge he’d been so proud to wear had impressed the beauties at court. ‘He’s your king, too.’
‘Is he?’ She shrugged dismissal. ‘I’ve never met him, never sworn my allegiance. My family and my own right arm keep me safe, not your king.’
‘But he will.’ He fought the tug of her voice, a strange combination of scorn and seduction. ‘He commands our men to join him in war against the traitor who has held him captive for the past two years.’
The ‘traitor’ had once been a duly appointed regent, but all things change.
Cate, not Rob, jumped in to answer. ‘And the wee king sent you to tell us, did he? You might have spared your horse. Brunson men will ride for no king of Fife. They ride to fulfil the promise of Geordie the Red and put Scarred Willie Storwick dead in the ground.’
He wondered what the man had done to earn such vengeance, but it mattered not. If that was his father’s promise, it would be broken.
‘The king commands you to fight his enemies, not each other. There’ll be no more raiding and reiving and thieving of cattle and sheep. I come to carry out the king’s will.’
And to earn his place at the king’s side, but that would not sway them.
‘And do you also come to stop the sun from rising of a morning?’ The curve at the corner of her mouth was a poor substitute for a smile.
If a man had said it, John might have answered with a fist to his gab. ‘The king wants—’
‘The king doesn’t rule here.’ Rob’s words were low and hard, his expression the one that had earned him the nickname