Knight's Blood (31 page)
Authors: Julianne Lee
Tags: #Kidnapping, #Science Fiction, #Fantasy fiction, #Married people, #Scotland, #General, #Fantasy, #Children - Crimes against, #Fighter pilots, #Fiction, #Time travel
Alex grunted, and had to admit even to himself she probably wouldn’t say that to Trefor. Maybe. He couldn’t figure out what Lindsay was doing with that elf in the first place; he certainly couldn’t be sure of anything else about her anymore. The nightmares he’d once had of the two of them together, sent to him by Nemed, came to mind and he shut his eyes to keep them out. He said, “Just trust me; there are things you don’t know and don’t want to know.”
“Then I’ll go. I do want to know, and I’ll find out what those things are.”
Alex frowned at him. “Why do you think she wants to be rescued?”
“I don’t care what she wants. It’s what I want.”
“You want to find your mother shacked up with a slimy old elf?”
Trefor let go a short bark of laughter. “That’s what you think? She’s left you for Nemed?”
“That’s nothing. For a while I thought he was your father.” The look of shock on Trefor’s face made him add, “Until I met you and saw how much you look like a MacNeil.”
“I look like you.”
“More like my brother. You’re a ringer for him. It’s . . . eerie.”
Trefor didn’t seem to have a reply for that, but cleared his throat and said, “Well. In any case, I’m going to find her. I think you should go with me.”
“She won’t want me to find her.”
“You don’t know that.”
Of course Alex didn’t know that. But even more he didn’t want to take the risk of finding her and learning for a certainty she had left London to be with Nemed. This way he could harbor a tiny corner of belief she had gone in search of Trefor by herself. Desperate hope that it was, he needed to cling to it. “I just want to let it be. There’s nothing I can do for her.”
“
You don’t know that.
You don’t know that she isn’t a prisoner. She could be held against her will.”
You don’t know that.
You don’t know that she isn’t a prisoner. She could be held against her will.”
“Lindsay? Right. Not unless she was locked up in chains.” Or a cage. Nemed had put her in a cage once and threatened to kill her. How she could be working for him now confused the hell out of him.
“I think you owe it to her—and to yourself—to find out. Never mind what you owe to me.”
“Why do you give a damn whether I go?”
Trefor’s reply to that was immediate and matter-of-fact, and entirely reasonable in a Machiavellian sort of way. “You have more men than I do. There could be a fight. I need you there.”
“I told you, let go of the John Wayne thing.”
“If this guy is as nasty as you say, and if these raiders are the land pirates they appear to be, then there will be a fight if we get close. We run a risk. I want backup. I need your help to contact my mother and make sure she’s all right. You’re her husband and my father; I think you have an obligation to the both of us.”
Alex considered that. Truly he did have an obligation to these two who were now his closest relations, but could it take precedence over his duty to Robert and James?
While he was thinking, Trefor added, “You want to split off from James. Tell him you see a necessity to patrol. You don’t have to tell him which direction you’re going, because you’ll be going back and forth, sending dispatches by single rider. You don’t like Douglas; you should jump on this opportunity to cut loose before he figures that out.”
Alex had to smile at the thought of James ever giving a rat’s ass whether anyone liked him. Nevertheless, he decided he liked the idea of splitting from the main army and said, “Fine. I’ll go to James. We’ll head north as soon as I can talk him into assigning us to patrol.”
Trefor nodded. “Good. I expect we’ll break away tomorrow.”
“I expect so.”
Without further discussion, Trefor ducked out the tent flap, leaving Alex to turn over in his mind what he thought he might find once he located Lindsay. Images tumbled in his head, and his gut soured. It surely wasn’t going to be pleasant.
But he told himself he’d been wrong about her before and it was possible he was wrong again. She’d not deserved his doubts and now might be perfectly innocent of the things he was thinking. He took a deep breath, finished stripping, and resumed his bath, then slipped under the blankets on his pallet. There to dream self-inflicted nightmares of Nemed and Lindsay together.
CHAPTER 16
It took some talking to get James to agree to a patrol. The Earl of Douglas already thought of his army as mobile, and Alex suspected he also liked to always be the first to contact the enemy. That was reasonable; he was as hot for the plunder as anyone else and felt he had more right to it than lesser commanders. Again, reasonable by the standards of the day. Naturally he resisted the idea of sending forty men to wander the countryside on their own, but Alex was insistent. So insistent, his talk skated close to a hint he might simply take his men and go. It was a risk, but he figured he’d known James long enough to have a feel for how much pressure he’d tolerate. He watched the earl’s face as he spoke, alert for signs of too much irritation. It was after several days of nudging that James finally came around to Alex’s way of thinking and acquiesced to the request to split off from the main army.
They headed south, sent a dispatch to James regarding the territory he was approaching, then circled around and struck north and west toward Carlisle. Though they had heard the troupe of An Reubair was raiding the English West March, in these days of slow travel and even slower communication they were still looking for a needle in a haystack. They might pass within a half mile of the raiders and never know it.
Then, tracing up a river unfamiliar to Alex, they came upon a town still smoking. In the midst of a thick forest, a remote village no bigger than a few houses gathered at a slow spot in the river had been burned to the ground and its inhabitants were beginning the process of rebuilding. At the approach of Scottish knights the hundred or so villagers took fright and scurried off to the woods. At a command from Alex, his and Trefor’s forty men approaching up the riverside went into action.
“Get one, bring him back,” said Alex, and Henry Ellot spurred away to cut off one of the men fleeing like a slow sheep running after a herd. His horse blocked the man’s path, and when the villager tried to dodge around, Henry wheeled his mount to block him again.
“Halt!” shouted Henry.
The man obeyed, tensed to run at the first opportunity. He looked beyond Henry and waved away a small boy who shouted at him from the forest edge. The boy hesitated, then ran into the woods before any of Alex’s men could catch him. The villager turned to Henry. “We’ve nothing more to take.” The fellow’s voice quavered with terror.
Henry said, “That’s plain to see. My master wishes to speak with you. We want to know who was here. Talk only. It’s information we need.” He nodded toward Alex to indicate where he wanted the man to go. “Tell him, and know you speak to the Earl of Cruachan.”
A light of surprise kindled in the man’s face, and he looked over at Alex, who waited patiently with Trefor at his left and Hector to his right. It was probably the first time anyone had ever expressed concern over the predicament of the border families, and particularly the English villager would be surprised at benign interest from a Scottish earl. He glanced back at Henry, then turned to approach Alex with a trepidation born of long abuse from the north.
At a respectful distance within earshot, he stopped and went to one knee. “My lord,” he said in a tone he might have used to speak to the king himself. He even seemed to be trembling. Alex may have been Scottish and therefore the enemy, but this guy obviously was interested in preserving his own skin in the midst of the earl’s loyal men.
“Stand and look at me.” Alex wanted to see his eyes, to know his mind. The detainee stood, and Alex continued, pointing with his chin at the destroyed houses. “Who did this?”
The man shrugged and shuffled his feet. “We cannot say. I don’t know who they were.”
“Describe them to me.”
“I saw little.” Fear rose to his eyes that he might not have enough information to please the earl.
“Tell me what you saw. Be truthful and thorough if you want to rejoin your family and friends.”
The man paled, a feat Alex would have thought impossible, for the fellow had been deathly pale and distraught to begin with. Then he said, “They were Scottish.”
Alex snorted, and lowered his head to peer into the man’s face with disgust. “I know that. Be kind enough to tell me something new. I know you can do better than that. Give it some effort.”
The villager’s feet shifted in distress. “They were merciless. We did not resist them, but they burned our homes regardless. They took things they could not have truly wanted; we had no silver, nor anything of real value except to ourselves.”
“Your livestock. They wanted the animals.”
“Aye, and they burned all that would burn. You can see for yourselves there’s naught left but ashes.”
Alex found it difficult to imagine Lindsay participating in that sort of senseless destruction. It sickened him. “Go on. How many were there?”
“I did not stop to count them, and cannae count so high in any case.”
“Were there as many as these you see before you?”
The villager looked around at Alex and Trefor’s knights, and said, “Aye. As many, but likely no more.”
“What else can you tell me? Anything, any small detail?”
The villager plundered his memory and opened his mouth to say something. He closed it, hesitating to say what was on his mind, thought some more, then finally said, “One of them was of the fey.”
Alex did not move a muscle of his face. He said, “You believe in faeries?”
“Do you not, my lord?” Many didn’t, for fear of those who would point the finger of accusation for heresy.
“Aye, I do.” Alex had to admit that he did believe the wee folk existed, and had little use for those who would deny the patently true. “So one of them had pointed ears? Or did he do magic before your eyes?”
“’Twas the ears. I saw one of the riders had ears that poked through his hair.”
“Black hair?”
The villager shook his head. “Fair, my lord.”
It wasn’t Nemed, then, and Alex’s gut untied some. He said, “Continue. Did you see a woman?”
The villager blinked. “How do you know of her?”
“Just tell me; was she there?”
“Aye. I thought her a vision, or a ghost perhaps, but since you tell me you know of such a creature then I expect she could be real. She was tall and thin, with hair longer than the men, spilling from below her helm and over her shoulders.”
“What color hair?”
“Black. And she was as cold a killer as the rest. She fought like a madman, with a sword as keen and merciless as anyone might see on a battlefield. And her shouts were not those of a man. They were a high trilling, as have been reported by those returning from the crusades. They say the women of Islam sound thus. Mayhaps she was a warrior from southern realms. Them and their strange ways.”
Alex knew the noise he was talking about, having been to the Middle East, but couldn’t associate it with Lindsay. If this warrior was his wife, she’d changed in ways he didn’t understand. Ways he wasn’t sure he wanted to understand. He asked, “She killed unarmed villagers?”
The man shook his head, and Alex was again relieved. “We were all too frightened to let her near. Nor any of the other rogues, neither. I can’t say as we were eager to die for our livestock, and most ran away rather than face such a harridan.”
Alex glanced around at the surrounding forest. “Which direction did they take in their retreat?”
Readily the man pointed upriver. “Thataway. You can see their tracks along the bank, though I expect they’ll find a rocky place to confound those who would follow.”
No doubt. It was a standard tactic when trying to shake pursuers, even when the victims of a raid were unlikely to give chase.
He was done here. He waved away the villager and said, “You may go.”
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