Shadowmoor (de Lohr Dynasty #6) (8 page)

Liselotte was thrilled at the prospect of accompanying the man into town. But she looked at her father for permission first and, when the man gave her a brief nod, it was all she could do not to gush like an excited fool.

“If you think I would be of help, my lord,” she said. “I am happy to go with you. Only….”

“Only what?”

“I do not leave the fortress too often,” she said honestly. “My father is afraid that Lord Bramley’s men will capture me and take me back to him.”

Daniel shook his head firmly. “That will not happen with me as your protector,” he said. “Therefore, you will be ready at dawn to depart. We have a good deal to do tomorrow and I do not want to delay.”

“Can I go?” Gunnar begged, jumping up and down. “Please? Can I go?”

Etzel put his hand on the boy’s head. “You have been away from home for weeks yet you want to leave us again so quickly?”

Gunnar was still jumping up and down. “To town, Papa, to
town
!”

Etzel could never refuse the boy. There was so little in his life to be excited about and especially as of late. He could hardly deny that hopeful face. He grunted reluctantly.

“Very well,” he said. “But you will not be a burden and you do everything your sister and Sir Daniel tell you to do. Do you understand?”

Gunnar was nodding eagerly, now running for the hall entry where the rain and thunder still pounded outside.

“Come on!” he stopped at the door and turned to yell for Daniel. “Come with me!”

Daniel wriggled his eyebrows at the eager lad and, begging his leave of Etzel and Liselotte, followed the happy boy to the door, soon disappearing out into the rain. Etzel and Liselotte stood there long after Daniel had disappeared, both of them looking at the open entry door, both of them pondering the drastic course their future had taken. It was a lot to absorb.

“Do you think he means what he says, Papa?” Liselotte asked with concern. She turned to her father. “It seems too good to be true. Do you really think he means to help us with Bramley?”

Etzel shrugged in a gesture that suggested he really didn’t have an answer. “I would like to think so,” he said, turning back to the table where the ale was. “He has made a lot of promises. It would be good if he kept them, for your sake.”

“What about yours?”

Etzel shook his head. “I have lived my life, Leese,” he said. “But you are young and beautiful. You still have your life ahead of you. It would be good if Sir Daniel really was the answer to our prayers.”

Liselotte sighed. “We have been so long without hope,” she said quietly. “Mayhap God has been testing us. Mayhap He has sent Daniel to finally give us hope.”

“Do you recall the story of Daniel in the Bible, taught by the priests?”

Liselotte nodded. “He was saved by God from the lions.”

Etzel expression softened, his gaze turning distant. “Mayhap God has sent Daniel to save
us
.”

“Do you think Daniel de Lohr is a messenger from God?”

Etzel collected his half-empty cup. “I like to believe in divine assistance,” he said. “Whether or not de Lohr is divine, he has nonetheless been sent to help us. He is an answer to our prayers. That is what I choose to believe.”

“Then we are to trust him?”

“We have no alternative but to go on faith. What is left for us if we do not trust him?”

He seemed rather firm about it. As Etzel finished what was left in his cup, Liselotte went to see to what was left over from the meal so she could prepare for tomorrow’s feeding. All the while, however, her thoughts lingered on Daniel de Lohr and his timely appearance. Was he really sent from God? Her father seemed to think so. But Liselotte was a bit more pragmatic.

Time would tell the tale if Daniel de Lohr really meant what he said.

She very much hoped that he did.

CHAPTER THREE

The next morning

G
od… that cheap,
horrible ale was the stuff of nightmares.

It always gave him the most terrible headaches the next day following a binge, an ache that traveled all the way down his neck and into his chest. His stomach, ruined from years of drinking anything he could get his hands on, was shriveled with sharp pains this morning.

Sharp pains like the ones that filled his very soul.

Brynner l’Audacieux had managed to stumble out of bed well before dawn, just as the rains from the previous night were trickling off. With a throbbing head, he had staggered out of the vault where he slept, the sub-level room beneath the keep that he kept only for himself, and stumbled out into the ward. His first trip had been to the kitchens to see if there was any drink to be had, as his father tended to move it around, hiding it from a son who kept hunting for it, and the best he was able to come up with was half a jug from the night before. It had been enough. Taking it with him, he grabbed most of the bread left from the previous evening and ate it, using the cheap ale in the jug to wash it down.

The guards at the gate, huddled around a fire for warmth, had seen him coming and knew the routine. It was usual with him. They already had the gate open enough to allow him to pass by the time he arrived and he slipped through the gate and out into the moors beyond before the sun even rose. It was dark and wet and near freezing, but Brynner didn’t care much. The cold seemed to be the only relief for his head on days such as this.

The storm from the previous night had cleared out, leaving wet and soggy land in its wake. The ground was heavy with scrub, muddied down and mashed, and the cold wind that blew up from the east had icy fingers that dug into a man’s chest, causing him pain every time he drew in a breath. Brynner was dressed in what he was usually dressed in; a heavy tunic, breeches made from leather, and a cloak that had once been fine and expensive. All three of those items were heavily worn and extremely dirty because Brynner never took them off. He slept in them, and drank in them, and at times had vomited in them, so they were beyond the normal filth of man.

In fact, he’d worn the same clothing for the past three years, ever since he’d gone to meet his lover and she’d told him of her plans to marry another. He’d never been able to change out of them, wearing them like a weighty suit of armor to remind him of that day his heart had been ripped from his chest. He needed those dirty clothes in a way he couldn’t describe, not only as a reminder of that terrible day but also as penitence.

With every step of the boots that had holes in them or every whiff of that horrific smell of his tunic, he was reminded of Maud. Only in moments like this, when he wasn’t drunk, did the pain and the smells weigh heavily on him, so heavily he could scarcely move. It was the drink that allowed him to forget. Drink had become a weapon against those memories and the punishment those dirty torn clothes brought about.

That was Brynner’s life these days. He wasn’t particularly tall but he was still strongly built, his battered body still holding some semblance of its former shape in spite of the fact that he was slowly trying to kill himself. He had the same bronze-colored hair that his sister had and his features were quite handsome still, although drawn and shaded from the self-abuse.

In moments of lucidity, however, he inevitably thought of his lovely Maud and her reasons for leaving him. Her father had insisted she marry another man, one of his choosing; a man who brought great wealth and an alliance to her family. Maud hadn’t wanted to marry him but she had been duty-bound, leaving Brynner, her love, a burned-out shell.

Her duty, his curse.

Brynner alternated between hating her and forgiving her. Sometimes he did both; he hated her sense of duty, the one that had cost him everything. He hadn’t been strong enough to pull himself out of his funk and move on with his life. All he could do was try to hide from the pain and pray that, some morning, he simply never woke up.

But that hadn’t happened yet, so on this dreary and cold morning he was forced to face that pain once again. He stumbled away from the gates of Shadowmoor, out into the darkened moor beyond, his thoughts turning from Maud to where he would get his next drink. His father kept ale around the castle, and sometimes even wine, but he tried to hide it from his son who seemed to have an uncanny ability to sniff it out. Brynner wasn’t beyond stealing ale or wine from local farmsteads, either, which he had done numerous times. That was why he always carried a dagger with him, in case he needed to threaten a farmer into turning over what alcohol he had.

Stumbling down the muddy path that led to the northeast, Brynner could see the landscape below the moor as the sun began to rise, all soft green patches and rolling hills. Fingers of gentle colors began to tint the horizon, creating stark contrast against the clouds that were moving their way east after the storm that had blown through overnight. He turned to look behind him somewhat, towards the southeast, where the horizon seemed to go on forever, and noticed figures on the road just below the moor.

They looked like specks with legs from where he was, men on horseback, but he could see them making the turn to the small road that led up to Shadowmoor. There were four of them that he could see, thundering up the road that was still muddy and slick from the rains.

Since the moors of Rombald weren’t well-traveled, only men with particular business for what was upon the moor would be traveling up the narrow road, and especially so early in the morning. Curious, and somewhat concerned, Brynner turned to glance at Shadowmoor, which was perhaps a mile or so behind him. He’d wandered far this morning as he’d thought of Maud and days gone by. He was fairly certain he couldn’t make it back to Shadowmoor’s protective walls before the men on horseback reached him, so he returned his attention to his original direction, northeast, and began to walk quickly through the muddy path. There was a collection of boulders not far away where he knew he could find shelter of sorts, a hiding place to conceal himself from the riders. Clearly, he did not know their purpose, but the knight in him, the highly-trained warrior he liked to keep well-buried, told him to make himself scarce until the riders passed.

It was also true that he wasn’t oblivious to what had gone on at Shadowmoor over the past four years. A local lord by the name of Bramley wanted Brynner’s sister as well as Shadowmoor. Brynner had been away at Okehampton Castle when it all started and his father had never mentioned anything about it until Brynner had returned home and by then, Brynner didn’t care about anything other than himself. Bramley’s oppression hadn’t mattered in his world and he’d promptly hid himself in the vault while Shadowmoor, and his family, suffered.

But Brynner stayed clear of all of that, only concerning himself with getting enough drink, but in moments like this, when he was lucid, and alone, he was concerned with four riders heading for Shadowmoor because they could quite possibly be Bramley’s men. He knew they patrolled the area around Shadowmoor but he’d always managed to stay clear of them. This would, again, be one of those times. He planned to hide.

So he took off as fast as he could, heading towards the boulders that would shield him from the riders. Everything was so wet that it was difficult for him to gain traction in the mud and in his worn and ragged boots, it was even more difficult. He was sliding everywhere, trying to run, falling on the thick and wet heather that covered the moor and then picking himself up to continue on his path.

Before drink had swamped him, Brynner had been very fast indeed but the advent of alcohol every day for the past three years had dulled his senses. He wasn’t as quick as he used to be. Struggling and slipping, he continued towards the boulders.

Unfortunately, his antics had attracted the attention he was trying to avoid. As the sun rose against the stark moor, it wasn’t difficult to see something moving along the hillside, scrambling across the wetness left from the rains. The four men who had been heading up the side of the hill had seen him from afar and had closed in on him easily. Brynner had no idea they were upon him until he heard the thunder of hooves and, by that time, it was too late.

Panicked, Brynner tried to scramble up part of the hill that was too steep for the horses to go but he couldn’t get his footing and ended up tumbling down. He rolled down the hill, ending up in the center of the four horsemen.

Covered in mud, with a throbbing head and now with fear in his heart, Brynner sat up, his baleful expression on those surrounding him.

“What do you want?” he demanded. “Why do you bother me?”

The man in the lead was big and well equipped. He rode a stunning roan warmblood and he was dressed as a knight but he wasn’t wearing a helm. None of the men were, which was strange considering the amount of weaponry they had with them. They looked as if they were ready for battle. The man on the roan peered down at Brynner, on his arse in the mud.

“Why are you running?” he asked in a heavy French accent. “What are you doing up here, far away from civilization?”

Brynner scowled. “That is not your affair.”

The Frenchman sat back in his saddle, pondering the reply, before looking around, back over his left shoulder to see Shadowmoor up in the distance as it perched upon the crag like a great beast of prey. He scratched his head.