Swords and Shields (Reign of the House of de Winter) (17 page)

Even though they were a larger force, the surprise attack against Drake’s forces had initially put them at a disadvantage. Because de Witt’s men were heavily armed, Drake lost six men right away to axes and swords, but very quickly, Drake’s men gained their weapons when they realized that their hosts were, in fact, trying to kill them. When that awareness dawned, the real fight began.

Drake, Cortez, Devon, and James plunged into the battle with daggers and small weapons only at the onset. Their broadswords and bigger weapons were in their personal possessions, which were with the provisions wagons for safe keeping as Drake’s men set up the shelters. At the point of them entering the fray, it was hand-to-hand combat in the worst way, men trying to stab or kick or punch each other, each man trying to assert dominance over the other.

Drake plowed into the group, grabbing de Witt’s men by the hair, pulling heads back to slit throats with the only weapon he had, a small dagger, until he could get to
Lespada
, buried in its scabbard and wrapped up in his rain cloak. Even so, his big fists and razor-sharp dagger did a great deal of damage as he pushed his way through the group, and he wasn’t halfway to his destination against the south wall when he realized that he literally had blood all over him. It covered his hands, splashed on his mail, and smeared up onto his neck where the ends of his hair had been wetted with blood and then it had brushed upon his skin like some macabre painting.

But the blood, the death, didn’t matter because Drake wasn’t one to overanalyze an event. He didn’t particularly worry about what was happening, or why; he only thought about what needed to be done in order that he should emerge alive and victorious. That was his mindset in battle. After retrieving
Lespada
, his usual concern would have been to find de Witt and kill the man for his treachery, but this battle was different – he had Elizaveta to worry over now and it was a struggle not to allow that panic for her safety to overwhelm him. He couldn’t be sure that the fight was only outside the castle; for all he knew, his wife was in danger on the inside of the castle and that was where his thoughts were focused. He had to get into the keep, and to Elizaveta, as if nothing else in the world mattered to him. He feared for her safety above his own.

But it wasn’t such an easy task to retrieve
Lespada
. There was a good deal of nasty fighting going on even though Drake’s men clearly outnumbered de Witt’s men. It seemed that they simply didn’t want to be subdued, so it was a bit of a struggle. At one point, Drake saw Cortez engaged in a vicious swordfight with de Witt but he couldn’t pause to watch it. He finally reached his possessions, tucked into the back of a provisions wagon, and he unsheathed the mighty de Winter weapon that had been in his family for at least one hundred and fifty years, and probably more. The steel had been worked and reworked many times to repair it by the same family of smithies that had served the House of de Winter since the family had first come to England during The Conquest. Therefore, steel that had been worked and re-worked, forged more solidly every time, was so sharp and so strong that it could cut through a human body as easily as knife through butter.
Lespada
was a weapon to be reckoned with.

Drake took a moment to get a good grip on the hilt of his family’s sword. The hilt was big and heavy, originally a rather simple hilt, but over the decades, the eldest sons who had inherited it had added their own marks to the hilt, making it heavier, and a bit more elaborate, with more layers of steel. Drake’s grandfather, Grayson de Winter, had been the first to add a jewel to it and there was a massive sapphire at the very end of the pommel. Drake’s father, Davyss, had then added a massive ruby to one side of the grip and then Drake had added an emerald the size of a quail’s egg to the other side of the grip. Now,
Lespada
bore jewels, making it quite a masterpiece of sword crafting. But no matter how bejeweled it became, it was still a deadly piece of equipment which Drake was about to prove.

Lespada
arched into the morning light, slicing through men and dominating any sword it happened to come into contact with. Being that it was over three feet long, it was hard to miss as Drake used it to remove anyone who stood between him and the keep. He was nearly through the writhing mass of men, which was starting to die down somewhat as his men began to restore order, when one of de Witt’s men undercut him with a dagger and sliced his chin and jaw near his left ear.

Furious, Drake dispatched the man, bleeding all over himself as he did so. He put his hand to the gash, feeling that it wasn’t too terribly deep, but he knew from experience that anything on the face or head would bleed profusely. As he held his hand against the gash in a vain attempt to stop the bleeding and headed for the iron door of the keep, a cry from above caught his attention. In fact, it caught everyone’s attention and when Drake looked up, he could see why.

A woman he didn’t recognize was hanging out of lancet windows overlooking the bailey. He could see her head and most of her torso and as he watched, Elizaveta stuck her head out of the window as well. He was gravely concerned to see his wife but that concern was swept with shock when Elizaveta put a very large knife to the woman’s neck. The woman howled and began weeping hysterically.

“Do you hear me?” Elizaveta bellowed in a tone Drake had never heard from a woman before. It was like a battle command. “De Witt, you will call your men off or I will kill your wife just as she tried to kill me and throw her dead body into the bailey. Do you understand me? Do it now!”

Drake, and nearly everyone else in the bailey, came to a halt out of sheer disbelief. But for Drake, there was something more to it. He was utterly terrified by what he was seeing but, at the same time, he was utterly awed. He simply couldn’t believe it. He heard a groan behind him, perhaps one of fear, and suddenly Devon was running past him.

“Dannie,” he moaned. “I must get to Dannie!”

Drake reached out and grasped his panicked brother. “Nay!” he commanded softly, putting an arm around Devon before the man could get away. “Wait, Dev… wait. Something is happening. Just… wait….”

Devon was looking up into the window that the women were hanging out of and he could catch a glimpse of his blond wife. It took him a moment to realize that she had the weeping woman by the hair, yanking on it firmly. Then he, too, was struck with disbelief at what was transpiring with the ladies. His sweet and lovely Daniella was being quite aggressive with the screaming woman. Devon’s mouth fell open in surprise.

Behind the brothers, de Witt emerged from the mass of men who were no longer fighting very much. Most of them seemed to be very confused with de Witt’s men looking to him for guidance. When Drake and Devon heard the movement behind them, of de Witt emerging from the fray, they turned to see the man walking up to them with Cortez following him, a broadsword to de Witt’s back.

De Witt was weaponless, bloodied, as his gaze was riveted to the window above where his wife was sobbing buckets of tears. He held up his hands.

“Do not hurt her,” he commanded weakly, as a man often does when grabbing for the last tatters of control in a situation. “I beg you not to hurt her.”

Elizaveta didn’t back down. “Then order your men to stop fighting,” she repeated. Then, her gaze moved to Drake as he stood there with blood all over the left side of his face and down his neck. Something in her face changed then; her jaw tightened and she poked the tip of the knife into Lady de Witt’s flesh, drawing blood. As Lady de Witt screamed in pain, Elizaveta roared with as much anger as she was capable of. “Look at my husband! Look what you have done to him, you brutal fools! I should cut this woman to pieces for what you have done to my husband!”

De Witt threw up his arms in a vain attempt to stop her. “Nay!” he bellowed, his voice cracking. “I beg you not to hurt her! She is unarmed!”

“That makes no difference to me!”

De Witt was trying to run at the keep but Cortez had him by the back of the tunic, preventing him from moving forward. “Please, lady,
please
,” he begged. “Tell me what you want of me. Tell me what you want and I shall do it. But do not kill my wife!”

Those were the words Elizaveta had been waiting for.
We must stop this battle and I think I know how.
She had known, indeed. She had planned on the fact that de Witt would do anything if his wife was in danger. Fortunately, her plan had worked, and Elizaveta considered his words a moment before backing off. Victory, for them, was in sight.

“Then ask my husband how he wishes for you to surrender,” she said. “Ask him now before I lose my patience.”

De Witt was trembling; Drake could see it when he looked at the man, standing several feet away. “Do what she says,” he told de Witt in a low tone. “Tell your men to drop their weapons.”

Shaken, de Witt turned to what was left of his fighting force and gave a curt command to disarm. Hesitantly, and still feeling the surge of battle in their veins, some resisted dropping their weapons while others let them immediately clatter to the ground. When Drake saw that his men were picking up discarded weapons and beginning to corral de Witt’s defeated men, he turned his attention up to Elizaveta.

“His men are surrendering, my lady,” he told her in a steady tone. “Bring your prisoner down here and release her to her husband.”

Elizaveta gazed down on him, her expression flickering with sorrow. “Are you badly injured?” she asked. “What have they done to you?”

He could see how concerned she was and it touched him deeply. He’d had women show concern for him before, but it had never mattered to him. But Elizaveta’s concern greatly mattered. He smiled faintly.

“It is hardly worth mentioning,” he said. “I will heal completely.”

He had hoped those words would ease Elizaveta, but they didn’t. She still had the knife to Lady de Witt’s throat. She took her gaze from Drake, frowning at the men below her, still clearly unhappy in spite of the fact that men were bending to her demands. There was something left in her, some kind of fight that wouldn’t give in so easily. She had been righteously offended, her husband had been injured, and now it was her time to speak. When she did, it was to de Witt.

“You fool,” she snarled at the man. “So this is how you conduct yourself? The king’s missive told you that my husband had married the East Anglia heiress and your wife, being born a de Mandeville, decided that she would avenge generations of her family by killing me. Is that the idiotic scheme she came up with? To kill me while you ambushed my husband and his men?”

A great deal was suddenly coming clear as to the reasons behind the attack, although none but a few understood the bad blood between du Reims and de Mandeville. Drake, however, was one of those who clearly understood; feeling a good deal of rage in his veins, Drake looked at de Witt.

“Is
that
what this was all about?” he asked the man. “You had prepared this ambush because your wife is a de Mandeville and she wanted to kill my wife?”

De Witt stood his ground. “Your wife’s family has made my wife’s family miserable for many years,” he said. “My wife’s intention was to avenge her family’s honor, as Lady de Winter has said. But now that is not to be and I want my wife returned to me, unharmed. You may do as you wish with me when we are reunited.”

Drake was truly at a loss, outraged and genuinely baffled by the man’s position. “So you would let your wife murder mine?” he asked, increasingly outraged. “Is that why you allowed that she should go into the keep without escort and find your wife inside?”

“It is.”

Drake had to make a conscious effort to keep his jaw from dropping. “But I serve Edward, as do you,” he pointed out. “We are allies. You would listen to your wife’s foolish prejudices over your duty to your king?”

De Witt simply looked at him; there was no point responding to what they both knew was truth. Drake grunted as realization dawned, looking to Devon and Cortez and seeing his outrage reflected in their eyes. It was a ridiculous and vain situation that had caused this chaos. Drake’s fury bloomed and he handed
Lespada
to Devon, moved over to where de Witt was standing, and threw a massive fist into de Witt’s jaw.

The tall knight went sailing backwards with the force of the blow, losing three teeth in the process. Overhead, Lady de Witt screamed anew when she saw the blow against her husband.

Twitching with rage, for hitting the man had not satisfied him in any way as he had hoped, Drake turned his attention back up to the window. “Elizaveta,” he commanded in a tone that did not invite refusal. “Bring that woman down here now.”

Elizaveta didn’t hesitate. She and Daniella pulled Lady de Witt out of the window by her hair and shoved the weeping, struggling woman down the spiral stairs and into the chamber with the big hearth and the dirt floor. The gate that led to the small entry room was locked and Elizaveta held the big knife to Lady de Witt’s ribs as Daniella unlocked the gate. Then, they pushed the woman through, all the way out into the bailey where she broke free of them and ran to her husband, who was just starting to pick himself up from the dirt. As the pair huddled together, Drake went immediately to his wife.

His gaze upon her was something Elizaveta couldn’t quite understand; there was fear there but there was also gratitude.
Appreciation.
She definitely saw appreciation. She also thought she might have seen respect and approval, but barely knowing the man, it was difficult to tell. When he spoke, his voice was oddly hoarse.