Читать книгу Return of the Border Warrior - Blythe Gifford, Blythe Gifford - Страница 12

Cate had a long, hard fight with herself as she ran away from him, back to the tower.

She had not allowed a man so close since …

Since then.

Though the Brunsons were family, they did not treat her as her father had, hugging her goodnight or ruffling her hair in play. Red Geordie was sparing with a hug, even for his own children.

That suited her. Here, she was protected, but no one tried to come too close.

Except this man, who knew no better than to put comforting arms around her shoulders.

She had stiffened at his touch, braced against the fear that would come and steal her mind, afraid she might spear him with her dirk before she could stop herself.

It did come, the fear, her old enemy, then left near as quickly as it came. And if she wounded his manhood and his pride, at least she didn’t leave him bloody.

Because his embrace had not felt like an attack, or even the prelude to a kiss. Instead, held against his chest, she had felt warm and comforted.

Safe.

When had she last felt that way?

Braw Cate, they called her. Cate the Bold. They thought her brave and bold and unafraid because she dressed in breeches and waved a blade.

She was not fearless. She was terrified.

Only with sword and dagger in hand did she dare to face those fears. Only when breeches disguised her womanhood could she rise from bed to face the world. Only with Belde within reach of her hand could she survive the most ordinary day. Going beyond the tower walls, as she must to train him, took every bit of her strength. And when she did, she always kept a clear view and an eye open for the enemy.

Now, this man had touched her and, for a few minutes, she had not felt fear.

And that frightened her more than anything else.

Inside the tower, with Belde at her side, she entered the hall, empty of mourners now. Black Rob sat alone, shrouded by mourning, looking every bit of his name.

Her heart ached for him. For all of them. She had lost a father, too.

She did not often speak idly with Rob. It was not their way. Words were worth no more than air. Necessary for breath, a menace in excess.

But today, she wanted words that might help her understand this tall, lean, blue-eyed stranger who bore the Brunson name. He barely seemed their kin, though he and Bessie shared a certain slant of the eye, an arch of the brow that spoke of pride. And action.

Bessie had told her of the boy, but it was the man she sought to understand, the man who was getting too close, not only to her body.

She hovered beside the table, waiting for Rob to look up.

When he saw Belde, he smiled, the first one she’d seen from him all day. ‘So you’ve let the beast inside again, eh?’

She nodded and sat across the table. The dog lay down beside her, close to the hearth, as if glad to be back.

She let the silence lay a while. Rob waited for her to speak.

‘So,’ she began finally. ‘John comes home.’

Not a question. That would be too difficult. Too personal. It would indicate she cared.

The smile disappeared. ‘Aye.’

Belde stretched out, his yawn a squeak in the silence.

She tried again. ‘He’s been gone a while.’

‘Long enough to change.’

She looked up and his eyes met hers as if he knew why she asked. ‘Change?’

‘He’s no Brunson now.’

She might have agreed an hour ago. Certainly, his tongue had little Brunson in it and his ideas did not belong to the Borders. But he was as stubborn as the rest of his kin, that she was sure. ‘Maybe not, but he shares your blood. Nothing replaces that.’

Ever.

She was here, safe, only because Red Geordie had taken her in. It was their code. It was how they lived. For family. For loyalty. For kin. To be cast away from the family was to be a broken man, wandering alone like the outlaws who prowled the no man’s valley of the Debatable Land.

Even Johnnie did not deserve that fate.

Rob’s shrug said the same. ‘Maybe, but he won’t be here long.’

‘Because you want him to leave?’

‘Because he doesn’t belong.’

She sighed. Johnnie had said as much. Her sense of safety was an illusion. He’d return to court, where he belonged, beside that king he spoke of and surrounded by the kind of ladies who would people such a place.

And she’d still be here. Alone.

Barely able to walk, John watched Cate and her dog disappear through the gate. After he’d recovered, he limped back to the tower, leaving the pony to graze near the west gate. He wondered whether her dagger might have inflicted less damage than her knee.

Understanding women had never been so difficult before. Living beside the king, he had never had to spare an extra thought for them. Women were fickle, accommodating creatures, ever ready to please you, in bed or out.

At least, the women at court were.

His sister was not like that, of course. And his mother had not been, either. Perhaps Border women were as different as their men. He’d ask Bessie about this Gilnock woman. Subtly, of course. He would not want her to feel forced to choose between her brothers.

* * *

He found Bessie in the courtyard’s kitchen hall, kneading a ball of light brown dough with calm, rhythmic strokes and blinking against tears.

Heedless of her sticky hands, he gave her the hug Cate had refused and she rested her forehead on his shoulder. ‘Are you all right, Bessie?’

She shook her head, not lifting it. ‘I knew we would lose him one day. Every time he went on a raid I prepared, but not … not for this.’

Some men prayed to die peacefully in their sleep. Brunsons were not among them.

He patted her back, not knowing what else to do or say, until she raised her head and forced a smile. Then he let her go and she straightened her shoulders, turned back to her breadmaking and pummelled the helpless dough into submission.

He wandered the kitchen, for there was nary a stool to sit on, wondering how to broach the subject of Cate. Finally, inspecting a large hanging carcass of beef as if to give it his approval, he glanced over at her, as if the thought had just occurred to him. ‘That’s a great beast she has, that Cate.’

‘She’s always with him. Close as some are to their kin.’

Closer than others. ‘So she lost her family, then.’

‘Aye.’ She did not look up from shaping a loaf.

‘Was she so …’ What word would capture it? ‘Bloodthirsty?’ Aye, there was the word, though it did not match the woman with fear in her eyes. ‘Even before?’

Before what? Her father’s death or something else?

Bessie was slow to answer. ‘Have you ever known a Borderer who was not?’ she said finally.

No. He had not.

Then why had he thought he could turn her from her own vengeance to young James’s? Now that he was here, he remembered what his years with the king had erased.

An eye for an eye.

It was the only Bible verse his father ever knew.

‘He always hoped you would come home, you know.’ She said it as if she had followed his thoughts.

He shook his head, fighting the longing her words evoked. Only Bessie would think so. A woman could weave entire cloth out of words a man never spoke.

It was too late for peace with his father. And now, Rob was head of the family, as he had been destined since birth. There was no place for John here, being beholden to his brother while they both tried to wrest a living from the same, stingy earth.

Maybe that was why his father had sent him away.

‘You and Rob are not comfortable, are you?’

He started, wondering for a moment whether she really were fey. Quiet, watchful, she had always had a way of reading people, of knowing the things that went unsaid, especially the ones you wanted to hide.

But then, Rob hadn’t bothered to hide his disdain.

‘We’re different, Rob and I.’

‘He’s alone now, Johnnie.’

The thought surprised him. He had assumed his brother knew his place and embraced it. Yet his father and Rob had been the pair, even when Rob was growing. His father had spent hours with his first born, teaching him to ride, to fight, to follow the trails when the moon was dark. Showing him the best places to hide the cattle. Telling him how to deal with a headstrong follower. Neither spoke much. A nod. A shrug. A grunt. These communicated as much as words for a talking man.

A good thing, since both of them had rust in their throats.

And in a battle, he had no doubt, they would have fought with one mind, finishing each other’s thrusts without needing to confer.

And now, Rob sat alone.

Well, that hadn’t sent him to Johnnie’s side, but it explained why he seemed frozen between John and Cate’s tug of war.

A sudden vision stunned him. ‘Does Rob plan to marry?’

A sigh. ‘Marry who?’

‘Cate Gilnock.’ Did every conversation lead to her? He paced abruptly, bumped his head against a hanging pot, then swatted it in irritation. That would explain Rob’s loyalty to her, even beyond that of kin. ‘They seem well matched.’

A slight smile touched Bessie’s lips, as if she were enjoying a joke he did not understand. ‘Too well. There’s no spark there, not the one that a man and woman feel.’

He ignored his relief. Then another thought nagged. ‘Is there someone for you?’ His little sister, grown now. Past time for her to find a husband. ‘Is that how you know about men and women?’

She finished shaping another loaf and lined it up beside the first. ‘I know,’ she said, stopping to face him, ‘because there is no one for me.’

He tried to remember the men who shook his hand yesterday. Fingerless Joe, Odd Jack, the rest. No, none of them would be good enough for her.

He faced Bessie’s future for the first time. What would happen to her? As her older brother, he had protected a shy, delicate, pliable sister. That was not the woman who faced him now. This woman had strength any man would be lucky to have beside him. Strength he had never seen in the women inside Stirling’s walls.

Strength like Cate Gilnock’s.

Unwelcome thought. ‘You could come back to court with me.’

‘Could I now?’ She put her hands on her hips and then presented her plain wool skirt as if to curtsy. ‘And wouldn’t I look so lovely meeting the king?’

‘We could find you something … else.’ What did he know of women’s clothes? How to take them off.

She dropped her skirts and returned to her bread. ‘You’ve a good heart, Johnnie Brunson. Don’t ever think you don’t.’

No. She was right. Court would welcome her no more than his family had welcomed him. The women in Stirling, perfumed and curled and expecting to be waited upon, would barely nod to her. Even the wench carrying the king’s bastard would mock Bessie Brunson, he feared.

‘And so does your brother,’ she said, bringing the talk back to a subject he’d hoped to avoid. ‘If you would give him a chance to show it.’

‘More than he’s given me.’ There seemed no truce between what he wanted and what Rob did.

But he had to find one—a truce with Cate and then with Rob—or he might never see Stirling again.

‘Why don’t you stay with us?’ she said, turning to face him. ‘Come home, Johnnie.’

‘My place is with the king.’ This was not his life. Hadn’t been for years.

‘He wants you to stay, you know.’

He searched her eyes, then shook his head. Only a sister’s foolish hopes. ‘No, he doesn’t.’

He started pacing, ducking the pots this time. He had not come home. And he had not come to the kitchen to talk to Bessie about Black Rob Brunson.

‘Cate says she wants to avenge her father. Is that all?’

‘Storwicks are no friends of ours,’ she said, sounding like the Borderer she was.

‘I mean to Cate. Is there something more?’

Bessie didn’t look up from the dough. ‘Why do you ask?’

Because of the fear she carries with her. Fear she seemed to be able to hide from the rest of them. Was it his to reveal? ‘Her eyes are … haunted.’

‘I thought you said she was bloodthirsty.’

‘Aye. That, as well.’ A contradiction. ‘That’s why I wonder—’

‘Don’t be asking me these questions,’ she said, and he saw a reflection of his mother’s expressions in her raised eyebrows. ‘Cate’s the one you must be asking.’

He sighed. He’d rather confront his surly brother than brave Cate’s knee again.

As he climbed the tower stairs, he heard raised voices in the hall.

‘Now! A raid in his honour. He would want it.’ One of the men. He could not tell which.

John hurried his steps. So soon, they returned to reiving. He heard a murmur, his brother’s steady voice, though he could not make out the words. Would Rob say yes or no?

‘There’s enough of us,’ someone else said. ‘We could go.’

‘The moon’s half-full.’ He could hear Rob clearly now. ‘The night still short.’

‘And our horses swift.’ Cate’s voice. ‘We could get to their tower and back before the dawn. And if Scarred Willie is there—’

As John reached the top of the stairs and entered the hall, he saw Rob surrounded. His brother’s face of strength had few differences from his face of grief, but John could see them. If Rob carried his grief into battle, the enemy would have an advantage.

‘Red Geordie is barely in the ground,’ John called out. ‘Can you not give him a moment’s peace?’

Rob, Cate and half a dozen of his men turned to look at him. Even the dog tilted his head, quizzically.

Cate scowled. ‘It was not peace your father wanted.’

Rob’s face of strength returned. John waited for a scathing rebuke, for he was arguing for the very respect for the dead he’d ignored yesterday, when Rob wanted the same.

‘Johnnie’s right. Return to your homes.’ He looked at John with an expression that might have been warning or thanks. ‘The time for riding will come soon enough.’

Cate’s look said she blamed John, but the men had cattle still in the hills and homes to return to. One by one, they took leave, giving a hand to both brothers, the grip of John’s hand less hearty this time.

Cate’s men, seeing her look, did not shake at all.

No matter. Rob had resisted a call for revenge. Perhaps he was ready to listen to reason instead of vengeance.

‘I would speak to you, Rob,’ he said, when only the three of them remained.

Rob nodded towards the table, and Cate started to follow him.

‘Alone,’ John said.

She looked to Rob. He nodded, a signal for her to leave them.

She glared at John before she did. The woman who had trembled in his arms less than an hour ago had disappeared. Only the defiant warrioress remained.

He searched her narrowed eyes, wondering which Cate was the real one.

She leaned closer. ‘Are you walking straight again, Johnnie Blunkit?’ Her growled whisper was soft, meant only to reach his ears.

Angry heat rushed to his cheeks as she passed him on her way to the stairs.

Johnnie Blunkit. The blue-eyed baby.

Words he had tried to forget ever since he’d left home. Not ones he wanted to remember as he faced his brother.

Although there were only three years between them, Rob, older, had been the favoured one. Tall, strong, taciturn, with their mother’s dark, straight hair and the Brunson brown eyes, he had wielded weapons, but never words.

Words had been left to blue-eyed Johnnie, the gowk in the Brunson nest.

So John learned to talk. Even as a bairn, he told stories and jokes and did tricks to make them laugh. It was the only way he knew to gain their approval.

And sometimes, when Black Rob wielded his sword, or his fists, too quickly, clever John was the one who made peace.

So they sent him away, a gift to amuse young King Jamie. That’s when he knew: all his clever words and funny tricks would never earn his father’s approval. And when he arrived, he discovered a six-year-old king who needed a big brother of his own.

He also found that while a glib tongue might get you out of trouble, it could also get you in—trouble you needed a strong sword to escape. So gradually, he became as his brother’s equal with a blade.

At least, that’s what he told himself as he joined Rob at the table, though to confront his brother with words was little easier than to face his sword. An untrained fighter, clumsy with a blade, could do untold, unintentional damage.

So could a man ignorant of words.

John settled himself across the table. Rob met his eyes, silent, waiting for him to speak.

Perhaps a different argument would sway him. Perhaps he could remove Rob’s dilemma and make the king his only choice. Maybe his brother would be relieved. Even grateful.

‘Have you thought, Rob, about what happens after you hunt down Willie Storwick?’ This was not swapping stolen cattle. Everyone on the Borders did that. Killing like that would continue for generations, kept alive in song. Borderers had a name for it. Blood feud.

‘Scarred Willie should have thought of that before he killed Zander Gilnock.’

‘Of course, Cate could change her mind.’ He leaned back, folding his arms, and shrugged. ‘Women often do. Then you’d be free to send men to the king instead.’

‘So that’s your plan.’

Never try to fool a brother. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You think to seduce her into helping you.’

He battled the vision of Cate, naked beneath him. ‘A woman like that? No.’ Though he had, once, foolishly, thought exactly that. ‘But women are changeable.’

At least, the ones he knew had been.

‘Cate?’ Rob near laughed. ‘You know nothing of her if you think that.’

‘I know something of women.’

Rob leaned forwards. ‘Do you now? Well, you know nothing of the Borders.’

Cate and this country, both unexpected mysteries. But it was no mystery what he must do here. ‘I know enough to do as the king commands.’

Rob studied him, confusion on his brow. ‘The king must have made some pretty promises to turn you into his lackey.’

The king had made no promises, but he had hinted at a wealthy bride and a position in the royal household. Cupbearer or Pursemaster, perhaps. ‘There’s no dishonour in serving the sovereign.’

‘Well, I hope you enjoy whatever bauble he gives you,’ Rob scoffed. ‘Your king offers us nothing we cannot get ourselves.’

‘Food in your belly, wool on your back, a stout wall and roof? Aye, all you can grab for yourself. But not the time to enjoy them. Only the king’s peace can give you that.’

Rob blinked and something shifted behind his eyes, as if he glimpsed a different life. John held his breath. Did his brother finally understand?

Then, Rob cast his eyes to the floor above, where, until yesterday, his father had slept in his own bed. ‘Only God can give you that, Johnnie.’ He shook his head. ‘Only God.’

‘And God sends us the king to do his bidding on earth.’ He leaned forwards to grip his brother’s forearm. ‘Help him, Robbie. Help him.’

But the Rob he recognised faced him again. ‘I’ll leave the helping of the bairn king to you, Johnnie. Just don’t think that wearing his wisp of a badge will let you lord it over the rest of us.’

John winced. ‘I’ve never thought that.’

Rob smiled. ‘Have you not?’

John sat back, suddenly wondering. Why else had he returned?

He had ridden home wearing the king’s badge, carrying the king’s word, expecting finally to garner his father’s respect. Or at least his attention.

Instead, he was Johnnie Blunkit again. Or worse. An outlander, no more part of the family than a Storwick.

But John had seen that outland, seen a life beyond these hills. ‘I know what the king plans. Scotland will face England as an equal.’

‘You think he’ll defy his Uncle Henry? He’s the one who’s been stirring the families across the border.’

It was true. The king’s uncle, the English King Henry, eighth by that name, was using the reiving families of England to keep the Scots occupied. ‘Because he has no respect for us.’

‘No. Because he does respect us. He respects our swords.’ Rob leaned forwards. ‘And I mean to be sure we keep that respect.’

John gripped his fists in frustration. ‘It’s been two years since Gilnock’s death. Why is it so important to avenge him now?’

‘Because now, I’m the head man.’

Pride, stubbornness—everything he knew of his brother was in those words.

He felt his voice rise, ready to shout. ‘I need to know why.’

Rob gave a snort. ‘If you’d not abandoned your family these last ten years, you would know.’

‘If my family had not abandoned me, I would care,’ he snapped.

Rob blinked.

John pressed on. ‘Two years and Father didn’t hunt the man down. Didn’t you ever wonder at the reason? Didn’t you ever think he was trying to avoid a blood feud?’

‘And you think to force us to ride where the king bids us instead? The last time we did that, ten thousand Scotsmen lay dead on Flodden Field, along with the foolish king himself. That’s a mistake we won’t be making again.’ Rob pressed his palms flat on the table and rose, done with listening. ‘Your king can wait for Brunson men. We ride after Willie Storwick within a fortnight.’

He cursed himself for a fool. Instead of easing Rob’s decision, he’d forced it. ‘And join the king after?’ If they found the man quickly, they could still meet the king in East Lothian by early October, though John would have to soothe his sovereign’s temper when he discovered they’d taken vengeance against an English Storwick.

‘I’ve not decided.’ Rob’s lips curved, less in a smile than in a sneer.

Not a defeat, then. Rob had not said no.

‘Ride with us, Johnnie. That is, if you’re not a fazart.’

Fazart. The worst kind of coward.

John stood now, shaking his head. It wasn’t death that he feared. ‘I will not join you in vengeance. Not when I promised the king I would stop it.’

Rob, who rarely smiled, did. ‘Ah, and promises must be kept, eh?’

A rueful smile touched John’s lips and, for a moment, they shared it. ‘Perhaps I’ve a drop of Brunson blood after all.’

‘What happens,’ Rob said, finally, ‘if you can’t keep it, your promise to the king?’

He had not faced that unpleasant prospect before. ‘If I’m a careful and lucky man, I’ll never lay eyes on King James again.’

‘And if you’re not?’

John liked the king and the king liked him, but he did not fool himself. Friendship and sentiment did not rule a king, not even this one. He’d cut down any enemies who stood in his way.

And any friends, as well.

‘If not, my happy life could be a short one.’ That was the fact of it. Now Rob knew.

John wondered whether he’d care.

His brother crossed his arms and shook his head. ‘Then I can only wish you luck, Johnnie. And that you enjoy it while you can.’