Conquer the Night, page 18
The way he lay there was almost like …
A swagger.
She burned. She blushed through every pore of her body.
“Off, dear God, off!” she cried out, pressing desperately at his massive frame.
“Jesu, my lady—”
“I can’t breathe!”
He shifted instantly, but he was still at her side, and his arm was around her, pinning her. His eyes were on hers, narrowed and sharp.
“Please …”
“Ah, there you go. You do use that word well. Please … what?”
“Get away from me. I—I told you. I can’t breathe.”
“I think that you’re breathing just fine.”
“No, I’m not. Please. Get up, go away! Let me up. You’ve had what you wanted.”
“Ah, Kyra, indeed, poor lady. You were so wretchedly seized! I have been cruel to you in the extreme!”
“You are cruel.”
He laughed softly.
She gritted her teeth, tried to strike out at him. He caught her arm, still smiling. “No surrender, my lady? Who meant to seduce whom?”
She gasped, staring at him. Newly infuriated, she struggled like a wildcat.
“Stop!” He laughed. “You’re furious with me because—”
“I was wretchedly seized!”
“Because you dropped your sword before the first blow was delivered.” He tried to smooth a tangle of hair from her face. She tossed her head to avoid his touch, but he caught her cheeks between his hands and met her eyes and warned her, “Ah, Kyra, take care. You’ll come to crave my touch, and I will be gone.”
“Hanged, drawn and quartered!” she retorted.
He laughed softly, and his reply was as quietly spoken. “Maybe.”
She went dead still, staring at him. “There’s no maybe about it; Edward will hunt you down. He means to have Scotland from east to west and north to south.”
“Then life should be lived to the fullest.”
“Your life, sir, is your own to cast away.”
“But I am very much alive tonight.”
“I am not; I am exhausted.”
“Amazing. I’d not have known.”
She struggled again, dying to strike him.
“If you’re truly exhausted, we can sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep with you. I don’t want to be with you; you’re mistaken in what you think was acquiescence.”
“I thought that it was more than acquiescence.”
“I cannot stay in this room!”
“You must stay in this room—you will stay in this room. You may have your charms, Lady Kyra, but you remain the enemy. Seduced though I may be, I don’t forget who I am for a minute, or that you are Edward’s beloved subject. But I’d not make you any more wretched tonight. Feel free to rest on the floor, my lady. You can always sleep on the furs before the fire.”
“I can sleep on the furs before the fire! You are incredibly rude, so discourteous! You go sleep on the furs by the fire.”
“But I was not the one complaining, my lady. I am content where I am.”
Blue shadows, blue flames, and all seemed to reflect the blue in his eyes. “I am content where I am,” he repeated. His expression was grave. He smoothed back her hair, and she didn’t protest, but met his gaze.
“Shall I make you stay with me?” he whispered.
“If you would have me here—aye!”
A small, grim smile curved his lips. “You can live with being forced, my lady. But you cannot live with any form of surrender?”
“If there is force, one can only fight.”
“Or bide one’s time,” he pointed out.
“Time, sir, is not with you.”
He stroked her cheek. “That much is true. Sleep with me, my lady.”
She closed her eyes.
“I am forcing you,” he whispered.
He pulled her against him. She made no protest. It was absurdly comfortable to feel his chest at her back, his body curved around her own.
“Don’t love me too much,” he murmured, and his voice was teasing at her nape. And yet, she thought, there was an edge to it.
An edge she felt as well.
“I do not love you at all!” she protested, stiffening.
The tension seemed to leave him. He laughed, and the sound was soft and low and pleasant in the night.
“Alas, my lady, how cold. When I am truly beginning not to hate you at all.”
“For being Kinsey Darrow’s?”
“Um.” His arms tightened around her. “Indeed,” he murmured, “I am beginning to forget that you were ever his.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mounted on Pict, Arryn watched as his men drilled with schiltrons, a formation in which they formed tight ranks and used sharpened pikes. With ten men in each group, they created a bastion effective against English cavalry. His men, and the armies of such men as William Wallace and Andrew de Moray, were made up of what the English called rabble, except for Andrew de Moray himself, who was a rich and powerful man in the north, as his father had been before him. Many of his family members had been seized at Dunbar, and now counted down the hours imprisoned in England or forced to fight for the king in France.
But what the armies were really made of were the people. Customarily, it was the magnates—the rich men, the aristocracy of the country—who fought. They paid their armies, made warriors of them, and knighted them on the field. But in this fight for Scotland, most of the aristocracy and the rich were compromised—they often held lands in England and in Scotland, and even if they did not, they might well have signed the oath of fealty, the ragman rolls, and thus had to take great care with what they did. Many of Scotland’s great barons had fought the king of England at Dunbar after the slaughter at Berwick, and there they had been beaten and imprisoned, taken to England to the Tower, or forced to fight for Edward in his eternal battle against the French. Some had to take care, lest they give Edward a reason to execute their imprisoned relations, and though Edward promised relief to the Scotsmen who fought his continental battles for him, it was said that he didn’t intend to keep his promise there any more than he had meant to keep the promise he had made before John Balliol became king—that he would leave Scottish matters to the Scots.
Nay, the men with whom they now fought were not typical. They were not the sons of rich men and barons, taught from childhood to wield heavy weapons. Some were the sons of nobility, aye, the younger sons of lesser nobility, but most were simply Scotland’s freemen, her landowners, farmers, merchants, masons, and fishermen. They had risen because of such atrocities as the massacre at Berwick; they had banded against the English because Edward had given his noblemen their daughters. They were the very soul of the country.
But the soul needed training.
Against many of his men was the fact that when the English came with a full army, that army was always accompanied by exceptional Welsh bowmen—Edward knew how to flatten a country, and how to draw from it. The Welsh had perfected the art of the longbow, and they could cause a rain of death to fall upon the enemy. Arryn’s men needed to learn the use of the crude shields he had them carving daily as shelter, just as they needed to learn to use them against the English swordsmen and cavalry who would come to slice and hack them down as if they were so much wheat in the field.
“Run it again … hard, fast, form rank, fall!” he shouted out, watching as the second group he had chosen for the schiltrons came forward. They were dedicated; they were good.
They were ill paid because they were not the soldiers of a great overlord; they took their chances when they rode against the English. Here, at least, they had sacked the riches of the castle, and it had contained a great deal of value. They had seized silver, gold, jewels, fine fabrics, and more important here and now, they had seized weapons, harnesses, horses, and food.
He looked up suddenly, feeling as if he was being watched. He was.
She stood upon the parapets of the outer wall and watched. He frowned, perplexed, wondering how she had escaped her tower room. They had been here five days now, and at the moment he was feeling particularly at odds with her, and irritated with himself that he should let her cause him to feel anything at all. In the nights since they had buried the fallen dead, she had refused to come down to dinner. He might have forced her down; he had chosen not to—though her absence had irked him. Still, it had seemed important to him that she not overestimate her own worth to their efforts. He had thought her more than resigned to his company after the night they made love—aye, made love; he had taken great care to seduce her—but the morning had brought her a greater distance from him than ever, and though he had thought he understood, her distance made him aware that he had given in far more than she. His wife’s murder had been brutal. He had been with other women since then, had seduced, been seduced, even laughed since then. But this was Kinsey Darrow’s betrothed; he was not supposed to be gentle and kind, nor give a damn as to her feelings on the matter. Yet she left him shaken, and still … beguiled. It was not surprising that such an exceptionally beautiful woman could create a wealth of lust, but it was irritating, a chafe to his temper, that he should find himself not at all appeased, and wanting to hear the sound of her voice, the soft peal of her laughter, feel the touch of her fingertips against his flesh … see her smile, hear her protest, feel her in the night as she slept against him. She was just a woman; Kinsey Darrow’s woman, at that. He lived far too often with haunting dreams of Alesandra calling his name, of her screaming as the flames rose around her….
He lived, he breathed, he fought, he was human, he risked all for his country. He needed companionship. But Scotland was filled with beautiful women, rich and poor, ardent for freedom, fond of such a passionate rebel. Those who knew they played a wretchedly dangerous game, that life was fickle, easily ended. While this one …
She had said that she always fought. He had thought she had given in. Maybe a battle, but never the war.
Don’t love me too much! he had taunted, because she had given in, or been swept away, or perhaps just shown the age-old wonder of what existed between men and women. Had he been too pleased, gloating?
I don’t love you at all! she had assured him.
And she had spent the last two nights curled in a ball on the furs before the fire. He had left her there. It had been painful. She would have come if he had forced her into bed. She would have had the luxury of keeping her pride intact, but he had found himself pitched into a battle of wills. Still, he had stubbornly determined that he would not allow her to consider herself so unbearably appealing—and he had put up a good pretense of ignoring her completely. Except that last night, he had managed only half the night, departing in the middle of it to sit brooding before the blaze in the great hall. She had sworn her fealty to Edward—and to Darrow. He had taken the castle, he had taken her, and now he could be done with both.
Why did he let her bother him so?
Guilt?
He suffered enough guilt every time he thought of Hawk’s Cairn.
He had come here with such venom in his heart. His vision had been clear: destroy Kinsey Darrow, his riches—and the woman he had loved. But she wasn’t what he had expected, and sometimes he remembered that he had known her father, and sometimes he realized that she was a child of the aristocracy, and marriage was a bartering system, not a union entered for love. Sometimes he admired her, and liked the way she fought, and wished that he had more men who had her constant supply of courage and determination against all odds.
Aye, he thought dryly, they needed more warriors such as this lady.
Don’t love me too much.…
He was coming to admire her too much. He couldn’t forget that, though he had liked her father, Hugh Boniface’s loyalty to Edward had been steadfast and indisputable. He had given homage to Alexander as well—in a time of grace and peace now gone. Sad indeed that the king of England should be so greedy, wanting the island to be his from north to south, east to west, and France as well. Maybe that was for the best, since the king himself remained in France, and he might have able warriors, but none so ruthless as himself. He was near sixty; he was still nearly seven feet tall in his full armor, rough, rugged, and ever ready to fight. If only he had not been born with the streak of cruelty that seemed to run among the Plantagenets, he might have proved to be an admirable king.
But there had been Berwick….
Arryn kept his eyes on Kyra. She appeared restless. Perhaps she was growing weary of the confinement she had set upon herself. Perhaps she was trying to distract him from his training. She was capable of distracting men; that much was certain. And therein lay the danger. It would be far too easy to forget that she owed her loyalty—and gave it freely—to the king who had massacred almost the whole of what had been a great and thriving town.
His eyes narrowed as he stared at her. She suddenly realized that he was watching her, and she started to back away from the wall. She knew that he would come for her, that he would have to quit his training session and seek her out. Had she intended her escape just to be of further irritation to him? To cause one of these very important sessions to be disrupted?
He would not allow her to do so. He would send one of his men instead.
“Jay!” he shouted. Leaving his position on the field, Jay mounted his horse and came loping toward him.
“Kyra is upon the wall. Will you see that she returns to the tower?”
“Aye, Arryn, if you wish,” he began, but then paused, looking past him toward the forest. Arryn had already heard the hoofbeats coming from the direction of the northern forest. As they watched, John Graham, with two companions, came from the trail, riding hard toward them, waving a hand in greeting.
His cousin had left at dawn just a few days ago, riding back to report to Wallace regarding Arryn’s men and his strength—and his promise to fight. Now John was back, and though they bordered the forest of Selkirk, Arryn thought that his cousin had ridden very hard and fast to have returned so quickly.
“See to Kyra!” he said briefly to Jay, and lightly spurred Pict so that his battle horse flew into motion, and he raced the distance to meet his cousin.
“There’s news?” he shouted.
“Aye! News, indeed.” John straightened in his saddle, looking around. The fields were filled with men. Arryn’s—good Scotsmen—and those who had begged mercy and sworn to his cause at the taking of the castle. Indeed, the Irish priest, Michael Corrigan, had proven to be something of a swordsman himself, and worked with a number of men now, teaching them about the weight of the weapon they carried, the art of retreat—and the art of a thrust to kill.
“We’ll head to the castle,” Arryn said.
John nodded to his companions, who broke off to remain in the field, watching the sessions. He and Arryn rode for Seacairn. The portcullis was open, and they traveled quickly through the outer and inner defenses. They left the horses with Brendan in the courtyard, and entered the main hall. It was empty. A carafe of ale sat at the far end of the table, and John helped himself liberally after the long ride.
“What is it, what is happening?”
“Good news is this—Andrew de Moray has become a powerful weapon for us here, even in the south. He is a man of vast means, a true baron, an aristocrat—and a man defying the king, and even the fact that the king holds so many of his kin hostage!”
“Aye, we’ve known that de Moray is a fine man for a rebel cause.”
“What we’ve not known is how many fine men he has compelled to follow us! Knights, Arryn, fellows who know the skills of warfare.”
“What of the king?”
“He has sailed for France, but his armies are on the move. They think they will crush us quickly in a decisive battle that will break the Scottish spirit once and for all! But, Arryn! Our successes have been so vast that Wallace and de Moray are ready to meet the armies.” He began to draw on the table, indicating events. “Aye, look here! We took Perth—I rode beside Wallace myself at this turn of the tide—and here at Dunottar, we took a large contingent of the English, many who had fled there! Then on to Aberdeen … We returned to Selkirk, but de Moray continued attacks. All these castles fell … Elgin, Forres, Nairn, Lochindab—at Aberdeen we destroyed English shipping. My God, Arryn, we’ve a good fighting chance, but we must move ahead more quickly. You’ll need to ride to Wallace within a few days’ time—he is choosing his ground for a major battle. See here, the English commander Cressingham moves thus, and Warenne rides along here. Word has it that Cressingham is so certain of his strength that he has told Percy to disband his army in the west!”
“I’m told Wallace offered no mercy whatsoever at Dunottar.”
“The barns of Ayr were sharp in his mind, Arryn. Don’t forget, the English trapped a good three hundred and sixty men there, tricking them to an eyre or council, hanging one and all, even the lads who served them, and burning them to ash. You know well how easily the English set blaze to both property and people!”
Arryn steeled himself against the pain that never failed to wrap around his heart at the reminder. Aye, they’d done enough in revenge, and God knew, the English had warranted it. It was no good claiming the Scots had struck first when John had still been king and invaded the north of England—not when the English army had crossed the border within two days to inflict the terror at Berwick.
“Still, cousin, if we’re ever to best the English at battle, the bickering amongst us will have to stop. I was nowhere near Irvine when our good nobles finally decided that with Edward busy in France, they might make a stand—but then argued so fiercely that they backed down before the battle!”
“Aye, well, it boils down to this often enough—the Bruces, who have wavered a few times too often, believe that a nationalist victory will have us rallying to stand behind John Balliol as king, and if not John, then another member of the Comyn family. Bruce is likely to give up the honor of Scotland for the honor of a throne. This Robert the Bruce is a pup—”
