‘A Brunson gave you his word,’ Rob said, anger edging his words. ‘It will be kept.’
On the border, a man’s word was good after death. At court, it might not be good after dinner.
‘When?’ she asked.
‘After he’s buried,’ Rob answered. ‘It must wait.’ He looked at John, the glance a warning. ‘As must other things.’
Cate caught the look and turned to John. ‘You do not come because of his death?’ Her eyes, assessing him, seemed ready to judge his answer. Not for this woman the warmth he usually felt from her kind. She seemed as cold and fierce as his brother.
Rob might want him to wait for the burial, but his father was dead and the king alive. And impatient. ‘I bring a summons from the king.’
‘You mean from his uncles or his mother or his stepfather?’ Rob looked no more willing to listen than Cate Gilnock.
John understood his hesitation. James, six years younger than John, had been king since birth, but he’d been under the control of others for the sixteen years since then. ‘From none of those. It’s his personal rule, now. No one else’s.’
They sat, silent, thinking of all this meant.
‘A man with much to prove, then,’ Rob said.
Did Rob speak of the king? Or himself?
Cate’s lips twisted in a smirk. ‘So what message is so important that your bairn king would send you here, all dressed in armour, to tell us?’
The harness and badge he’d been so proud to wear had impressed the beauties at court. ‘He’s your king, too.’
‘Is he?’ She shrugged dismissal. ‘I’ve never met him, never sworn my allegiance. My family and my own right arm keep me safe, not your king.’
‘But he will.’ He fought the tug of her voice, a strange combination of scorn and seduction. ‘He commands our men to join him in war against the traitor who has held him captive for the past two years.’
The ‘traitor’ had once been a duly appointed regent, but all things change.
Cate, not Rob, jumped in to answer. ‘And the wee king sent you to tell us, did he? You might have spared your horse. Brunson men will ride for no king of Fife. They ride to fulfil the promise of Geordie the Red and put Scarred Willie Storwick dead in the ground.’
He wondered what the man had done to earn such vengeance, but it mattered not. If that was his father’s promise, it would be broken.
‘The king commands you to fight his enemies, not each other. There’ll be no more raiding and reiving and thieving of cattle and sheep. I come to carry out the king’s will.’
And to earn his place at the king’s side, but that would not sway them.
‘And do you also come to stop the sun from rising of a morning?’ The curve at the corner of her mouth was a poor substitute for a smile.
If a man had said it, John might have answered with a fist to his gab. ‘The king wants—’
‘The king doesn’t rule here.’ Rob’s words were low and hard, his expression the one that had earned him the nickname Black. ‘We do.’
I do, he might have said, for his brother would be the one to say where the Brunsons would ride.
Yesterday, the decision would have been his father’s.
‘Surely your loyalty does not rest with the English king?’
‘My family holds my loyalty,’ his brother said. ‘Who holds yours?’
He and his family had parted ways years before. Nothing had made that more clear than returning to them. ‘We all owe loyalty to the throne. Scotland must be one country or it will be no country at all.’
‘I owe nothing to your bairn king,’ Cate said, heading for the door. ‘Go back and tell him to leave us be.’
No one followed her.
John looked back at Rob, waiting for a decision, but his brother seemed frozen with grief. The son most like his father, Rob had been prepared all his life to lead the family, but uncertainty lay beneath the stubborn set of his jaw.
Borderers had long held themselves above the king of either country.
No, now was not the moment to force a sorrowing son to choose between his father’s promise and the king’s command.
But if Cate released Rob from his father’s promise, then the choice would be easier. John would have to wrestle only with his brother’s stubbornness instead of with a dead man’s ghost. No, in order for the Brunson men to ride east to meet the king, Cate Gilnock must drop her demands and step aside.
So John would persuade her to do exactly that.
And quickly. The king was expecting John to deliver Brunson men before the first frost.
Brew was served and the sharing of stories began, stories of Geordie the Red at his best. And his worst.
Refusing to share in laughter and tears he did not feel, John left Rob and the rest in the hall and went in search of a place to stow his gear and his armour.
Avoiding the floor where his father’s body lay, he made his way to the open sleeping room on the upper level. He had travelled alone, without even a squire, for speed and secrecy, so he wrestled his armour off by himself.
He would certainly not beg his brother for help.
Instead, he pondered the problem of Cate Gilnock.
For the few days of the wake and burial, he would leave Rob to mourn and turn his charm on the woman. By the time his father was in the ground, he’d have her ready to release Rob from whatever promise she’d been given.
She looked and sounded like no woman he had ever met, yet underneath, he had no doubt that she was the same as all the rest. With the right handling, she’d be persuaded to peace.
Reason would be useless, of course. Near as useless as, he feared, it would be against his brother. But there were other ways.
His family might confound him, but women did not. He knew how to flatter and cajole them, how to overcome their feigned resistance, and how to coax a smile or a kiss. He and the king had shared their fill of women and John had even taught the younger man a thing or two, though in truth, the king needed little teaching in this realm.
He headed down the stairs to find her, a smile returning to his face. No doubt Cate Gilnock had never been wooed by a man before, acting as she did. All she needed was a honeyed word and a winning smile and she’d soon be releasing Rob from the daft-headed promise his father had made.
And Brunson men would be riding to join their king.
Cate forced herself to walk down the tower’s steps when she left him, though everything in her screamed to run. She only ran towards things now, never away.
Fear only encouraged them.
But this one, with his smooth tongue and his knightly armour, this one scared her as none had in years. Not because she thought he would hurt her body. She’d let no man do that ever again.
And if one did, she would not let herself feel it.
No, it was because of the judgement she saw in his eyes, criticising the rough armour she had forged around her life, carefully as bits of iron hidden between the quilted layers of her jack-of-plaites vest.
If he knew the truth, it would be worse.
She escaped to the stables, where her sleuth dog had been banished until the burial. Usually, Belde was ever at her side, holding her fear