brother is not like the others.’ He threatened the defences that had served her so well.
Bessie nodded, not asking which brother Cate meant. ‘We were close when he was a boy.’
Cate could see that they would be, both lean with rust-coloured hair, unlike Black Rob, who favoured his mother’s people.
Then, Bessie smiled, sadness banished. ‘We called him Johnnie Blunkit.’
‘Blunkit? Why?’ She could not imagine this angry man dragging a blanket behind him.
‘Because of his eyes.’
‘Ah.’ Blunkit fabric was a soft blue-grey, remarkably similar to the colour of John Brunson’s eyes. ‘He must have hated that.’
‘Later, aye—’ Bessie nodded ‘—he did.’
Cate shook her head, trying to picture this strong knight as a youth. ‘I don’t remember him.’
‘You must have seen him when he was younger.’
‘When?’ She would have been no more than ten when he went to court, Bessie even younger.
‘A wedding, a year, maybe, before he left. I cannot remember whose, but the tower was full. Everyone had come to celebrate.’
Cate tried to summon the event and had a dim memory of two lads in the courtyard, crossing swords. The taller—it must have been Rob—had the advantage, but John gave no quarter, fighting harder when he accused his brother of holding back.
‘So long ago.’ She was no longer the giggling girl of nine who knew nothing of the world’s horrors and still thought to be a bride one day. ‘I had forgotten.’
‘He was not like the others.’ Bessie nodded towards the bed where her father lay. ‘Even then.’
Cate shook her head. Perhaps Bessie no longer knew her brother. ‘He’s like enough.’
He was a man. One whose first thought had been to kiss her.
When John returned to the hall, the fire had burned low and the raucous conversations had quieted. Some men dozed.
He accepted a mug and took a wedge of cheese, the first food he’d had all day. So simple, the things that kept a body bound to the earth.
Rob sat alone on the stone window seat. He did not move or speak when John joined him.
He wasn’t sure what drew him back to his silent brother, but he had faced the truth: his father was truly gone. The triumphant return he’d hoped for lay shattered at his feet. There would be no reconciliation.
It was the king’s favour he must seek now, not that of a family who had never granted it and never would.
His father, Cate, his brother. Each had judged him and found him wanting. The king would not—not when John brought three hundred Brunson men to fight at his side.
Cate walked into the hall and another man rose to take her place in the dead man’s room. This stubborn woman, determined to oppose the king’s will, was haunting him more than the things that should have been: his father, the king, his mission.
She was nothing like the women he had known at court, any of whom seemed ready to flip their skirts for a chance to bed a king’s man. Even those women already wed.
‘She’s a skittish one, isn’t she?’ he said to Rob, nodding towards the other side of the hall where she stood with one of her men.
‘Cate?’ Rob shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
John took a sip, waiting.
His brother said nothing more.
He gritted his teeth. Silence was not the way at court. There was always chatter, even if the words were meaningless.
Even if they were false.
He forced another question. ‘Why is that, do you suppose?’
Another shrug. ‘Not for me to say.’
‘Not for you to say or not for me to know?’ Was Rob hiding something? With as few words as the man used, it was hard to tell.
Then, Rob turned his head to look at John with that familiar expression that needed no words to say Little Johnnie Blunkit. ‘She lost her father to the Storwicks. Do you expect her to be dancing?’
‘No,’ he said, refusing to yield, ‘but I don’t expect her to dress like a man and wield a sword, either.’
Rob shrugged and made no answer, but his face spoke his grief. He had just lost a father. He was not dancing. And if John forced him too soon, he’d not be sending men to the king, either.
‘She has no mother?’ John said, cracking the silence.
‘Dead. Years before her father.’
‘Brothers? Sisters?’
Rob shook his head.
She had no family, so she stole his. Well, she could have them.
‘When did it happen?’ His brother delighted in making him beg for each scrap. ‘Her father’s death?’
‘Two years ago.’
Longer than he had thought. Long enough that she should no longer be in grief’s grip. ‘How?’
Rob sighed, finally accepting John would ask until he was answered. ‘She said little. It was about this time of year. They were still in the hills with the cattle when Scarred Willie came. Killed everyone but Cate. Took the cattle.’
Killed everyone. It was not the way of the Borders, such killing. But the woman’s life had been spared, as was right.
‘Could you not chase him down?’
‘We didn’t find out till weeks after.’
‘Why not?’
‘She buried them, her father and the others, before she came down from the high land.’
John studied her again, the woman who could barely keep a blade upright. How had she summoned the strength of body and heart for that? ‘And then?’
‘We tried,’ Rob growled, as if John accused him of shirking his duty, ‘but the Storwicks denied his guilt and the English Warden wouldn’t hand him over for trial.’
The Borders had their own laws, enforced jointly, on occasion, by royally appointed Wardens on both sides of the border.
‘And even if he had,’ Rob continued, ‘it would have been his word against hers.’
‘So Father promised her the justice the Wardens wouldn’t.’ Suddenly, he saw hope, something that might persuade Rob, persuade all of them, to the king’s side.
‘The
