‘Are you a Brunson, then?’ he asked. She looked like some cousin, long forgotten.
She lifted her chin and gave a quick shake of her head, ruffling her cropped hair. ‘I’m a Gilnock.’
The Gilnock family were distant kin, descended from the same brown-eyed, bloodthirsty Norseman as the Brunsons—and the only family on the Border more unforgiving than his own.
‘But she’s under our roof now,’ Rob said. Under Brunson protection, as might happen when a child was orphaned.
With a quick motion, she dismissed her men and moved closer to Rob and John.
‘I must speak with you, Rob,’ she said. Her voice surprised John. It was lower than he expected, the words round and deep and shimmering as if she were whispering secrets in the dark. ‘Your father died with his word unkept. What happens now?’
‘He was not your father,’ John retorted, wondering what had been promised. Yet she seemed more a Brunson than he, as if she had donned men’s clothes in order to usurp his place.
‘He was my headman,’ she answered, looking at the new headman when she answered. ‘Sworn to protect my family.’
‘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,
