Prologue #3
“By all that’s holy—” Michael began, but Patrick threw up his hands, freed from the leather ties that had bound them.
The shadow rose. It was Great William’s lad; Michael had seen him fall in battle, seen him crumple atop his father.
He’d been sure the boy, Waryk, was dead.
But he lived. Streaked with mud and blood, he was a length of darkness.
All that was light of him was the blue fire in his red-rimmed eyes as he stared around himself at the men left to their turn at death in the cottage.
Not fourteen yet, he stood well above many a full-grown man with the breadth of shoulder that would eventually fill out with power.
This had been his first test of arms, but Michael had seen him work with his father often enough in the open fields, learning his swordplay.
“Sweet Jesu,” Michael breathed.
The lad started toward him. “Your father, your brother,” Waryk said quietly to Patrick, indicating the bound hands of the others in the room. “I’ll free Michael.”
Yet even as he approached Michael, the Viking warrior appeared in the doorway once again. “What’s this, eh? A nit left alive among the dead lice! A young one for the hanging, this now!” he declared.
Waryk reached down for Michael’s discarded sword. The blond giant laughed. “A cub would fight with wolves, eh? Have it your way. May not be so merciful a death as the quick snap of a rope, for I’ll slice you from stem to stern, my fine boy!” he claimed.
The muscled warrior laughed and used his great strength to swing his battle-ax.
Waryk watched him for no more than seconds, then let out a cry.
The cry filled the night, like something unearthly, borne on the wind.
He charged the man straightforward, and before the man’s ax could fall, the “nit” had pierced him through the gullet with his sword.
Lord Renfrew’s Nordic mercenary fell to his knees, shock lighting his eyes ’til death glazed them over.
All in the room stared. Patrick paused in his attempts to slice his father’s bonds. Michael forgot that nooses still awaited them all.
“What goes in there?” came a cry from outside.
“Quick!” Michael ordered.
Once again, Patrick and Waryk set forth to free the men.
They worked in swift silence. When another of the enemy came to the door, Waryk spun around again and, this time, met a swordsman.
The clash of steel alerted those outside that there was trouble in the cottage, where the last of those they had conquered should have been making peace with their Maker.
Now it was the Scots who had the advantage, for as each attacker crossed the cottage threshold, he was set upon.
Soon the blood ran thick beneath the firelight, and men tripped upon the bodies of others as they fought.
Renfrew’s men began to back away, stumbling in their haste now to be free from those so intent upon vengeance. They were followed by the Scots.
Out in the moonlight, Michael was so fiercely engaged in battle that he was unaware at first of the sound of horses’ hooves pounding against the earth as a troop of men approached them.
He hammered the head of a combatant with his battle-ax, then swung quickly to see who was riding down upon them as at last he heard the thunder of hoofbeats.
The king. The king had come. His warriors pitched themselves into the battle with the enemy.
Their enemy. Now outnumbered. Dead and dying on the field of those they had slain before.
Yet David was commanding mercy; the survivors were casting down their weapons. The sound of a single fight was all that remained, steel clanging against steel in the night.
Michael saw that it was the lad, Waryk, son of the man they had called Great William, known as William de Graham.
The boy had Norman and Viking blood of his own in his veins; his father had traveled northward with the king from borderlands farther to the east, lands invaded time and again by the Vikings, and ruled by them for a time as well.
“From the gray home,” or so the name—according to both the Norman and the old English.
But the name might have been borrowed from the lad’s mother as well.
Legend had it that the most ancient of the Scottish people, the lad’s mother among them, had introduced the name Graeme into the borderlands.
The boy’s maternal border kin might have come from a family with an old and illustrious Scottish history.
A Graeme had been a general with the armies of an ancient king from the very early years of Christianity, King Fergus, and this Graeme who had served him had led the king’s army when it had breached the Roman wall set against the “barbarians”—the old races of Scotland.
Graeme’s Dyke still existed at the remnants of the old wall.
God knew. Names came from anywhere. Some men were just Thomas, Michael, Fergus, or so on, and some took on their father’s names, which became their family names.
His own great-grandfather had been Innish, and now, he was of the family, clan MacInnish, just as a Norseman might be Eric, Olaf’s son—though with the Norse, he was more likely to become Eric Blood-Mace or the like.
Even the king’s family name, Canmore, had come from his father, and the old Gaelic Caenn Mor, meaning big head.
It had become a noble name.
Whatever the ancestry in the boy’s name, it didn’t much matter. Today, the lad was showing his worth as a man.
His worth, and his pain. Anguish that created raw courage and defied fear and even death.
Men fallen all around him, the boy fought still. He had taken on Lord Renfrew himself, and no matter how the skilled, hardened, and experienced Renfrew attacked, battered, and countered, the lad was there.
Waryk had found his father’s sword; he fought with it.
When Renfrew dared breathe, the boy charged him.
Renfrew was skilled. He charged, and charged again, his onslaughts merciless, but the Graham neither lost his balance nor his sword.
What advantage Renfrew had in power, the lad countered with speed and subtlety.
Still, it appeared that the boy, battered, black-and-blue, and crusted with blood, must eventually give.
Renfrew attacked with a practiced, relentless aggression, his great muscles swinging his sword again and again with grim determination. He would not cease until he had killed.
Yet right when Renfrew lifted his sword above his head to slice down with the coup de grace, Waryk de Graham used Renfrew’s bid for momentum against him. He swung his sword upward with a startling, eerie force, impaling Lord Renfrew just below the ribs.
Renfrew clutched the sword, dying. He stared at the lad, still arrogant, stunned, and in disbelief.
Yet there was no denying death. When the man fell at the foot of the lad, the boy didn’t move. He didn’t reclaim the sword. He stood there shaking.