CHAPTER THREE #2
Arryn’s cousin, Sir John Graham, had, from the start, befriended William Wallace, a man who seemed to some—even among the Scots—to be a tremendous danger, while to others he represented the soul of freedom for their country.
Wallace had been gaining more and more followers in his quest against the English here in the southern half of the country, while Andrew de Moray had been putting forth a fair fight to the north.
Wallace fought for a country for Scotsmen, and for the Scottish king, John Balliol, in his captivity, no matter how weak Balliol had proven to be.
Though Arryn thought little of the captive king, he had come to know Wallace through his cousin, and he admired the man very much, and had joined with his band on many an excursion against the English.
Wallace continued to respect the imprisoned John Balliol as king, but he didn’t live under the assumption that the king would be released.
He fought under the flag of the lion triumphant, the symbol of their country.
Arryn led his own group of knights and freemen.
He was respected as the leader of his group, and he led with his own stern set of ethics.
Far too much that was true butchery had been done by both sides in this wretched war, and thus the way he fought, and the understanding among his men that they would not massacre their own people or the English peasantry in battles in which they had no voice.
As Jay had said, he allowed no man to be put to torture, but fought fair battles.
He slaughtered neither women nor children.
His men were free to ravage what property they might; God knew, they had to survive, and survival was getting harder all the time.
He had burned fortresses to the ground, seized supplies, relieved great ladies of their jewels—but not their lives.
A little more than a year ago, soon after Edward had forced Balliol’s abdication and demanded that all Scotsmen sign an oath of allegiance to him, Arryn had encountered Lord Angus Darrow, cousin to Kinsey, and they had fought upon a bridge.
Arryn had bested the man, but Angus Darrow had flown at him in a rage and plummeted to his death far below.
Arryn and his men had still granted quarter to Darrow’s followers, doing nothing more evil than relieving them of the gold, jewels, and fine woolen goods they had been attempting to bring south to England from Scottish coffers.
Not long before that fight, Arryn had married Alesandra MacDonald, his friend’s young cousin and ward.
He hadn’t really thought that he’d had the time or the right to take a wife, but he knew that she had cared for him and trusted him since they’d been children.
She’d been orphaned as a child, and she was always there, smiling, gentle, eager to see him always.
His father had been dead then, having perished on a journey northward some months earlier.
What had happened to Sir Robert Graham, they didn’t know.
His body had been found on the side of a cliff.
There had been no witness to his death. Arryn missed him bitterly.
He could only guess that his father had been murdered, accosted as he had been himself. But he could prove nothing.
Alone, he had become what they called the Graham of Hawk’s Cairn, a knighted, well-to-do, and well-respected landowner; it was time to start a family.
He had known different women in his life, in different places: landed widows, buxom maids, the lonely, the passionate.
But now he wanted a wife, someone to love and cherish—a gentle touch, someone with whom to talk at night, to keep his house, bear his children, laugh with him, grow old with him.
He and Alesandra had been children together, but she had changed.
Shy and slim as a girl, she had grown into a beautiful, self-possessed young woman with dark doe eyes and a wealth of rich brown hair.
She had captured him in a way he had least expected, slipping beneath his skin with the softness of her voice, the hesitancy and tenderness of her touch.
She had seemed to him to be everything that he was not: patient, courteous, balanced, thoughtful, and kind.
She embodied all the honor and innocence for which they fought.
Her outlook on life was bright and optimistic and ever cheerful, and little had made her as happy as the knowledge, soon after their wedding, that they were going to have a child.
At Hawk’s Cairn, she had turned his grand but nearly deserted manor into a home, given it elegance, made the whole of his holdings seem richer than they had been.
Then, while he was in the north, meeting with Moray, Darrow had ridden in. Arryn had heard from the few survivors that his wife had been seized and raped by her tormentors, then left in an upper bedroom of the manor, stunned and bleeding, when the fire had been set.
Even now, nearly a year since, his flesh went cold when he thought of what his wife had suffered.
He had left her to that fate! She had died so because she had been his wife!
Guilt plagued him when he lay awake, and it tortured his dreams. He would see her walking toward him, see her eyes so wide, hear her whisper his name …
and when he would look up, she would suddenly begin to burn before him, and he would hear her screams.
Even now his hands began to shake, and he felt hot and cold, and sick! He couldn’t bear the thoughts that tortured his mind, that would do so until his dying day….
And yet men would ask him for mercy!
He lowered his head, closing his eyes against the beauty of the country for which it seemed he had sold not only his soul, but Alesandra’s as well.
Darrow and his men had killed his wife. Darrow had been guilty of heinous cruelty and brutality, as King Edward had been, but it was true, as Jay had warned, that to become like them would be his defeat, and their victory.
He would not slaughter men needlessly, inflict agony upon the innocent … brutalize women or children.
But neither could he let Darrow’s betrothed go in peace!
God knew what role she might have had in any of this, no matter what her passion and pleas for others.
And did it matter? Of all that belonged to Darrow, she needed most to be taken away.
She was the slim thread that gave him any power in Scottish affairs; her family had the position and the wealth.
And if he hesitated in taking revenge, all he had to do was close his eyes… .
And the dreams would haunt him, waking, sleeping. He would see the flames rise….
And hear Alesandra’s screams in the silence of the night.
He turned away from the view, looking up to see that one of his men duly guarded the open tower above the master’s chambers. He saluted his man, walked the circumference of the parapets, then hurried down the outer stairs to the courtyard below.
He summoned his squire, Brendan, a second cousin, and one of the lads he had found half-dead outside the manor walls at Hawk’s Cairn.
Brendan had been struck with a battle-ax while defending the door to his lady’s house.
Amazingly, he had survived the blow. The lad was sixteen, the age Arryn had been himself at the king’s death.
He had shown amazing courage, readily risking his own life for others’.
“Fetch Pict for me, Brendan.”
“Aye.”
Pict, aye, he still had Pict, the great destrier King Alexander III had given him on the day he was knighted, fighting as the king’s champion in a border skirmish that had been determined by his victory.
His father had still been living then; that was before men were found mysteriously dead along the wayside for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to Edward of England.
Brendan returned with his horse. “Shall I ride with you, Arryn?”
Arryn hesitated. This cousin of his was very much like him: a tall, strapping lad with very dark hair and serious deep blue eyes.
He had spent hours training with weapons of war at Hawk’s Cairn, and listening to the words of the rebels when they met.
Most of his family had perished beneath Edward’s pounding fist in one way or another, and he was destined to wage war against the English as well.
“It’s always well to have a man at your back,” Brendan told him.
Arryn grinned. “That’s true, and you’re a good fellow for a man to have at his back. But right now, Brendan, I think I’ll ride alone.”
“Aye, Arryn.”
So he rode alone, circling first the inner walls of the tower at Seacairn, then calling to his men on the portcullis to raise the inner gate, and seeing that the outer defenses were as secure as the inner defenses.
Seacairn was an admirable fortress, begun back in the days of the Norman conqueror, enhanced during the realm of David I to the exceptional fortification it was now, with two walls to be breached to secure the innermost tower.
Dawn was breaking by the time he had ridden the whole of both walls and spoken with the people who remained awake to tend to the wounded, and to his own men, who had taken over the key lookout points on the walls.
Returning at last to the inner courtyard, he chose to brush Pict down himself and stable him with a fine supply of English grain.