Chapter Twenty-One
Someone was calling her name.
In a deep sleep, someone was calling her name in a dream. Caledonia. She could hear them but couldn’t see them. It was a male voice that she thought might be her husband, so she began to hunt for him in her dream. She was eager to see him, looking for him in the mist.
Caledonia!
It was louder this time. It felt as if it was right in her ear.
In fact, it was so loud that it jolted her out of her sleep.
She opened her eyes to a dark room except for the fire in the hearth that gave off some illumination—enough for her to see that there was someone else in the chamber with her.
For a moment, she thought it was Thor and sat up with a gasp of delight, the cobwebs quickly clearing away.
She was halfway out of bed before she realized that it wasn’t Thor.
It was someone else.
Her eyes fixed on a living nightmare.
“Good,” Rotri said. “You are awake. You and I must speak, Callie.”
It took Caledonia a fraction of a moment to realize that her uncle was very real and standing in her bedchamber.
When the awareness settled, she pealed a scream and threw herself to the opposite side of the bed, hysterical in her panic.
She screamed again when she saw him move toward her, and she jumped over the bed in the opposite direction, rushing for a small alcove where she knew Thor kept some weapons.
He had them in the keep, in the armory, in the hall, and a half-dozen other places around the castle because that was simply his way.
He was always prepared for a fight. But Rotri caught her as she dashed for the alcove, and in her panic, she grabbed the nearest item—not even knowing what it was but seeing something in her periphery on a table—and smashed it right over his head.
Rotri was rocked by a blow from a broken pitcher as Caledonia darted into the alcove and made a grab for a dagger.
Shaking off the bells in his ears, Rotri was right on top of her.
“Stop!” he commanded, trying to force her to release the dagger. “Let go before you hurt someone!”
Caledonia was almost incoherent with terror.
She tried to slash at him and managed to clip his right wrist, but he nearly broke her fingers forcing her to drop the dagger.
As it clattered to the floor near the hearth, she screamed again and pulled away from him, running to the far end of the chamber, on the other side of a big table, and contemplated her next move.
Rotri stood near the alcove, inspecting the cut on his wrist.
“Now,” he said decisively. “That will be enough of that. I did not come here to fight you.”
Caledonia’s breathing was coming in sharp gasps. “How did you get in here?” she demanded. Then she started smacking her hand on the table in a loud and commanding gesture. “Get out before I kill you!”
Rotri shook his head. He stood there, looking at her with both contempt and impatience, before sighing heavily and looking away. He appeared strangely weary as he sat down in the nearest chair, which was next to the hearth.
For a brief moment, the chaos in the room stilled.
It was quiet.
For now.
“Nay,” Rotri said after a moment. “No more killing. There has been enough killing this night. Your cousin is dead, Callie. God help me, my son is dead.”
She hadn’t expected to hear that, so it threw her off guard a little. “Dead?” she repeated. “Domnall?”
Rotri nodded. “Domnall,” he confirmed. “So is your husband. That is why I am here.”
Caledonia sucked in her breath, her eyes widening. “Thor?” she gasped. “It’s not true!”
“It is, I’m afraid. Killed in an ambush.”
Those words hit Caledonia as heavily as a blow from a battering ram. She actually stumbled back, slamming into the wall, her hands flying to her mouth to hold back the hysterical screams.
“Nay,” she breathed. “Nay, it cannot be. It is not true!”
She went from whispering the words to screaming them all in a split second, shouting at him as Rotri put up a hand to quiet her.
“I told you that it is,” he said. “Your husband rode out to defend Millford, but my knights killed him. Now we must speak about your future, Lady Stafford.”
Something happened to Caledonia at that moment. Thor is dead? She knew she shouldn’t believe her uncle, but on the other hand, the only way he would be here, in a chamber with her, was if Thor was unable to prevent it.
Dead.
My husband is dead.
And with that, Caledonia started to scream.
Her hands flew over her ears and she sank to the floor, screaming loudly enough for the entire castle to hear.
Knowing this, Rotri ran out to the landing and locked the door at the top of the stairs to prevent anyone from entering to see what was amiss.
It cut the floor off from the stairs. He didn’t need any do-good soldiers trying to rescue Lady Stafford or, worse, the woman named Nica, as Janet had described her, interfering.
He needed Caledonia’s attention and was going to get it, because he had plans for the woman.
Finally, he had her where he wanted her.
“Callie, stop,” he commanded as she huddled on the floor and screamed. “Do you hear me? Stop!”
She heard him, but she couldn’t. She was in a quagmire of grief, deeper than anything she’d ever known, and her screams were meant for her husband to hear, wherever he was.
Thor had to hear how badly she was taking the news because, in the short time that they had known one another, a love had been built that could not be broken.
Not even by death. Perhaps her screams were meant to bridge the veil of death, to reach out to him to convey the depth and strength of the love between them.
He had to hear her.
But… oh, God… the pain.
Eventually, Caledonia fell over onto her left side and the screams faded to gut-wrenching sobs.
Rotri had made his way over to her by this point, frowning as he gazed down upon her.
He wasn’t very tolerant of emotions or weakness.
Infuriated, he pulled up a stool and planted himself on it as he yanked her into a sitting position.
“What is the matter with you?” he demanded. “Why do you weep for a man you were hardly married to? A man who was forced upon you?”
Caledonia couldn’t answer him. She was leaning against the stone wall, her face turned away from him as she wallowed in grief.
“Answer me,” he said. “Why do you carry on so for a man who simply married you out of greed?”
Caledonia suddenly lashed out a foot and caught him in the face, sending him toppling off the stool.
“It was not out of greed!” she cried. “You are the only greedy bastard I know, and that is exactly why you are here! Greed has driven you to persecute me for the past two years, you vile son of a whore. Get out of here and leave me alone!”
Rotri wasn’t bleeding, but it had been a good kick. Rubbing his sore nose, he reclaimed his stool and slapped her in the face when she tried to kick him again.
“Do not kick me,” he warned. “The next time, my response will be more painful, so stop behaving like an animal and listen to me.”
“Nay!” she shouted as she managed to squirm away from him and get to her feet. Sick, exhausted, and overwrought, she staggered away. “Get out of here, Rotri. I do not want to hear you.”
Rotri stood up, tracking her as she stumbled out of his reach. “You have no choice,” he said steadily. “You are going to listen to me because I have come to claim my due, something you have denied me since birth.”
“I haven’t done anything!”
Rotri cocked his head. “Untrue,” he said. “Constantine was the first. He is the one who truly stole my inheritance, but then you came along. You were a worthless female until your brother and father died, and then you became the heiress of everything that should have been mine.”
She was over by the hearth now, glaring at him with tears and mucus streaming down her face. “I did not ask for it,” she said. “I did not want it. If you want to blame someone, blame the king. Blame the laws. But do not blame me, because I never wanted it.”
Rotri rubbed his sore nose again. “Be that as it may, it is yours,” he said. “But I have waited long enough. You will marry Cristano so he can assume the earldom of Stafford, and he will give me Tamworth. I shall have what blood right should have given me long ago.”
“Cristano?” Caledonia said with horror when she realized that was whom he intended to marry her to. “De Lucera?”
“Do you know another Cristano?”
“I will not marry that bastard and you cannot make me!”
“You will do as I tell you.”
As the tears fading, a sense of self-preservation took hold.
If what he said was true and Thor was dead, there was no way out for her.
She was to be pushed from marriage to marriage because of her value as an heiress and nothing more.
She was, once again, a commodity. Déchet, Robert had called her.
She was back to being rubbish. From the days of heaven with Thor, it was back to the endless hell she had always endured.
But she wasn’t going to endure it any longer.
“Nay,” she said after a moment. “I will not do as you tell me. You are not my lord. You are nothing to me but a greedy, conniving fool who has lived in the shadow of my father his entire life. You are worthless, Rotri. You will never have Tamworth because I am not going to let you have it. Once and for all, you will not have it.”
With that, she bolted for the nearest lancet window, scrambling into it.
The walls were thick, so every window had a wide ledge or even a stone seat.
In this case it was a wide ledge, and before Rotri could stop her, she was clinging to the frame of a window that was high above the side of the motte.
The plunge below, by the time she hit the ground, would be thirty feet or more.
If the fall alone didn’t break her neck, then the roll down the steep motte would surely finish her off.
Rotri could see that quite plainly.