Chapter Twenty-One
“Put her down! Estevan, put her down!”
Mabel was shouting at him. Mother Michael was shouting at him.
Everyone was shouting at him as he carried Anaxandra’s limp, bloodied form into the sanctuary.
He was holding her so tightly that he couldn’t seem to let her go, fearful that if he did, she would die.
As long as he was holding her, she wasn’t dead. He could still feel her warmth.
She wasn’t dead.
She’s not dead!
Mateo and Titan were there, trying to separate them. In fact, every knight at St. Margaret’s was there, trying to figure out what in the hell was going on. Mabel was bloody, Anaxandra had been stabbed, and there was a dead man no one had ever seen lying in the corner of the bailey.
“Es,” Titan said in Estevan’s ear. He was pressed up against him from behind, his arms around the man, trying to force him to loosen his grip. “Release her, Es. Let your mother look at her wounds. Be a good lad—let her go.”
Estevan was trying. He really was. But he was terrified to.
He didn’t know when he realized that he was weeping, but suddenly, he heard a sob and was aware that it had come from him.
Somehow, Titan managed to force him to relax his grip and Mateo pulled Anaxandra from his arms, laying her on his bed.
There was blood everywhere.
“Matty, Kal?” Mabel motioned. “Quickly, now. Roll her onto her right side. Carefully. I must get a look at the wounds.”
The knights did as they were told, and Anaxandra was gently rolled onto her side as Mabel and Mother Michael both cut away the fabric that had been tattered and stained. Between the two of them, they managed to expose the wounds. The were wide punctures that were still seeping.
“Your Grace,” Mabel said calmly and quietly, “we need rags for the bleeding. Also, we must remove her tunic and you must piece it together to see if any fabric has been pushed inside the wounds. Will you do this quickly, please? Before the wounds seal?”
Mother Michael was already moving. “Indeed,” she said, motioning a weeping Sister Hildegarde forward. “Find something to cover her with. And get all of these men out of the sanctuary, please. They should not witness this.”
Sister Hildegarde wiped the tears from her cheeks as she turned around and began shouting at the people crowded into the sanctuary.
Along with a few of the other women, they managed to herd every man that didn’t belong there out of the sanctuary.
When they tried to herd Lucan and Caelus out, they received some resistance until Kaladin told them that they could remain, as dun Tarh brothers.
And they would need all of the brothers to keep Estevan calm.
Lares was another story, however. He stood at the end of the bed, watching the activity going on, admittedly more concerned for his wife than the woman bleeding on the bed.
Mabel seemed well enough except for some blood on her neck, but given the status of the woman on the bed and the dead man in the bailey, it could have been much worse.
Lares was deeply thankful that it wasn’t.
“Mabel?” he said quietly. “Yer neck is bleeding, love.”
Mabel knew that. It was staining the top of her dress and she could see it.
“Were it not for this young woman, there would be considerably more blood,” she said, pausing to look at him.
“That man in the bailey attacked me. Had it not been for the bravery of this young woman, he would have killed me. I owe her my life, Lares.”
Lares didn’t question that. But he did want to know what happened. “What did he do?” he asked. “And who is he?”
Mabel was peering closely at the wounds, which were trying to clot. “I do not know,” she said. “But he asked me if the queen was here. I can only assume he was part of the army that attacked us at the gate.”
Estevan, by this point, had stopped weeping, though his face was still damp. When he heard his mother’s explanation, he turned to his father as they silently relived the conversation they’d had earlier.
Only dun Tarh men entered the gatehouse.
Are ye sure?
As usual, Lares was right. He was almost always right in situations pertaining to the nature of men and battle. He’d seen a good deal in his lifetime and had dealt with a variety of situations, so in this case, he had correctly surmised what had happened.
And it had almost cost Mabel and Anaxandra their lives.
Guilt swept Estevan. They shouldn’t have agreed to keep their suspicions private.
They should have told everyone so they could be on their guard.
That judgment call might have cost him everything, because as he watched, Mother Michael returned to the bedside bearing metal instruments for probing the wounds for foreign substances.
Anaxandra’s tunic was carefully stripped off by Sister Hildegarde and another nun, who promptly took it away to inspect it for missing pieces.
Meanwhile, another nun brought a blanket to cover Anaxandra’s nudity from the waist up.
Between Mabel and Mother Michael, she was carefully covered and wrapped.
There was nothing to do now but wait for Anaxandra’s wounds to be assessed.
Far calmer than he had been only moments earlier, Estevan sat at the end of the bed with Titan, Mateo, and his father, watching Mabel and Mother Michael inspect the wounds with long, sharp tweezers.
It was a good thing that Anaxandra was unconscious, because the pain would have surely been too great for her to bear.
One wound appeared to be clean, with no fabric pushed into it, but the one on her torso seemed to have a bit of cloth pushed deep.
Mabel was the one who used the pointy tweezers to dig in and pull forth a tiny piece of material. Fortunately, that seemed to be all.
After that, Mabel and Mother Michael cleansed the wounds with copious amounts of wine before tightly stitching them up. As this was going on, Estevan felt in control of himself enough to stand up and pull his father aside for a coherent conversation on the situation.
“What do ye intend tae do with that bastard who did this?” he asked. “Where is he? I want him made an example of, Papa.”
Lares, who hadn’t been told directly of Estevan’s affection for Anaxandra, started to figure it out the moment his son collected her bloodied body and carried it back to the sanctuary. The way he carried her and the emotion he displayed pointed to something more than simple concern.
Something much more.
Therefore, he wasn’t surprised by his son’s passionate request.
“The body is still where we found it,” he said as Titan, Mateo, Kaladin, Rodion, Caelus, and Lucan crowded around. “He is clearly one of the Ormsfolk. He must have slipped in with my army and we did not notice.”
Estevan’s face was tight with emotion. “They left their dead behind when they fled the battlefield,” he said. “How many of them are there?”
“Thirteen,” Rodion said. “That is how many I counted from the wall.”
“Thirteen,” Estevan muttered. “Plus one in our bailey. Papa, correct me if I am wrong, but I have heard that the Northman believe that if a body is buried without eyes or a tongue, he canna enter their heaven. Have ye heard that?”
Lares nodded. “Also, if the hands are removed, they canna eat or drink. They will go through eternity like that.”
Estevan looked at the men around him. “The Ormsfolk are known for their brutality,” he said. “Attacking two women as they did proves it. Papa, they know their queen is here, which means these attacks aren’t over. We know that. They’ll return, again and again, if we dunna stop them.”
Lares inhaled deeply, pondering that statement thoughtfully. “What would ye suggest?”
Estevan’s pale eyes glittered. “Do ye truly want tae know?”
“I asked. Tell me.”
Estevan didn’t hesitate. “Slay them,” he hissed. “Slay them all.”
“I agree,” Mateo spoke up. He’d been listening to everything and had something to add.
“Leonore told me of a prisoner the Ormsfolk had, a man who was a Scottish warlord. They cut a piece off him every week, cauterizing the wounds, until the man was nothing but a head and body. They even took his ears and his tongue. Then they left him in a hole for eight days, waiting for him to die. Now… think what you will, but I agree with Estevan. I do not want to end up in a hole with no arms and legs. We must slay them before they slay us. Or worse—make us wish they had.”
The decision was made on the spot.
They had to end it, once and for all.
Later that day, Lares took all of the knights, his sons, and his entire army out of the walls of St. Margaret’s to hunt down the Ormsfolk. It was a ruthless task, but a necessary one if they wanted any peace. As Estevan had said, it was time to slay them.
And they did.
No mercy.
But before they went, they collected the dead, including the one killed by Anaxandra, and all of them had their eyes, tongues, and hands removed.
Then they were hung from the wall of St. Margaret’s as a warning to those who would try to attack the abbey again.
When the bodies were on display, Lares and his men charged into the trees, following the paths of the Ormsfolk, paths that were not difficult to follow, and spent the next two days chasing down every last man and killing them.
With no one left, they hauled the bodies down to the mouth of the River Nith, where their boats were still grounded, and made several funeral pyres.
Bodies were burned, including the bodies from the walls of St. Margaret’s, and the boats were burned right along with them.
Ashes were combed down to the shoreline of the Solway Firth, and when the tide came in, those ashes became part of the sea.
No trace was left of the Ormsfolk from the Isle of Mann, for they had tangled with the wrong people.
Dun Tarh, de Wolfe, and de Velt had seen to that.
The men who lived by violence, and died by violence, returned to the place they came from—the sea.
When Estevan told Leonore, she wept.
Finally, she was free.
As were they all.