She stopped herself and turned away, but he reached out and grasped her by the arm, preventing her from moving away. “But with me what?”
Corisande shook her head and tried, weakly, to pull her arm away. “It does not matter,” she said. “I have already said too much. If you really do intend to return to battle, please be careful.”
He didn’t let her go, but his grip wasn’t crushing. It was firm, strong. She finally stopped trying to pull away and just stood there, turned away from him.
“Cori,” he said in a soft, seductive purr. “Look at me.”
Slowly, she did. He smiled faintly at her when their eyes met. “It is my duty to return,” he murmured. “But for you, I will be especially careful. Only for you.”
Corisande returned his smile, however reluctantly. “You must think I am a terrible bother,” she said. “I have no right to even suggest that you should be careful. I am no one to make such a request.”
His smile faded. “That is not true,” he said. “You are someone to me and, God willing, you will become more important by the day. As I said, this is all part of coming to know each other and, unfortunately, we are doing it under strained circumstances. But this will pass.”
She gave him a long look. “It will not be the last battle you ever attend.”
His grin was back. “Nay, it will not be,” he said. “But I’ve done fairly well until now. It is my intention to keep my limbs and body intact because I do not want you sticking needles in me like you did to Addax and that young soldier. You would probably do it excessively hard simply to punish me.”
Corisande started giggling. “Are you telling me that you are not afraid of a broadsword, but you are afraid of a little needle?”
He finally let her go, chuckling because she was. “Do not laugh at me,” he said, pretending to be wounded. “I have had my share of stitches and they hurt like the blazes, so if I can avoid them, I will.”
Corisande found that quite funny. “You are an immoveable object, a knight of the highest order,” she said. “But if I come at you with a needle, will you faint?”
“I might.”
She burst out into gales of laughter that were cut short when Alastor entered the hall. Seeing Corisande and Cole, he rushed in their direction.
“They are leaving,” he said to Cole. “The Scots, I mean. They’re finally leaving. We’ve got more wounded, so I am going to open the portcullis to admit my army.”
Cole was already on the move, unsheathing his broadsword. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “In case the Scots decide to turn around, I’ll be standing at the mouth of the gatehouse to discourage them.”
Alastor turned around and rushed out, preceding Cole from the hall. Cole may have been focused, but he hadn’t forgotten Corisande. He paused at the hall entry long enough to turn around and wink at her.
And then he was gone.
Corisande stood there for a moment, replaying that wink over in her mind a few times before returning to her duties. Not strangely, she couldn’t keep the smile from her face or the giddiness from her heart.
Not strangely, she was coming to like the man who so badly wanted to court her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Berwick
One month later
The tavern was called Blankenship and it sat in the wharf area of Berwick’s seedier side, a district called Hide Hill. This lower section of society contained all of the dregs, thieves, pickpockets, robbers, and thugs that one could imagine, all of them using the dingy buildings as hovels and lairs during the day. When night came, like vermin, they would wander out to find their victims.
Berwick had been through a great deal of turmoil over the past hundred years or so, with the English in charge of mighty Berwick Castle, then the Scots, then the English again until Richard the Lionheart sold Berwick to the Scots to raise funds for his foray into The Levant.
The Scots didn’t seem to have much interest in law and order. The castle at Berwick, an enormous bastion with a massive keep, had become no better than a stable with all of the Scots living there like animals. A man named Shaw MacHeth was in command of the garrison, so Addax and Essien had discovered.
In fact, that had been their task – to discover what they could about Berwick.
After MacDuff’s attack on The Keld, Cole and Addax had returned to Pelinom Castle to tell Jax everything that had happened, from Canmore’s gruesome death to the Justiciar of Scotia coming to demand de Bourne’s allegiance. The key of Jax’s focus, and everyone else’s, seemed to be Berwick.
That locale was the only nugget of information they had to go on for a coming invasion, the only thing of interest that had come up in their interrogation of Canmore, so Jax sent Addax and Essien to Berwick to discover what they could while Cole went to Alnwick to relay everything to the Earl of Northumberland, Yves de Vesci. Once Cole was finished at Alnwick, he was supposed to return to Pelinom, but he’d returned to The Keld instead.
A month later, that’s where he remained.
Cole’s presence at The Keld wasn’t entirely unnecessary, as a liaison between his father and Alastor de Bourne, since de Bourne seemed to be such a target for the Scots, but Addax and Essien knew why he’d really gone there.
There was a pretty little blonde who had his attention.
And Jax knew nothing about it… yet.
In fact, it was probably best if Cole stayed away from Berwick considering he was a de Velt and they were known in these parts. Addax and Essien made the perfect spies because they blended in with the rabble that came off the cogs anchored along the river’s shoreline. Berwick was a fairly cosmopolitan port, with ships coming in from France, Spain, Lisbon, and several of the Baltic countries. There was a blend of many nationalities here, so the two brothers from the lands beyond The Levant blended in quite well.
But it had been a long month. Mostly, they were focused on Berwick Castle and the comings and goings, but they also spent their time in the taverns and hovels, pretending to be sailors looking for a job, but also pretending to be drunk the entire time so no one would hire them and no one would take them seriously.
Addax had even taken to letting his hair grow on his face and, a month later, had a seriously bushy beard growing, while Essien had taken to shaving his head and wearing jewelry he received from women in exchange for what he termed as “services”. Addax knew what he meant, and Essien had bedded several women who were either concubines or even wives of the Scots at Berwick Castle, so he had learned a great deal from the local women. As he’d told Addax, a woman never spoke more loudly or more freely when he was withholding a climax from them. Addax had to shake his head at his brothers rather bawdy way of doing things, but it worked.
A month into their mission, they had more information than they could have hoped for.
With Addax and his bushy beard and Essien with his gold earrings and jewels around his neck, they made quite a pair on the dirty, smelly streets of Berwick, but they were tolerated and completely overlooked in most cases. Scots from the castle would drift into the taverns and speak rather freely in front of them. Sometimes, they would speak freely to them after they’d had a few drinks purchased for them.
One of the more important things they had learned while trolling in Berwick was the fact that MacHeth didn’t keep his fortress very secure. The gatehouse was always open, and any number of gates down to the river were also always open and often without a guard. There was one particular gate down at the river’s edge they didn’t even lock any more. It remained open all the time, day and night, although if someone wandered into it and ended up at the castle, there was usually a guard at the mouth of the passage to stop them.