He was met with silence. The hollow echo of the cold stone walls and the icy fingers of the earth reaching up through the ground grasping at him, caused him to feel that iciness in his heart. His grief threatened to consume him but, even above that, all he could feel was unmitigated anger at himself for being stubborn enough and foolish enough to tell his wife that he was beyond her reach during a time when he should have been at her side every moment of the day.
He was absolutely right. Her obedience of his directive had caused her to die without his comfort. Lady de Lohr had said that Jane had writhed with pain as she struggled to bring forth a child that could not, and would not, be born. What terror and agony she must have felt knowing that she couldn’t deliver the child. Surely she would have known that towards the end, realizing that nothing she could do would push that babe from her body.
Jane died alone, without the love or comfort of her husband, and with only Lady de Lohr and the physic as company.
That knowledge was beginning to eat him up inside.
His head fell forward into his hands, and he sat there a moment with his eyes closed and his hands over his face as he tried not to envision Jane breathing her last and knowing her husband would not come. His face would not be the last one she ever saw. It was a horrible ending for a kind, pretty, and gentle soul, one who had captured Tor’s attention even as a girl.
Tor had known Jane since his arrival at Lioncross Abbey, as she had been a ward of the House of de Lohr. In that sense, they had grown up together, and he had been given the privilege of years of knowing Jane. She wasn’t like the other girls who followed Lady de Lohr around and learned from her direction. She wasn’t flighty or gossipy, and that was always something he had appreciated in her. She had her moments of wisdom, her moments of stubbornness, but mostly, she had her moments of brilliance and those were moments he was very much going to miss. When he’d been at Goodrich, he’d missed her, but never as much as he did at this very moment, knowing she wasn’t going to return.
And then there was their child.
Given the size of the babe and the fact that Jane had been too weak and too small to push it out, he was positive that it had been a boy. A son of the House of de Wolfe that would never know his destiny. It would not be the first child of de Wolfe that did not know his destiny, and it probably would not be the last, but this particular tragedy hit closer to home to Tor than the other instances.
He’d had his share of death when it came to young males in the family.
When Tor had been a youth, he had lost a younger sister and youngest brother in a tragic accident that also took his mother’s life. As a result, his father had fled the tragedy, unable to face his grief or his guilt. Tor and his older brother, William, had been away fostering at the time, so they were somewhat removed from the heart of the disaster. Tor would never forget how his father basically abandoned the family for a few years until he was finally able to come to grips with his grief.
An event he felt responsible for.
It had been Scott de Wolfe who had given the approval for the happening that had cost the life of Tor’s mother and siblings, but also the life of his aunt and two cousins. The women and their two youngest children were traveling after a series of heavy rainstorms and the carriage they had been traveling in had been dumped into a river where they had all drowned. Scott was the one who had put them into the carriage and sent them along their way, and it had taken him years to get over the guilt of sending all six of them to their deaths.
Now, Tor understood how his father felt.
He was responsible for this event.
He had been the one who had impregnated Jane. He had been the one who had kept her abed, taking delight in her supple, young body and filling her with his seed on a nightly basis. He had been reckless and lustful, never once considering that anything bad could come of it. They were married and they wanted children, and Jane had been determined to give him a son.
Her determination had resulted in her death, but it wasn’t her fault.
It was his.
Tor felt sick to his stomach. The sight of Jane’s grave made him feel woozy. He had killed her as surely as if he had taken a knife to her. Removing his hands from his face, he looked around the old abbey at all of the knights and ladies who had lived before him, great and wise men and women. But the same couldn’t be said for him.
He could feel their critical stares.
He had failed.
Leaning forward, he put his hands against the soft, cold earth of the new grave. The moment he touched it, tears filled his eyes and the lump in his throat made it so tight that he could not speak. He wanted to take her home, back to Castle Questing where generations of de Wolfes were buried. She was a de Wolfe, after all, and the right was hers to be buried with her husband’s family.
But in the same breath, he realized that she needed to stay here.
Lioncross Abbey was where she had practically grown up and it was where she had met her husband, and Tor knew how happy she had been here. She had never even been to Castle Questing, so it seemed to him that this was the best place for her – where she had been her happiest. It was where he had been happy, too, but it occurred to him that he could not stay here. He couldn’t stay here and face the ghost of her memories every time he turned around. Jane was imprinted here – she was part of this place. The more he thought about it, the more angst he felt.
The control he so carefully employed left him, leaving chaos in its wake.
That very day, Tor de Wolfe fled Lioncross Abbey Castle and took two small girls with him, not by desire, but by obligation. They were his responsibility and it had been a deathbed request from his wife. He had already let her down once. He wasn’t going to let her down a second time.
That day, Tor de Wolfe left the Marches behind forever.
And left a piece of himself behind.
The Hunting Party
CHAPTER ONE
Year of Our Lord 1301
Northumberland
They were on the hunt.
One of their own had been badly slandered and the de Wolfe knights were not going to stand for it.
A Hunting Party had been gathered. It had started at Castle Questing with Tor and his half-brothers Jeremy, Nathaniel, and Alexander. Tor was a product of his father’s first marriage to Athena de Norville and his half-brothers were the product of his father’s second marriage to Lady Avrielle du Rennic.
Tor was very close to his younger half-brothers and also to his half-sisters, of which he had several. In fact, he was close to the entire family for the first time in his life. He had been sent away at a young age to foster along with his older brother, and they had spent those formative years at Lioncross Abbey. But ever since returning home to Castle Questing, he had been given the privilege to come to know the brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles that he hadn’t grown up with.
Now, he was part of the massive de Wolfe collective.
He was one of them.
That familial bond was why they had all gathered. His Uncle Blayth’s daughter, Isabella, was supposed to have been married on the last Friday of the month, but her betrothed had second thoughts and had fled south. Poor Isabella was devastated and her father, a mighty warrior who had survived a horrific wound in his youth, was bent on hell.
Blayth had called together his nephews and sons and brothers to pursue a coward who had left his daughter alone on her wedding day. Never in the history of the de Wolfe household had such a thing happened to one of their women, so the de Wolfe men were all bent on revenge. No one slandered their women and got away with it.