LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘We didn’t find out till weeks after.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘She buried them, her father and the others, before she came down from the high land.’

      John studied her again, the woman who could barely keep a blade upright. How had she summoned the strength of body and heart for that? ‘And then?’

      ‘We tried,’ Rob growled, as if John accused him of shirking his duty, ‘but the Storwicks denied his guilt and the English Warden wouldn’t hand him over for trial.’

      The Borders had their own laws, enforced jointly, on occasion, by royally appointed Wardens on both sides of the border.

      ‘And even if he had,’ Rob continued, ‘it would have been his word against hers.’

      ‘So Father promised her the justice the Wardens wouldn’t.’ Suddenly, he saw hope, something that might persuade Rob, persuade all of them, to the king’s side.

      ‘The king has appointed a new Scottish Warden.’ John leaned forwards. ‘I carry the papers with me. This one will insist Storwick is brought to justice.’

      Rob snorted. ‘One Warden’s no different from the next. Scots or English.’

      ‘This one is.’ John’s statement was more emphatic than his certainty. He knew little of the man. ‘You must give him time to prove it.’

      ‘I must?’ Rob near shouted. ‘You left us and now you come back and tell me what I must do?’

      ‘I didn’t leave. Father sent me.’ He lowered his voice, hoping Rob would follow.

      He did not. ‘Well, I didn’t see you running home when you turned one and twenty.’

      ‘And I saw no invitation.’

      ‘You don’t need an invitation to come home, Johnnie.’ All the arrogance of a big brother was in his voice.

      ‘For no better a welcome than I’ve had, I do.’ Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that conversation in the hall had stopped.

      ‘Well, what have you done since you arrived but yammered about what the Brunsons must do because your precious king says so? You might at least have given your father the grace of his burial.’

      His plan to make Rob’s decision easy had already gone well awry. ‘We’ve little time. The king needs our men in East Lothian by mid-October.’

      Realisation reflected in Rob’s eyes. He rose. ‘Well, Johnnie, my father is more important than your king. He, and you, can wait for my decision until we’ve laid Geordie the Red in the ground.’

      Rob turned his back and walked out of the hall.

      And when John looked up, everyone was watching, silent.

      Including Cate Gilnock.

      Chapter Three

      It was no day for a funeral, John thought, as they gathered outside the tower’s walls the next morning. The sun looked downright cheerful to see the man put in the ground.

      To Bessie fell the role of leading the procession to the burial ground, as her mother would have had she been alive. Awed, John watched his sister calmly assume yet another duty. When last he had seen her, she’d been a lass of eight. Now, she seemed a woman who had already seen, and accepted, all the sorrow life could offer.

      His brother stepped up to the coffin, first man to be ready to heft it to his shoulder. John moved to take his place on the other side.

      ‘I’ve five other men already,’ Rob said.

      ‘None of whom is his son,’ John said, warning them back with a glance. Estranged as he might be from his father, from the family, this was his role, his right.

      His duty.

      The others stepped away, not waiting for Black Rob’s permission. In this, John had the right.

      He took his place and at Rob’s nod, they lifted the coffin to their shoulders.

      Bessie led them from the tower, singing of sorrow in a song that needed no words. Cate fell in behind her, ready to lend an arm if she faltered. Next to his sister, Cate, with her cropped hair, loose pants and knee boots, seemed as young as a lad.

      The burden rested heavy on his shoulder as the men found their common step. Arms raised, he steadied it with both hands, feeling as if his father’s weight held him fast to the earth. But he would not be the first to cry off. And in the mile between the tower and the burial ground, they only paused once to let the coffin down.

      The Brunson burial ground perched on the leeward side of a hill beside an empty church. The grave had been prepared beside his mother’s. All there was to do now was to take the body from the coffin and lower it into the ground with ropes.

      Not for them the priest and the prayers, the laying on of hands, the final rites that might have eased his father’s passage. A few years ago, the Archbishop of Glasgow had banned the riding clans from the church and cursed them to eternal damnation with a vengeance that would have made a reiving man proud.

      The priest had left.

      The Brunsons remained.

      So at the end, his father was laid to rest with only his family and the land he belonged to. Perhaps, he thought, as they consigned his father to the earth, this was more fitting.

      John looked out across the valley his father had loved. Grey clouds had gathered atop the hills, shielding the sun, and he felt a stir of unwelcome emotion. This earth, this clay, had made him, too.

      Yet now, he was a stranger to it. His brother and the others who rode it daily could find their way on a moonless night. To him, it was like a woman he had not yet bedded. The soft hills, the surface he could see, beckoned, but he did not know what parts of her body would respond to his touch. Hadn’t found the hidden places.

      He found himself watching Cate, wondering what hid beneath her disguise. She embodied every dilemma he faced: a family who had disowned him, a land that kept its secrets, a way of life at odds with everything he wanted.

      And yet, something about her tugged at him, tempting him to peel back her layers, to discover her secrets. And something about her made him mourn what he had lost.

      The ancestral melody began. Bessie and Rob joined voices to sing the ballad of the Brunsons. The song that had come down from ancestors no longer remembered, except through song.

       This is the story, long been told

       Of the brown-eyed Viking, man of old

       Left on the field by the rest of his clan

       Abandoned for dead was the first Brunson man

      Abandoned for dead was the first Brunson man.

       Left for dead and found alive

       A brown-eyed Viking from the sea

      He lived to found a dynasty.

      There were verses unnumbered, names and stories of the Brunsons since the first, and when the last had been sung, Rob stepped forwards to sing alone.

       I sing today of Geordie the Red;

       A Border rider born and bred

       A man more faithful never found

       Loyal to death and then beyond

      Loyal to death and then beyond.

      The last notes faded. The song had been sung. His father laid to rest and his legacy created. Loyalty. But did Rob sing of loyalty to king or to kin?

      Or was he still

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