Knight of Grace. Sophia James

lack of caring.

      The hollow sound of steel against steel rang so loud that she found herself placing her hands across her ears just to dim the noise. Not pretty. Not easy. No dainty practised fight this one, but the raw lunges of two men who would kill each other should the chance present itself. And it nearly did as Lachlan parried, his feet hitting the roots of an elm behind and tipping him off balance, the wicked sharpness of his opponent’s blade making him pay for the mistake in a deep slash down his left arm. The soldiers near her mumbled, and Lachlan bade them back.

      ‘Nay. Be still. It’s a scratch and my word has been given.’

      He did not look at her as he said it, did not in any way include her in the moment. Grace tried to catch his glance to show him that she was at least grateful for his protection, but he allowed her nothing. His very indifference to his fate angered her, made the whole basis of this marriage even bleaker. She wondered how much longer she would have a husband, so careless was he of his life?

      With the settling of the fight a different rhythm seemed to come, a closer, finer combat, thrust and counter-thrust, the sweat building on both men’s brows belying the chill in this part of Scotland in early August. Lachlan Kerr moved with a grace seldom seen in a big man, his every movement carefully honed and delivered, nothing left to chance as he came in again and again against his opponent’s weakening thrusts. And then the other man was down on the ground, a sharp swordpoint pinning him motionless and pressing deep. Horror overcame disbelief. Her husband would kill a defenceless man and risk the wrath of God and the eternal promise of an afterlife?

      ‘No!’ The desperate shout distracted everyone and all eyes came upon her. Without conscious thought she drew herself up to her tallest form and made herself speak. ‘H-H-He h-h-holds no weapon and if you sh-sh-sh-should kill him, God w-w-will punish y-y-your soul.’

      Silence met the statement and then the budding of anger. From everyone.

      ‘Is she a gomeral or just plain saft in the heid?’

      The dark-haired man spoke from his position on the ground, the words strangling with such caustic incredulity that pure wrath replaced Grace’s softer anger and she made no effort to harness it. ‘You m-m-might c-c-c-consider the message of m-m-my words r-r-rather than the s-s-stutter in them, sir.’

      ‘A Dhia, thoir cobhair, she insults me again?’

      Lachlan unexpectedly began to smile as he released the throat of his foe, allowing the man to roll over.

      ‘Get up, Elliott, and be thankful that my wife has not yet worked out the ways of the Scots. She thinks her truth does you a service.’

      A quivering waiting filled the air around them, sifting out options as to a way forwards.

      ‘Then if I hear you have smothered her in the night, Kerr, I will know the reason why.’

      He laughed and anger dissipated, and as the group from the river collected their armour and withdrew, Grace was finally allowed from the prison of her tight band of men.

      ‘They d-d-did not l-l-leave their w-weapons and you w-w-won.’

      ‘Ye think that? Ye think that I won?’

      For a second Grace imagined Lachlan Kerr would raise his hand against her, so forcibly did she feel the fire of his fury.

      ‘Next time when you think to order me, wife, know that you will be punished. Severely.’

      He swiped at the wound on his arm as he pushed past her, the fresh red flow of blood marking the trail of his passage into the trees.

      Horrified, she glanced at the ground, not wanting to meet any other censure. Connor was the first to speak.

      ‘You can ride home with me.’ When he turned away before she could argue, she felt tears prick behind her tired eyes. No one fostered manners here. No one held to the polite tones of normal deportment. She had saved a life and a soul and these men were too arrogant to realise the help she had given them. With her head held high, she leaned against the bough of an oak and contemplated just how far in walking distance it was to the Kerr’s keep of Belridden.

      Lachlan could barely stop the roiling anger from bubbling over into a shout of wrath. His wife had shamed him and he knew with a certainty that the news would be travelling around the Marches like wildfire come the evening. The Laird of Kerr brought to task by the plain Englishwoman he had been forced to marry.

      Damn it. He had told her to shut her eyes and hide her head and instead…instead she had spoken with her quavery voice, stuttering a truth in the way that only she could have imagined it. His hands tightened around his aching arm and he looked down at the injury, the sides of skin peeling away and leaving the wound wide open.

      He should have killed Elliot, for if this cut should fester then he himself would be the man marked for the hereafter.

      A wavering sadness counteracted fury. His first wife had been a harlot and this one was a blabbering loudmouth. Dalbeth’s curse weighed on his shoulders, and the banal and aimless void of living stretched long and lonely into a future he could no longer imagine or care about.

      He drew in breath and listened to the birds in the trees. Life. His life. This one and only life. He was no longer a religious man, though he hid his lack of belief well, stacked against the certainty of the Kerrs’ bad luck and the vagaries of a more primitive faith. He had lived by the sword for so long now he could barely remember what it had been like before.

      Once he had been young, hopeful, running through the forests to the north with his brother, and seeing in the shape of leaves or the colour of the first flowers of spring, a God-given beauty, a plan, a way of living that did not incorporate so much death and loss and despair.

      ‘If you kill him, God will punish you.’ Grace’s words, give or take the stutter. She was a woman who still believed in the power of a soul and in the very darkness that his should be cast into. He grimaced. She knew nothing of his life and could not understand that it was well past time to worry about his particular salvation or to chart the celestial journey of any humanity that still lingered inside him.

      His life! He remembered his fingers around the neck of those who would support David’s enemies when the talking had come to nothing and the splintered and isolated monarchy was again threatened. God, he wiped the hair from his eyes and said a prayer, not believing in the message but comforted by the habit of it.

      Nay, the bleating goodness of a woman of principle was not for the likes of him, buried as he was in the netherworld of survival.

      David had no notion of what he destroyed under the auspices of politics. Her life for one: Grace Stanton-Kerr and her bloody stuttered truths. Running his fingers through the length of his hair, he wondered again about the validity of what was whispered by royal enemies who would sacrifice the monarchy. Yet the alternative bore down on him like a heavy harbinger of doom. No king? The mantle of tradition was preferable to the absence of it.

      Anarchy!

      He had seen it in the eyes of the powerful magnates and the sons of Balliol, and heard it in the words of Edward of England’s detractors and Philip the Sixth’s enemies.

      Change for the better? This was a risky hope pinned on rebellion and paid for in the blood of men. Countrymen!

      Finding at last what he sought he stripped the sphagnum moss and mulched it between his fingers, spitting on the pink mass to form a paste before smearing it across his wound. The astringent flared and he swore softly, but held the potion in place until the pain ceased altogether. His mother had taught him about the medicines found in the forest.

      His mother!

      When she had died in childbirth, the light had gone out of Belridden, and had been out ever since.

      As he pulled down the sleeve of his jacket, the angry sound of his new spouse’s voice broke across his thoughts.

      ‘I w-w-w-will not get up on that h-h-horse.’

      Con’s reply was surprisingly