Knight Triumphant. Heather Graham

them open the gates,” he said. “We are a band of dead men riding already.”

      “Guard!” she called. “It is I, Igrainia, lady of Langley. Cast down the bridge.”

      There was motion on the parapets high above them, and a reply.

      “My lady, where is your guard? You must be away from this place; you must not reenter here!”

      “Open the gates; lower the bridge.”

      “Sir Robert has said that you must not return—”

      “I am lady here; open the gates.”

      “You ride with madmen; you come with rebels—”

      “The guard will die if you do not open the gates.”

      “Oh, my lady! For your own dear life—”

      “I am commanding you. Open the gates. Let down the bridge.”

      For a moment Eric feared that the woman might not have the authority she should wield; despite his desperation, he had not come here ill prepared, without knowledge regarding the situation at Langley. The lady here was a woman of greater importance than the lord. Though her husband had been a Scottish peer in his own right—one who had maintained a loyalty to Edward of England—this woman, wife of the perished lord, was the daughter of an English earl, a man who had gained his title some years back through an ancestor born on the wrong side of the English royal blanket.

      The sound of gears and pulleys creaked against the stillness of the day. The gates began to lower to span the moat. Here, near the sea, it was an oddly clean body of water, for the moat joined a stream that cut a blue ribbon across the green plain toward the rocky coastline where the land joined the sea. Moments later the gate was down, and entry to the castle was but yards away. He spurred his horse and entered into the courtyard.

      A pathetic show of troops came mustering from the tower keep as his band of men came clattering over the bridge. Though clad in mail and the colors of their late lord, the group that greeted them did not draw weapons, but formed a semicircle around their horses, waiting. They seemed to be leaderless, strangely adrift.

      “Set me down!” Igrainia said, “if you would manage this without bloodshed.”

      He didn’t like her tone, it was as rasping as her mere existence. But her words made sense toward his one driving goal, that of reaching Margot, his daughter, Aileen, and the others. It was all he could do to keep from throwing the woman down from his horse. She was anathema to him, hair pitch black when he sought a woman with a head of hair as golden and glowing as the sun, eyes a curious dark shade of violet when his world had come to rise and set in a gaze as soft and blue as the most beautiful spring morning.

      Alive and well and walking while Margot lay dying . . .

      He lifted the Englishwoman with a forced control and set her to the ground before dismounting behind her.

      “Where is Sir Robert Neville?” she asked.

      One of the guardsmen stepped forward.

      “My lady, he is . . . he is abed.”

      “Does anyone tend to him?” she asked anxiously.

      Eric lost his patience, stepping around her. “I am Eric Graham, emissary of the rightful king of this holding, Robert the Bruce of Scotland. Lay down your arms, and your lives will be spared. The castle is now in the hands of the Scots who honor and acknowledge Robert Bruce as king.”

      He glanced back at Peter MacDonald, who had ridden at his heels, giving a quick nod that he should now take over as the authority. Ignoring all else, he then started across the courtyard to the door to the keep, knowing exactly where the prisoners, even though near death, were held. It might have been a foolish move; a guard with a death wish of his own might have brought a battle sword piercing through his back. Behind him, he could hear the fall of arms as his men dismounted from their horses and collected the weapons. Peter MacDonald, a man who had been his right hand since the coronation of the king, began shouting the orders. Eric had complete confidence in Peter: the Scottish nationalists with whom he rode had survived thus far by covering one another’s back. They had become so tightly knit in their numbers, they nearly thought alike.

      He was prepared for some sign of resistance when he entered into the great hall, but there was no one there, other than an old man hunched in a chair by the fire. The old man tried to stir at the sight of Eric, but the effort seemed too great. He fell back into the chair, watching Eric as Eric watched him.

      “You’ve the disease, man?” Eric asked, his voice seeming to bellow across the stone expanse.

      “Aye. But survived, I believe,” the fellow replied, watching Eric. “You’ve come to take the castle, sir? You’ve taken hell, sir, that’s what you’ve done. Slay me, if you will. I would serve you, if I could.”

      Eric waved a hand. “Save your strength. Tell me, where are the rest of those who serve the castle?”

      “Dead, many dead. Sir Robert Neville fell, and the Lady Igrainia’s maid tends him in his room. The guards . . . not yet afflicted, keep to the courtyard and the armory. The Lord of Langley was laid hastily into the crypt, walled into his grave, lest his sickness travel; his wife could not bear that he should be burned, as the rest of the victims.”

      “And what of the prisoners and their guards?”

      “Fallen together below in the dungeons.”

      “And who tends them?”

      “Those who still stand on two feet among their own number. Before . . . ah, well, the lady of the castle tended to the dying, until she was sent from here that her life might be spared.”

      “Rest, old man. When you’ve strength, you might yet be called upon to serve.”

      Eric strode through the hall, finding the passage that led from the hall to the winding stone stairs that led below. Hell. . . the man had said. Hell had been planned long before any disease for those incarcerated here. The damp stairs to the bowels of the castle seemed endless; the prisons here were sure to bring about disease all on their own, fetid, molded, wretched. Those brought here to the belly of the fortification were among the dead, long hallways with crypts where past lords and ladies, knights, nobility, and those who had served them well lay in perpetual silence and rot, some in no more than misty shrouds that barely hid the remnants of finery and bone, while some were walled with stone and remembered with fine chiseled monuments. The passages of dead came before the cells with their iron bars, chains and filthy rushes. The dead of the household were far more honored here than the prisoners brought in with little hope for life.

      Eric passed through the crypts and knew he neared the cells again as he heard the sound of moaning. Ducking beneath an archway he came to a large, thick wooden door with a huge bolt; the bolt was not slid into place and the great door gaped. Pushing through, he saw the cells, and those who lay within them.

      There were no soft beds or pallets here. The stench was so overwhelming that he wavered as he stood, but for no more than a matter of seconds. On either side of the hall, the sick and dying lay like piles of cast-off clothing. He entered to the right, where he had been kept with Margot and his daughter. He rolled a body over, saw where the boils on the man had swollen and burst. He did not recognize the dead man, who had surely been one of his own. He looked at a death more heinous than any horrible torture devised by his enemies.

      The dead should have been taken away, their sad remains burned to keep the pestilence from spreading. Here . . .

      “Margot!” he whispered his wife’s name, because the scene would allow for no more than a whisper, and he moved through the bodies around him on the rushes. He could not find Margot, but even in his desperation, as he searched, a burst of fury and fear gave him a force of energy that was near madness; he made some sense of the room, finding those who breathed, with signs of life, and lifted and carried them, separating the living from the dead.

      “She is not here.”

      He