CHAPTER ONE
TheSaesnegbastardtried to take her head off.
They were pouring over the eastern wall because they’d managed to get the platform repaired and ladders up, even though her men had done their best to dislodge them. They couldn’t burn the platform down because the English had been clever—they’d soaked the wood with water. Flame couldn’t take hold. Every time they tried to dislodge the ladders, the English archers would fire at them. She’d already lost several men because of those damnable archers.
Damn, damn, damn!
Now, the wall was breached, and she was fairly certain there was no way to stem the tide of English soldiers and knights crowding onto the wall walk. They were armed and looking for blood. That being the case, she did the only thing she could do.
“Bylchu!” she cried.
Breach!
The alarm was sounded. The Welsh in the bailey below began to run for the wall with anything they could use for a weapon—clubs, swords, broken pieces of wood. One man even had an iron rod from the blacksmith’s forge. They were rushing to protect what they believed to be rightfully theirs, a castle thathad seen its share of English and Welsh ownership. ButCastell Brythonig, or Brython Castle, was built upon a mount that, legend said, was a gate to the Otherworld where the ancestors of the Welsh had risen from. What the English didn’t understand was that not only were they dealing with a prize castle that controlled a major road in and out of Wales, but they were dealing with a locale that ancient legend spoke of as a sacred site.
Brython wasn’t the castle’s real name. The real name had been lost to time because there had been a fortress on that exact location since the time of the Romans. Some thought the real name of the castle was Arallfyd, meaning Otherworld, but somehow over the centuries, Arallfyd and Otherworld became Brython for the sacred place the Brittonic people had come from. They were only legends, really, but legends the Welsh had always taken seriously. The location meant more to them than it did to the English.
And that was why she wasn’t going to let the English gain control of the castle.
Again.
And the woman had been charged with that task. Unfortunately, her resolve wavered when she saw big, powerful knights with thousands of weapons leaping over the wall. It seemed as if they had a thousand weapons, but it was possibly more like only one or two. She, too, was armed, but in spite of her command capability and skill with a blade, even she wasn’t sure she could win in hand-to-hand combat with the English knights, who were making short work of the Welsh soldiers trying to stop them.
“Lady!” someone was shouting at her. “Elle!Come down from there! You will be killed!”
Enid Avrielle ferch Gwenwynwyn heard her name being called, knowing who it was before she even looked. She knew her commander’s voice, the very loud and steady voice of Gethinap Guto. The same man who had rejected the English offer of a marriage of truce. He was frantic to get her off the wall.
But Elle wouldn’t listen.
No one told her what to do. She’d established that early in her life when she didn’t even like the sound of her own name and insisted on being called Elle because it sounded stronger than what her mother had saddled her with. Ignoring Gethin’s shouts, she unsheathed her sword, summoned her courage, and charged forward along the wooden fighting platform that now constituted most of the wall walk around Brython. The bombardment by the English had managed to damage most of the fighting platforms and put big holes in the stone wall walks, but there were still places where one could move around on the wall.
This was one of them.
But it was a perilous wooden platform at best. In fact, most of Brython was perilous from the damage the English had inflicted, but she wasn’t going to let them know just how badly they were hurt. More and more English were pouring over the wall, and her men were being thrown down to the bailey below, most of them with holes in them made by English weapons. Elle simply wasn’t going to stand for it. She’d been fighting this battle from the beginning and she was going to fight it until the end.
With a roar that sounded more like a scream, she charged.
A particularly big knight was coming over the wall, and she ran at him like a bull, lowering her head and ramming him right in the midsection as he came over the top. Her momentum threw him off balance, and he instinctively grabbed hold of her. Together, they went toppling back over the wall and crashed into several men who were coming up the ladders. The English knight had her in his iron grip, and from the way he was falling, he was taking all of the concussions.
She hardly felt a thing.
But she did know they were falling.
For a woman who suffered from an inherent fear of heights, she had to admit that tackling the knight as he came over the wall hadn’t been the smartest move. As they hit the platform about ten feet below the top of the wall, she ended up falling onto her right arm and shoulder. In the process, her head hit the platform, and the helm she was wearing, which was too big for her, tumbled off her head. Blonde hair, braided, spilled out, and it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that a woman, dressed in mail and leather, was in their midst. Realizing that she had somehow lost her broadsword in the tumble, Elle began to punch the knight in his lowered visor as hard as she could.
“You…bastard!” she yelled, raining a furious barrage of punches on his face and neck. “I will kill you, do you hear? This ismycastle! I will kill every last one of you Saesneg dogs!”
The knight was nearly three times her size. He was also heavily armed. His sword was in its sheath at his side, and he had daggers along the belt at his waist. When Elle realized this, she made a grab for the daggers, but he grabbed her wrists with a grip of iron. He also moved out from underneath her as she tried to kick him, since he had her hands trapped. With ease, he stood up and pulled her with him as she fought back with everything she had. The knight just held on to her wrists, making no move to strike her. He did stop the next knight passing by him, however, as the man prepared to mount the ladder to the wall above.
“Take her,” the knight said, shoving her at the man with his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. “Take her to my father. Tell him she’s one of the soldiers.”
“I amnota soldier,” Elle shouted, managing to kick him in the armored shin. “This ismycastle. Send your men away before I kill them all!”
The man with his foot on the ladder snorted. “You take her,” he said. “I have my fight waiting for me. I think you’ve found yours.”
With that, he slipped up the ladder, leaving the enormous knight hanging on to a wildcat of a woman. Elle swore she heard him sigh sharply, clearly displeased, before releasing her wrists and grabbing her by the braids.
He had moved like lightning.
