“What is wrong, Toby?” she asked.
Toby had her arm around Ailsa, eyeing the knights at the table. “Keep your voice down,” she hissed. “We must leave this place right away.”
Ailsa frowned. “Leave? We just got here.”
Toby had a grip on her sister’s arm. “You must trust me. We must leave this very moment and I do not want you to argue with me. Just come.”
“But I do not want to leave,” Ailsa said loudly. “Stop grabbing my arm. You are hurting me.”
By this time, Stephen and Kenneth had heard pieces of the conversation. Toby tensed when Stephen rose to his feet.
“Leave?” he repeated. “Who is leaving?”
Toby was exhausted and frightened. She couldn’t even look at Edward, stuffing his face with bread. At this point, it would do no good to lie about her reasons or intentions. She had never been one to mince words.
“We are,” she announced, trying to pull Ailsa with her. “We are leaving this place and you will not stop us.”
Stephen’s gaze was steady. “Why are you leaving?”
Toby was backing up with Ailsa in her grip. Her hazel eyes moved rapidly between Stephen and Kenneth as if waiting for them to leap up and grab her.
“Because we must,” she said firmly. “We must return to Forestburn.”
“Forestburn is ashes.”
“No thanks to you,” she snapped; her quaking legs had spread to her body, making it difficult to remain balanced. “Those who burned my home were after you. I suppose I knew it all along but my illness has affected my thought processes. Now I know that my sister and I must leave if we are to survive. It was a mistake to come here with you.”
By this time, Kenneth was on his feet. “Mistress, perhaps you should sit,” he suggested. “You have been ill and….”
“I do not want to sit,” Toby exploded, losing her grip on Ailsa. She stumbled backwards and in a reversal of roles, Ailsa was now the one with a firm grip on her arm. “I want to leave. I must leave. I do not want to be here when Mortimer’s men burn this place down around our ears. I want to go home to Cartingdon where I belong.”
“Toby, what is wrong?” Ailsa was starting to tear up. “Why are you so angry?”
Toby was losing ground fast. She struggled to stay on her feet as she looked at her sister. “I am not angry,” she insisted hoarsely. “I am terrified; terrified because de Lara and his men have lied to us since the beginning. Those men who burned Forestburn and killed Mother and Father were sent by Roger Mortimer. They are looking for the king and we were caught in their path.”
Ailsa’s eyebrows lifted in disbelief. “Theking? But…?”
Toby threw an arm in the direction of the table. “That squire, Ailsa. He is not a squire at all. He is King Edward the Third. They had come to kill him but killed our parents instead.”
Astonished, Ailsa’s head snapped in the direction of the table. Not surprisingly, Edward was no longer eating. He was staring wide-eyed at Toby, his expression one of a mouse caught in a trap.
Toby’s pale face was clouded with loathing as she met his stare. “It would have been the decent thing to tell us who you really were rather than carry on a lie that would cost us everything,” she directed her venom at the boy. “At least if we had known, we could have made an effort to protect ourselves. But you left us open and vulnerable without regard for our safety. Is that the kind of king you really are? Do you care nothing for your subjects?”
Slowly, Edward rose to his feet, swallowing what was left in his mouth. He wiped at his lips with the back of his hand.
“How did you know who I was?” he asked with surprising firmness.
Toby sighed heavily, her weakness growing. Lamely, she lifted an arm and let it slip back down to her side. “I did not for certain until this very moment,” she realized that she felt overwhelming sadness more than anything. “We have lost everything because of you. Why did you have to come to Cartingdon in the first place? Why could you not have simply left us alone?”
“Because Cartingdon is my holding and I serve the king.”
Tate emerged from the stair hall, his storm cloud eyes riveted to Toby. His progression into the room was slow, deliberate, the expression on his face unreadable. He had heard most of her rant as he came down the stairs, not surprised that she had figured out who the young squire was. She was a very smart woman. He found himself oddly torn as he faced off against her; torn between remorse and duty. He was sorry she had been put through such trauma but it had been, in fact, in the line of duty. And he was not going to apologize for his sense of duty.
Toby watched him as he moved towards her, his stalking gait and powerful form. The terror she had initially felt was fading, being replaced by a strange numbness. Her body was shaking with fatigue and emotion and it was increasingly difficult to hold a thought.
“You should have told me who he was,” her voice was quivering. “Out of trust and generosity, we showed you hospitality and you allowed harm to come to my family. If this is the kind of king that Edward plans to be then I will side with Mortimer before I trust him again. He has allowed us to come to devastation.”
She was so pale that she was gray; Tate knew she wasn’t feeling well but he was having difficulty keeping his temperdown. He was extremely protective of Edward, even against an ill young woman who had every right to be angry.
