THE DARK ANGEL
A Medieval Romance
By Kathryn Le Veque
PROLOGUE
January 1216
Pelinom Castle, Northumberland
The battle hadbeen raging for nearly two days.
It was one of the most desolate, brutal things Julian de Velt had ever seen. He’d been in battles before, too many times to count, but he’d never had his home attacked as it was now. Pelinom was his family’s home. He’d been born there, as had his siblings and even his mother. Certainly, they had trouble with Scots now and again, but those had always been quick or unspectacular raids because no man in his right mind would go after the seat of the most feared warlord in England.
The man known as The Dark Lord.
Except for, perhaps, the King of England himself.
That’s where this bombardment came from. John Lackland, as he’d once been known, had been waging a horrific scorched earth campaign against his own warlords, those who were opposed to his rule and had been after more than fifteen years of dealing with a king who had little respect for the men who were sworn to him. Years and years of a king who refused to keep his word to his own vassals, who lied and cheated and swindled his way through his reign. When the warlords, like Jax de Velt,could take no more and refused to fight for John any longer, the king raised an army of mercenaries from the darkest corners of the earth.
Men who had only come to kill for the money it would bring them.
It was their only motivation. John paid them well with ill-gotten funds to kill his enemies and that’s exactly what they did. They had no regard for England or her warlords, no respect for the land or the people. They’d moved from Winchester to Nottingham to York, fighting their way northward, before finally descending on Berwick Castle. Berwick was an outpost of the de Velt empire, at least temporarily, and Julian’s older brother, Cole, was the garrison commander. But Cole fought valiantly against John’s hired army of thugs so they moved off to the west, along the River Tweed, tearing into any castle they came across that wasn’t loyal to John.
Northwood.
Wark.
Roxburgh.
And finally, Pelinom.
Northwood, Wark, and Roxburgh held against the onslaught, but not without significant damage. Northwood, in particular, had suffered a great deal, but in the end, John’s army moved away, heading for that jewel called Pelinom. If they could take down Pelinom, the line of castles holding the Scots border would break and they very much wanted it to break. John was prepared to move into Scotland, all the way to Edinburgh and the Highlands, but he had to break the border first.
But the warlords held strong.
That only seemed to infuriate him.
Now, on the dawn of the third day, Julian stood at the keep entry, though the doors themselves were bolted and the iron grate, like a portcullis, had long been lowered and secured. Evenif John’s mercenaries made it into the bailey, there was no way to make it into the keep. The doors behind the grate could be burned, but the grate was too big and too heavy to be moved or destroyed. The nearest windows were slender lancet openings and unless a man was as thin as a reed, there was no way to slip through them.
The keep of Pelinom, containing Julian’s mother and sisters, was tightly secured.
But that meant the army had been out in the open, exposed to the projectiles that John’s army flung over the walls from time to time. At first, they were bundles of wood, tied together and soaked in oil and then flung over the walls in the hope of catching some structure on fire. All they managed to do was create nice, warm piles of kindling that the de Velt army warmed themselves on.
Then came the human cargo.
Literally, the mercenaries started flinging terrified squires or drunken soldiers over the walls in an attempt to get men on the inside. Pelinom’s walls were so incredibly tall, with great crenelations that Jax himself had put all the way around the wall walk, that mounting the walls was a near impossibility. The mercenary army had tried for two days. They were still trying. The men who had come flying over the walls had all been killed either during the endeavor or shortly thereafter. Jax had ordered their bodies slung back over the walls and into Pelinom’s substantial moat.
It had both demoralized and enraged the mercenaries.
And everyone knew it.
The smoke was heavy in the air as the sun began to rise, the smell of cooking fires mingled with the heavy, oily smell of burning bodies. It wasn’t that anyone in Pelinom was burning bodies, for they’d suffered no casualties, but more that themercenaries were burning their dead, unable to provide for storage or a place to bury them because the ground was frozen.
It was the beginning of the third day of an increasingly unpleasant standoff.
“Were you able to sleep?”
