“Then I’ll ask ye the same question again,” he said. “What now, Ean?”
Ean was red around the ears, indicative of his level of anger. “They’ll come now,” he said. “They’ll come tae Bailie, but they’ll get nothing.”
“My mother could climb over yer curtain wall,” Brend said. “The Sassenach will be able tae mount it and then they’ll be in yer lap. Do ye not have a plan for that?”
“I have a plan.”
He didn’t elaborate, frustrating Brend. “What is it?” he said. “Or must we guess? Ean, do ye even know where the Sassenachare? Do ye have scouts watching the south, scouts who can warn us when the army approaches?”
“We dunna need scouts.”
He was being incredibly evasive and Brend had suffered enough. Without another word, he stood up from the table and motioned to his men, well-seasoned Lowlanders wearing their traditional long woolen tunics, and headed from the hall. Ean watched them go, his mouth open in shock, but more than the abandonment he was feeling, he was also feeling outrage.
Outrage that his world was coming to an end and he had no one to stand with him.
Around his table, only two men remained. The rest had either been killed at Gleann na Fola or they’d deserted him. Those two men, his cousins, were looking at him with trepidation. They weren’t Gordie or Brend. They were young men, barely having reached manhood, and they had no idea what to say. No one knew what Ean was going to do now or what he wanted.
But Ean was about to show them.
With a gleam of madness in his eye, he stood up and went over to the hearth. There were a couple of torches leaning into the flame, so light would always be available in the darker recesses of Bailie, and he picked up one of those torches. The burning end was soaked in fat, spewing black smoke into the chamber when he pulled it out. Heading over to one of the support columns that held up his ceiling, Ean held the torch against a dry patch of splinters long enough for it to ignite.
The column began to burn.
Ean still didn’t say a word.
He simply fled.
*
Red Keith’s circleof men to the west of Westerkirk lands netted thirteen men from the Maxwell of Westerkirk, but the English army heading north captured more.
It was like trying to herd chickens, however.
There were almost two thousand knights and soldiers marching on Westerkirk and they had absolutely no resistance until they reached Bailie Castle. Even when they arrived, however, the resistance was minimal because the castle itself was in flames. Flames that were seen for miles before the de Wolfe army reached them, and once they arrived, the de Royans brothers, along with Blayth and Thomas, sent men into the compound to root out anyone else who was there and take them prisoner.
It was a chaotic scene as the de Wolfe men chased down Scots, fighting with many, while still others just simply gave up. While that was going on, the men from Northwood spread out to the east and north, sweeping through a few small communities and coming up with eleven Maxwell clan members who were in hiding.
A long day turned into a long night.
William, at the head of the dragon, wanted to make sure everything they did was clean and as ethical as it could be because he’d kept peace on the border for sixty years. He wasn’t going to jeopardize it now over a rogue clan chief. Along with Scott and Troy, he’d made his way into the bailey of Bailie Castle, surveying the carnage and the fire as the keep burned, when Scots suddenly came out of the piles of debris that were stacked around the ward and attacked. William found himself fighting off a few rabid Scotsmen as Scott and Troy and a collection of de Wolfe soldiers backed him out of the danger zone.
But he’d taken a good nick to the forearm.
All he could think of was the fact that he’d promised his wife he wasn’t going to bear a sword. He was simply going to managethe situation, he’d told her, but here he was with a sizable nick on his left wrist and, as it turned out, a broken bone in his hand from the impact of the sword that cut him. Scott had to give him three stitches in the nick and wrapped his hand up with some wood to keep it straight and protected, but William hated the fact that he looked like a bloody invalid with the big bandage on his hand.
Still… it could have been worse.
As the night turned to dawn, the Northwood army returned bearing their prisoners and the de Wolfe army had collected any captured Scots from Red Keith Kerr and his men. They were all brought to the de Wolfe encampment, which was just outside of Bailie Castle. The castle itself continued to burn even now as the fire moved from the keep to outbuildings, to anything else that was flammable.
The entire countryside smelled of smoke and despair.
William was waiting for news that Ean Maxwell was among the many Scots captives. Standing at the door of his tent at sunset, he was nursing a sore back and shoulders from the unexpected fight in the bailey. Truthfully, he still hadn’t recovered from the battle at Gleann na Fola Castle. His body didn’t recover like it used to, and his ailments, coupled with the injury to his left hand, when his dominant hand was the left one, had him feeling somewhat under the weather.
Everything hurt.
It especially hurt when he inhaled deeply, so he tried to avoid doing that. He was starting to think that maybe his wife was right and that he shouldn’t be fighting at his age, but the truth was that he didn’t know anything else. This was his life, the life he’d chosen, and it was in his blood. But he didn’t want that blood spilled any more than Jordan did.
Perhaps it was finally time for him to hang up his sword.
