Cole cut him off. “Of course measures should have been taken to protect the women,” he barked. “Are you telling me there were no guards on the provisions wagons?”
“There were about twenty soldiers with the wagons,” Alastor said. “They help with the wounded, but they are fully armed. They were there, Cole. I would have never let my daughters remain with the wagons unprotected.”
Cole opened his mouth to shout at him again but Jax shook him, breaking his concentration. “Nay, Cole,” he said quietly, firmly. “He feels badly enough. Do not punish the man. We must focus on a solution now.”
Cole was genuinely trying to keep his composure, but he was having a devil of a time. “I must go,” he said, trying to pull away from his father. “I will go and retrieve her.”
Jax was on him in a flash, grabbing him by the arms. “Cole,listen,” he said. “You cannot go alone.”
“Nay, you cannot,” The Marshal said, coming to help Jax corral his son. “You cannot go it alone. This is a mission for a small group of men or a large army, but not for only one man. You would get yourself killed.”
Cole didn’t like being restrained. “I amgoing.”
The Marshal had him by the arm. “You are going with your fellow knights,” he said. “You, Addax, Essien, Bric, Dash, Peter, Sherry, Kress, and Achilles will enter the camp in stealth, find the women, and bring them back. Are you listening to me, Cole? I need your level head now, not your rage. Your rage will get everyone killed.”
Cole knew that, but he was still verging on hysteria. The thought of Corisande in the midst of a gang of Scots had every fiber of his body in knots. His stomach was lurching, his hands contracting into fists as if to punch his way straight into Scotland.
But his heart was in the biggest knot of all.
It was slowly dying of grief.
God, no, he thought.Not Corisande.
Realizing he was about to go mad with anguish and fury, he did the only thing he could do. He took a long, deep breath and doubled over, fighting against everything that was straining to let loose.
“God,” he groaned, squeezing his eyes tightly before standing up to focus on The Marshal. “I am calm. I swear I am. You have my level head. You have all of me. But so does Corisande. I am going to marry the woman, so I cannot simply stand here.”
The Marshal put a hand on his shoulder. “I know,” he said quietly. “I have heard the rumors. The knights in my stable may be able to keep the most precious secrets of state, but they tend to talk about one another. You know we have no secrets.”
Cole looked to the men behind him, men that he knew and loved. He could see the sympathy, the support. He didn’t know ifthat made it better or worse. “There has been no time to speak of it to anyone, personally,” he said. “In fact, I have barely told my own father. I had hoped to speak of it to the rest of you when the battle was over and there was a wedding to attend.”
The Marshal gave him a supportive squeeze on the shoulder. “There still will be a wedding to attend, I am certain,” he said. “But until then, you must face this rationally. You are a knight, Cole. You know that you must contain your emotions. Especially now.”
He was right. Cole was trying to keep his breathing steady, knowing that an unrestrained man would get himself killed. He struggled to focus on what needed to be done, not the danger Corisande was facing. If he focused on that, he would lose what was left of his control.
“Then I will take command of the rescue mission,” he said, though his voice was quivering. “Do we know where they were taken?”
The Marshal glanced towards the north. “I believe William is in the hills north of Berwick,” he said. “The Scots who took the de Bourne sisters came over the Ord Crossing. If you return to that bridge, mayhap you can follow their trail.”
Cole thought on that. He looked up into what was presumably the sky, but he couldn’t see it through the fog.
“In the night and in this mist, it will be difficult to see,” he said. “My instinct is to go at this very moment and use the fog to our advantage, but that would be foolish. North of Berwick is unknown to me and in a mist like this, we could get lost.”
By this time, Addax and Essien had moved forward to listen, as had Peter, Bric, Dashiell, Alexander, Kress, and Achilles. All of them seasoned agents, all of them listening to Cole try to reason out the situation. But he wasn’t in complete control, terrified for Corisande, and that was something they could all sympathize with.
It was Alexander who finally stepped forward.
Out of the entire group, Alexander was the most natural commander. The Marshal had used him often for missions because Sherry, beloved by all of The Marshal’s men, had the ability to see everything from all angles. He had never made a mistake that The Marshal had been aware of, so when the group of Executioner Knights stepped in to listen to Cole speak, The Marshal discreetly motioned Alexander forward. Cole wanted to command the mission to retrieve the woman he was going to marry, but The Marshal wanted someone who was driven by logic and not emotion.
Alexander cleared his throat softly.
“Cole,” he said quietly, smiling at the man when their eyes met. “Let me do this for you, my friend. Let me take charge of seeing your lady safely returned. Will you let me do this? You cannot go charging in there with your heart and not your head. That would jeopardize your safety as well as ours, so let me do this for you. Will you trust me?”
Cole looked at the man who had brought him into The Marshal’s ring to begin with. He adored him. He also knew that everything Alexander said was right.
But, God, it was difficult for him to relinquish control where Corisande was concerned.
“We must get her out of there, Sherry,” he insisted softly.
