Not wanting to mingle with Edmund’s group, Thomas held up a hand to his men, indicating they remain in place until he gave the order to move out. Thomas watched as the armed Northumbria escort moved fairly quickly through the gates, heading out into the countryside beyond with Kyloe Castle as their destination for the night. Kyloe was about five or six hours away, depending on how fast they traveled and, from the look of them, they intended to travel fast.
That made Thomas think about what his father had said earlier; clearly, the man had spoken with Northumbria and Thomas was eager to know what had been said. Whatever it was, it was enough to drive Edmund out of Wark in a hurry. He had hoped it was a positive conversation but the expression on hisfather’s face led him to believe that all was not well. Edmund was fleeing and William wasn’t happy.
Perhaps he wasn’t so eager to hear what had been said, after all.
Pushing that all aside, Thomas gave the order to move out once Northumbria was clear of the gatehouse, and Thomas, Desmond, Maitland, Tibelda, and fifty heavily-armed soldiers passed beneath the two-storied gatehouse also, taking the road that would lead them north and east, while the Northumbria party headed southeast. Thomas wasn’t sorry to see them go but, the more time passed, the more he was very anxious to know what had been said between Northumbria and his father.
A conversation that would control his destiny.
With that on his mind, Thomas took his party north into Scotland.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The ruins of Castle Heton
5 miles east of Wark Castle
“Isaw twoescorts leaving Wark,” a breathless man said. “One is heading north and west, and the other is heading right for us. I hurried back to tell you.”
Heton had once been a great tower, a beacon of strength against the Scots along the England-Scotland border, but a tower that had collapsed under a siege forty years ago when Clan Elliot tried to take it and the English descended on it.
Now, it was a mound of ghostly ruins.
The tower had been four stories of stone and might, and the walls surrounding the small courtyard had been tall and impenetrable. That was when William de Wolfe, the newly-appointed commander of Northwood Castle’s army, had devised a clever plan. While a part of the army had made a big show of attacking the gatehouse to draw the attention of the Scots, William had set the rest of their army to digging a tunnel fromthe northeast corner, undermining the wall, and into the vault beneath the keep. Part of the wall had collapsed because of the tunnel, and the northeast corner of the keep had sunk as well. After that, the English had rushed in and the Scots had been all but purged.
It would seem that those in the area had been dealing with a de Wolfe, father or sons, for a very long time.
As they did last night.
They called themselves theThurrock Cú, or the Thurrock Dogs, and their leader, The Bold Hobelar. Hobelar wasn’t his real name, but that was what the men knew him by, men who were both Scots and English, men with no real loyalties to anyone other than themselves. There used to be a hundred of them, spread out between Heton and another ruined tower north of the River Tweed, but now their number had been decimated by half, and even more after the run-in with the knights from Wark Castle last night.
Now, they were a weary, injured few, but there were enough.
Enough to strike back.
“An escort,” Hobelar repeated in a thick Scots accent, scratching his head with a bandaged right hand. “How big?”
The breathless man came near the fire, burning in the partially collapsed but enormous vault of the castle formerly owned by Hobelar’s mother’s family. They could have a fire in the morning like this, when it mingled with the smell of other cooking fires in the area. Men had returned during the night wet and half-drowned, at least those who had made it out of the river once the Wark army had pushed them over the cliff.
Fifty-three men had gone on the raid at sunset the previous evening, heading up to Duns with the hope of raiding enough cattle or livestock to bring south, across the River Tweed, but so far, only thirty-two had made it back to Heton, with no cattle, and Hobelar was bent on revenge.
The breathless man knew this as he settled down by the fire, warming his freezing hands. He knew his lord and he knew the man was humiliated and furious with the loss of life and the fact the Wark’s commander had outsmarted him. “I’ve counted at least thirty armed men and a great lord traveling on a very expensive horse,” he said. “There is a wagon carrying many chests that I am certain are filled with gold.”
Hobelar digested that. “What about the group that headed northwest?”
The breathless man shook his head. “Not so many, but there were two big knights from what I could see,” he said. “They had women with them, too. It seemed to me that they were heading to Kelso.”
Hobelar sat back on the broken stone he used for a seat, noting the expectant faces looking at him. He was the son of a great Scottish laird and an English mother from the House of de Grey, and he’d spent his childhood in Scotland in the summers and Essex in the winter. As a young man, he’d found a life as a mercenary in Saxony and Ghent, and that lust for lawlessness had never left him. He was back on the borders now, home to him, and had his own group of outlaws that had been moderately successful for the past year, successful enough to drive out another gang of reivers who had controlled the area. Now, it was just Hobelar and his men, and the defeat they had suffered last night at the hands of the commander of Wark had been devastating.
He couldn’t risk another.
“The party headin’ towards us,” he said. “How swiftly do they move?”
The breathless man accepted a piece of roasted bird from a man who had been cooking the fowl over the fire. “Not swiftly at all,” he said. “We can easily catch them to the south if we leave now. They are carrying much riches, Hobelar… the wagon wasfull of such things. It would be small compensation for the defeat of last night, but it would be something.”
It was his way of suggesting to Hobelar that they take the easy target. Morale was terrible this morning and even if it was an easy kill, they needed it. They wanted it.
In truth, Hobelar understood that.
