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She was close enough that his mind wandered, careless of the blades, thinking that under her tunic and vest she had breasts. Now he could see her face, the angles of it as sharp and cleanly sculpted as her sword. Yet thick lashes edged her brown eyes, disguising some of the hatred there.

‘Surrender now?’

Panting, she shook her head. Yet her lips parted, tempting him to take them. She was, after all, a woman. A kiss would be mightier than a sword.

He pushed her arm down, pulled her to him, and took her lips.

She yielded for a breath, no more.

But it was long enough for him to lose his thoughts, to forget she held a sword and remember only that she was a woman, smelling of heather …

In a flash she turned as stiff as a sword and leaned away—though her lips did not leave his, so he thought she only teased.

When he felt the point of a dirk at his throat he knew she did not. Had he imagined the echo of the bedchamber in her voice? No more.

AUTHOR NOTE

For several years now I’ve written stories about characters born on the wrong side of the royal blanket. They do not have a family in the conventional sense, and for most of them at least one of their parents is unknown or shrouded in mystery.

This story, and the ones that follow, take me on a new path. After years of resisting, I have embarked on a series of connected books, centring on a family of reivers on the Scottish Borders. In few other places and times has loyalty to family been so fierce and strong. There are no bastards—royal or otherwise. Everyone knows his or her parents and siblings well.

And that, of course, is part of the problem …

About the Author

After many years in public relations, advertising and marketing, BLYTHE GIFFORD started writing seriously after a corporate lay-off. Ten years and one lay-off later, she became an overnight success when she sold her Romance Writers of America Golden Heart finalist manuscript to Harlequin Mills & Boon. She has since written medieval romances featuring characters born on the wrong side of the royal blanket. Now she’s exploring the turbulent Scottish Borders.

The Chicago Tribune has called her work ‘the perfect balance between history and romance’. She lives and works along Chicago’s lakefront, and juggles writing with a consulting career. She loves to have visitors at www.blythegifford.com, ‘thumbs-up’ at www.facebook.com/BlytheGifford, and ‘tweets’ at www.twitter.com/BlytheGifford.

Previous novels by the same author:

 THE KNAVE AND THE MAIDEN

 THE HARLOT’S DAUGHTER

 INNOCENCE UNVEILED

 IN THE MASTER’S BED

 HIS BORDER BRIDE

Look for Bessie’s story in The Brunson Clan trilogy coming soon

Return of the
Border Warrior
Blythe Gifford

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To all those who still battle nightmares.

Thanks to Matt G and Matt G and Michael

and Francisco and the rest of the gang at the Big Bowl.

And to the hillbilly poet, who really did help.

Silent as moonrise, sure as the stars, Strong as the wind that sweeps Carter’s Bar. Sure-footed and stubborn, ne’er danton nor dun’

That’s what they say of the band Brunson Descendant of a brown-eyed Viking man Descendant of a brown-eyed Viking man.

The ballads echoed in the hills along the Borders for so long that some confused them with the wind’s song. After a while, no one knew how long they had been sung. No one knew the people, now gone, who had been sung of. They knew only the whisper of the legend, as much a part of the land as the scent of heather in the autumn. And just as delicate.

But once, long ago, the songs were new and the people, real.

Chapter One

The Middle March, Scottish Borders—late summer 1528

Something was wrong. He could tell, even from this distance, though he could not explain how.

John had not set eyes on his family’s brooding stone tower in ten years. Not since he’d been sent to the court of the boy king. Now that king was grown and had sent him home with a duty to perform.

One he meant to complete quickly, so he could leave this place and never return.

A shaft of sunlight cast sharp-edged shadows across the summer-green grass. His horse shifted and so did the wind, bringing with it the sharp, painful wail of keening.

That was what he had recognised. Death. Someone had died.

Who?

He gathered the reins and urged the horse ahead, thinking of the family he had left behind. Father, older brother, younger sister. His mother was dead these twelve months. They had sent him word of that, at least.

His sister was the only one he cared to see again.

No surety that they mourned a family member. Others were part of the tower’s household. But he galloped across the valley as if the time of his arrival might matter.

At the gate in the barmkin wall around the tower, he was challenged, as he had expected. The man was not one he recognised.

Not one who would recognise him.

He removed his polished helmet to show friendly features, glad of cool air on his face again. ‘It’s John Brunson. Sir John now, knighted by the king.’ He had waited years and miles to say so. ‘Tell Geordie the Red his youngest son is home.’

Tell him I’ll not be here long.

The man leaned back on his pike. ‘There’ll be no telling of anything to Red Geordie Brunson. He lies dead in his bed.’

And John, silent, couldn’t summon up even the pretence of sorrow.

John or Sir John, there was no convincing the man to let him in. Despite the fact that people were gathering for the wake, they made him wait until they fetched his brother, Rob, to verify his identity. He could not blame them. That was the way of the Borders.

In truth, he’d found little more trust in the men surrounding the king. They were just less obvious about their suspicions.

Rob, bearded now and taller and broader than John remembered, stood on the wall walk, arms folded in doubt, letting John sweat beneath his full harness of armour. It was as much for his moods as his dark hair that they’d called him Black Rob. Now, new lines scored his brow and John wondered how many of them had deepened since he woke to find himself head man of the riding clan.

‘You claim to be my brother?’ Even Rob could not recognise him with a glance. John had been twelve, only half-grown when he left.

‘Aye. You’re looking at the son of Geordie the Red.’

‘A Storwick could say the same.’ His sceptical disdain was everything John had remembered. And hated. ‘What brings you here?’

He did not ask what brings you home, as if he would not call Brunson Tower John’s home, either.

But everything was different now. Instead of begging Rob’s permission and asking his help, now John would tell his brother what must be. ‘I’m sent of King James, fifth of that name.’

His brother snorted. ‘That’s no talisman of entry.’

Ruled by his advisers for the last fifteen years, the young king’s name struck no terror on the Borders. But John knew the king well enough to know that it would. And soon.

‘Look at my eyes and you’ll know me.’ Johnnie Blunkit they had called him. The only Brunson with blue eyes.

‘If you’re a Brunson, then what’s your father’s father’s father’s father’s name?’

He searched his memory, blank, then tried to summon the ballad of the Brunsons. Only the opening lines sang in his head.

Silent as moonrise, sure as the stars, Strong as the wind that sweeps Carter’s Bar.

There was little else he remembered of his people. And less that he wanted to.

‘I may not be able to name my great-great-grandfather, but I remember well enough, Black Rob, how you tried to teach me the sword. Your own blade slipped and I’ve still a mark on my rib to show for it.’

Some of the ladies at court had found the scar quite appealing.

Rob’s frown did not ease, but he jerked his head to the guards. The gate opened, creaking.

John rode in, searching for something he might recognise. Was that the corner where he and Rob had practised with dagger and sword? This the spot where he and his sister had buried their toys? It felt no more familiar than any of the succession of castles he and the king had slept in over the years.

And no more welcoming.

A slender young woman with flowing red hair stepped into the courtyard. ‘Johnnie?’

Bessie.

His sister, at least, knew him. When he’d left, she had been eight and they had been the youngest together, united against the world.

Now, she was a woman grown.

He swung off the horse and hugged her, letting her squeeze him back, holding the embrace longer than he would have because it gave him something to do. Time to think. And a moment’s illusion that he still belonged here.

‘Ah, Johnnie, I always told them you would come home.’

He held her away so he could see her eyes. Brown, like all the Brunsons except his, but today, red with tears.

He shook his head. ‘Not for long, Bessie.’ Never again. ‘I’m Sir John now. I ride beside the king.’

Rob, down from the wall, clasped his arm, without warmth.

‘I must talk to you,’ John began. ‘The king wants—’

‘Whatever the king wants, I’ll not hear of it now. It will wait until we’ve sent Red Geordie to rest with our forefolk.’

It was always thus. All work, all life would stop for the ‘dead days’ before burial.

Well, that might be the way of the Borders, but the king had no time to wait.

Still, John held his tongue and followed Bessie into the tower. His heavy armour clanked in protest as they climbed the stairs to the central gathering room.

‘I found him in his bed,’ Bessie said, as if she thought John would care, ‘when he didn’t come to break fast. Died in his sleep he did, with no one to receive his last words.’ She whispered, as if to speak aloud would make her cry. ‘Snatched away without a moment to say farewell.’ Her voice shook. ‘Yet peaceful he looked, like he was still asleep.’

‘No death for a fighting man,’ Rob muttered behind him.

At the door to the gathering hall, Bessie paused. ‘I must make his body ready.’ She gave John another brief hug, then climbed the stairs to the floor beyond, where his father lay dead, hovering above him like an evil angel.

She, at least, mourned Geordie Brunson.

They entered a crowded hall, the yawning hearth half filling the outer wall. But instead of sorrowful mourners, he first faced a table surrounded by half a dozen warriors.

‘This is my brother, John,’ Rob announced, with no acknowledgement of his knighthood and no hint that he might have come for any other reason than to mourn his father.

One by one, the men rose to greet him. Toughened by war and hard living, wearing vests of quilted wool and boots of well-worn leather, each man took his hand, took him in, and gave him trust because he was a Brunson. No other reason given and none needed.

The last one, slender shouldered, sitting with his back turned, rose last. And John saw, astonished, that he faced a woman.

Her brown eyes did not meet his with the warmth of the others.

‘This is Cate,’ Rob said. ‘These men are hers.’ He said the words as if it were no more remarkable than blooming heather.

She was tall and spare and blonde as the brown-eyed Viking who, legend said, was the father of all Brunsons. Nose sharp, chin square, cheeks hollow with more than hunger, neither face nor body showed a woman’s softness.

A woman who refused to be one. How did he treat such a woman?

He thrust his hand to shake hers, as he had the others, but she did not reach out, deigning only a curt nod. He returned it, his hand dropping awkwardly to his side as he suppressed his resentment. Then he broke away from her stare, his gaze falling, without deliberate intent, to search for breasts and hips. He found only edges, no curves. No comfort for a man there.

And based on the expressions of the other men, none sought.

‘Are you a Brunson, then?’ he asked. She looked like some cousin, long forgotten.

She lifted her chin and gave a quick shake of her head, ruffling her cropped hair. ‘I’m a Gilnock.’

The Gilnock family were distant kin, descended from the same brown-eyed, bloodthirsty Norseman as the Brunsons—and the only family on the Border more unforgiving than his own.

‘But she’s under our roof now,’ Rob said. Under Brunson protection, as might happen when a child was orphaned.

With a quick motion, she dismissed her men and moved closer to Rob and John.

‘I must speak with you, Rob,’ she said. Her voice surprised John. It was lower than he expected, the words round and deep and shimmering as if she were whispering secrets in the dark. ‘Your father died with his word unkept. What happens now?’

‘He was not your father,’ John retorted, wondering what had been promised. Yet she seemed more a Brunson than he, as if she had donned men’s clothes in order to usurp his place.

‘He was my headman,’ she answered, looking at the new headman when she answered. ‘Sworn to protect my family.’

‘A Brunson gave you his word,’ Rob said, anger edging his words. ‘It will be kept.’

On the border, a man’s word was good after death. At court, it might not be good after dinner.

‘When?’ she asked.

‘After he’s buried,’ Rob answered. ‘It must wait.’ He looked at John, the glance a warning. ‘As must other things.’

Cate caught the look and turned to John. ‘You do not come because of his death?’ Her eyes, assessing him, seemed ready to judge his answer. Not for this woman the warmth he usually felt from her kind. She seemed as cold and fierce as his brother.

Rob might want him to wait for the burial, but his father was dead and the king alive. And impatient. ‘I bring a summons from the king.’

‘You mean from his uncles or his mother or his stepfather?’ Rob looked no more willing to listen than Cate Gilnock.

John understood his hesitation. James, six years younger than John, had been king since birth, but he’d been under the control of others for the sixteen years since then. ‘From none of those. It’s his personal rule, now. No one else’s.’

They sat, silent, thinking of all this meant.

‘A man with much to prove, then,’ Rob said.

Did Rob speak of the king? Or himself?

Cate’s lips twisted in a smirk. ‘So what message is so important that your bairn king would send you here, all dressed in armour, to tell us?’

The harness and badge he’d been so proud to wear had impressed the beauties at court. ‘He’s your king, too.’

‘Is he?’ She shrugged dismissal. ‘I’ve never met him, never sworn my allegiance. My family and my own right arm keep me safe, not your king.’

‘But he will.’ He fought the tug of her voice, a strange combination of scorn and seduction. ‘He commands our men to join him in war against the traitor who has held him captive for the past two years.’

The ‘traitor’ had once been a duly appointed regent, but all things change.

Cate, not Rob, jumped in to answer. ‘And the wee king sent you to tell us, did he? You might have spared your horse. Brunson men will ride for no king of Fife. They ride to fulfil the promise of Geordie the Red and put Scarred Willie Storwick dead in the ground.’

He wondered what the man had done to earn such vengeance, but it mattered not. If that was his father’s promise, it would be broken.

‘The king commands you to fight his enemies, not each other. There’ll be no more raiding and reiving and thieving of cattle and sheep. I come to carry out the king’s will.’

And to earn his place at the king’s side, but that would not sway them.

‘And do you also come to stop the sun from rising of a morning?’ The curve at the corner of her mouth was a poor substitute for a smile.

If a man had said it, John might have answered with a fist to his gab. ‘The king wants—’

‘The king doesn’t rule here.’ Rob’s words were low and hard, his expression the one that had earned him the nickname Black. ‘We do.’

I do, he might have said, for his brother would be the one to say where the Brunsons would ride.

Yesterday, the decision would have been his father’s.

‘Surely your loyalty does not rest with the English king?’

‘My family holds my loyalty,’ his brother said. ‘Who holds yours?’

He and his family had parted ways years before. Nothing had made that more clear than returning to them. ‘We all owe loyalty to the throne. Scotland must be one country or it will be no country at all.’

‘I owe nothing to your bairn king,’ Cate said, heading for the door. ‘Go back and tell him to leave us be.’

No one followed her.

John looked back at Rob, waiting for a decision, but his brother seemed frozen with grief. The son most like his father, Rob had been prepared all his life to lead the family, but uncertainty lay beneath the stubborn set of his jaw.

Borderers had long held themselves above the king of either country.

No, now was not the moment to force a sorrowing son to choose between his father’s promise and the king’s command.

But if Cate released Rob from his father’s promise, then the choice would be easier. John would have to wrestle only with his brother’s stubbornness instead of with a dead man’s ghost. No, in order for the Brunson men to ride east to meet the king, Cate Gilnock must drop her demands and step aside.

So John would persuade her to do exactly that.

And quickly. The king was expecting John to deliver Brunson men before the first frost.

Brew was served and the sharing of stories began, stories of Geordie the Red at his best. And his worst.

Refusing to share in laughter and tears he did not feel, John left Rob and the rest in the hall and went in search of a place to stow his gear and his armour.

Avoiding the floor where his father’s body lay, he made his way to the open sleeping room on the upper level. He had travelled alone, without even a squire, for speed and secrecy, so he wrestled his armour off by himself.

He would certainly not beg his brother for help.

Instead, he pondered the problem of Cate Gilnock.

For the few days of the wake and burial, he would leave Rob to mourn and turn his charm on the woman. By the time his father was in the ground, he’d have her ready to release Rob from whatever promise she’d been given.

She looked and sounded like no woman he had ever met, yet underneath, he had no doubt that she was the same as all the rest. With the right handling, she’d be persuaded to peace.

Reason would be useless, of course. Near as useless as, he feared, it would be against his brother. But there were other ways.

His family might confound him, but women did not. He knew how to flatter and cajole them, how to overcome their feigned resistance, and how to coax a smile or a kiss. He and the king had shared their fill of women and John had even taught the younger man a thing or two, though in truth, the king needed little teaching in this realm.

He headed down the stairs to find her, a smile returning to his face. No doubt Cate Gilnock had never been wooed by a man before, acting as she did. All she needed was a honeyed word and a winning smile and she’d soon be releasing Rob from the daft-headed promise his father had made.

And Brunson men would be riding to join their king.

Cate forced herself to walk down the tower’s steps when she left him, though everything in her screamed to run. She only ran towards things now, never away.

Fear only encouraged them.

But this one, with his smooth tongue and his knightly armour, this one scared her as none had in years. Not because she thought he would hurt her body. She’d let no man do that ever again.

And if one did, she would not let herself feel it.

No, it was because of the judgement she saw in his eyes, criticising the rough armour she had forged around her life, carefully as bits of iron hidden between the quilted layers of her jack-of-plaites vest.

If he knew the truth, it would be worse.

She escaped to the stables, where her sleuth dog had been banished until the burial. Usually, Belde was ever at her side, holding her fear at bay, but a dog in the house with the dead could be killed if he got too close to the body.

She would let herself be killed first.

Tail wagging, Belde sniffed her from the toes up, his usual greeting. It took longer this time, because he caught an unfamiliar scent.

‘That’s a new Brunson you smell,’ she muttered, scratching behind his ears. A Brunson who threatened the fragile barrier that protected her. ‘Bite him when you see him.’

Intent to understand the new scent, the dog didn’t lift his head. She wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face against his reddish fur. There would be no tears, but this creature would be the only one allowed to see her sorrow.

The men accepted her silently. Braw Cate, they called her, and if she was not exactly a comrade in arms, none of them saw her as a woman. That part of her had died and she would let no one resurrect it.

Especially a blue-eyed Brunson.

She lifted her head and settled a firm expression on her face.

Sorrow would be left on the dog’s coat.

John found her in the soft, grey light of the afternoon doing something he’d never seen a woman do: waving a sword at her fading shadow in a corner of the courtyard.

He watched her from the doorway, more baffled than ever. She was slim and strong. Bone and sinew bent to her will. This was not, he could tell, the first time she had lifted a blade, but the sword, more than half her height, was one a man needed two hands to wield.

What kind of woman tried the same?

Quietly, he unsheathed his dagger and crept around the edge of the yard. It was no match for her sword, but confronted with a weapon in a man’s hand, she’d no doubt gasp and blush and step aside.

She heard him before he got within a sword’s length and whirled to meet him. He lifted his weapon and crossed it with hers.

‘Surrender?’ he said with a smile.

Instead, she knocked his dagger aside. ‘Never.’

Then, lips set, eyes narrowed, she pointed the sword at his chest, as if to make a touch.

Or something even more deadly.

He tightened his grip on the dagger and took a step back, wishing he still wore his armour. On his guard, he countered her, exhilaration warring with annoyance as they circled each other. He had learned to fight in this very yard, learned because it was a matter of life and death, but his style had been polished beside the king, who had picked up an adult sword at thirteen.

Partnering with King James, guided by the same master, he had developed swift elegance that allowed his opponent to increase his skills without either fighter being hurt.

Even disadvantaged by his weapon, he should be able to toy with this woman until she lowered her blade.

Yet she knew none of those rules. She swung her sword with the bluntness of a warrior astride a hobbler pony, fending off an enemy brandishing a pike. Her sword’s thrust carried urgency, even passion, that somehow stirred his blood.

Even his loins.

He jumped just in time to escape a touch. Now was not the time for distractions. He had expected a playful joust. Instead, he faced a warrior.

He swung high, but she held up her sword, turned sideways, to block his stroke. A clever move, but lifting the two-handed sword had strained her strength and when she lowered it, her arms shook.

Seizing on her weakness, he attacked and they crossed blades again. Prepared now, he leveraged his strength against her sword. Though she kept her grip, he pushed the blade away, coming close enough to feel her chest rise and fall, nearly touching his.

Close enough that his mind wandered, careless of the blades, thinking that under her tunic and vest, she had breasts. Now he could see her face, the angles of it, sharp and cleanly sculpted as her sword. Yet thick lashes edged her brown eyes, disguising some of the hatred there.

‘Surrender now?’

Panting, she shook her head. Yet her lips parted, tempting him to take them. She was, after all, a woman. A kiss would be mightier than a sword.

He pushed her sword arm down, pulled her to him and took her lips.

She yielded for a breath, no more.

But it was long enough for him to lose his thoughts, to forget she held a sword and remember only that she was a woman, breasts soft against his chest, smelling of heather …

In a flash, she turned stiff as a sword and leaned away, though her lips did not leave his, so he thought she only teased.

When he felt the point of a dirk at his throat, he knew she did not.

‘Let me go,’ she said, her lips still close enough that they moved over his, ‘or you’ll be bleeding and I’ll leave you to it, I swear.’

He eased his arms from her back and she pushed him away, wiped her mouth and spat into the dirt.

He touched the scratch she’d left on his neck, grateful she had not drawn blood.

Her eyes, which he had thought to turn soft with pleasure, narrowed, hard with fury.

‘It’s a Brunson you’re facing,’ he said, trying a smile. ‘Not a Storwick.’

She raised both sword and dirk, the larger wobbling in her grip. ‘It’s a man I’m facing who thinks what I want is of no consequence if it interferes with his privileges and pleasures.’

Had he imagined the echo of the bedchamber in her voice? No more.

He raised his eyebrows, opened his arms and made a slight bow. ‘A thousand pardons.’ Words as insincere as the feelings behind them.

She frowned. ‘You are a stranger here, so you know no better. And because you are a Brunson, I’ll let you keep your head, but I’ll warn you just once. You will not do that again. Ever.’

She lowered her sword, slowly.

You are a stranger. She was the Brunson, besting him with a sword, displacing him at the family table. His temper rose. ‘And what if I do?’

The blade rose, this time, not pointed at his throat, but between his legs. ‘If you do, you won’t have to worry about bedding a woman ever again.’

He swallowed, gingerly, his body on fire. Only because she had challenged him. Nothing more. No man could desire such a woman.

‘Then have no worries on that score, Catie Gilnock,’ he said, flush with anger. ‘When next I bed a woman, it most certainly will not be you.’

Cate watched him go, struggling to keep her sword upright. Only when he was safely inside the tower did she lower her blade and raise her fingers to her lips.

He had dared to kiss her. And for just a moment, she had felt what other women must.

What she had thought never to feel.

After the raid, after her father died, after … the rest, she had been mercifully numb. Months were a blur. Some days, the only sensation she felt was Belde’s nose, nudging aside tears she didn’t remember shedding.

Then the numbness faded, and the fear came.

Bit by bit, day by day, she fought it. Piece by piece, she built a wall to hold it back.

Now, no one questioned why she was not like other women. But Johnnie Brunson did. His careless smile was a cruel reminder of doubts she had smothered and regrets she had suppressed. When he looked at her, they haunted her anew. Who she had been. Who she could never be. All the things she wanted to forget, the questions she did not want to ask, wanted no one to ask.

The questions she would never answer.

She carried her sword back to the armoury and polished the blade, reluctant to rejoin the wake and see him again.

Surely she would not have to fight Johnnie Brunson for long. He’d soon learn that no outlander could dictate to a Borderer who or how he could fight. This land, these people, were beyond the whims of a king.

But fight she would, and keep fighting until Scarred Willie Storwick lay cold beneath the ground. Not, as most thought, because of what he had done to her father.

Because of what he had done to her.

Chapter Two

John watched Cate return to the hall and join her men near the hearth without so much as a glance his way.

The wake was in full swing and John was surrounded by strangers. Rob had gone upstairs to sit with the body, which was never allowed to be left alone before burial. Soon enough, John would have to face his father’s corpse, knowing the sightless eyes would never see the king’s badge of thistle that John had so proudly pinned to his chest.

It seemed to impress no one here on the Borders. Not even the Gilnock wench.

In truth, he had not planned to kiss her, but when she refused to surrender, when her eyes clashed with his as strongly as her blade, he found himself … roused. Even then, he had expected little more than the taste of cold steel. But her lips, thin and sharp as her tongue, warmed, drew him in …

And then rejected him.

She might not have meant it as a challenge, but that was his body’s translation.

Women did not refuse Johnnie Brunson.

He watched her, surrounded by her men, wondering what kind of a woman she was. Flaxen hair framed a face hard, sharp and spare as the rest of her. At least, that’s what he had thought until he was close enough to feel her breasts against his chest and see the sweep of her thick lashes.

He forced his thoughts away from rumpled sheets and throaty laughs. She did not seem to offer stories of her own, but she laughed at the others and encouraged them to tell their own tales.

In that, at least, she seemed a woman. She was likely as changeable as any he had known. All he must do was figure out how to change her.

Beside John at the table, the men who had ridden with Red Geordie were swapping stories of Storwick cattle stolen and recovered and stolen again and making promises of the cattle they would steal in Geordie’s memory.

John did not waste breath to argue. Black Rob would decide when, where and if they raided again, but John must not force that choice too soon.

When next John turned to look for Cate, she had gone.

‘Would you sit a watch with him?’ His sister’s voice, soft, came over his shoulder.

He turned to see her, and Rob, faces scored with grief, behind him.

‘It should be kin beside him,’ Rob began, as if John were kin no more.

‘Rob, please.’ Bessie’s voice was weak and weary.

He met his brother’s eyes, clashing as they had, even as boys. ‘I am as much his son as you are,’ he said. At least, that was what he had told himself whenever he had doubts. ‘I will take my turn.’

He rose. No other choice. He must face his farewell.

Alone, he climbed the stairs and paused at the open door to the room where his father lay. The candle that would burn throughout the night flickered on the chest by the hearth.

And at the foot of the bed, Cate Gilnock sat, head bowed, as if she were kin with the right to sit with him.

Anger pushed him into the room to claim his place. His brother, his sister, even the men who rode beside Geordie the Red were closer to him than John was. That, he had accepted.

But not this woman, this interloper.

‘I sit with him alone,’ he said, voice cold.

She jumped up and reached for her dagger, stopping only when she recognised him. ‘If you cannot respect his word, you should not sit with him at all.’

Her words twisted inside him, sharp as a blade. ‘Alone,’ he said, not trusting himself to say more.

Wordless, she lowered her blade and stepped outside.

His father lay in the curtained bed where he had died, arms at his side, wrapped in white linen. John could hardly imagine his gentle, doe-eyed sister having prepared the body for burial, but here he lay, even in death, his face as fierce as in John’s memories.

He took a step forwards. He should pay his respects. He should pray for his father’s soul as Cate no doubt had done. Or perhaps he should be fearful that the man’s spirit, vengeful, might still haunt the room. He should feel … something.

Instead, he felt as if he stood in an empty room.

Hard to even picture this body as his father, straight, strong and spare of speech with no time for his youngest boy except brief minutes to drill him in the wielding of the staff and sword. He had not been the son favoured with the old man’s care and training. John had been the one pushed from the nest and sent to the king, his loss mourned no more than that of a cow or a sheep.

And in ten years, never a word sent except notice of his mother’s death, as if John had ceased to exist once he had left Brunson land.

Well, he was back and his father, in truth, was dead as he had been to John for the last ten years.

Taking a step closer to the bed, he was swept with a wave of grief that weakened his knees. Staggering, he gripped the corner post of the bed to stay upright. He thought Rob was the one who needed to grieve, Rob the one who needed time to adjust to his father’s loss before he shouldered the demands of the head of the family.

Now, John faced the truth. He was the one for whom it was too soon. Too soon to accept that his father was gone. Too soon to release the glimmer of hope he’d felt as he rode across the hills, proudly wearing his armour. Hope that he might make peace with the man at last.

Too late for that now.

Peace, if peace were possible, would have to be made with his brother.

The air stirred behind him. The room was empty no more.

‘When did you last see him?’ Cate’s voice.

He did not turn, but spoke the memory. ‘I was twelve. He sent me to Edinburgh, with just enough men to assure I’d arrive safely. We rode as far as the burn, crossed the water, I turned back to wave…’

But his father had already left the parapet and, in that moment, left his life.

John shook his head, stood straight and turned his back on the body in the bed. There would be no reconciliation now. ‘I last saw him ten years ago.’

Shadows and candlelight softened her face, until he believed, for a moment, that she understood.

Or did he see only pity for a man who did not belong to his family?

He bristled against it. She was the one who did not belong beside the deathbed. ‘Why are you praying over my father as if he were kin? Where is your own?’

‘Dead as yours.’ Whispered, words more vulnerable than any she had yet spoken. ‘At the hand of Scarred Willie Storwick.’

Now. Only now did he understand. ‘So you picked up his sword and his men and vowed vengeance.’

She didn’t bother to nod, and when her eyes met his, the woman’s softness was gone and he faced the warrior again. ‘And your king will have no men of ours until I’ve had it.’

Her words, a vow, chilled him, but hot anger rose to wipe out the feeling. This stubborn woman was his enemy, as much or more so than the Storwicks across the border. ‘The king will have his men, or you’ll wish he had.’

She sniffed. ‘I’m not afraid of your king.’

‘I was not speaking of the king.’

Her eyes widened and he regretted his threat, but her obstinacy had swamped all his plans of persuasive charm.

He leaned closer, this time resisting her lips. ‘But the king, too, knows something of revenge. That’s why he’s going to destroy the man who’s held him captive these last few years.’

‘If he’s a man who knows revenge, he will know why I need mine.’

‘He won’t. Not if it stands in his way.’

He wanted to best her now, as he’d been unable to do in the yard. ‘So if you’re of the Brunsons, you’ll do as we do. The king will have his men. I am here to make sure of it.’

‘Johnnie!’ Bessie stood at the door, the faintest hint of judgement in her voice.

How long had she stood there, silent as a wraith, watching?

And what had she seen?

She did not wait for him to ask. ‘You’ve travelled long today. Get your rest. I’ll sit with him.’

He walked out, silent, without a backward glance at the bed.

Or at Cate Gilnock.

‘Did you see to the dog?’ Bessie moved so silently, it always surprised Cate when she spoke.

‘I tied him,’ Cate answered, returning to sit on her stool. ‘With the horses.’

‘I’m sorry you must be separated.’

Silent with surprise, Cate blinked. She thought she had fooled them all, that they judged Belde only a dog, valuable for tracking and nothing more.

Bessie pulled a stool beside Cate’s and sat, then let her head fall into her hands with sorrow, or fatigue.

Cate reached out to touch her shoulder, uncertain how to help. ‘Let me get you something.’

Bessie shook her head without opening her eyes. ‘They’ll be here, coming and going all night.’ Her voice soft, still. Then, she sat up, straightened her shoulders and met Cate’s eyes, coming to herself in a way so similar to her brother’s that Cate blinked. ‘I’ll sleep later.’

Bessie was the woman every man expected: chaste, quiet, placid and peaceful. One who looked out on the world with an open gaze, as if she knew and was perfectly content with her lot in life.

And though the two women had shared a room and a bed for near two years, Cate still knew no more of her than that.

‘Your brother is not like the others.’ He threatened the defences that had served her so well.

Bessie nodded, not asking which brother Cate meant. ‘We were close when he was a boy.’

Cate could see that they would be, both lean with rust-coloured hair, unlike Black Rob, who favoured his mother’s people.

Then, Bessie smiled, sadness banished. ‘We called him Johnnie Blunkit.’

‘Blunkit? Why?’ She could not imagine this angry man dragging a blanket behind him.

‘Because of his eyes.’

‘Ah.’ Blunkit fabric was a soft blue-grey, remarkably similar to the colour of John Brunson’s eyes. ‘He must have hated that.’

‘Later, aye—’ Bessie nodded ‘—he did.’

Cate shook her head, trying to picture this strong knight as a youth. ‘I don’t remember him.’

‘You must have seen him when he was younger.’

‘When?’ She would have been no more than ten when he went to court, Bessie even younger.

‘A wedding, a year, maybe, before he left. I cannot remember whose, but the tower was full. Everyone had come to celebrate.’

Cate tried to summon the event and had a dim memory of two lads in the courtyard, crossing swords. The taller—it must have been Rob—had the advantage, but John gave no quarter, fighting harder when he accused his brother of holding back.

‘So long ago.’ She was no longer the giggling girl of nine who knew nothing of the world’s horrors and still thought to be a bride one day. ‘I had forgotten.’

‘He was not like the others.’ Bessie nodded towards the bed where her father lay. ‘Even then.’

Cate shook her head. Perhaps Bessie no longer knew her brother. ‘He’s like enough.’

He was a man. One whose first thought had been to kiss her.

When John returned to the hall, the fire had burned low and the raucous conversations had quieted. Some men dozed.

He accepted a mug and took a wedge of cheese, the first food he’d had all day. So simple, the things that kept a body bound to the earth.

Rob sat alone on the stone window seat. He did not move or speak when John joined him.

He wasn’t sure what drew him back to his silent brother, but he had faced the truth: his father was truly gone. The triumphant return he’d hoped for lay shattered at his feet. There would be no reconciliation.

It was the king’s favour he must seek now, not that of a family who had never granted it and never would.

His father, Cate, his brother. Each had judged him and found him wanting. The king would not—not when John brought three hundred Brunson men to fight at his side.

Cate walked into the hall and another man rose to take her place in the dead man’s room. This stubborn woman, determined to oppose the king’s will, was haunting him more than the things that should have been: his father, the king, his mission.

She was nothing like the women he had known at court, any of whom seemed ready to flip their skirts for a chance to bed a king’s man. Even those women already wed.

‘She’s a skittish one, isn’t she?’ he said to Rob, nodding towards the other side of the hall where she stood with one of her men.

‘Cate?’ Rob shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

John took a sip, waiting.

His brother said nothing more.

He gritted his teeth. Silence was not the way at court. There was always chatter, even if the words were meaningless.

Even if they were false.

He forced another question. ‘Why is that, do you suppose?’

Another shrug. ‘Not for me to say.’

‘Not for you to say or not for me to know?’ Was Rob hiding something? With as few words as the man used, it was hard to tell.

Then, Rob turned his head to look at John with that familiar expression that needed no words to say Little Johnnie Blunkit. ‘She lost her father to the Storwicks. Do you expect her to be dancing?’

‘No,’ he said, refusing to yield, ‘but I don’t expect her to dress like a man and wield a sword, either.’

Rob shrugged and made no answer, but his face spoke his grief. He had just lost a father. He was not dancing. And if John forced him too soon, he’d not be sending men to the king, either.

‘She has no mother?’ John said, cracking the silence.

‘Dead. Years before her father.’

‘Brothers? Sisters?’

Rob shook his head.

She had no family, so she stole his. Well, she could have them.

‘When did it happen?’ His brother delighted in making him beg for each scrap. ‘Her father’s death?’

‘Two years ago.’

Longer than he had thought. Long enough that she should no longer be in grief’s grip. ‘How?’

Rob sighed, finally accepting John would ask until he was answered. ‘She said little. It was about this time of year. They were still in the hills with the cattle when Scarred Willie came. Killed everyone but Cate. Took the cattle.’

Killed everyone. It was not the way of the Borders, such killing. But the woman’s life had been spared, as was right.

‘Could you not chase him down?’

‘We didn’t find out till weeks after.’

‘Why not?’

‘She buried them, her father and the others, before she came down from the high land.’

John studied her again, the woman who could barely keep a blade upright. How had she summoned the strength of body and heart for that? ‘And then?’

‘We tried,’ Rob growled, as if John accused him of shirking his duty, ‘but the Storwicks denied his guilt and the English Warden wouldn’t hand him over for trial.’

The Borders had their own laws, enforced jointly, on occasion, by royally appointed Wardens on both sides of the border.

‘And even if he had,’ Rob continued, ‘it would have been his word against hers.’

‘So Father promised her the justice the Wardens wouldn’t.’ Suddenly, he saw hope, something that might persuade Rob, persuade all of them, to the king’s side.

‘The king has appointed a new Scottish Warden.’ John leaned forwards. ‘I carry the papers with me. This one will insist Storwick is brought to justice.’

Rob snorted. ‘One Warden’s no different from the next. Scots or English.’

‘This one is.’ John’s statement was more emphatic than his certainty. He knew little of the man. ‘You must give him time to prove it.’

‘I must?’ Rob near shouted. ‘You left us and now you come back and tell me what I must do?’

‘I didn’t leave. Father sent me.’ He lowered his voice, hoping Rob would follow.

He did not. ‘Well, I didn’t see you running home when you turned one and twenty.’

‘And I saw no invitation.’

‘You don’t need an invitation to come home, Johnnie.’ All the arrogance of a big brother was in his voice.

‘For no better a welcome than I’ve had, I do.’ Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that conversation in the hall had stopped.

‘Well, what have you done since you arrived but yammered about what the Brunsons must do because your precious king says so? You might at least have given your father the grace of his burial.’

His plan to make Rob’s decision easy had already gone well awry. ‘We’ve little time. The king needs our men in East Lothian by mid-October.’

Realisation reflected in Rob’s eyes. He rose. ‘Well, Johnnie, my father is more important than your king. He, and you, can wait for my decision until we’ve laid Geordie the Red in the ground.’

Rob turned his back and walked out of the hall.

And when John looked up, everyone was watching, silent.

Including Cate Gilnock.

Chapter Three

It was no day for a funeral, John thought, as they gathered outside the tower’s walls the next morning. The sun looked downright cheerful to see the man put in the ground.

To Bessie fell the role of leading the procession to the burial ground, as her mother would have had she been alive. Awed, John watched his sister calmly assume yet another duty. When last he had seen her, she’d been a lass of eight. Now, she seemed a woman who had already seen, and accepted, all the sorrow life could offer.

His brother stepped up to the coffin, first man to be ready to heft it to his shoulder. John moved to take his place on the other side.

‘I’ve five other men already,’ Rob said.

‘None of whom is his son,’ John said, warning them back with a glance. Estranged as he might be from his father, from the family, this was his role, his right.

His duty.

The others stepped away, not waiting for Black Rob’s permission. In this, John had the right.

He took his place and at Rob’s nod, they lifted the coffin to their shoulders.

Bessie led them from the tower, singing of sorrow in a song that needed no words. Cate fell in behind her, ready to lend an arm if she faltered. Next to his sister, Cate, with her cropped hair, loose pants and knee boots, seemed as young as a lad.

The burden rested heavy on his shoulder as the men found their common step. Arms raised, he steadied it with both hands, feeling as if his father’s weight held him fast to the earth. But he would not be the first to cry off. And in the mile between the tower and the burial ground, they only paused once to let the coffin down.

The Brunson burial ground perched on the leeward side of a hill beside an empty church. The grave had been prepared beside his mother’s. All there was to do now was to take the body from the coffin and lower it into the ground with ropes.

Not for them the priest and the prayers, the laying on of hands, the final rites that might have eased his father’s passage. A few years ago, the Archbishop of Glasgow had banned the riding clans from the church and cursed them to eternal damnation with a vengeance that would have made a reiving man proud.

The priest had left.

The Brunsons remained.

So at the end, his father was laid to rest with only his family and the land he belonged to. Perhaps, he thought, as they consigned his father to the earth, this was more fitting.

John looked out across the valley his father had loved. Grey clouds had gathered atop the hills, shielding the sun, and he felt a stir of unwelcome emotion. This earth, this clay, had made him, too.

Yet now, he was a stranger to it. His brother and the others who rode it daily could find their way on a moonless night. To him, it was like a woman he had not yet bedded. The soft hills, the surface he could see, beckoned, but he did not know what parts of her body would respond to his touch. Hadn’t found the hidden places.

He found himself watching Cate, wondering what hid beneath her disguise. She embodied every dilemma he faced: a family who had disowned him, a land that kept its secrets, a way of life at odds with everything he wanted.

And yet, something about her tugged at him, tempting him to peel back her layers, to discover her secrets. And something about her made him mourn what he had lost.

The ancestral melody began. Bessie and Rob joined voices to sing the ballad of the Brunsons. The song that had come down from ancestors no longer remembered, except through song.

This is the story, long been told

Of the brown-eyed Viking, man of old

Left on the field by the rest of his clan

Abandoned for dead was the first Brunson man

Abandoned for dead was the first Brunson man.

Left for dead and found alive

A brown-eyed Viking from the sea

He lived to found a dynasty.

There were verses unnumbered, names and stories of the Brunsons since the first, and when the last had been sung, Rob stepped forwards to sing alone.

I sing today of Geordie the Red;

A Border rider born and bred

A man more faithful never found

Loyal to death and then beyond

Loyal to death and then beyond.

The last notes faded. The song had been sung. His father laid to rest and his legacy created. Loyalty. But did Rob sing of loyalty to king or to kin?

Or was he still struggling to choose?

They walked back to the tower even more slowly than they had left. Ahead of him, Rob and Bessie leaned towards each other, shoulder to shoulder, eyes on the life ahead of them.

A life in which he had no place.

Cate, to his right, was dry eyed, but none wearing the Brunson brown and blue had more vengeance in their gaze than she. More vengeance, he thought, than sorrow.

No, Rob would not, could not yield, he feared, as long as Cate held him to his father’s word. She was the key.

Well, women were changeable. The king’s own mother had sided with the English, the French and the Scots in turn, changing sides as easily as she changed husbands. This Cate would be no more steadfast if he gave her the right persuasion.

He just had to figure out what persuasion that was.

***

Last night, the hall had been full of talk, laughter and tears. Today, the guests were gone and only Rob’s and Cate’s men remained. And the silence of sorrow.

John escaped the tower, even the courtyard, unable to feign regret he did not feel. Outside, in fresh air, he would be able to think clearly on the challenge of Cate Gilnock.

He did not need her acceptance. He did not need, or want, to touch the woman. He simply needed her to release vengeance he still did not fully understand. He feared, however, that peeling away her layers could be even harder than peeling off her clothes.

Beyond the tower walls, the Galloway ponies dotted the field, left to feed themselves until the coldest weather came.

Let them find their own forage, his father would say. Makes them strong.

He paused to pat one of the bays on his broad, sturdy chest and the pony let him, nosing for a treat. John held up empty hands. ‘Not today, boy. Next time.’

In apology, he swept his hand down the reddish hair of the beast’s back, feeling warmth beneath his palm. When they were boys, Rob used to challenge him to mount a pony bareback and race around the tower. John won often enough that Rob dropped his dare. He beat his brother because he was more flexible, able to communicate with the horse, rather than forcing the creature to his will.

He grinned. He could probably do it still.

Seized with the memory, he murmured a word or two and stepped away to allow a running start. The pony waited patiently as John approached, jumped, then pushed himself up and swung his leg over to settle astride.

Well trained, the pony lifted his head and waited his command. No saddle held John on. No reins helped him guide. And no armour separated him from the feel of his mount’s muscles, flexing beneath him.

He guided with his legs and, by shifting his weight, headed out to where the Liddel Water skipped down the valley. He was surprised to discover that, once mounted, he remembered paths his head had long forgotten.

Following the stream, he saw Cate in the distance, wading across in water that reached near to her waist. She carried a wad of cloth and kept glancing downstream, as if looking for someone.

Instead of calling out, he stopped the pony in a thicket of trees where they could not be seen, curious.

She dropped the cloth on the other side of the stream, then waded back across. Man she might try to be, but now he knew the truth. Now, he could appreciate the shades of ash and flax mixed in hair that did not reach shoulders too slender to be mistaken for a man’s. And as she climbed out of the stream, wet cloth clung below her waist, drawing his gaze to the place her legs met and putting him in mind of what might happen if she spread them for him. Strange that a place normally hidden behind a skirt should be so tempting when clothed in breeches.

Pausing, shoulders hunched, she looked from tower to valley to hillside, as if wary of danger. Storwicks could be around any bend, true, but it was early in the season and still daylight. An attack was unlikely.

His pony, trained to be silent and invisible, did not draw her eye. Then she turned her back on him and ran downstream to disappear around a bend and into the trees.

Baffled, he urged the horse ahead, slowly, uncertain whether to follow. What was she doing with—?

Before he could finish the thought, a sleuth dog in leather harness burst through the bushes, pulling Cate behind.

The beast weighed more than she, if John were any judge. Nose to the ground, the dog dragged her with him as he followed the trail she had laid, turning abruptly to cross the water where she had, and pouncing on the bundle of cloth with his tail wagging when he reached the opposite bank.

Well trained, he thought.

‘Good, Belde,’ she said, pulling a treat from her pocket for him to gobble. ‘Good dog.’

And then she petted him with more affection than she’d shown to any two-legged creature.

As they crossed the stream again, he dismounted and walked closer. But before he reached her, she heard his step over the rushing water, whirled and drew her dirk.

Not drawn for him, he realised. She was a woman wary of any sound. He held up his hands, palms toward her, a gesture of peace. ‘No enemy. Only me.’

She did not lower the blade. The softness she’d shown the hound did not extend to him. They reached the bank and the dog bounded over to him, then put his nose to John’s waist and started sniffing him up and down.

John pushed him away to no avail. ‘What’s he doing?’

‘Getting to know you.’

He took a step towards her and the dog, between them, started to growl, the hair on his neck standing straight.

‘What do you want?’ she asked. After four trips through the water, she was soaked. Only the quilted jack-of-plaites vest disguised her sex.

He raised his eyes, fighting irritation. ‘Not a kiss. I promise.’ He had told her flatly he would not bed her. Could she tell his body was not listening? ‘Call off your dog and put down your dirk.’

She sheathed the blade and her eyes flickered to the pony, standing patiently behind him. ‘You’re riding Norse. He’s a fast one.’

Her tone gentled, as when she had spoken to the dog.

‘Do you work with the ponies, then?’

‘Aye.’ She walked over to the pony and stroked his neck. Her dog followed and sat squarely between Cate and John.

Physical persuasion was futile, but the four-legged creatures seemed to be the chink in her armour. ‘You’re good with the animals.’

She threw him a look of disgust. ‘I’ve found them to be kinder than people.’

An odd statement. ‘I never thought animals had any feelings at all.’

‘At least they don’t kill their own.’

He did not remind her that she was the one ready to kill Willie Storwick. ‘What possible quarrel might one sheep have against another?’ He laced the question with a smile, bending towards her.

The dog rose, growling.

‘Sit, Belde,’ she said, grabbing his harness.

The dog looked at her, wagged his tail and sat.

John eyed him warily. Drooping ears and a wrinkled face gave the dog a lazy look, but he acted as if he would kill, if she asked.

‘He’s very protective of you,’ John said.

‘To the death,’ she answered, meeting John’s eyes. The gentleness she showed to the animals did not extend to him.

He raised his brows. ‘A sleuth dog usually has an English hand on the leash.’ And behind him, a pack of riders tracking the reivers across rock and water.

‘Not this one.’ Cate wasted no more words than his brother.

‘How did you get him?’

Something softened around her eyes, as if she was thinking of a smile. ‘Da stole him.’

John nodded. It was the only honourable way for a reiver to get anything.

Her memory, apparently, was a good one. ‘He had been tracking Da, but he slipped his leash and lost his tracker. When he found Da, he was so pleased he just sat there wagging his tale while Da rubbed his head.’

She had kind feelings for the beast, that was certain. ‘He does not wag his tail for me.’

‘He does not know whether I am safe with you.’

I do not know whether I am safe with you, she might have said.

‘You must tell him …’ He met her eyes. If he could get the dog to like him, maybe the woman’s trust would follow. ‘Tell him that you are.’

She swallowed, then looked down at the dog. Her breath came faster, but she did not speak.

‘How would you do that?’ He kept his voice soft, not wanting to force her. ‘How would you tell him?’

She did not look up. ‘I would tell him you are a …’ She glanced up, studying John, as if uncertain he deserved the label. ‘That you are a “friend”.’

Looking into the mirror of her eyes, he suddenly wanted to be worthy of the name. ‘I am.’

Though her eyes reserved judgement, she turned back to the dog. ‘Friend,’ she said firmly, then spoke over her shoulder. ‘Reach out to him.’

He held out his hand and Belde sniffed it.

‘Friend,’ she said, as the dog licked his fingers. ‘John.’ Then she smiled. ‘He should not growl at you again.’

John hoped the same would be true of Cate. ‘How long have you been working with him?’

‘Three years.’

Only the dog brought softness to her eyes, so he would talk of the dog. ‘Was he with you the night your father was killed?’

The joy that had touched her face shattered.

Fool. Speak of something else. ‘The ponies? How long have you worked with them?’ Would she deign to answer?

She shook off the sorrow. ‘Longer. I had no brothers, so my father depended on me. And once he was gone …’ The darkness returned, and with it, all her barriers. Then she faced him again, head high. ‘We’ve the finest horseflesh on the Borders. Sturdy and tireless. They’ve been known to ride sixty miles without a stop.’

Long enough to leave Scotland after sunset, foray deep inside England and return home before the sun rose. In fact, without such mounts, there would be no reiving.

Yet in her talk of the ponies, he had heard a flash of pride. Better that than fear or anger. ‘You do a fine job, I’m sure.’

Instead of the smile he had wanted, she turned back to the pony, blinking against tears.

‘There now.’ He walked up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders and forced her to turn. ‘No need to cry at a compliment.’

Belde stood to all fours, growling.

‘Quiet, beast,’ he said. ‘Friend.’

He wrapped both arms around her in a hug, thinking she would smile as most women did when cajoled.

Instead, she brought her knee up, squarely between his legs.

Hard.

He dropped his hold and doubled over, biting back a curse.

Teeth bared, the dog barked. Cate groped for his fur coat, without looking where her hand fell. Instead of his pain, he saw hers. There were no tears, but horror had replaced sadness and he wasn’t sure whether she saw him at all.

‘Cate!’ He tried to stand, barely able to hear himself over the dog’s baying. ‘What is it?’ She looked as if she were staring at spirits.

Cate knelt beside the barking beast and clasped her arms tightly around his neck. Then, as if her prayers for deliverance had been answered, her face relaxed, her eyes met his, and he saw Cate again.

She lost her parents to the Storwicks. Do you expect her to be dancing?

But that had been two years ago and death was no stranger to these hills. Her fear was beyond that.

She rose, her hand never leaving the dog’s fur, and gathered his leash. ‘I must go.’

And she turned her back, clearly intending for him not to follow.

But, with a slight limp in deference to the ache between his legs, he did.

His brother might disdain him. This woman might detest him. But he was not a man to be feared by women, even by one who clearly had much to fear. He grabbed her arm. ‘Stop.’

She did, but pulled her arm away so he was no longer touching her. The dog growled again, but she stilled him. ‘I told you—’

‘Listen to me,’ he began. ‘You may not like me. You may not want to lose Brunson men to the king’s business. And I understand you want no kisses, but I am a Brunson and you’re under my family’s protection, so you needn’t pull a dirk every time I am close.’

‘It’s you who must listen,’ she answered. ‘I warned you and you act as if you are a man without ears.’

‘I heard what you said.’ Lucky, he thought, that she had used her knee and not the dagger she’d threatened him with last time. ‘And it was a kiss you warned me against, not a simple touch.’

‘Then let me make it clear enough that even you can understand my meaning. No man touches me. Ever.’

He remembered again that first day, when she refused his hand. Strange even then, he had thought. And now he had seen the fear behind it. ‘I am not a man who hurts women. Ever.’

She stilled then, accepting his gaze with those deep-brown eyes, come from some common ancestor. A sigh escaped. ‘I know,’ she said finally, a whisper.

The whisper reminded him of the kiss, now so fully forbidden. He swayed towards her, then stopped himself before the dog could take a chunk from his leg.

‘Go then,’ he retorted, wincing and wanting to clutch himself again. He’d have to walk the pony back from here.

She did, but he called out before she was beyond earshot, ‘And don’t let that beast growl at me again.’

She looked over her shoulder with that barely-a-smile crooked corner of her mouth that made him think she might be laughing at him.

He might not be a man to be feared, but some man was. He wondered who. And why.

Chapter Four

Cate had a long, hard fight with herself as she ran away from him, back to the tower.

She had not allowed a man so close since …

Since then.

Though the Brunsons were family, they did not treat her as her father had, hugging her goodnight or ruffling her hair in play. Red Geordie was sparing with a hug, even for his own children.

That suited her. Here, she was protected, but no one tried to come too close.

Except this man, who knew no better than to put comforting arms around her shoulders.

She had stiffened at his touch, braced against the fear that would come and steal her mind, afraid she might spear him with her dirk before she could stop herself.

It did come, the fear, her old enemy, then left near as quickly as it came. And if she wounded his manhood and his pride, at least she didn’t leave him bloody.

Because his embrace had not felt like an attack, or even the prelude to a kiss. Instead, held against his chest, she had felt warm and comforted.

Safe.

When had she last felt that way?

Braw Cate, they called her. Cate the Bold. They thought her brave and bold and unafraid because she dressed in breeches and waved a blade.

She was not fearless. She was terrified.

Only with sword and dagger in hand did she dare to face those fears. Only when breeches disguised her womanhood could she rise from bed to face the world. Only with Belde within reach of her hand could she survive the most ordinary day. Going beyond the tower walls, as she must to train him, took every bit of her strength. And when she did, she always kept a clear view and an eye open for the enemy.

Now, this man had touched her and, for a few minutes, she had not felt fear.

And that frightened her more than anything else.

Inside the tower, with Belde at her side, she entered the hall, empty of mourners now. Black Rob sat alone, shrouded by mourning, looking every bit of his name.

Her heart ached for him. For all of them. She had lost a father, too.

She did not often speak idly with Rob. It was not their way. Words were worth no more than air. Necessary for breath, a menace in excess.

But today, she wanted words that might help her understand this tall, lean, blue-eyed stranger who bore the Brunson name. He barely seemed their kin, though he and Bessie shared a certain slant of the eye, an arch of the brow that spoke of pride. And action.

Bessie had told her of the boy, but it was the man she sought to understand, the man who was getting too close, not only to her body.

She hovered beside the table, waiting for Rob to look up.

When he saw Belde, he smiled, the first one she’d seen from him all day. ‘So you’ve let the beast inside again, eh?’

She nodded and sat across the table. The dog lay down beside her, close to the hearth, as if glad to be back.

She let the silence lay a while. Rob waited for her to speak.

‘So,’ she began finally. ‘John comes home.’

Not a question. That would be too difficult. Too personal. It would indicate she cared.

The smile disappeared. ‘Aye.’

Belde stretched out, his yawn a squeak in the silence.

She tried again. ‘He’s been gone a while.’

‘Long enough to change.’

She looked up and his eyes met hers as if he knew why she asked. ‘Change?’

‘He’s no Brunson now.’

She might have agreed an hour ago. Certainly, his tongue had little Brunson in it and his ideas did not belong to the Borders. But he was as stubborn as the rest of his kin, that she was sure. ‘Maybe not, but he shares your blood. Nothing replaces that.’

Ever.

She was here, safe, only because Red Geordie had taken her in. It was their code. It was how they lived. For family. For loyalty. For kin. To be cast away from the family was to be a broken man, wandering alone like the outlaws who prowled the no man’s valley of the Debatable Land.

Even Johnnie did not deserve that fate.

Rob’s shrug said the same. ‘Maybe, but he won’t be here long.’

‘Because you want him to leave?’

‘Because he doesn’t belong.’

She sighed. Johnnie had said as much. Her sense of safety was an illusion. He’d return to court, where he belonged, beside that king he spoke of and surrounded by the kind of ladies who would people such a place.

And she’d still be here. Alone.

Barely able to walk, John watched Cate and her dog disappear through the gate. After he’d recovered, he limped back to the tower, leaving the pony to graze near the west gate. He wondered whether her dagger might have inflicted less damage than her knee.

Understanding women had never been so difficult before. Living beside the king, he had never had to spare an extra thought for them. Women were fickle, accommodating creatures, ever ready to please you, in bed or out.

At least, the women at court were.

His sister was not like that, of course. And his mother had not been, either. Perhaps Border women were as different as their men. He’d ask Bessie about this Gilnock woman. Subtly, of course. He would not want her to feel forced to choose between her brothers.

* * *

He found Bessie in the courtyard’s kitchen hall, kneading a ball of light brown dough with calm, rhythmic strokes and blinking against tears.

Heedless of her sticky hands, he gave her the hug Cate had refused and she rested her forehead on his shoulder. ‘Are you all right, Bessie?’

She shook her head, not lifting it. ‘I knew we would lose him one day. Every time he went on a raid I prepared, but not … not for this.’

Some men prayed to die peacefully in their sleep. Brunsons were not among them.

He patted her back, not knowing what else to do or say, until she raised her head and forced a smile. Then he let her go and she straightened her shoulders, turned back to her breadmaking and pummelled the helpless dough into submission.

He wandered the kitchen, for there was nary a stool to sit on, wondering how to broach the subject of Cate. Finally, inspecting a large hanging carcass of beef as if to give it his approval, he glanced over at her, as if the thought had just occurred to him. ‘That’s a great beast she has, that Cate.’

‘She’s always with him. Close as some are to their kin.’

Closer than others. ‘So she lost her family, then.’

‘Aye.’ She did not look up from shaping a loaf.

‘Was she so …’ What word would capture it? ‘Bloodthirsty?’ Aye, there was the word, though it did not match the woman with fear in her eyes. ‘Even before?’

Before what? Her father’s death or something else?

Bessie was slow to answer. ‘Have you ever known a Borderer who was not?’ she said finally.

No. He had not.

Then why had he thought he could turn her from her own vengeance to young James’s? Now that he was here, he remembered what his years with the king had erased.

An eye for an eye.

It was the only Bible verse his father ever knew.

‘He always hoped you would come home, you know.’ She said it as if she had followed his thoughts.

He shook his head, fighting the longing her words evoked. Only Bessie would think so. A woman could weave entire cloth out of words a man never spoke.

It was too late for peace with his father. And now, Rob was head of the family, as he had been destined since birth. There was no place for John here, being beholden to his brother while they both tried to wrest a living from the same, stingy earth.

Maybe that was why his father had sent him away.

‘You and Rob are not comfortable, are you?’

He started, wondering for a moment whether she really were fey. Quiet, watchful, she had always had a way of reading people, of knowing the things that went unsaid, especially the ones you wanted to hide.

But then, Rob hadn’t bothered to hide his disdain.

‘We’re different, Rob and I.’

‘He’s alone now, Johnnie.’

The thought surprised him. He had assumed his brother knew his place and embraced it. Yet his father and Rob had been the pair, even when Rob was growing. His father had spent hours with his first born, teaching him to ride, to fight, to follow the trails when the moon was dark. Showing him the best places to hide the cattle. Telling him how to deal with a headstrong follower. Neither spoke much. A nod. A shrug. A grunt. These communicated as much as words for a talking man.

A good thing, since both of them had rust in their throats.

And in a battle, he had no doubt, they would have fought with one mind, finishing each other’s thrusts without needing to confer.

And now, Rob sat alone.

Well, that hadn’t sent him to Johnnie’s side, but it explained why he seemed frozen between John and Cate’s tug of war.

A sudden vision stunned him. ‘Does Rob plan to marry?’

A sigh. ‘Marry who?’

‘Cate Gilnock.’ Did every conversation lead to her? He paced abruptly, bumped his head against a hanging pot, then swatted it in irritation. That would explain Rob’s loyalty to her, even beyond that of kin. ‘They seem well matched.’

A slight smile touched Bessie’s lips, as if she were enjoying a joke he did not understand. ‘Too well. There’s no spark there, not the one that a man and woman feel.’

He ignored his relief. Then another thought nagged. ‘Is there someone for you?’ His little sister, grown now. Past time for her to find a husband. ‘Is that how you know about men and women?’

She finished shaping another loaf and lined it up beside the first. ‘I know,’ she said, stopping to face him, ‘because there is no one for me.’

He tried to remember the men who shook his hand yesterday. Fingerless Joe, Odd Jack, the rest. No, none of them would be good enough for her.

He faced Bessie’s future for the first time. What would happen to her? As her older brother, he had protected a shy, delicate, pliable sister. That was not the woman who faced him now. This woman had strength any man would be lucky to have beside him. Strength he had never seen in the women inside Stirling’s walls.

Strength like Cate Gilnock’s.

Unwelcome thought. ‘You could come back to court with me.’

‘Could I now?’ She put her hands on her hips and then presented her plain wool skirt as if to curtsy. ‘And wouldn’t I look so lovely meeting the king?’

‘We could find you something … else.’ What did he know of women’s clothes? How to take them off.

She dropped her skirts and returned to her bread. ‘You’ve a good heart, Johnnie Brunson. Don’t ever think you don’t.’

No. She was right. Court would welcome her no more than his family had welcomed him. The women in Stirling, perfumed and curled and expecting to be waited upon, would barely nod to her. Even the wench carrying the king’s bastard would mock Bessie Brunson, he feared.

‘And so does your brother,’ she said, bringing the talk back to a subject he’d hoped to avoid. ‘If you would give him a chance to show it.’

‘More than he’s given me.’ There seemed no truce between what he wanted and what Rob did.

But he had to find one—a truce with Cate and then with Rob—or he might never see Stirling again.

‘Why don’t you stay with us?’ she said, turning to face him. ‘Come home, Johnnie.’

‘My place is with the king.’ This was not his life. Hadn’t been for years.

‘He wants you to stay, you know.’

He searched her eyes, then shook his head. Only a sister’s foolish hopes. ‘No, he doesn’t.’

He started pacing, ducking the pots this time. He had not come home. And he had not come to the kitchen to talk to Bessie about Black Rob Brunson.

‘Cate says she wants to avenge her father. Is that all?’

‘Storwicks are no friends of ours,’ she said, sounding like the Borderer she was.

‘I mean to Cate. Is there something more?’

Bessie didn’t look up from the dough. ‘Why do you ask?’

Because of the fear she carries with her. Fear she seemed to be able to hide from the rest of them. Was it his to reveal? ‘Her eyes are … haunted.’

‘I thought you said she was bloodthirsty.’

‘Aye. That, as well.’ A contradiction. ‘That’s why I wonder—’

‘Don’t be asking me these questions,’ she said, and he saw a reflection of his mother’s expressions in her raised eyebrows. ‘Cate’s the one you must be asking.’

He sighed. He’d rather confront his surly brother than brave Cate’s knee again.

As he climbed the tower stairs, he heard raised voices in the hall.

‘Now! A raid in his honour. He would want it.’ One of the men. He could not tell which.

John hurried his steps. So soon, they returned to reiving. He heard a murmur, his brother’s steady voice, though he could not make out the words. Would Rob say yes or no?

‘There’s enough of us,’ someone else said. ‘We could go.’

‘The moon’s half-full.’ He could hear Rob clearly now. ‘The night still short.’

‘And our horses swift.’ Cate’s voice. ‘We could get to their tower and back before the dawn. And if Scarred Willie is there—’

As John reached the top of the stairs and entered the hall, he saw Rob surrounded. His brother’s face of strength had few differences from his face of grief, but John could see them. If Rob carried his grief into battle, the enemy would have an advantage.

‘Red Geordie is barely in the ground,’ John called out. ‘Can you not give him a moment’s peace?’

Rob, Cate and half a dozen of his men turned to look at him. Even the dog tilted his head, quizzically.

Cate scowled. ‘It was not peace your father wanted.’

Rob’s face of strength returned. John waited for a scathing rebuke, for he was arguing for the very respect for the dead he’d ignored yesterday, when Rob wanted the same.

‘Johnnie’s right. Return to your homes.’ He looked at John with an expression that might have been warning or thanks. ‘The time for riding will come soon enough.’

Cate’s look said she blamed John, but the men had cattle still in the hills and homes to return to. One by one, they took leave, giving a hand to both brothers, the grip of John’s hand less hearty this time.

Cate’s men, seeing her look, did not shake at all.

No matter. Rob had resisted a call for revenge. Perhaps he was ready to listen to reason instead of vengeance.

‘I would speak to you, Rob,’ he said, when only the three of them remained.

Rob nodded towards the table, and Cate started to follow him.

‘Alone,’ John said.

She looked to Rob. He nodded, a signal for her to leave them.

She glared at John before she did. The woman who had trembled in his arms less than an hour ago had disappeared. Only the defiant warrioress remained.

He searched her narrowed eyes, wondering which Cate was the real one.

She leaned closer. ‘Are you walking straight again, Johnnie Blunkit?’ Her growled whisper was soft, meant only to reach his ears.

Angry heat rushed to his cheeks as she passed him on her way to the stairs.

Johnnie Blunkit. The blue-eyed baby.

Words he had tried to forget ever since he’d left home. Not ones he wanted to remember as he faced his brother.

Although there were only three years between them, Rob, older, had been the favoured one. Tall, strong, taciturn, with their mother’s dark, straight hair and the Brunson brown eyes, he had wielded weapons, but never words.

Words had been left to blue-eyed Johnnie, the gowk in the Brunson nest.

So John learned to talk. Even as a bairn, he told stories and jokes and did tricks to make them laugh. It was the only way he knew to gain their approval.

And sometimes, when Black Rob wielded his sword, or his fists, too quickly, clever John was the one who made peace.

So they sent him away, a gift to amuse young King Jamie. That’s when he knew: all his clever words and funny tricks would never earn his father’s approval. And when he arrived, he discovered a six-year-old king who needed a big brother of his own.

He also found that while a glib tongue might get you out of trouble, it could also get you in—trouble you needed a strong sword to escape. So gradually, he became as his brother’s equal with a blade.

At least, that’s what he told himself as he joined Rob at the table, though to confront his brother with words was little easier than to face his sword. An untrained fighter, clumsy with a blade, could do untold, unintentional damage.

So could a man ignorant of words.

John settled himself across the table. Rob met his eyes, silent, waiting for him to speak.

Perhaps a different argument would sway him. Perhaps he could remove Rob’s dilemma and make the king his only choice. Maybe his brother would be relieved. Even grateful.

‘Have you thought, Rob, about what happens after you hunt down Willie Storwick?’ This was not swapping stolen cattle. Everyone on the Borders did that. Killing like that would continue for generations, kept alive in song. Borderers had a name for it. Blood feud.

‘Scarred Willie should have thought of that before he killed Zander Gilnock.’

‘Of course, Cate could change her mind.’ He leaned back, folding his arms, and shrugged. ‘Women often do. Then you’d be free to send men to the king instead.’

‘So that’s your plan.’

Never try to fool a brother. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You think to seduce her into helping you.’

He battled the vision of Cate, naked beneath him. ‘A woman like that? No.’ Though he had, once, foolishly, thought exactly that. ‘But women are changeable.’

At least, the ones he knew had been.

‘Cate?’ Rob near laughed. ‘You know nothing of her if you think that.’

‘I know something of women.’

Rob leaned forwards. ‘Do you now? Well, you know nothing of the Borders.’

Cate and this country, both unexpected mysteries. But it was no mystery what he must do here. ‘I know enough to do as the king commands.’

Rob studied him, confusion on his brow. ‘The king must have made some pretty promises to turn you into his lackey.’

The king had made no promises, but he had hinted at a wealthy bride and a position in the royal household. Cupbearer or Pursemaster, perhaps. ‘There’s no dishonour in serving the sovereign.’

‘Well, I hope you enjoy whatever bauble he gives you,’ Rob scoffed. ‘Your king offers us nothing we cannot get ourselves.’

‘Food in your belly, wool on your back, a stout wall and roof? Aye, all you can grab for yourself. But not the time to enjoy them. Only the king’s peace can give you that.’

Rob blinked and something shifted behind his eyes, as if he glimpsed a different life. John held his breath. Did his brother finally understand?

Then, Rob cast his eyes to the floor above, where, until yesterday, his father had slept in his own bed. ‘Only God can give you that, Johnnie.’ He shook his head. ‘Only God.’

‘And God sends us the king to do his bidding on earth.’ He leaned forwards to grip his brother’s forearm. ‘Help him, Robbie. Help him.’

But the Rob he recognised faced him again. ‘I’ll leave the helping of the bairn king to you, Johnnie. Just don’t think that wearing his wisp of a badge will let you lord it over the rest of us.’

John winced. ‘I’ve never thought that.’

Rob smiled. ‘Have you not?’

John sat back, suddenly wondering. Why else had he returned?

He had ridden home wearing the king’s badge, carrying the king’s word, expecting finally to garner his father’s respect. Or at least his attention.

Instead, he was Johnnie Blunkit again. Or worse. An outlander, no more part of the family than a Storwick.

But John had seen that outland, seen a life beyond these hills. ‘I know what the king plans. Scotland will face England as an equal.’

‘You think he’ll defy his Uncle Henry? He’s the one who’s been stirring the families across the border.’

It was true. The king’s uncle, the English King Henry, eighth by that name, was using the reiving families of England to keep the Scots occupied. ‘Because he has no respect for us.’

‘No. Because he does respect us. He respects our swords.’ Rob leaned forwards. ‘And I mean to be sure we keep that respect.’

John gripped his fists in frustration. ‘It’s been two years since Gilnock’s death. Why is it so important to avenge him now?’

‘Because now, I’m the head man.’

Pride, stubbornness—everything he knew of his brother was in those words.

He felt his voice rise, ready to shout. ‘I need to know why.’

Rob gave a snort. ‘If you’d not abandoned your family these last ten years, you would know.’

‘If my family had not abandoned me, I would care,’ he snapped.

Rob blinked.

John pressed on. ‘Two years and Father didn’t hunt the man down. Didn’t you ever wonder at the reason? Didn’t you ever think he was trying to avoid a blood feud?’

‘And you think to force us to ride where the king bids us instead? The last time we did that, ten thousand Scotsmen lay dead on Flodden Field, along with the foolish king himself. That’s a mistake we won’t be making again.’ Rob pressed his palms flat on the table and rose, done with listening. ‘Your king can wait for Brunson men. We ride after Willie Storwick within a fortnight.’

He cursed himself for a fool. Instead of easing Rob’s decision, he’d forced it. ‘And join the king after?’ If they found the man quickly, they could still meet the king in East Lothian by early October, though John would have to soothe his sovereign’s temper when he discovered they’d taken vengeance against an English Storwick.

‘I’ve not decided.’ Rob’s lips curved, less in a smile than in a sneer.

Not a defeat, then. Rob had not said no.

‘Ride with us, Johnnie. That is, if you’re not a fazart.’

Fazart. The worst kind of coward.

John stood now, shaking his head. It wasn’t death that he feared. ‘I will not join you in vengeance. Not when I promised the king I would stop it.’

Rob, who rarely smiled, did. ‘Ah, and promises must be kept, eh?’

A rueful smile touched John’s lips and, for a moment, they shared it. ‘Perhaps I’ve a drop of Brunson blood after all.’

‘What happens,’ Rob said, finally, ‘if you can’t keep it, your promise to the king?’

He had not faced that unpleasant prospect before. ‘If I’m a careful and lucky man, I’ll never lay eyes on King James again.’

‘And if you’re not?’

John liked the king and the king liked him, but he did not fool himself. Friendship and sentiment did not rule a king, not even this one. He’d cut down any enemies who stood in his way.

And any friends, as well.

‘If not, my happy life could be a short one.’ That was the fact of it. Now Rob knew.

John wondered whether he’d care.

His brother crossed his arms and shook his head. ‘Then I can only wish you luck, Johnnie. And that you enjoy it while you can.’

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