Read Online Knight Triumphant by Heather Graham - Free Book Online

through no lack of effort on our part.”
    â€œHe knows this. Even now, weak, spent and incoherent, he knows this.”
    â€œWe’re taking a chance.”
    â€œThe only chance we take is with you.”
    â€œHe would kill me, and spare the others?”
    Father MacKinley shook his head. “You are of no use dead.”
    â€œThen I should stay.”
    â€œThen you must not. Igrainia, you must go back to your brother. You had something fine here with Lord Afton. Marriage, as surely you are aware, is not often so sweet. Go home to your brother, let him guard you, live in the estates outside London where every day is not plagued by war and death. Perhaps one day you will marry again.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou will be expected to marry again, and with your brother as your guardian, you will have a choice. You don’t see it now, but there can be happiness in your future. You mustn’t stay here. This man could do many things. Imprison you in misery. Barter with the powers in England for your life. For your safety, your honor—your mind!—you must be away from here. What can be done to a noblewoman held prisoner can be far worse than death. Look what King Edward has done to the women of the Scots.”
    Igrainia thought with unease of how Robert Bruce’s sister, Mary, and the young Countess of Buchan, who had rushed to Robert Bruce’s coronation, had been punished by the king; caged outside the castle walls of Berwick and Roxburgh, as if they were rare animals on display. Day after day they spent in their wooden prisons. The same punishment had first been ordered for Bruce’s twelve-year-old daughter, Marjorie, but thankfully, enough men around the king thought that such a sentence upon a child was too savage, and so the girl had been sent to a monastery. The Bruce’s wife, daughter of an English earl, was kept in strict captivity in the manor of Burstwick-in-Holderness.
    Igrainia’s own father had been an earl; her brother was an earl. But he was young and did not hold the kind of power yet that swayed kings. If she was captured by the Scots and made into an example of their retaliation, she could face dire consequences indeed.
    â€œWhat if you’re wrong?” she asked softly. “What if I am gone, and in his fury, he executes even you.”
    â€œFew churchmen have met an axe, even in the vengeance and brutality of what has gone by.”
    â€œThe others . . .”
    â€œHe has not killed the men in your escort who surrendered to him.”
    â€œHe has lain ill and unconscious most of the time he has been here.”
    Father MacKinley shook his head. “He gave orders before he sat with his wife that none were to be killed unless they refused to yield. Death has stricken Langley hard enough. He does not take pleasure in bloodshed, as do some. Igrainia, it is you I fear for. I beg of you, leave here.”
    â€œHow can I do so? We can muster no escort, and even most of the women are ill. I cannot take Jennie, not when she is still so important here. And I cannot go with Sir Robert Neville who is still so ill, yet must be taken quickly from here. He is my husband’s kinsman and surely in great danger among the Scots.”
    Father MacKinley looked at her a moment and then smiled slowly. “No, you cannot go with Sir Robert, for precisely those reasons. And you mustn’t fear for him. Sir Robert has already been taken south. He and his squire slipped out this morning through the tunnel at the end of the crypt.”
    Igrainia gasped. “I wasn’t even informed!”
    â€œI thought it best to make his escape at the first moment I could, and not because I didn’t trust your judgment or want your counsel. The opportunity arose this morning and I had to take it. The outlaw Scots were busy in the courtyard, except for the man guarding Eric Graham and the door to the master’s chamber. No one knows that he has gone, as yet.