The Wayward Alliance Page 2

  “Your leg was sore hurt,” King James said, turning his eyes back to Law. “Yet you brought us more news than we’d had. I am certainly grateful, man.”

  “Aye.” The earl gave a sigh. “I am glad to hear such details that you have of their deaths.”

  “I am sure you will find a peaceful place in the kingdom since your fighting days look as though they are done for the nonce,” the King said.

  Law feared he was right, but what was left for a landless knight who could not fight?

  “You are the first to return to Scotland from the battle. And there is the matter of reward for carrying out a duty to bring us this news though no one would have held you to it. My lord Douglas, you’ll see to a reward.”

  Recalling that he’d heard the king’s treasury had been drained dry to pay his ransom to the English, Law clamped his lips tight on a wry smile. Any reward would come from the purse of the Earl of Douglas.

  “Your leg?” Douglas asked, looking thoughtful. “Is there any chance the hurt will not leave you halt?”

  Even as a youth, the earl had been blunt-spoken. Law winced, but there was no point in delicacy. “The friars who treated me said I shall always limp, for the muscle was much torn. But that won’t keep me from holding a sword. I can still fight.”

  “That is too bad. I suppose you understand that I dinnae need a knight who is lame. I couldnae believe you’d be able to do what is required.” He continued to look thoughtfully at Law, tapping on the table. A ring glittered on each of his fingers.

  Laws felt the blood drain from his face. For a moment, he was light-headed, though he wasn’t quite sure if it was from rage or from fear. He gritted his back teeth to keep the curse welling up his throat from spewing forth. After his years of service to the Douglas’s father, he was to be tossed aside like a lame dog. He took a deep breath, clenching his hands so tight his nails dug into his palms. The sting of them helped calm him. Again he filled his lungs with the cool night air.

  “But the king is right that I owe you a debt for telling us as much as you could.”

  “A last duty to my patron, your lord father,” Law said, keeping his face blank. “Though I wouldnae refuse a reward for I…” He almost choked on the need to beg. “I served your sire faithfully. Surely, I deserve…” He couldn’t bring himself to go on.

  Douglas stood and took his purse from his belt. He seemed to weigh it for a moment in his hand but then handed it over. It was heavy in Law’s hand, and he was ashamed of a rush of relief. Once split with Duncan, it could not be a great sum, but enough that it would keep him for a few months, surely long enough for him to find a new patron to serve.

  “If any ask, I shall assure them you served my lord father well.”

  “I thank you for that, my lord.”

  The king waved his dismissal, so Law bowed, and Douglas strolled with him towards the door. “So, where will you go from here?”

  “I have nae yet decided, my lord. Wherever I’m most likely to find a new patron.”

  “Aye, that is wise, man. I suggest you look in Perth. The king favors it, which means half of Scotland favors it as well. I believe he means to make it his capital.”

  The curfew bell was ringing as Law set off toward the inn where Duncan awaited. In the gloaming, rough-dressed laborers were plodding home. A troop of mounted men rode by, tack and armor jangling, the lion of the king of Scotland gleaming golden on their cloaks.

  He stopped before a yard above, which swung a crudely painted sign of a foaming cup of ale. Inside, beside the door, people sat at a long table eating. Across the room, around a barrel of ale on a trestle, others stood, a raucous group, talking and laughing. Law spotted Duncan sitting near a brazier where a peat fire burned, and a youth stirred a steaming cooking pot that gave up a scent of onions and thyme. He hurried to the small table and sank gratefully onto a stool. Duncan stared at him, eyebrows raised expectantly, eyes bright with greed just as they had been in France. The memory was so clear, it made Law’s leg throb.

  Law shrugged off the unwelcome memory, reached into his jerkin, and fumbled out two half-nobles that he tossed onto the table.

  Duncan slapped his hand down on the coins. “This willnae keep me long.” Duncan had stuck to him like a limpet, convinced Law owed him for his half-dragging him from the battlefield in France, and Law supposed that he did. Besides that, he could trust Duncan at his back, no mean consideration, and the loss of every friend from his past left an empty place in his chest. Duncan was not much of a friend, but a friend of a sort, nonetheless.

  “On the morrow then, we’re off for Perth,” Law said with a yawn. “I hope they have a decent bed to let here.”

  Through a gray curtain of drizzle, Law looked down from his window at the muck of the vennel below. Narrow shops where the shutters were closed against the damp chill, under the shadow of overhanging jetties, moldering plaster walls interspersed with graying timber uprights. All of the poor parts of Perth were like this: streets lined with taverns, shops, and drear houses crammed with the leavings of their betters, not much like the castles where he’d spent his life serving the duke.

  He had not remembered Scottish Octobers being so miserable. Life had been wars unending and the plague, now an autumn so cold and wet it made the fires of Hell seem tempting. Had he not lost his faith on some battlefield that God cared, he would have thought the Maker was angry. After spreading his gaze across the rooftops that hid the dark River Tay where it seethed in its banks, he snapped the shutters shut.

  A tiny peat fire in a brazier threw fingers of red across Law’s scarred table. The room was small, smaller even than his tent in the days when he’d followed the Douglas to war. His narrow pallet bed was against the opposite wall, separating his room from the landlord Wulle Cullen and his wife, Mall. The meager bits of furniture were rented with the room. A wooden kist near the door held the few belongings he had salvaged from the disaster in France. In the month that he’d been in Perth, he’d talked to a dozen lords hoping for service, with no luck. It was time for a new plan, though what that might be… He sighed.

  Loud voices that nearly drowned out the sound of a minstrel playing a clàrsach harp filtered up to Law through the wooden floor above Cullen’s tavern. It was no inn and usually did not rent out rooms, but Law paid for the space at only a few pence per week. The tavern was jammed between a leather shop and a baker, the daub of the walls thin and flaking. The ground floor boasted a barrel of ale on a trestle, stools, a couple of benches and a long trestle table for eating. Mall Cullen could usually be found stirring a pot of broth that hung from a crane over a peat fire on the hearth. Gray-haired Wulle bustled about tending to the customers.

  Law hunched over the chipped pitcher of ale he’d ordered from downstairs, his long legs stretched out under the table, and filled a chipped horn cup to the rim. He quickly gulped down the malty brew, sandy hair flopping into his eyes. He poured another cup and drank that, too. The ale numbed an ache that still plagued his leg. He tried not to think about the fact that it had gotten no better. When he picked up the pitcher to pour a third, there was a tap on the door. He looked up with a belch. Frowning, he called out, “Aye?”

  Cormac MacEda opened the door. He was snub-nosed and barely past being a youth, his striped red-and-cream doublet with crumpled red ribbons at the seams that Law thought regrettably loud even for a minstrel. But his eyes were blue and playful under the curtain of his ginger hair.

  He closed the door behind him, lounged against it, and said, “There is a man in the tavern looking for you. Says his name is Lord Blinsele.”

  “Looking to hire a man-at-arms?”

  “Mayhap. You’ll want to talk to him. He has siller to hire judging by his dress.”

  “Send him up, lad,” Law said. “Send him up.”

  Cormac glared at the reference to his youth, huffed, and turned to swagger out. “Thoir Ifrinn ort!” he called as he took the rickety stairs down to the inn.

  Law considered that
it was probably best that he had no idea what that meant. Like most Lowlanders, he spoke some Gaelic, but his was that of a soldiers’ camp. From the tone, the comment couldn’t have been a compliment. Law stood, smoothed his worn doublet, and tugged it down to try to hide the small patch mid-thigh in his hose. He’d dumped out the night-soil bucket this morning. After years in military camps, he didn’t leave his belongings flung about, not that he had many. Poor though he was now, he kept his meager room as neat as he could. Hopefully, someone desiring to add a lordless knight to his tail would look for no more.

  Chapter 2

  Perth, Scotland

  A smooth voice on the stairway said, “Aye, I see the way. Leave us the nonce.”

  The door was flung open, and a man strode in. He half-turned, an eyebrow raised and watched until the minstrel was out of sight. He was a lean, erect man in his mid-thirties, medium height, with a hawk nose and his short beard neatly shaped. Dark hair curled around his forehead and over the back of his neck. His black velvet houppelande hung in rounded pleats to his knees. Along with his black chaperon hat twisted into a fantastical shape, he would have been fashionable even in the court of France. A dagger in an engraved scabbard hung at his belt. He swept his smiling gaze around the room. “Sir Law Kintour.”

  “At your service…” Law nodded amiably. The man looked like he could afford men-at-arms in his service, but the clothes were in a French style, which was strange.

  “I am Lord Blinsele.”

  Law bowed and with a sword-callused hand indicated the stool he had vacated, the only seating in the room other than his pallet.

  The man nodded briskly before scanning the stairway once more and pulling the door firmly shut. He ignored the stool to take a slow turn around the room. The dulcet notes of the minstrel’s clàrsach came through the floor along with the sound of a strident, drunken laugh. A ragged spatter of rain clattered morosely against the shutters. The ashes of the dying peat fire in the brazier twitched and flickered. The caller watched them for a moment with bright eyes.

  “What might I do for you, my lord?”

  “I have heard you served the Earl of Douglas in France,” the man said at last. “And were in his confidence.”

  “The Duke of Touraine as he was at his death.” Law gave a curt nod. “Aye, that is true, at least to some degree.”

  “Good.”

  Law nodded again, trying to urge the man on. Blinsele was not the name of any lordly family he recalled, but he had been fighting in France more than in Scotland until his lord’s death. Yet he was certain he would have heard if the man was from Perth even in the month since his return. The thought of the duke’s death and his own reception at the hands of the new earl on his return curdled his belly, to be cast off as though his service had meant nothing. He pushed the thought away. From the look of it, this man had the coin to afford knights to follow him. “And you heard I was seeking a new patron,” Law prodded.

  “Tell me about yourself, Sir Law. If I am to employ you, I believe I have the right to ask.”

  “There is little to tell, my lord. I am thirty years old. I was a squire in the Earl Archibald’s household and knighted by his hand. Was with him in France when he was made a duke.” Law crossed to the window and opened a shutter to peer through the murk. “I was in his following when he fell in battle.”

  “Yet lived to tell the tale,” Blinsele said in a mild tone.

  “Aye. Some might call it luck that I was near buried in bodies. A man-at-arms, Duncan, helped me drag myself from the battlefield, or I might have died there after all. The two of us managed to make our way back home, but…” He shrugged and turned back to find the man studying him with narrowed eyes. “That is all there is to the tale.”

  After a long pause, the man said, “I am concerned with a private matter.”

  “You have no one in your service, no servant, you would trust to handle such a matter discreetly?” This seemed odd. A lord did not take on a knight to handle private matters.

  “It would be a tempting piece of tittle-tattle. But you are unknown in Edinburgh, so would not be there to spread it about.”

  Law stiffened. “I’m no tittle-tattler. If I give you my oath that aught you say shall go no further than this room, then it shan’t.”

  The man gave an ostentatious sigh. “My lady wife has disappeared. If it were kent—” He threw himself down on the stool and leaned his arms on his legs, hands dangling between his knees. “If it were kent, I would be a laughingstock. In the court… Even in the servant’s quarters. They’d snicker behind my back and sneer to my face. Call me a cuckold. She must be found.” He gave Law a stricken look.

  “But why look in Perth?”

  “I was able to learn that the man I am sure she fled with is here. He was seen at the guesthouse of Blackfriars Monastery. I watched yesterday, but he must have spied me out, for he did not return.”

  “She has been seen there?”

  “No one is biding in the women’s hall as far as I saw. I watched as I said, well past when the gates were locked. I saw no sign of either, but someone telt me he had been there only the day before.”

  “He could have changed his lodging to one of the other monasteries—” Law frowned. “Or even a hostelry. It will mean watching Blackfriars, but the others would have to be checked as well.” He shrugged, wondering how to rid himself of the man. It was an appointment beneath him. Yes, his money would not last long, but to fall so low… “I’m a knight. I can guard a lord’s back, train his men, and guard his keep. I do not sneak in the night or spy on straying wives.”

  Blinsele slid a hand into the breast of his houppelande and pulled out a small leather purse that he bounced once in his palm, letting the contents jingle. “I came prepared to pay well—” His mouth curved into a sly smile. “—Sir Knight.” He poured out the coins, ten demi-nobles, into his hand, and dropped five of them, one by one, onto the table. “Half now and half when the job is done.”

  Law stared at the man, narrow-eyed. Blinsele knew Law wouldn’t be wearing a worn doublet and biding in a shabby room if he didn’t need the money, but having it thrown in his face sat badly. He was tempted to stand by his refusal, but he was no closer than when he arrived a month before in finding a patron. To refuse them could mean being tossed out of even this shabby tavern. That would be no disaster. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d slept on the ground but would make finding a patron even less likely. If he accepted them, it meant creeping about in the dark like a thief, yet it might lead to more, to better.

  He gave an embittered nod. “There will be too many places for one man to watch.” Law strode toward the door, managing not to limp, but Blinsele leapt to his feet.

  “No!” He grabbed Law’s sleeve. “The story must go no further.”

  “I’ll tell him no more than needs must, but to check all the places they could be in Perth, I’ll need help.” With a firm hand, Law removed the man’s grip. “I’ll call him up. He’s…a friend…of sorts, and will not ask questions, I assure you.”

  When Law opened the door, he breathed a soft snort upon seeing Cormac lounging against the wall at the foot of the stairs. The minstrel would find himself in deep waters one day if he weren’t careful because he was not subtle at eavesdropping. Law called down, “Tell Duncan I need him.”

  Duncan had spent more time gambling and whoring than seeking a patron but would credit Law finding him work to the debt he still insisted that Law owed. When Duncan came in, Law closed the door behind him.

  “Lord Blinsele, this is Duncan Leslie, who also was in service in France.”

  Duncan made a polite bow to Blinsele with his hand on his chest, but he threw Law a questioning glance.

  Law said, “Lord Blinsele lost something valuable in Edinburgh and believes that the thief is in Perth. I’ll check the guesthouse at Whitefriars monastery. I need you to keep watch at Blackfriars. That vennel next to the dyer’s yard across from the gate should be a good place to keep watch
. I’ll meet you there after nightfall.” He glanced at Blinsele. “When we find him, you want us to keep watch and send word to you?”

  “Aye.” Blinsele rubbed his mouth as though in doubt.

  Duncan strolled over to stand by the table. His eyes fastened on the pile of coins, and he turned to Law and pursed his lips in a silent whistle.

  Law gave a slight warning shake of his head. “It may take some time if he has left Blackfriars, but finding the man shouldn’t be that hard if he is in Perth. It’s simply a matter of checking the monasteries, taverns, and hostelries. It should take a few days at worst. Finding what he absconded with should be easy once we locate him.”

  Duncan grunted, crossing his arms. “And how are we supposed to find this thief, whoever he is?”

  “He should be easy to pick out, but make sure he doesn’t realize you’re watching him.” Blinsele’s voice sharpened and his lips thinned to nothing. “You’d call him middling height, I suppose. Plump and fair with curling yellow hair so light it is almost white.”

  “How old would you say?” Law asked.

  Blinsele shrugged. “Younger than you but not a great deal. Mayhap twenty-five.”

  “Is he a Scot?”

  Blinsele shook his head jerkily. “From Rome most recently, though before that, Alto Adige I think. He goes by the name of Brunerus de Carnea.”

  Law gave a snort through his nose. That name should make a man easy to find, though since he was sought, he might use a false name. “A cleric, then?” Rome was full of churchmen of one sort or another.

  “How should I know if he ever took orders?” Blinsele burst out. At Law’s raised eyebrows, the man took a deep breath, and his tone was smooth when he continued. “Not a cleric as far as I can tell. He’s a strutting peacock in bright-colored silks, but the silly women seem to like him.”