Chapter Thirty-One

 

 

 

Impossibly, Pontefract appeared even more massive and foreboding than when Niall had first laid eyes on it.

He stared at the thick, tiered walls snaking around the castle’s base. Behind the walls, the stronghold’s towers jutted into the flat gray sky like daggers.

He and Mairin bounced in the wagon as it rolled through the outer bailey’s wide gates. As before, the bailey teemed with soldiers. This time, however, the men wore tunics in Edward’s colors—blood-red, with roaring gold lions emblazoned on their chests.

Andrew Harclay, who’d ridden through the gates at the front of their somber procession, led the way through both the outer and inner baileys and to the keep’s courtyard. He reined his horse before the massive tower Lancaster had used for his great hall, then motioned for the prisoners to be brought forth.

Niall angled himself in front of Mairin, but it was pointless to try to resist the half-dozen soldiers who took him in hand and dragged him from the wagon. He had watched like a hawk for any opportunity to attempt escape—for Mairin, if not for the both of them—on the journey from Boroughbridge, but surrounded by such a vast sea of Harclay’s soldiers, they wouldn’t have stood a chance even if a window for a getaway had opened.

At least they’d removed the bindings on their wrists. The soldiers, too, must have known escape was impossible. They’d also ungagged Niall, but the problem was, there was naught Niall could say to convince them that he and Mairin ought to be released. We aren’t loyal to Lancaster—on the contrary, we serve King Robert the Bruce, Edward’s sworn enemy. Nay, if they knew his and Mairin’s true purpose, they’d likely swing from a rope even before Edward had a chance to order a traitor’s death of drawing and quartering.

“Are you well?” he asked quietly as Mairin was set on her feet beside him.

She gave him a jerking nod. She’d avoided speaking as much as possible so as not to draw attention to the fact that she was Scottish.

Niall dipped his head to offer a low reassurance, but they were pulled into motion by the guards. Ahead of them, Lancaster, Audley, and Badlesmere were being led into the great hall. The soldiers marched them in after the nobles, their hands tight on Niall’s arms.

Inside, Niall squinted at the glow of torches and candles. As his eyes adjusted, his gaze shifted to the raised dais. The table and multitude of silk-upholstered chairs that Lancaster’s nobles had once occupied had been removed, but the massive, carved wood throne that Lancaster had so often sat in was now occupied by King Edward himself.

Niall had never met the King before, but there could be no mistaking the heavy gold and jewel-inlaid crown sitting atop the man’s head. Beneath the crown, the King’s fair hair lay in ringlets to his smooth jawline. He was encased in a fur-trimmed velvet cloak of deep purple that spilled over the chair in its rich excess. His hands rested on the chair’s arms and he had one long leg casually crossed over the other, as if the throne he sat on had always been meant for him.

Edward watched with impassive blue eyes as Lancaster and the other rebel nobles were brought before him. Niall and Mairin were assembled behind the nobles, along with the handful of commanders that had been captured.

“Welcome to my castle, Cousin,” the King said to Lancaster. He waved a lazy hand at the great hall. “I do so appreciate you holding it for me, but I find that I wish to put it to my own use now.”

“Your Majesty—” Lancaster began, attempting to bow in the grasp of the soldiers, but Edward cut him off with a soft chuckle.

“I am ‘Your Majesty’ to you today, when yesterday you thought to overthrow me?” he asked, his voice deadly calm. “Nay, I think not, Thomas. No more niceties and formalities from you.” The King’s eyes hardened, flashing with anger. “Come sunrise tomorrow, you will face the punishment you have so thoroughly earned.”

“But we are blood, Your Majesty!” Lancaster cried. “First cousins! You cannot think to treat me like a—”

“Traitor?” Edward cut in. “Ah, but that is exactly what you are, Thomas. Even more so than I realized when I set out to face you at Burton.”

Edward flicked his fingers at a row of finely dressed men who stood along the hall’s back wall. One man stepped forward and approached the dais. Judging from his snowy-white robes, ornate purple stole, and golden roped cincture, the man was an archbishop.

The archbishop extended a stack of folded parchment toward the King, then backed away and resumed his position along the wall.

“Archbishop Melton of York received quite an interesting packet of missives only a few days ago,” Edward commented, leafing through the parchment. Each piece bore a broken seal on the back. Even from more than a dozen paces away, Niall could make out the knight on horseback pressed into the red wax before it had been broken—Lancaster’s seal.

Lancaster blanched whiter than snow. “Those are…”

“Your correspondence with Robert the Bruce, aye,” Edward said.

Niall’s stomach leapt to his throat. He jerked his gaze to Mairin. Her eyes had gone wide and her mouth slack. She darted a glance at him, her features pulled with shock. He gave her an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

“They reveal that you have been plotting with that Scottish vermin behind my back for months,” Edward continued. He held up one of the missives. “You even had the gall to demand that the Bruce…what was it? Ah yes. That he ‘come to our aid, and to go with us in England and Wales’ and ‘live and die with us in our quarrel,’” Edward read.

Slowly, he lifted his gaze from the parchment to Lancaster, his eyes filled with barely restrained venom. “You signed them ‘King Arthur.’ As if you were not only already the sovereign, but that you would lead my country to some mythical sparkling glory. Tell me, Cousin, was Pontefract your Camelot, or was it Dunstanburgh?”

Lancaster’s throat bobbed with a hard swallow, but he could not form a response.

“I hear that you reserved a chamber at the top of this tower for a special purpose,” Edward went on, casually setting the treasonous missives aside. “You imagined that after your successful rebellion, you would imprison me there, I gather, until after you’d had yourself crowned. I wonder what you would have done to me after that?”

Edward leaned forward in his chair, his lips drawing back from his teeth. “Since you fancy yourself a King already, Thomas, mayhap you should spend your last night on this earth in that special chamber—along with your lackeys—before you meet the fate you would have so eagerly doled out to me.”

He waved a dismissive hand at Lancaster, Audley, and Badlesmere. Instantly, the guards began dragging the three noblemen toward one of the spiraling staircases leading from the hall.

“Nay, you cannot!” Lancaster bellowed. “Please, Edward, listen to me! I—”

His voice, along with Audley’s pleas for mercy, cut off as they were dragged up the stairs.

Niall stood stiffly, waiting for word of their own fate. He held no hope of being able to convince Edward to grant them leniency, not even for Mairin. This was not a trial. Edward had already judged them all traitors by their actions.

Now that Lancaster was gone, Edward’s features slid back into impassivity.

“Take the others to the dungeon until tomorrow morning,” he said, his voice almost bored as he waved them off like a gnat.

They were hauled toward a different staircase, one that spiraled down rather than up. Niall struggled to stay close to Mairin, earning him a swat to the head. But he managed to position himself next to her, at the back of the group of commanders.

One of the soldiers plucked a torch from a wall sconce as they began descending into the belly of the castle. As they wound their way lower, the stone stairs grew slick with moisture and moss. Dank, cold air seeped up from below. The torch cast leaping shadows against the walls, but didn’t touch the deeper darkness farther down.

Mairin began to pant, her breaths growing audibly ragged. She swiveled her head this way and that, chasing the skittering shadows with her wide gaze.

Damn it all. They would be deposited into cells, then the soldiers would retreat—taking the torch with them. And Mairin would be cast in utter, complete darkness.

“It will be all right, Mairin,” he lied. For speaking, one of the soldiers swatted his head again. He turned to the man. “Please, I am begging you. Convince your companion to leave the torch down here.”

The soldier narrowed his gaze on Niall. “Why? Are you plotting something?”

“Nay,” Niall said hurriedly, “but my…my wife doesn’t like the dark.”

“And I don’t like traitors,” one of the other soldiers replied, drawing chuckles from the rest.

The stairs ended and the ground leveled out. The torch revealed a corridor of a half dozen cells framed in stone, with an iron door set into each.

Lancaster’s commanders were all shuffled into the farthest cell down. The men holding Mairin and Niall forced them to move, heading for the same cell.

“Please,” Niall said again. “At least put us in our own cell. She will panic, surrounded by strangers in the dark.”

Proving his words, Mairin began to shudder in the soldiers’ hold. “Nay, nay, nay…” she groaned as they shoved her out of the circle of light cast by the torch and toward the already crowded cell at the far end of the dungeon.

“What if it was your wife?” Niall demanded, desperation slicing through his voice. “What if these were her final hours? I am not asking that you forgive us, only that you show a sliver of mercy for her suffering. I beg you.”

One of the soldiers hesitated at that. He glanced at Mairin, who shivered and shot her frightened gaze over the black corners of the cell like a wild animal in a trap.

“There’s no harm in putting them in another cell,” he murmured to the one who held the torch.

The torch-carrier sighed and rolled his eyes. “Very well. But I won’t leave the torch down here. They can stew in the dark for their last night on this earth.”

The others seemed satisfied with that, so one moved to a cell closer to the stairs and unlocked the door with a rusty squeal. Mairin and Niall were shoved inside, and the door slammed behind them.

Instantly, he drew Mairin into his arms. Her fingers sank into his tunic, her gaze riveted on the receding torchlight. The soldiers mounted the stairs, chattering excitedly about events they’d get to witness tomorrow—there was bound to be at least one drawing and quartering given all the King’s treasonous prisoners, and mayhap even more.

As their voices drew higher up the stairwell, so did the light.

“Oh God,” Mairin whispered. “Please, nay.”

Her fingers turned to claws on his back, her body pulling taut with fear. Niall wanted to tear down their stone prison with his bare hands. He wanted to howl until God himself heard him. But all he could do was hold Mairin tight as she shuddered and moaned, watching the light fade.

And when they were sunk into total darkness, Niall turned her face into his chest to muffle her screams.