Page 8 of The Hawk Laird
“He means to ruin Aberlady!” she hissed.
“This is necessary.”
“We cannot trust this man to help us! You know what they say about him now!”
Eustace sighed. “He brings hope, where we had none.”
“Aberlady will be destroyed!”
“I would have set fire to these walls myself when we left. It is our chance.”
She stared at him, stunned. He hurried away to join Lindsay, who stood behind a merlon stone, scanning the English garrison. Isobel hesitated, then ran after them, pausing by an embrasure in full view of the English soldiers below.
Lindsay grabbed her arm, pulling her behind the merlon. “Are you a dimwit, to stand there?” he asked.
“The English will not harm me,” she said with certainty.
“If you believe that, you are not much of a prophetess,” he snapped, as he held her fast.
“Watch this,” Eustace said to Lindsay. “Each day, the English fill their ditches with bracken to smooth the incline for their siege engines. Each night, we set them afire, see.”
Just then, two men on the wall walk lit arrows wrapped in cloth and pine pitch, touching them to a torch. They loosed the flaming arrows to sail toward the lower ditches, setting them ablaze.
Held fast in the iron curve of Lindsay’s arm, Isobel watched the fires spark and blossom. She saw Lindsay’s men mount the steps and arrange themselves along the battlements.
“When I let go of you,” Lindsay murmured in her ear, “I want you to crawl along the wall-walk to that corner tower over there.”
“When you let go of me,” she said between her teeth, “I will go where I please.”
“Do as he says,” Eustace pleaded, as he loaded a crossbow. An English arrow whined overhead and slammed into the wallwalk. Two more clattered on stone and fell aside.
Lindsay released her. “Go! Keep down!”
Isobel rose boldly to face the embrasure gap, sure that the English would stop when they saw her there. But an arrow slammed into her upper arm with tremendous force, and she spun with the blow.
Lindsay grabbed her, pulling her down. Isobel curled forward in searing pain, and he supported her with one arm.
“Lady Isobel!” Eustace called. “Dear God, she stood too quick.”
“It is not serious.” Deftly, Lindsay cracked the long shaft protruding from her arm, leaving the broadhead arrow embedded in the muscle. “Can you bear it for a while?”
She nodded, wincing. Arrows fell around them in a cruel rain, smacking against stone and wood. Within seconds, an arrow whooshed through the crenel and glanced past the back of Lindsay’s leather hauberk.
Another broadhead bit hard into her left ankle. The shaft fell aside. Isobel flinched, grabbing her leg. Lindsay pulled her to him roughly, shielding her.
“You will be killed out here,” he growled, holding her. As arrows whined and clattered around them, he carried her toward a corner tower, kicked the narrow door open, and brought her inside.
Setting her down on the stone floor of the tiny room, he hunkered down beside her. In the dusky light that came through the arrowslit window, he bent to examine her wound.
Without asking her leave, he lifted the hem of her skirt—she gasped at that—and tore a wide strip of linen from the embroidered hem of her chemise, wadding the cloth around the seeping, throbbing wound in her right arm. Isobel drew the silk veil from inside her sleeve with a shaking hand and pressed it to the bleeding cut above her ankle.
“Arrow wounds are painful,” Lindsay said. “I have had several. Wounds like that heal.” Then he shook his head. “Foolish to stand up on a battlement like that.”
“They will not fire when I am on the wall. They must not have seen me then.”
He took the cloth from her to wrap it around her ankle. “Do you have some agreement with them?” He glanced at her sharply.
She sucked in a breath at his implication. “Their king wants me brought to him. That has helped us in this siege. I stood up because I hoped to halt a battle.”
