Come the Morning Read Free Page A

battle-ax, then swung quickly to see who was riding down upon them as at last he heard the thunder of hoofbeats.
    The king. The king had come. His warriors pitched themselves into the battle with the enemy.
    Their enemy . Now outnumbered. Dead and dying on the field of those they had slain before.
    Yet David was commanding mercy; the survivors were casting down their weapons. The sound of a single fight was all that remained, steel clanging against steel in the night.
    Michael saw that it was the lad, Waryk, son of the man they had called Great William, known as William de Graham. The boy had Norman and Viking blood of his own in his veins; his father had traveled northward with the king from borderlands farther to the east, lands invaded time and again by the Vikings, and ruled by them for a time as well. “From the gray home,” or so the name—according to both the Norman and the old English. But the name might have been borrowed from the lad’s mother as well. Legend had it that the most ancient of the Scottish people, the lad’s mother among them, had introduced the name Graeme into the borderlands. The boy’s maternal border kin might have come from a family with an old and illustrious Scottish history. A Graeme had been a general with the armies of an ancient king from the very early years of Christianity, King Fergus, and this Graeme who had served him had led the king’s army when it had breached the Roman wall set against the “barbarians”—the old races of Scotland. Graeme’s Dyke still existed at the remnants of the old wall. God knew. Names came from anywhere. Some men were just Thomas, Michael, Fergus, or so on, and some took on their father’s names, which became their family names. His own great-grandfather had been Innish, and now, he was of the family, clan MacInnish, just as a Norseman might be Eric, Olaf’s son—though with the Norse, he was more likely to become Eric Blood-Mace or the like. Even the king’s family name, Canmore, had come from his father, and the old Gaelic Caenn Mor, meaning big head.
    It had become a noble name.
    Whatever the ancestry in the boy’s name, it didn’t much matter. Today, the lad was showing his worth as a man.
    His worth, and his pain. Anguish that created raw courage and defied fear and even death.
    Men fallen all around him, the boy fought still. He had taken on Lord Renfrew himself, and no matter how the skilled, hardened, and experienced Renfrew attacked, battered, and countered, the lad was there.
    Waryk had found his father’s sword; he fought with it. When Renfrew dared breathe, the boy charged him. Renfrew was skilled. He charged, and charged again, his onslaughts merciless, but the Graham neither lost his balance nor his sword. What advantage Renfrew had in power, the lad countered with speed and subtlety. Still, it appeared that the boy, battered, black-and-blue, and crusted with blood, must eventually give. Renfrew attacked with a practiced, relentless aggression, his great muscles swinging his sword again and again with grim determination. He would not cease until he had killed.
    Yet right when Renfrew lifted his sword above his head to slice down with the coup de grâce, Waryk de Graham used Renfrew’s bid for momentum against him. He swung his sword upward with a startling, eerie force, impaling Lord Renfrew just below the ribs.
    Renfrew clutched the sword, dying. He stared at the lad, still arrogant, stunned, and in disbelief.
    Yet there was no denying death. When the man fell at the foot of the lad, the boy didn’t move. He didn’t reclaim the sword. He stood there shaking.
    Michael hadn’t realized that the king, still mounted, sat his steed just to his own back. The king nudged his horse forward. “My God, who has bred this lion pup?”
    â€œYour own man, sire,” Michael said wearily. “Great William who lies yonder.”
    â€œAh!” David said