Sword of Justice (White Knight Series) Read Free Page B

swore and ranted at the fate visited upon their compatriot, the beardless youth who met with an ungodly end. Their outrage was grounded in a gruesome revelation: not only had Maynard of Clarendon been gutted like an animal for the table, his manhood had been cut away. Death was horrible; castration, unforgivable.
    Drake pushed his tongue against the biting gag and spoke, his words garbled yet clear enough to be heard. “Didn’t kill him.”
    “The sword was in your hand,” said a man whose voice Drake didn’t recognize.
    Drake twisted around and tried to see him through the folds of the dirty rag wrapped around his head, but glimpsed nothing but shadow. The trouncing renewed, fiercer than before. Blood, warm and strangely comforting, ran down his face and into his neck. A wave of nausea took hold. He spilled what was left in his guts and rolled into a ball of agony, moaning and stinking to high heaven.
    “The bastard deserves no less for what he did,” Graham said.
    The knights argued among themselves. A majority vote of four ruled. A fifth man, his voice unheard but his presence palpable, also grunted approval. His captors had arrived at unanimous consent: to get the blood money first and hang him afterwards.        
    * * *
    Having exhausted themselves, the drunken knights shuffled out to get drunker.
    “How much drink does your father keep in his stores?” the big knight bellowed.
    “More than enough to wash away the blood,” Seward answered, his voice disappearing down the passageway.  
    Another wave of sickness overcame Drake. Heaving, he managed to shift into a kneeling position and vomit the remaining bile. When it was over, he slumped against a nearby wall for support, arms bent to the cords.
    Drake sensed he wasn’t alone.
    He gazed up and sniffed out a faceless adversary staring down at him. Through the blindfold, his eyes failed to glimpse the remotest shadow, yet the two knights met over a dark divide. Drake wasn’t sure if the other man was emanating hatred or pity, but it felt more like pity. Eventually, the silent knight followed his fellows, leaving Drake confined behind a barred wooden door, to suffer alone and bleed in the dark. At least now, though, he knew where he had been brought. Twyford Castle. Soon his father would come looking for him. Drake prayed, though he never prayed, that it wouldn’t be too late.
    Either no time or an eternity had elapsed. Sleep, or more likely sporadic unconsciousness, came easily to Drake and without memory. When the door finally cranked open, he roused, incapacitated, disoriented, and hurting beyond misery.
    “Good news,” Rufus said. “His eminent lordship the senior fitzAlan has delivered your ransom posthaste.”
    A second man cut the cord binding his ankles. The two hefted Drake up by the armpits. His cramped legs didn’t work very well. His head was the size of melon and his thinking hazy. He moaned words that were incomprehensible even to him.
    “Aren’t you the lucky one,” Rufus said cheerfully to Drake. “We won’t have to hang you.”
    His breath stinking of aqua vitae , Seward belied his partner’s gay declaration with a voice filled with dread. “You know why we have to do this, Drake. If … if we let you go … you’d geld us … like you did Maynard.”
    Drake shook his head in protest, but he wasn’t about to convince either man, drunk as louts, of his honorable intentions, much less persuade either what a bad idea it was to hang him. A very bad idea indeed.
    “ Not to mention he murdered him ,” Rufus said to Seward. “Or did you forget so soon?”
    Rufus fitzHugh and Seward Twyford transported their bloody burden up a wheel staircase, through the kitchen, down a winding passage, and past a creaking postern gate. For the distance, they blathered on how they planned to celebrate when the deed was done. Two lasses, five flagons, three days, two nights, and a cozy fire, a formula so contrived as to forget they snuffed out