Free Conquer the Night by Heather Graham

he had sold not only his soul, but Alesandra’s as well.
    Darrow and his men had killed his wife. Darrow had been guilty of heinous cruelty and brutality, as King Edward had been, but it was true, as Jay had warned, that to become like them would be his defeat, and their victory. He would not slaughter men needlessly, inflict agony upon the innocent … brutalize women or children.
    But neither could he let Darrow’s betrothed go in peace! God knew what role she might have had in any of this, no matter what her passion and pleas for others. And did it matter? Of all that belonged to Darrow, she needed most to be taken away. She was the slim thread that gave him any power in Scottish affairs; her family had the position and the wealth. And if he hesitated in taking revenge, all he had to do was close his eyes….
    And the dreams would haunt him, waking, sleeping. He would see the flames rise….
    And hear Alesandra’s screams in the silence of the night.
    He turned away from the view, looking up to see that one of his men duly guarded the open tower above the master’s chambers. He saluted his man, walked the circumference of the parapets, then hurried down the outer stairs to the courtyard below.
    He summoned his squire, Brendan, a second cousin, and one of the lads he had found half-dead outside the manor walls at Hawk’s Cairn. Brendan had been struck with a battle-ax while defending the door to his lady’s house. Amazingly, he had survived the blow. The lad was sixteen, the age Arryn had been himself at the king’s death. He had shown amazing courage, readily risking his own life for others’.
    â€œFetch Pict for me, Brendan.”
    â€œAye.”
    Pict, aye, he still had Pict, the great destrier King Alexander III had given him on the day he was knighted, fighting as the king’s champion in a border skirmish that had been determined by his victory. His father had still been living then; that was before men were found mysteriously dead along the wayside for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to Edward of England.
    Brendan returned with his horse. “Shall I ride with you, Arryn?”
    Arryn hesitated. This cousin of his was very much like him: a tall, strapping lad with very dark hair and serious deep blue eyes. He had spent hours training with weapons of war at Hawk’s Cairn, and listening to the words of the rebels when they met. Most of his family had perished beneath Edward’s pounding fist in one way or another, and he was destined to wage war against the English as well.
    â€œIt’s always well to have a man at your back,” Brendan told him.
    Arryn grinned. “That’s true, and you’re a good fellow for a man to have at his back. But right now, Brendan, I think I’ll ride alone.”
    â€œAye, Arryn.”
    So he rode alone, circling first the inner walls of the tower at Seacairn, then calling to his men on the portcullis to raise the inner gate, and seeing that the outer defenses were as secure as the inner defenses. Seacairn was an admirable fortress, begun back in the days of the Norman conqueror, enhanced during the realm of David I to the exceptional fortification it was now, with two walls to be breached to secure the innermost tower.
    Dawn was breaking by the time he had ridden the whole of both walls and spoken with the people who remained awake to tend to the wounded, and to his own men, who had taken over the key lookout points on the walls.
    Returning at last to the inner courtyard, he chose to brush Pict down himself and stable him with a fine supply of English grain.
    Then he returned to the main hall, where Ragnor waited for him, standing now by the hearth, ready to give him a report. Another friend since childhood, Ragnor was a tall blond man with a red beard and light eyes, coloring that betrayed his Viking ancestry, something to be found frequently among the Scots, as in his own ancestors—just as Norman