Master of Shadows by Neil Oliver Read Free Book Online

said, to no one in particular, though all waited for Sir Robert to respond.
    ‘Aye, hunting it is, Mr Armstrong,’ he said. ‘We will ride out to find the rest of the patrol. I tell you all now: I will know the whole story by nightfall.’
    There were shouted orders then as men came to their senses and set about the business of preparing to leave, and on a war footing. Violent death was hardly a rarity in these debatable lands, but Sir Robert Jardine of Hawkshaw was known to be unusually vengeful – even by the standards of the day. He interpreted any abuse of his men as an attack upon his own person. And then there was the matter of the victim. Will Kennedy was feared at best by most of the community around Hawkshaw, but none had expected to live to see the day when any gained the upper hand in a fight with the man.
    ‘Where is the Moor?’ shouted Sir Robert, as he strode towards the stables. Angus Armstrong had recovered his arrow from the crow’s carcass. He and Jamie Douglas and several more of the men trotted over to his lairdship and kept pace with him.
    None of them had offered any immediate reply to Sir Robert’s enquiry.
    ‘Khassan – Badr Khassan? Where is he?’ asked Sir Robert a second time, a note of impatience rising in his throat like gall.
    ‘He’s not here,’ said Armstrong.
    He it was that had been first of all the Hawkshaw men to meet the giant stranger upon his arrival on the road in front of the fortress more than two months before. Having brought him inside the palisade, Amstrong had felt a responsibility for the stranger’s presence ever since. Though he had grown to respect, even to like the man they called the Bear, still he had bothered to keep an eye on the stranger’s comings and goings.
    Sir Robert stopped and turned to face Armstrong, a man he valued above all others and found it worth paying attention to – in times of strife, most of all.
    ‘He’s not here, my lord,’ said Armstrong again. ‘I have not seen him since yesterday, in fact, and I am confident of saying he did not spend last night at Hawkshaw.’
    Badr Khassan had been in the habit of leaving Hawkshaw on his own. If anyone asked him about it, he always put it down to curiosity.
    ‘I am a stranger in a strange land,’ he would say. ‘There is much to see and to know.’
    Sir Robert had been informed of Badr Khassan’s habits and had been content to leave him on a long leash. As far as he was concerned, if people saw the Moor on Jardine land, then he served as a visible symbol of his own ever-present authority in these parts.
    It burned Armstrong to have to admit that he had no idea concerning Khassan’s whereabouts. He did not make mistakes, and yet … and yet it seemed to him that the Bear’s absence at such a time was more than a coincidence. For the first time in a long time he felt he had been – now what was the word … outmanoeuvred. He would not let the same thing happen twice in one day.
    Sir Robert remained stationary, and for a moment Armstrong knew he read thoughts similar to his own on his master’s face.
    Saying nothing, Sir Robert turned and strode faster still, down towards the stable block. A groom had his horse ready, as always – a tall and broad-chested destrier, a warhorse – and he almost leapt into the saddle in his haste to be away. The beast was briefly startled and reared slightly in protest, but Sir Robert brought it quickly and easily under control before wheeling it around and making for the gates of the palisade at a canter.
    Casting his mind back to the evening before, to his conversation with Davey Kennedy, he stumbled suddenly across memories of Patrick Grant. Along with thoughts of Grant came memories of a woman. Those images were worn and stained, like portraits hung on a wall exposed to too much daylight. Before mounting his horse he had had not an idea in his head of where in his demesne to begin the search for the foe. Now, without knowing quite why, he shouted out