Brenda Joyce by A Rose in the Storm Read Free Book Online Page B

never been as apprehensive. She heard footsteps in the hall on the landing, and she picked up her mantle, threw it on and hurried out. Sir Neil stood there, holding a torch.
    “Are we ready?” she asked.
    “As ready as we can be. If they think to scale our walls, they will be badly burned, at the least.”
    And that was when she heard a terrible sound—a huge and crushing sound—accompanied by the deep groaning of wood.
    “It has begun,” Sir Neil said. “They are battering the first gates on the barbican.”
    “Will they break?”
    “Eventually,” he said.
    Margaret hurried past him, heading for the stairwell that went up to the crenellations. He seized her arm from behind. “You do not need to go up!” he exclaimed.
    “Of course I do!” She shook him off and raced upstairs, stepping out into the gray dawn.
    Smoke filled the air from the dozen fire pits, as did the stench of burning oil. The sky was rapidly lightening, and Margaret saw men and women at the walls, but no one was moving. “What’s happening?” she asked.
    Malcolm stepped forward and said, “They are just moving their ladders to our walls.”
    Margaret had to see for herself, and she walked past him.
    She stared grimly down. Dozens of men were removing ladders from carts drawn by horses and oxen, pushing them toward her walls. She could not tell what the hundreds of men behind them were doing, and she glanced south, toward the barbican. Several dozen men were pushing a huge battering ram forward. She held her breath as the wheeled wooden machine moved closer and closer to the gates, finally ramming into it.
    The crash sounded. Wood groaned.
    In dismay, she realized the gates of the barbican would not hold for very long. A slew of arrows flew from her archers upon the entry tower, toward those men attacking her barbican. Two of the Wolf’s soldiers dropped abruptly from their places by the battering ram.
    Instantly, other soldiers ran forward, some to drag the injured away, others to replace them.
    “It isn’t safe for you to remain up here,” Sir Neil said, and the words weren’t even out of his mouth before she saw more arrows flying—some toward the men below, who were erecting the ladders upon her walls, and others coming up toward her archers and the women on her ramparts. Sir Neil pulled her down to her knees, arrows flying over them and landing on the stone at their backs.
    “You are the mistress of this castle,” Sir Neil said, their faces inches apart. “You cannot be up here. If you are hurt, or God forbid, if you die, there will be no one to lead us in this battle.”
    “If I am hurt, if I die, you must lead them.” Just then, the arrows had not hit their targets, but she was not a fool. When the Wolf’s archers were better positioned, they would strike some of her soldiers, and perhaps some of the women now preparing to throw oil on the invaders. And as she thought that, she heard a strange and frightening whistling sound approaching them.
    Instinctively, Margaret covered her head and Sir Neil covered her body with his. A missile landed near the tower they had come from, exploding into fire as it did. More whistles sounded, screaming by them, rocks raining down upon the ramparts now, some wrapped in explosives, others bare. Two men rushed to douse the flames.
    Margaret got onto her hands and knees, meeting Sir Neil’s vivid blue gaze. “You must tell me what is happening—when you can.”
    * * *
    T HE SOUNDS OF the Wolf’s siege became worse, and did not cease. The battering of the front gate, the screams of missiles and explosives, the locustlike whirring of arrows. But other screams accompanied these sounds—the frightened whinnies of horses, the cries of the men who were shot, and worse, the screams of those in agony as boiling oil scorched their heads, shoulders and arms.
    Margaret now stood in the south tower, not far from the entry tower and the barbican. From her position at the uppermost window on the third