Dark Destroyer Read Online Free PDF Page B

not have my daughter become a captive in exchange for all of my food stores. I should have her well protected by an escort.”
    Gates simply nodded. “Aye, my lord,” he said. “When shall I go?”
    “Immediately. For all I know, she may have already taken her vows, so there is no more time to waste.”
    “And if she has taken her vows, my lord?”
    Jasper cast him a long look. “Get her out of that convent,” he said. “I do not care how you do it, but vows or no vows, she is to come home. This is not open to negotiation.”
    Gates understood. He looked at Alexander. “My escort and I can come with you as far as Knighton where we will turn east for Ludlow,” he said. “Mayhap it would be best if we got an early start on the morrow.”
    Just then, a roar of laughter and yelling rose up in the room and the knights turned to see that several soldiers had been pulled into one of the hearths. One man was running through the hall with his hair on fire whilst his friends tried to douse it. Alexander simply shook his head at the antics as he turned back to Gates.
    “Mayhap we should make it the day after tomorrow,” he said, eyeing the room of drunken, and in some cases burning, soldiers. “I do not think my men will be in any shape to travel come the morrow.”
    Gates could see his point. He turned back to his cup of wine, petting the dog next to him absently and coming to realize that he had just been given orders to violate the sanctity of a convent should Jasper’s daughter have already taken her vows. Not that it particularly bothered him; he’d done many things in his life that he wasn’t particularly proud of, actions that were a means to an end. But violating the sanctity of a priory was something altogether different.
    Gates found himself hoping that the de Lara girl hadn’t taken her vows simply so he wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of breaking down the door to get at her. As he sat there and pondered what the future might bring, Jasper spoke up.
    “Enough foolish talk,” he declared, his mood swinging back in the direction of joviality. “Let us speak on far more entertaining things, like Poitiers. Who will tell me more tales tonight? Bear, I have not heard nearly enough from you. What will you tell me of the last phase of fighting when both Jean and his son, Philip, were on the field? Where were you during this time?”
    Stephan struggled not to show any measure of displeasure at his liege’s expected request. Dutifully, he thought back to that brutal and bloody day, thinking back to the friends he lost, to a close friend that had fought with him almost to the end only to be accidentally cut down by an English archer. It was a memory he did not wish to share but one that had him increasingly frustrated as de Lara pushed him for stories. Without the tact that his fellow knights had, Stephan was untried in keeping his thoughts buried.
    Therefore, as de Lara pushed him beyond endurance, the entire story of his close friend dying in his arms with an arrow to the back of the neck came out and the disgust in the Battle of Poitiers was made clear by a man who did not wish to relive it, not even to his liege. It was a harrowing and painful story that emerged, one without humor and by the time Stephan was finished telling it, de Lara was gazing back at him with a measure of shock and sorrow. Suddenly, there was no more joy in demanding stories from Poitiers for Jasper de Lara. Beyond the glory of the English victory were the stories of grief. That was what men on the battlefield truly felt.
    Jasper learned, after that night, not to demand any more tales of Poitiers lest he hear stories like the one d’Avignon told him. Inevitably, it reminded Jasper of Roget’s death ten years earlier as the man had been impaled by a pike upon the muddy, violent fields of Crècy, a raw wound to Jasper’s memory that had never properly healed.
    After that night and tales of Stephan’s dying friend, the raw wound