The Complete Kingdom Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

Unlike his step-siblings, quiet wee bairns that they were, James had inherited a lisp from his ma and the dark anger of his da, which he showed in sudden twists of rage.
    Sim recalled the day before, when Buchan had arrived and everyone flew into a panic, for here was the main Comyn rival to the Bruces standing at the gates and no-one was sure whether he was in rebellion, since he should not be here at all.
    Worse still, his wife was here, thinking her husband a few hundred or more good Scotch miles away with English Edward’s army heading for the French wars, so leaving her free for dalliance with the young Bruce.
    So there had been a long minute or two when matters might have bubbled up and Sim had spanned his monstrous latchbow. The young Jamie, caught up in the moment, had raised himself on the tips of his toes and lost entirely the usual lisp that affected him when he roared, his boy’s body shaking with the fury in it, his child’s face red.
    â€˜Ye are not getting in. Ye’ll all hang. We will hang you, so we will.’
    â€˜Weesht,’ Sim had ordered and slapped the boy’s shoulder, only to get a glare in return.
    â€˜Ye cannot speak to me like that,’ he spat back at Sim. ‘One day I will be a belted knight.’
    There was a sharp slap and the boy yelped and held his ear. Sim put his gauntlet back on and rested his hand on the stock of his latchbow, unconcerned.
    â€˜Now I have made ye a belted knight. If ye give your elders mair lip, Jamie Douglas, ye’ll be a twice belted knight.’
    He mentioned the moment now to Hal, just to break the man’s gaze on the place where the boys had been. Jerked from the gaff of it, Hal managed a wan smile at Sim’s memory.
    â€˜Bigod, I hope he has no good remembrance of it when he comes into his own,’ he said to Sim. ‘You’ll need that bliddy big bow to stop him giving ye a hard reply to that ear boxing.’
    A sudden blare of raucous shouting snapped both their heads round and the great slab face of Sim Craw creased into one large frown.
    â€˜Whit does he require here?’ he asked, and Hal did not need to ask the who of it, for the most noise came from in and around the great striped tent of the Earl of Buchan.
    â€˜His wife, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Hal answered dryly, and Sim laughed, soft as sifting ashes. Somewhere up there, Hal thought, glancing up to the dark tower, is the Countess of Buchan, the bold and beautiful Isabel MacDuff, keeping to the lie that she had coincidentally turned up to visit Eleanor Douglas.
    Buchan, it seemed, was the one man in all Scotland who did not know for sure that the young Bruce and Isabel were rattling each other like stoats and had been lovers, as Sim said, since the young Bruce’s stones had properly dropped.
    For all the humour in it, this was no laughing matter. The Earl of Buchan was a Comyn, a friend to the Balliols of Galloway, who were Bruce’s arch-rivals. A Balliol king had been appointed four years before by Edward of England – and then stripped of his regalia only last year when he proved less than biddable. Now the kingdom was in turmoil, ostensibly ruled directly from Westminster.
    But all the old kingdom rivalries bubbled in the cauldron of it and it would not take much for it all to boil over. Finding an unfaithful wife with her legs in the air would do it, Hal thought.
    A piece of the dark detached itself and made both men start; a wry chuckle made them drop their hands from hilts, half ashamed.
    â€˜Aye, lads, it is reassuring to a man’s goodwill of himself that he can make two such doughty young warriors afraid still.’
    The dark-clothed shape of the Auld Templar resolved into the familiar, his white beard trembling as he chuckled. Hal nodded, polite and cautious all the same for the Auld Templar represented Roslin and the Sientclers of Herdmanston owed them fealty.
    â€˜Sir William. God be praised.’
    â€˜For