The Intended Read Online Free PDF

whispered under her breath.
    With a nod, Edward looked into the center of
the hall. Following his eyes, Jaime saw a group of five or six men
half sitting and lying down. They had to be the ones, Jaime
thought. His prisoners. Her challenge.
    “M’lord!” A burly, round-faced man carrying a
stout club approached them, and Edward turned irritably toward
him.
    “What is it, Reed?” he snapped.
    “Well, m’lord, this ‘ere Spaniard in yon
corner may be done fer. I thought—since ye happened by this
morning, ye’d like to talk to ‘im. All of the sudden, seeing his
end ‘afore ‘im, ‘e appears to ‘ave a bushel full to pass on. Some
of it ye might just find to yer liking, m’lord.”
    “Very well.” Edward turned to Jaime and
glanced over his shoulder at the officers who had ridden in with
them. Taking her by the hand, he said, “Wait for me right here.
This should only take a moment.”
    Jaime watched him follow the jailer into a
dark corner and down a few steps where they pushed aside a ragged
piece of cloth that did little to conceal the murky, torchlit
antechamber beyond. As they passed into the small room, she could
see a man hunched against a wall. Dark patches spotted the wall
above the man. She wondered if it was the Spaniard’s blood. If not
his, she thought, then whose? Looking back at the group Edward had
indicated before, she paused. Two of them, standing in conversation
over another, were wearing clothes of the French nobility. She
threw a glance at Edward, and then at his officers.
    This was, indeed, why he had brought her
here. Aye, he meant to test her loyalty, but perhaps he also wanted
to see if she might be able to identify these men, perhaps to give
him a sense of their true worth? The thought of him bringing her
into such a sordid business repulsed her all the more. But, she
argued inwardly, how else could he be assured that her years of
study in France or the Scottish blood that he thought ran in her
veins would not divide her loyalties.
    The crack of a whip tore through the air,
followed by the shrill scream of a man. Her hands instinctively
rose to her mouth to stop her own shocked cry. She turned toward
the antechamber. Edward was bent over the cringing heap that she
knew to be the Spaniard. She shut her eyes tightly as Edward
stepped back, giving Reed room to strike again at the dying man.
She backed away in an unconscious attempt to put more distance
between herself and the horrifying sight.
    Jaime stumbled slightly as she tripped over
the outstretched foot of a prisoner sitting nearby. The man’s
vacant eyes looked up at her, but they didn’t seem to comprehend
what he was seeing. And then he began to cough—it was a painful,
consumptive fit—and Jaime found herself edging away in the
direction of the French prisoners.
    More cries emanated from the corner room and
again the crack of the whip—again and again the lash fell. She
looked about—the officers, the coughing man at her feet—she could
see Edward speaking to someone just inside the antechamber. But no
one seemed to hear the man’s cries. Everyone but Jaime herself
seemed deaf to the sounds of the torture. The coughing man vomited
a sizable amount of blood. She took another step back while trying
to swallow the bile in her throat. These men were dying before her
eyes.
    As she continued to move off, she heard a few
words of French and realized she was almost on top of the new
prisoners . Northerner ... late ... With an anxious look
at Edward, still in the corner room, she slowly approached them,
but they backed away in silence as she neared them.
    There was a man lying in the straw before
her. With a start Jaime bent over him—he was an elderly man wearing
the red and gray tartan of the MacGregor’s. A Scot, she thought.
Edward had never mentioned that he had taken Scots in his victory.
A bloody cloth covered the man’s eyes, and his face and beard were
caked with dried blood. Before she even knelt, she knew that