Declan O'Duinne (The Saga of Roland Inness Book 6) by Wayne Grant

Author:Wayne Grant [Grant, Wayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graogonzo
Published: 2019-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

Pursuit

John de Courcy was first to find the unconscious man in the privy and the abandoned carving knife on the bench. It took him a moment more to comprehend that the spy he’d unmasked had used the castle’s garderobe to make an escape.

“Damn!” he said in amazement, peering down through the hole in the bench. Below, he saw nothing but darkness. The fall was forty feet or more, so most likely this Sir Roland was lying bloody and broken on the rocks at the base of the keep, but the tide was in and if the man had somehow cleared the rocks… He would not leave such a thing to chance.

Within minutes, the glow of torches lit up the inner ward of Carrickfergus Castle as the guard was turned out. The light quickly spread to the port town as de Courcy led a score of his men over the drawbridge and down toward the harbour. For long minutes, men clambered along the narrow fringe of rock that stood along the base of the keep looking for a body, but found none.

A boat put out into the harbour to look for the fugitive and the three cogs were searched from deck to keel, all to no avail. Then a sharp-eyed local discovered hoof prints in the fringe of hard-packed sand that rimmed the harbour. The prints might be innocent, left by a townsman or one of the newly-arrived English mercenaries, but de Courcy thought not. The Prince turned the search of the local area over to the Captain of his guard and hurried to the stables in the town with ten of his men.

The spy’s body might lay at the bottom of the harbour and not float up to the surface for a day or two, but John de Courcy’s instinct told him Inness was not dead. He’d somehow survived the fall and managed to steal a horse. But there had been two sets of tracks in the sand. Had this spy had an accomplice?

As de Courcy’s men hurriedly saddled the best mounts in the stable, the Prince considered where the fugitive might head. With nothing but water to the south and east Inness had to have gone north or west. To the north there were few roads or places of refuge. A man on foot might choose that direction, but not a man with a horse. Surely Inness had gone west. There was a decent road that ran along the bay in that direction and the man’s fellow spies had ridden out that way a week ago. He spurred his horse up to the westward road with ten men in his wake.

The road that ran along the shore of the bay was good by Irish standards, but rough—even in broad daylight. In the pitch dark of a moonless night, it was treacherous. With de Courcy himself in the lead, the riders moved cautiously but relentlessly through the dark. The going was painfully slow, but it would be the same for the man they pursued.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.