Henry watched as the child went to crouch by a wall with one hand on the canvas, no doubt ready to flee should Henry make any sudden move. Slowly, so as not to frighten him, Henry got up and left the bed.
The boy looked about nervously. “They will be coming for me.”
“Who will?”
“My masters. They always find me when I escape. They find me and they...”
Henry saw the horror on the boy’s face as if he were reliving whatever they had put him through. The boy began to pant in panic.
“I have to kill you.” The boy rose to his feet. He drew his dagger again and moved toward Henry. “If I don’t, they will come for me.”
Henry grabbed his hand before he could sink the dagger into his chest. “I can protect you from them.”
“No one protects me. I have only myself.”
They wrestled for the dagger.
Someone drew back the tent flap. “Majesty, we found...” The guard’s voice died as he caught sight of their struggle.
The guard shouted for reinforcements.
With a fierce grunt, the boy let go of the dagger as guards swarmed into the tent. Henry watched in awe as the scrawny child fought like a cornered lion. Had the boy possessed any strength on his starved bones, he would have easily defeated the twelve-man guard. But as it was, they brought him down hard on the floor.
Still the boy fought so furiously that it took five guards to keep him there.
“Release him.”
All twelve of his guards looked at him as if he were crazed.
“Majesty?” his captain asked hesitantly.
“Do it.”
It wasn’t until they let go that Henry realized the boy’s arm had been broken during the fight. His nose was bleeding and he had a cut on his forehead. Still, the child made no sound as he pushed himself to his feet. He merely held the broken arm to his side while he watched them warily as if expecting the absolute worst from them.
The child neither begged nor pleaded, and that told him much about what horrors the boy must have lived through. He stood strong and defiant before all of them.
His guards regained their feet, and the captain came forward to address Henry, but he still kept a jaundiced eye on the child. “We found two Saracens on the edge of camp, Sire. I am sure he is one of them.”
“As are we,” Henry said. “Boy, what is your name?”
The boy dropped his gaze to the floor. When he spoke, his voice was barely audible. “My masters call me Kurt.”
Henry frowned at the foreign term he’d learned the first few weeks they had been in this land. It was used to mean either maggot or worm. “What is your Christian name?”
“When I served the Earl of Ravenswood, I was called Sin.”
Henry’s breath caught at the name, for he knew who this child was. “You’re MacAllister’s son?”
Again, the emptiness returned to the boy’s eyes. “I am no man’s son.”
Indeed. When Henry had offered to return this boy home to his father in Scotland, the old laird had said as much. Sin was the only one of the Scottish boys they’d held whose father had refused to have him return home.
Not knowing what else to do about the matter and having little time to deal with it, Henry had left the boy in Harold of Ravenswood’s custody.
Obviously, that had been a mistake.
It wasn’t often Henry felt guilt. But he felt it now. It gripped his heart with unfamiliar pain and burned in his soul. This poor, unwanted boy had been his ward, and he had left him to a fate no child should ever know.
