WolfeBlade: de Wolfe Pack Generations by Kathryn Veque (top 20 books to read .TXT) 📗

her what he and Lukas suspected and where he was going. Andreas really wasn’t surprised when she insisted on going with him. In truth, he didn’t have the heart to stop her.

There was no way he could have.

A mother determined to get to her child.

Within the hour, they were mounted along with Will, Brodie, Gareth, and Corey, leaving Reed riding hard for Kale Water Castle to summon help from Troy. The Lair was closer, but Andreas wanted his father’s help because his Uncle Scott had enough to deal with at the moment, Scots and all. Lukas was left at Falstone to command the army. It was his post, after all, and he would man it till the death.

As he watched the group of knights and one hundred soldiers pour out of Falstone’s gatehouse, he seriously wondered how this situation was going to end. He had several scenarios in his mind and only one of them good.

When one was dealing with the House of de Soulis, the devil was in the details.

Or, so the rumors said…

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The journey to Edenside Foundling Home was a little more than a day’s ride from Falstone under normal conditions, but having suffered through a recent snowstorm, these weren’t normal conditions.

Far from it.

Even though the day following the storm had dawned bright and remained so, the appearance of the sun and the rise in temperature had turned the roads into soup and the rivers into torrents. The snow was melting and the water runoff was great., More than once, the horses had been up to their knees in muck.

But that didn’t stop them.

Andreas was trying to be thoughtful of Gavriella and not push too hard but, as it ended up, she was the one pushing them and setting the pace. She was heavily clad in warm clothing, so she was protected against the temperatures as she pushed her sturdy horse through swollen streams and muddy roads like a madwoman. There was a frenzy to her movements, a desperation.

She had a son to retrieve.

It came to the point where the men were simply trying to keep up with her.

Andreas let her lead the way, mostly because there was no way to stop her, and it occurred to him how much the separation from the baby must have hurt her. He thought back to the moment he’d first met her, how hysterical and sad she had seemed. Guarded. She’s been rude and planted behind a shield of her own making. Given what he knew now, he understood completely, but the fact that she was rushing almost recklessly to collect her son told him much, much more.

How much she had been hurting.

It also began to occur to him what a rational nature she had because she didn’t view the child as something horrific, a reminder of the worst moment of her life. She didn’t equate him to the violent and vile act of his conception and Andreas thought that was quite remarkable. As a knight, he’d been trained to keep emotions out of the violence perpetrated in battle. An emotional fighter was often a man with a death wish. But a woman with that kind of capacity for reason and understanding of a violent moment in her life was remarkable, indeed. With every moment that passed, Andreas was more and more impressed by her.

And the group pushed on.

In truth, no one said a word about Gavriella wanting to push that hard. They simply followed her. When they reached spots in the road that seemed impassable, someone always found a way around it. Because the days were shorter, the sun set much earlier than normal and evening came beneath what was, strangely enough, called a wolf moon. It happened in January every year and was thought, by some, to have been called a wolf moon because the wolves seemed to bay at it more than any other moon.

Andreas thought it was rather appropriate.

That big, bright moon illuminated the countryside so they could see their way into Kelso. It had been dark for a few hours by the time they reached the border village with its great abbey, a soaring icon of stability and religion against the night sky. Andreas had been here, several times, and it occurred to him that he should probably send word to his Uncle Thomas about the situation since Edenside was his wife’s charity.

Mae de Wolfe, Thomas’ wife, had taken charge of the charity right after a scandal that had seen those in charge of the children selling them off for most unsavory purposes in most instances. She had taken a charity rocked by pain and scandal and mistrust and had made it into something fine and good.

When he first heard that Gavriella’s infant had been taken there, he knew the child would be well-tended. He’d tried to tell Gavriella that before they left that morning, but she had been too preoccupied with the idea of seeing her son soon. Until the advent of Andreas, it was something she could have never even dreamed of. A distant father, a dark situation, and no hope.

Andreas had once called her a new day. What he hadn’t realized was that he was her new day, too.

The village of Kelso was quiet at this time of night and Andreas forced Gavriella to slow down so she wouldn’t awaken the entire village by thundering through. Reluctantly, she did, and Andreas took the lead, directing the party through the village and to the eastern side, which had been heavily burned by the Scots. The road continued all the way to Berwick, but the Edenside Foundling Home was just a few minutes out of town along this very path.

Andreas could see it up ahead.

Gavriella, of course, had never been to the home, so she didn’t know they were there until Andreas reined his horse to a halt in front of it.

In fact, it didn’t look like a foundling home at all.

Edenside had been a fortified tower house