given the privilege to come to know the brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles that he hadn’t grown up with.
Now, he was part of the massive de Wolfe collective.
He was one of them.
That familial bond was why they had all gathered. His Uncle Blayth’s daughter, Isabella, was supposed to have been married on the last Friday of the month, but her betrothed had second thoughts and had fled south. Poor Isabella was devastated and her father, a mighty warrior who had survived a horrific wound in his youth, was bent on hell.
Blayth had called together his nephews and sons and brothers to pursue a coward who had left his daughter alone on her wedding day. Never in the history of the de Wolfe household had such a thing happened to one of their women, so the de Wolfe men were all bent on revenge. No one slandered their women and got away with it.
They were going to find the errant groom and make him pay.
Along with his three younger half-brothers, Tor was joined by Isabella’s uncles, Nathaniel and Alec Hage. Since there were two Nathaniels in the family, named in honor of different men, the older Nathaniel, from the Hage branch, was called Nat. Nat and Alec were very big, very seasoned knights, and part of the reason Blayth had sent Tor and the others along was to keep Nat and Alec from tearing their niece’s intended into tiny pieces.
Nat was particularly upset and he kept talking about cutting off that which was most vital to a man while his brother, Alec, who was the oldest of the siblings and the head of the House of Hage, didn’t seem too inclined to tell his younger brother to calm down. Nat’s rage seemed to please him.
But Nat wasn’t the only one who was angry. Their posse had stopped at Kyloe Castle to collect Blayth’s youngest brother, Thomas, and his oldest son, Artus. Thomas de Wolfe was the Earl of Northumbria, a title he had inherited through marriage, and he had a very large army. Artus was his adopted son, a former orphan, who had been trained as any noble son would have been. At twenty years of age, he was already a formidable knight and Thomas could not have been prouder of the young man had he been of his own blood.
The last addition to what they had deemed the Hunting Party had been the brother of the bride herself. Ronan de Wolfe was Blayth’s eldest son and the fact that his sister had been shamed had the young knight’s blood boiling even more than Nat’s blood was. Nat was only an uncle, a brother of Isabella’s mother, but Ronan was her brother. He was the angriest of all because he actually knew the groom, Steffan de Featherstone, who had been a friend. Or, at least, he thought he was a friend. It was through Ronan that Steffan had been considered a marital prospect for Isabella.
Now, Ronan was feeling like a fool.
He, more than any of them, had a score to settle.
Upon leaving Kyloe, the group of de Wolfe and Hage knights continued south to Newcastle upon Tyne. They knew that was where the groom was going because when he’d fled, he had left behind a terrified squire who had told Blayth everything because he feared for his life at the hands of too many vicious de Wolfe men. The squire had spilled his master’s plans quite easily, so the pursuing knights knew where they were going.
They were going to find that bastard if it was the last thing they did.
It was late spring, and along with late spring came the storms that would turn the land into flowers in the summertime. But those same storms also turned the roads into soup and the collective party of heavily armed knights were covered in mud from their travels. The nine of them made a formidable sight as they stopped at Alnwick Castle on their way south to sup and pay their respects to Lord de Vesci. When Lord de Vesci heard the tale of a jilted de Wolfe bride, he offered them four of his most seasoned knights. Thomas, who knew de Vesci as a friend, readily accepted.
The de Wolfe Hunting Party grew.
Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to have so many men, but it was prudent because Steffan de Featherstone was a seasoned knight in his own right. He served the Lords of de Royans at Netherghyll Castle and everyone knew their knights