Chapter 759: A Stolen Throne (Part Two)
"Almost no one knew me mother were with child," Sybyll said slowly after taking a deep pull on the bottle of wine. "But me father, he told his brother Aiden when the second month passed an’ mother didn’a get her moonflow."
"So yer grandfather, he brought the strongest wine he could," Sybyll said, shaking her head at how simply her father had been defeated. But then, he’d never grown up needing to defend himself from the people who were closest to him. He’d never had to watch the person sleeping next to him for a hand in his purse or a knife in his back. And he’d never thought his brother would turn against him instead of celebrating with him.
"I weren’t even born yet, but me mother saw first hand when Aiden strangled his own brother in bed after gettin’ ’im drunk that night," Sybyll explained. "She only barely got away from it all by throwin’ herself out the window. She broke her arm in the fall an’ walked with a limp the rest ’o her life after that, but she got away an’ fled the barony."
"Aiden never stopped huntin’ her, neither," she added bitterly. "We was always runnin’ those years. Runnin’ an’ hiding ourselves away from his knights an’ their hounds," she said with a pointed look at Sir Carwyn.
The young knight shuddered at the thought of what Baroness Caitlin must have endured. His own wife was only a little bit further on in her own pregnancy than the Baroness had been she’d been forced to flee and he couldn’t imagine Owlyna walking from one side of their village to the other without taking a rest, much less fleeing through the wilderness.
"The, the records say it was the Red Cough," Hugo said numbly as his mind grappled with the version of events that Sybyll related. But as soon as he thought about the Red Cough, he realized why Aiden Hanrahan might have chosen that particular sickness to blame for the deaths of his brother and sister-in-law.
"He wanted an excuse to burn the bodies quickly, before anyone could see how Brighton really died," he said as he forced himself to meet Sybyll’s crimson gaze. "Or that the woman’s body they burned wasn’t really Baroness Caitlin. Everyone would have insisted on a grand funeral for a baron’s death, but to stop the spread of the Red Cough..."
A year ago, Hugo might not even have thought of such a thing. But, a year ago, he hadn’t entered Owain’s service or conspired to poison an innocent mother and her child using spider-demon venom, just because Sir Tommin had offended Owain.
A year ago, things like plotting to murder family members over the right to inherit had seemed like fantastical tales told by minstrels about the schemes of corrupt noblemen in the old countries. They were things that couldn’t happen in places like Lothian March where good and godly men still held the line against the real enemy, the demon hordes who would wipe out their kingdom and their way of life if they had the chance to.