Chapter 15

The mood in Cecilia’s castle was bleak. It had been going downhill ever since the raid that had killed Richard. If there was any rumor that Marion had been sighted, Cecilia sent off a group of her men to investigate, but that was all they ever were: rumors. In the meantime, Cecilia’s grasp on reality started to slip. She was ever more fearful of the people turning against her. This fear led her to institute loyalty oaths for all her men. She demanded they move their families into York and made it clear that if any of them tried anything that went against her, their families would be killed by torture or burned at the stake. She would use fear to keep everyone in line if she had to. At the same time, she raised taxes even further.

Any household that couldn’t pay was forced to provide free labor for Cecilia’s estates, a young man for her army, or a young woman to help entertain the soldiers or work in one of Cecilia’s brothels. If the household couldn’t or wouldn’t meet these conditions, then the family would be destroyed. Cecilia wouldn’t kill anyone in the family outright, though; they were more valuable to her alive. The men, older women, and young children would be worked to death on her estates, usually in the mines, while the rest of the females would be forced into sexual servitude. They would be sent to one of Cecilia’s brothels, where their life span would be measured in months. These women would be the ones to serve the customers who had social diseases or who had a very kinky taste, like murder or cannibalism fetishes. Cecilia didn’t care what happened to the girls as long as the customers paid for the goods.

On this day, Cecilia was waiting on a gold shipment. She had made money by selling the extra food she had brought in with her taxes. The people needed the food, but she required hard cash even more. The shipment was under a strong guard and was led by one of her most trusted men, Captain Matthew Hall. He was competent and extremely loyal. The only thing that bothered Cecilia about using him was that he had no family for her to have leverage over him.

Thankfully, the captain was due back soon. Matthew had sent a messenger ahead when they started on their way back to tell Cecilia that he had the shipment under guard and was leaving London. He even gave her an approximate date he thought he would be back. While tending to her criminal enterprise, she got a message stating that some of the captain’s men had returned, but not the captain. Cecilia went to meet with them, but there were only two who had returned out of twenty who had left London. Furthermore, none of the money had made it back, which outraged Cecilia. She managed to barely hold her temper in check while the men gave their reports.

It seemed that Marion was back, and the entire group had survived. She had ambushed the convoy and killed most of the guards. The only way they had survived was that they had played dead while Marion and her followers had looted the money, arms, and armor from the dead. The men got away with this because they had gotten their story straight before they got into York and had made the appropriate preparations. They dumped most of their arms and armor in the river and took Marion’s advice to heart. Before they reported in, they stopped by their homes and hid the money Marion had given them.

Cecilia exploded. Her damn sister was back and now had a lot of money, horses, and arms. Cecilia expected almost £5,000 from selling the extra food and other goods. The surviving men quickly retreated while Cecilia was busy ranting and raving.

“Was that a good idea lying to her like that?” one asked.

“You want to go back and tell her the truth? Plus, we did not exactly lie; we just left some things out of our report.” was the response, “Besides, with the money that Marion gave us, we can afford to buy food for our families for the next couple of months.”

This settled it for them; Cecilia didn’t need to be bothered by the embarrassing details of how only two women had ambushed them, and more than half of the survivors, including the commander, had joined Marion.

After Cecilia had worn herself out with her tantrum, she called all her commanders together. The survivors had given her the approximate position of Marion’s ambush, and Cecilia was eager to get revenge and get her gold back. It would take a couple of days to get the men ready to go, but Cecilia gave her men just one day to prepare. She had almost 3,000 men at her command and 100 elite housecarls. She would send nearly everyone out except for 100 men that she would use to keep order in town and guard the castle.

Everything in town was thrown into chaos. Soldiers were busy gathering food and fodder for the expedition. They also had to prepare all the horses, oxen, and mules. Weapons had to be sharpened, and uniforms had to be mended. Some horses needed new shoes, and a few saddles had to be replaced. Every civilian in town was put to work helping get the soldiers ready to go. Cecilia had also ordered the gates of the city to be sealed. No one was allowed in or out without her direct orders, and there were no exceptions. The preparations went on through the night; no one in town got any sleep, including Cecilia. She was going over her commander’s plans and gathering all intel on the forest where it was said that Marion was hiding.

Cecilia also talked to the armorers she had tasked to recreate Tom’s gear to see if they succeeded. They had no success with the steel parts, while the leather was pretty easy. None of the armorers knew why they couldn’t make any progress. Some mysterious process had been used to create it, and sorcery was suggested as the only way it could be done. Cecilia had hired some of England’s most experienced armor makers to make armor like Tom’s, but none could come close. Cecilia knew better because she had witnessed Luke make his armor, but her input didn’t help. Once again, Cecilia went into a rage. It was so bad that she executed her head armorer and issued a stern warning to the rest of them that if they kept failing, then they and their entire families would be executed as well.

Everything had been done by dawn the following day, and Cecilia’s army marched out of town. Their orders were simple. Comb every centimeter of the countryside until they found and eliminated the threat that Marion posed. They were ordered that under absolutely no circumstances were they to return until Marion’s whole crew had been killed. Cecilia wanted Marion’s and Luke’s heads returned to her on pikes. She no longer cared about taking either of them alive.

Within a day, the army had reached the final ambush site, and they found plenty of evidence to show that Marion had been there. There were plenty of tracks on the road that appeared to be from the right time. One of the men found a scrap of green fabric that seemed to be the same material that Marion’s crew was said to wear. They also found the dead guards scattered around the site. Some of them still had the arrows embedded in them. The two that had escaped were stunned by this because they had been ambushed several hours up the road. The only ones killed here were the advanced guard, yet all their companions’ bodies were here. It didn’t take them long to realize that Marion cared about them, not Cecilia. After all, Marion had risked detection to place the other dead men around so that they wouldn’t look guilty of lying.

They decided to take their families out of York separately and join with Marion as soon as possible. That is if this wild goose chase ever ended and they weren’t killed by it. They privately acknowledged to each other that their chances of catching Marion ranked far below a snowball’s chances in the depths of hell, and their chances of getting back alive were not much higher. If they could have gotten their families out of York, they would have deserted in a second, but Cecilia sealed the gates as soon as the army departed.

The scouts had found five different trails leading away from the area, and some tracks were from heavily loaded horses. That would be the pack animals. There had been fifteen of them in the money convoy, and none of them were found with the guard’s corpses. No dead horses were found either. The commanders sent groups of their scouts to follow every track. They were to follow them for the rest of the day and return tomorrow unless they found Marion; then, they were to report back while leaving some men to shadow her while the army got into position.

The first scout started screaming within five minutes of leaving the main army. It was close enough that the commanders went to investigate for themselves. When they got there, they found that group’s leader hanging by his feet from a tree and impaled on a bed of wooden spikes. A new leader was appointed for the group, and they were strongly advised to stay off the trail and keep alert. When the commanders returned to the army, they got word that one of the other parties had also walked into a trap. Only there, half the scouts had been killed when they had been bunched up and had walked over a camouflaged pit that contained a large number of sharp wooden stakes. Another group had lost two members to arrow fire. The arrows had come out of nowhere, and no shooters could be found. This was going to be a very long and costly expedition, but they had their orders. They were not to stop hunting Marion until she was found and killed or Cecilia recalled the army.

The following six days proceeded in the same fashion. Some scouts would see nothing, and other groups would be ambushed and annihilated. It was far worse for the night guards because half of them would be dead; their throats were slit, and their armor and weapons were stripped.

The mood in the camp was getting worse and worse. It didn’t take the soldiers long to determine that being assigned to night sentry duty or scouting was a death sentence. The army’s discipline started to break down despite most men having families back in York and being well-supplied with food and drink. It reached the point where groups of five or six men would be assigned to every sentry post.

Finally, they got a solid lead. One of the patrols had sighted a large camp near a stream. In the stream, they saw a lovely redheaded female bathing. They saw bits of armor and at least one man moving around. The patrol reported back as ordered, and the commanders got the army underway within an hour. They also sent a report back to Cecilia detailing what was going on.

To move through the forest at speed, they had to leave almost all of their gear behind. The men were spread out through the forest to move more easily. Deeper and deeper into the forest, the army went. Occasionally, a man would scream, and then there would be silence again. The booby traps that Marion’s crew had set up were highly ingenious, very well hidden, and they were taking a heavy toll on the men. After almost three hours, they reached the camp.

They found a man still in camp, and he was quickly detained. This was one of the men who had deserted from the money guard detail. Since he had been sick, he hadn’t been on patrol with the rest of Marion’s group. It didn’t take him long to start talking. Marion had told him not to bother keeping secrets if captured. If there were anything that she didn’t want anyone to know, she wouldn’t tell them.

The army set about looting the camp while the captured man was tortured. Everything from thin knives stuffed under fingernails to his balls being crushed didn’t tell the commanders any more than they had been told when he was first captured. The torture went on for hours, and still, nothing could be learned, so the commander had the man tied to a stake and burned alive. The men who had been looting the camp didn’t have any better luck. They found some coins, pots and pans, an odd bit of armor, and an old horse.

It turns out that the camp the army discovered was one of Marion’s forward camps. These were camps that were used when they were raiding nearby. They were sparse because they were meant to be abandoned at a moment’s notice. This way, the pursuers would be distracted by the prospects of booty while Marion’s people escaped. Marion made it a point never to do any raiding near her main camp.