The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1)

by Dorothy Dunnett

There is nothing very jolly about being locked in a cellar with a man whom, in every possible sense, you have just stabbed in the back. As Will Scott crashed into the stair rail and heard the trap thud above him, his very thews melted with apprehension.

“I wish to God,” said Gideon with mild exasperation, “that you’d talk—just once—in prose like other people.” “All right,” said Lymond, and quoted with malice. “And as for Scottishe men and Englishe men be not enemyes by nature but by custome; not by our good wyll, but by theyre own follye:

Time, precious and profligate, was wasting before their eyes. The heat, girdered with tension, crept like wadding into the interstices of the brain and muffled the starving air.

Dismiss the ruthless plotting, the devious schemes for battle and gain which we have heard about this afternoon—he is simple and vulnerable. Think, last of all, of how he has conducted himself today; of the fluent and malicious tongue from which you, as lords of the highest court in the land, have not been exempt. Does it seem to you that this drunkard, this outlaw, this wastrel son of an ill-starred family, is the man of this pitiful history? Or do you think, as I do, that it is all a pack of lies?” The echoes died. The Lord Advocate removed his spectacles, and spoke gently. “But we are asked for proof. What proof have we? Nearly all the people concerned are dead. It is not the sort of transaction likely to leave a record; and those persons who still remember the event are in enemy country.

“That boy,” bellowed Sir Wat, “was a shilpit, shiftless, shilly-shallying gomerel before he met up with Francis Crawford. And now, by God—he still maybe makes up his mind three times in the time a normal man would do it once, but I’d sooner have him back of me in an argument or a fight than any finnicking ninny that stayed at home and got wed at St. Cuthbert’s before he stopped talking like the squeak off a tumbler!”