Maybe there was already nothing left. His expression had turned to ice, cold and hard. “Is that what you really want?”
Her insides knotted. “Aye.”
She wanted to call the word back as soon as she said it, but she knew it had to be said. He had to choose.
She just didn’t think he’d choose to leave her.
15
MARGARET LOST sense of time. She didn’t know how long she sat at the base of the tree sobbing. A minute? Two? Ten? But suddenly Brigid was there.
“Maggie! Thank goodness, here you are! Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
Margaret lifted her head and met her friend’s gaze in the moonlight.
Brigid paled, her eyes widening in horror. She raced forward to kneel beside her. “Dear God in heaven, what has happened?”
Margaret blinked through the tears of her swollen eyes and shook her head, her throat too tight to respond.
“Did Tristan do this to you?” Brigid said. “I was worried when I saw him come back to the castle without you in such a temper. Oh God, please tell me my brother didn’t force you?”
Only then did Margaret realize the state of her clothes. She hadn’t tied the laces of her gown where Eoin had loosened them, and she probably bore his mark where he’d ravaged her mouth and throat with his kiss. Following the direction of Brigid’s gaze, she looked down and saw the scratch low on her bodice that must have been from his beard.
She shook her head. “N-not T-Tristan.”
Margaret could see the relief on her friend’s face, before it hardened into steel. “Then who? Who did this to you? We must get back to the castle to tell your father.”
Margaret grasped at her to prevent her from standing. “No,” she said. “No, you mustn’t.”
“Of course we must. The fiend might still be in the area.”
“No, Brigid. I mean it. You can’t,” she said frantically. “It isn’t what you think. They can’t know . . .”
Margaret stopped, not wanting to say too much. Eoin might have broken her heart, but that didn’t mean she wanted him to die for it.
She forced herself to stand, though her legs wobbled, and tried to compose herself. Her friend watched her every move, as Margaret did what she could with her appearance.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” Brigid asked. “Your husband. He’s the one who did this to you. He’s the one you are trying to protect.”
Margaret tried to deny it, but she was a horrible liar, and Brigid knew her too well. In the end she was forced to admit it, or Brigid swore she would go right to Margaret’s father. “But you must swear to say nothing, Brigid—not to anyone. It might be over, but I still love him.” Hot tears filled her eyes again. “It’s over, Brige. It’s really over.”
Her friend enfolded her in her embrace and did her best to console her. But Brigid could not put back together what had been shattered.
“Are you sure?” Brigid asked.
There was something in her friend’s gaze that Margaret didn’t understand. An intensity—a vehemence—with which she asked her question.
Margaret nodded. “Aye. I’m sure.” Her voice caught with a sob. “He doesn’t want me.”
Once again she was enfolded in her friend’s arms. Brigid squeezed and rocked her back and forth. “Then he’s a fool, Maggie Beag, and he doesn’t deserve you. Maybe . . . maybe a definitive end will be best.”
It almost sounded like a question, but Margaret was too devastated to heed the warning.
Margaret didn’t realize her mistake until the following morning, when she rose after a sleepless night and tried to open her bedchamber door. Perhaps the only benefit of being the sole female in the family was that she’d been given a small, private solar on the second floor of the tower house.
She pulled a few times on the handle, but it had been barred from the outside. At first she thought it was a mistake and knocked loudly, calling for someone’s attention. But when one of her father’s soldiers brought her food to break her fast, she realized it wasn’t a mistake.
She barraged him with questions, which went unanswered, and demanded to be released, which he uncomfortably refused. When it was clear she would get nowhere with him, she asked to see her father.
Over the long hours that her father kept her waiting, she was forced to consider the possibility that her best friend had betrayed her.
A fact that was confirmed for her a few minutes after Dugald MacDowell strode into the room. He looked like a cat who’d just eaten a big fat mouse as he took off his helm, slammed it on the table, and collapsed in her favorite chair before the brazier.
She stood in front of him practically shaking in frustration. “What is the meaning of this, Father? Why have I been locked in my chamber all day?”
His eyes narrowed just a little at her tone, and maybe on another day he would have chastised her, but today he was too pleased with himself. “It’s for your own protection.”
“For my what?”
His smile turned just a tad cold. “I wouldn’t want your duty to become confused.”
Then he told her just how horribly she’d been betrayed. Brigid had told him—actually she’d told Dougal— everything. She stared at her father in numb disbelief. “But why? Why would Brigid do this?”
He shrugged indifferently. “Why should I care? But I suspect it’s some silly lass’s infatuation with your brother. She has always mooned after him.”
She had? How could Margaret not have noticed? But it still didn’t make any sense.
“Would that it had been my own daughter who brought me news of the rebel’s presence instead.”
She didn’t miss the none-too-subtle reproach. But even her father could not deny that she owed Eoin her loyalty. “He’s my husband, Father.”
“Not for much longer.”
His certainty sent a chill into her heart. “Please, Father, you must believe that I have no idea where he is. I’m sure Eoin is long gone by now.”
“I’m sure he’s nothing of the sort. We’ve been expecting an attack, and your husband’s presence in the area has all but confirmed it. Loch Ryan is the perfect place to safely land a significant number of ships. Have you not noticed all the men I’ve been mobilizing in the area for the past month? I’ve spread them out among the nearby castles trying to prevent the rebels from knowing our strength. We’ll have a wonderful surprise waiting for them. Tonight, I’d wager.”
Oh God . . . no. Margaret dropped to the bed, no longer able to stand. The room seemed to be spinning. Her head was pounding with his words: “Tell no one of my presence.”
She hadn’t meant to. But Brigid had guessed, and she’d thought she was protecting him by confirming it. She’d thought she could trust her. She’d never imagined her friend would do something like this.
But it didn’t matter. Unwittingly or not, Margaret had revealed his presence here, and in doing so, betrayed him. But she couldn’t let her mistake cost him his life.
“Please, Father, you misunderstand. He came to see me, that is all. W-we argued. He saw me with Tristan and misunderstood.”
Her father stood, his gaze hardened. “I wondered why he’d be fool enough to chance a meeting with you. Undone by jealousy.” He laughed, shaking his head. “If you are telling the truth, you have nothing to worry about. But if you are lying . . .” His mouth fell in a flat line. “If you are lying, nothing will save him anyway, because nothing will stop me from exacting vengeance on the men who killed my kinsman. And if this is Bruce’s ‘glorious’ return to retake his kingdom, we will finally get the recognition our clan deserves. Can you imagine how Edward will reward the man who brings him the head of the murderous traitor King Hood?”
Margaret pleaded her case, but she knew it was to no avail. Her father had set his course, and her happiness was a small price to pay for vengeance and ambition.
Her mistaken attempt to protect her husband could well end up costing him his life. He’d warned her. “Tell no one . . . Under any
circumstances.” Oh God, how could she not have listened to him?
She had to do something.
It was a slaughter. Eoin’s stomach lurched as he fought off the MacDowell warriors while knee deep in the blood and gore of his compatriots. Hundreds of bodies, most of them Bruce’s men, were strewn across the beach and floating facedown in the loch that in dawn’s light would be a grisly red.
They’d realized they were trapped too late. The fleet of ships and army that had taken Robert the Bruce five months to put together—over two-thirds of them Gallowglass mercenaries from Ireland—had sailed into the loch under the moonless sky without the vital element of surprise. The enemy was waiting for them. Far more than their intelligence had led them to believe.
Eoin grimaced as a fountain of blood splattered on his face from the slash of his sword across his opponent’s neck. He didn’t have time to wipe the grime from his face—or think about how MacDowell might have come upon his intelligence—before the next Gallovidian swarm of warriors was upon him. Two, three, sometimes four men at a time. MacDowell’s men poured out of the trees where they’d hidden like plaid-covered locusts.
MacDowell was a wily bastard, Eoin would give him that. The Galwegian chief and his men had lain in wait until a large part of Bruce’s army had dragged their birlinns up the beach before attacking—and then with only a small force meant to entice more of Bruce’s army to come to their aid.
It had worked. Thinking they were sailing to the rescue, the crews in the second wave of ships had been surprised, and then overwhelmed as a much larger force of MacDowell’s men suddenly appeared.
As part of the vanguard, Eoin and Lamont had been among the first men on the beach. Realizing what was happening, Eoin tried to warn the ships behind them to turn back, but his shouts could not be heard from above the clatter of the battle, and he couldn’t break away from his attackers for long enough to do anything else. In between swings of his two-handed great sword, Eoin watched as men he’d fought alongside for months were cut down under the vicious onslaught.
Their only stroke of luck came when someone had lit a beacon meant to guide the seafarers into the mouth of the loch. It had alerted the last ships to the danger, and two had managed to escape before they sailed into the trap. Of the eighteen ships and nine hundred men who sailed into Loch Ryan to launch Bruce’s rebid for the crown, all but a little over a hundred men had been caught in MacDowell’s web.
The rest of them were left to fight their way out or die. Eoin fought like a man possessed, but it wasn’t enough. Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, Thomas Bruce, one of the commanders, gave the order to retreat, which in effect was a call to flee by whatever means possible. A moment later, Eoin watched in horror as Thomas, along with his younger brother, Alexander, were surrounded by MacDowells and forced to surrender.
With their commanders taken, it became a free-for-all—every man for himself—as what remained of Bruce’s army ran for the trees, their only hope to evade capture in the forest.
Above the din of the mayhem, Lamont shouted to get Eoin’s attention and motioned for him to head his way. Eoin nodded with understanding and dispatched one of the two swordsmen attacking him with a disabling swing of his sword across his legs, followed by a deadly one across his neck. He slashed his way through a few more enemy warriors, slowly forging his way up the beach toward his partner.
He was only a few feet away from Lamont when a large warrior stepped in his path. From the quality of his armor and weaponry, Eoin knew he wasn’t a regular man at arms, but it wasn’t until their swords met in the first clash of steel that Eoin recognized the face beneath the helm and grime: Dougal MacDowell, his wife’s eldest brother.
Eoin cursed and stepped back. He was furious with Margaret, but there was no way in hell he’d go back to her as the man who killed her brother. For despite her ultimatum, he had every intention of claiming his wife at the first opportunity. She wouldn’t be rid of him that easily, but he wasn’t going to stand there arguing with her when she was being so irrational. “Let me pass, Dougal.”
“Surrender,” the MacDowell heir responded, “and my father may be persuaded to spare your life. You deserve some credit for this, after all.”
Eoin’s stomach dropped; his bones turned to ice. No.
Dougal smirked, reading his shock. “Your devotion to my sister has turned out to be surprisingly useful—for us.”
He laughed, and Eoin felt as if he’d just taken a dirk in the gut. Nay, in the back. He couldn’t believe it. She’d told someone about his presence. He’d known he’d made a mistake when he followed her and had been forced to reveal himself, but not once had he ever really thought she would betray him.
She’d betrayed him. The words echoed over and over in his head, but still they couldn’t quite penetrate.
“MacLean, watch your back!”
He heard his partner’s warning an instant too late. His inattention—his shock from his wife’s treachery—had cost him in more ways than one. While he’d backed away from Dougal, another MacDowell warrior had come up on his flank. He turned in time to see the flash of silvery steel right before the blade struck the back of his head with a felling blow.
As Eoin fell to the ground, he was almost glad he wasn’t going to have to live with the knowledge of what his weakness for his wife had done.
Margaret was still miles away from Stranraer and the beach at Loch Ryan when she began to hear the sounds. Horrific sounds. The violent clash and clatter of metal, the shouts of angry voices, and the hideous cries of the dying.
She was too late. It had taken her too long to escape and reach the old beacon at Kirkcolm. Her warning hadn’t worked. The ships must have been ahead of her.
Oh God, please don’t let anything happen to him!
If only it hadn’t taken her so long to light the beacon. She’d brought a tinderbox and was able to get a small fire going, but the last keeper hadn’t left the basket ready, and it took her some time to gather the wood and twigs, and then climb up and down the rungs on the pole to place them in the iron fire basket.
Her heart seemed to have stopped beating as she rode as fast as she dared through the dark forested path—praying, begging, bargaining every step of the way.
But the sounds from the beach only grew worse as she drew nearer. The fierce clatter of swords that had reverberated in the air dulled as the battle lost its intensity, and the cries took over. They were cries unlike any she’d ever heard, and would haunt her dreams for years to come, but instinctively she knew what it meant: it was the sound of a massacre.
The world seemed a blur, whether from the tears pouring from her eyes or the horrible images spinning through her mind. But by time she reached Stranraer, jumped off her horse, and pushed her way through the hundreds of celebrating clansmen, Margaret seemed to have lost all sense of reality. She felt like she was in a hideous nightmare, a slow-moving world of disbelief and horror, as she raced toward the beach, her path lit by the torches that seemed to have sprung up all around her.
Some of the men recognized her—she heard more than one surprised “my lady”—but no one tried to stop her. She knew why the moment she broke through the trees and the crescent-shaped beach spread out before her: the battle was over.
Her stomach heaved at the sight that met her eyes. Bodies—or parts of bodies—were everywhere. A few patches of light sand were all that remained in the sea of blood and gore. She retched, the sickly, coppery smell overwhelming.
When she lifted her head, she gazed around blindly, not knowing where to look—not knowing how to look—so scared of what she might find.
Eoin. Please, not Eoin.
Her father’s men were dragging bodies into piles. The sudden roar of fire and the first throat-searing, acrid wafts of burning flesh that hit her nose explained why.
With a sharp cry of desperation, she began to frantically search among the bodies. Bile rose to the back of her throat more than once at the grisly images, the faces mutil
ated beyond recognition, the blood, the unstaring eyes, swirled in front of her, as she picked her way through the dead.
Many were young, and few wore mail. From the saffron-dyed leines and quilted cotuns, she realized most were Irishmen. But no blackened nasal helms and black leather cotuns studded with mail.
“Margaret, what the hell are you doing here?” Duncan had come up behind her, and spun her around by the elbow to face him. “Satan’s stones, as if I need to ask! I couldn’t believe it when one of the men said he saw you. You must be mad coming here like this. It could still be dangerous. Father would be furious to see you.”
“Where is he, Duncan? Where is Father?” she pleaded desperately. “I must see if he knows anything about Eoin.”
Her breath caught as something flickered in his expression—sympathy?
“MacLean is dead, Maggie. Dougal saw him fall.”
“No!” She staggered. “No!” She clutched at Duncan’s arm to steady herself. Eoin couldn’t be dead. “Where is he? If he is dead than show me his body.”
“It’s probably too late.”
“What do you mean, too late?”
His eyes flickered to the far edge of the beach where she could see the flames of a fire beyond a large crowd of men. Her heart froze. Panic raced wildly through ice-cold veins.
She started to run. Duncan yelled after her to stop, but his words were droned out by the hammering of her heart in her ears.
He caught her when she was still a few dozen yards away. “You can’t go over there,” he said furiously, lifting her off the ground from behind by her waist. “Jesus, Maggie, trust me, you don’t want to see that.”
“Why not? What are they—”
A flash of silver above the heads of the men followed by a roar of cheering cut off the question in her throat. She stopped thrashing in her brother’s arms and he turned her around to face him.
“Some of the rebels are being executed,” he explained.
Her eyes widened with horror. Her father was exacting his vengeance with mercilessness and brutality that would be remembered for ages.
The Striker Page 20
