Dougal glanced around, seeking his brothers, and spotted Andrew, leaning in to take a swipe at a redcoat. Ciaran was a few steps back, watching, sword at half-mast. Andrew finished defending his younger brother, then swung around and yelled something Dougal couldn’t hear. But in Dougal’s mind, Andrew’s thoughts were clear: Kill or be killed, Ciaran! Fight, damn it!
“There, Da!” Dougal yelled, pointing across the field. “Andrew’s just saved Ciaran’s arse again.”
His father nodded shortly, his face haggard behind a shaggy beard. “They’ll do. Let’s you and I go then.”
The two roared into the thick of things, black-haired demons with fury burning in their eyes.
But the fire had been extinguished from his father’s. One minute he was beside Dougal, cursing the English in furious Gaelic, hacking through them as he would swing an ax through trees. Then he was on his knees, gaping into the victorious expression of one of them. The soldier’s bayonet was sunk deep in Duncan’s chest, and Duncan’s filthy hands, emptied of their own weapons, clutched at the blade, heedless of its edge as it sliced through his fingers.
Despite the chaos, Dougal heard the blade go in, cutting through the thick blanket of tartan, carving into his father’s body like a knife into meat. He heard Duncan’s tortured scream at the initial pain, then the gurgling sobs that began to seize him. The soldier shoved Duncan backwards with the heel of his muddied boot, yanking the bayonet from the kill, and Duncan’s voice suddenly seemed much younger. As if he were a child, a youth, surprised at being cheated.
Dougal thrust his sword through the soldier’s back in a reflex action, then fell to his knees at his father’s side. He didn’t hear the soldier die. Didn’t care.
“Da?” he cried. “Da!”
Duncan’s eyes had begun to glaze into an opaque stillness Dougal had seen too many times. Blood snaked from the corner of his mouth, but he tried to smile, pulling back his lips and showing teeth dark with blood.
“Proud o’ ye, son,” he grunted.
“No, Da! Hold on!”
But Dougal knew, as his father knew. Nothing could be done for Duncan.
They were in an area to the side of the main field, slightly out of the way of the oncoming missiles of grapeshot and cannonball. Dougal dragged his father out of the way, avoiding the relentless tide of foot soldiers. His father needed him, needed someone, and everyone else was gone. Dougal hunched beside the shuddering body, bracing his father with one arm, gripping his sword defensively with the other. Just before he had to rise and fight, he heard his father’s last breaths, a weak gasp, then a lifeless whistle as his lungs released air for the final time.
“No!” Dougal cried, feeling rage and grief roar like flames in his chest. He set his father gently onto the ground and bent over the still chest, breathing quickly, forcing his tears to stay within. There was no time for them now. “I fight for you, Father,” he said, then leaned forward to kiss the clammy brow.
Turning away, Dougal threw himself into the battle like a man possessed. These men would pay. They would pay with their meaningless lives for the only one that had mattered. Dougal was a ban-sidhe, a whirling monster sick with rage, black eyes burning through a face smeared with filth and blood.
Such was his trance that he didn’t notice the five sweat-soaked redcoats surrounding him until the black mouths of their muskets yawned at his head.
“ ’Allo, you scum-suckin’ toad,” yelled one over the battle noise, peering at Dougal through his sight. He took a moment to spit to the side and peruse the fallen bodies at Dougal’s feet, then set his chin back to the handle and squinted. “We’ll ’ave yer ’ead for all this mess, we will.”
Dougal stood panting, his face twisted with fury, each hand clenched around the hilt of a different sword. He drew a blackened arm across his brow to clear his eyes of stinging sweat, lifting his upper lip in an instinctive display of teeth. “No’ one of ye to pull the trigger? Go on then. Afraid I’ll come back from the grave to haunt ye? Clever bastards, ye are. For I will. I will remember each of ye. I’ll tear yer hearts through yer own teeth while ye watch.”
A cannonball ripped through the air twenty feet away, crashing through trees, men, mules, anything in its path. Muskets flashed, men shouted, but the nervous glance exchanged by a couple of the soldiers seemed more related to Dougal’s threat than to the obvious physical one. They shuffled nervously, and two musket barrels wavered, but at a grunt from the lead soldier the men snapped back into position.
The first soldier smiled and gave Dougal a knowing wink. “You ain’t comin’ back, mate. Where you’re off to, they don’t let you come back. Tell you what, though. We won’t kill you just this minute. We’ll ’ave a bit of fun with you first, right? And when we’re done, I’m willing to wager you’ll wish one of us ’ad shot you. An’ then maybe we’ll just take you wif us when we go ’ave a little visit with your mother and sisters, shall we?” He nodded at Dougal’s two swords, dark with blood, held in readiness at his front and side. “Drop those, would you?”
“I won’t,” he assured him.
The soldier shook his head with apparent disappointment, as if Dougal were a child requiring discipline. “Oh, you will.” He jerked his chin toward a soldier behind Dougal. On cue, the second soldier slammed his musket into the base of Dougal’s skull.
When he woke, he lay on his stomach, unable to move. He opened his eyes but kept his head down, leaving his cheek to chill on a bed of mud. The air was still, its quiet engulfing the ringing in his ears. Battle sounds had ceased. It was done. The back of his head felt as if a horse’s hoof had dug into it with the weight of the beast behind it, and his eyes throbbed from the pressure. His shoulders ached. He tried to bring one palm to his forehead but discovered his hands were tied and bound behind his back. His feet were tied as well.
So, he thought. My head isna the worst of my worries.
He wasn’t alone. He lay among others of his kind, all similarly trussed, most groaning with pain. From his vantage point, facedown in the dirt, Dougal didn’t think any of them seemed too badly injured. That meant, he assumed, they were to become prisoners of the damn English dogs, slaves to their demeaning whims. Dougal knew some of the men here would rather die than face that prospect. Rather slit their own throats than submit to English rule. But Dougal had other thoughts. He would survive, if only to make the English regret everything they had done to him. To his father. To his brothers.
Where were his brothers? Not here in this writhing mass of captives. He studied the group as closely as he could, checking each dirty face, listening for familiar voices, but found nothing of them.
Very carefully, ignoring the crushing agony at the back of his neck, Dougal turned his head so he faced the battlefield. As he’d thought, the fight was done. A pall of thick smoke still hung in the mist, stinking of sulphur and death. Wincing at the pain, he peeled his cheek from the wet ground so he could see farther. He narrowed his eyes, watching dark, red-tinged figures wander through the field. Occasionally the sharp crack of a musket cut through the fog. Putting the badly injured out of their misery, he figured. Maybe that was a blessing, to end the suffering. If they weren’t hurt too badly, it appeared they ended up here on the ground, tied like a beast.
Dougal’s gaze picked out two of the distant soldiers and followed their movements. They walked, stopped, then leaned down, jerked back, and repeated the motion. Strangled sounds of men were cut suddenly short. Dougal shuddered and thought of his brothers again, this time with more urgency. Please, God, he prayed. Don’t let them be lying injured on that smoke-shadowed moor. Not shot to pieces and still breathing. Because those poor souls were being systematically dispatched by English bayonets.
“Wherever ye are, brothers, I go wi’ ye in spirit,” he murmured, then lost consciousness again.
Under the Same Sky Page 28
