by Amanda Scott
“Will Thomas Cummings meet them with us?” he asked.
Giving him a look that told him de Raite disliked being questioned about his plans or anyone else’s, Will nevertheless held his gaze and waited.
At last, with a sigh, de Raite said, “Ye should ken fine by now that me uncle and I differ on many matters, and when it comes tae essential Comyn affairs, I’d liefer confer wi’ men who be more of a mind wi’ me. Sakes, he nae longer even calls hisself a Comyn!”
“So, Granduncle Thomas knows naught of this conference,” Will said. “He is a canny man, sir, and a wise one. We should at least hear his opinions.”
“He’s nobbut an ancient wi’ daft notions,” de Raite snapped. “I dinna like him. Sending ye tae him were a grand mistake, so we’ll nae talk more o’ this. Ye’ll do as I bid ye without comment or complaint, me lad, or I’ll see ye rue the day.”
Hew smirked at Will, which increased Will’s concern. Whatever de Raite and Hew were up to, he doubted that it would entail only talk with fellow Comyns. It would do him no good, though, to pursue his suspicions with Hew, Liam, or Colley, because all three men habitually supported de Raite.
They departed an hour later, taking the main road west toward Inverness, but well before then, they turned off onto a track that led southward and followed the course of the river Nairn uphill through woods on the east face of hills that Will knew formed part of Glen Mòr’s steep eastern slopes.
He was still trying to imagine what de Raite had in mind when his cousin Dae approached him that night as they made camp on the south shore of a narrow loch in yet higher hills where he had hunted with Wilkin, several miles southeast of Inverness. Clouds had gathered all afternoon. Some had burst into brief pelting rain; others produced a continued, annoying drizzle. The air was now damp and heavy. They had scouted but found no one else in their vicinity, let alone Comyn kinsmen.
Will welcomed his cousin, saying, “Art hungry, Dae?”
“Starving,” Dae said. He was about Hew’s age, ten years Will’s senior, but having grown up in the Lowlands of Perth, Dae tended to regard Highlanders with awe. Hew had oft called him a “Lowland feardie.” As Hew’s man, Dae had never been more than polite to Will, but compared with Hew or Liam, he was affable.
Men were spreading out in the dusky light to forage for food before full darkness fell, because they expected another moonless night. None paid heed to the damp, nor would they if it rained harder. Only a fierce thunderstorm on high ground would put de Raite off whatever plan he had or make his men seek shelter.
They were still in Clan Chattan country. So, although Glen Mòr was home to other clans, including several that supported Clan Comyn, camping on what amounted to the back side of its northeast slope rather than taking the main road through Inverness to the western side, where most of their allies dwelt, made Will sure that de Raite was up to no good.
Most clans on the east slopes supported the King. Those to the west favored Alexander, the Lord of the Isles, who, since his release from imprisonment the previous year, had shown no interest in resuming hostilities and kept uncharacteristically silent.
However, in the months following the royal defeat at Inverlochy, Alexander’s allies, including Comyn factions, had joined his Islesmen under his cousin Donal Balloch and done all they could to stir trouble for the King’s allies in Glen Mòr and surrounding areas. The Highlands had been quiet for a time since then, though, and Will doubted that any in Glen Mòr would cheer if de Raite stirred trouble again.
Dae murmured, “I’m thinking there be more tae this than what yer da has said, although Hew said only tae keep m’self ready for trouble, and all will be well. But de Raite sent Liam and two o’ his men on southward for summat. What it be, I dinna ken ’cause it be devilish hard tae get aught out o’ Hew. But if I’m going tae get kilt in a row that yer da has wi’ some other clan, I’d like tae ken the why of it.”
“I have had such feelings all day,” Will said grimly. “I have little to explain them, though, other than our failure to meet yet with fellow clansmen. Has Hew chanced to mention who is to meet us?”
“He says nowt tae me o’ nowt,” Dae grumbled. “I ha’ seen the man prepare for battle afore now, though, and that be what he’s a-doing. All he’ll say is that we ha’ tae be prepared for aught that may come.”
Will nodded. “Then more lies ahead than they want to say. Whatever it is, we’ll soon find out, so we should sleep. Dawn comes early this time of year.”
As it was, they slept only a few hours before Hew and Liam crept about under a black, drizzly sky, rousing their men. Before Will was fully awake, he knew that de Raite planned to attack someone, but he knew naught of where they were going or how many men, if any, would join them when they arrived.
Then, Hew said, “Our way up tae Loch Moigh lies a quarter-mile ahead. Allies be coming from all directions tae surround the castle afore dawn, so it will mean the end for the Malcolmtosh. Da says Jamie Stewart willna mind, ’cause we can prove Malcolm broke the peace when he stole Nairn back from us.”
“Has de Raite sent word to the King?” Will asked as he finished arranging his plaid and adjusting his baldric to lie diagonally across his back and chest with his sheathed sword’s hilt ready to draw with his right hand. Slipping his dirk into its own sheath, he added, “I ken fine that he talked of complaining to Jamie, but—”
“Sakes, man, he’s been a-planning this attack since then,” Hew said as if that should have been obvious and answered Will’s question.
It was not obvious to Will, for though de Raite had seized Raitt Castle while Sir Fin was off fighting for the King, he had attempted little truly warriorlike since.
Malcolm, meantime, had steadily enhanced his own near-legendary repute with skillful handling of matters from the King’s Parliaments to the royal victory at Lochaber and the Mackintoshes’ meritorious actions and few losses at Inverlochy.
“But to attack Loch Moigh!” Will exclaimed. “That’s just madness. Does it not sit much higher in these mountains, in the midst of Clan Chattan territory?”
“Aye, it does,” Hew said with a smirk. “That be the glory of it. Sithee, they dinna ken we’re a-coming. And, when we take it, we’ll hang the wee Malcolmtosh from his own gatepost. But Da will explain it all tae ye, or tae Jamie if he must. Fact be that Malcolm be a gey old man wha’ doesna listen tae reason. Da says he should ha’ been hanged long since, so wi’ luck, we’ll attend tae that afore day’s end.”
Before Saturday’s dawn broke two hours later, de Raite’s men and their allies, from all directions, had crept up and over the steep, rocky slopes surrounding Loch Moigh and hidden themselves behind boulders, natural rises in the terrain, and in rocky declivities nearer the loch and the dark stone castle on its islet.
The night had remained moonless, damp, even muddy, and as dark as such a night could be, but the clouds were beginning to break. Stars peeked brightly between them, providing light enough to make out dark shapes of men moving here and there, but only, Will suspected, if one knew the men were there.
They had come quietly, making no more sound than the stirring of a pebble or the hushing of a leafy shrub or slight splash of a puddle as they eased themselves into concealment, less noise than night creatures might make while doing the same.
By Will’s reckoning when he had topped the northwest end of the rockbound oval in which the loch’s calm water mirrored the stars, Loch Moigh was over a mile long and nearly a half mile at its widest point. It lay northwest to southeast amid higher peaks of the Monadhliath Mountains. Its islet was much the same shape as the loch and perhaps one-fifth of its length.
The towering dark shadow of Moigh Castle dominated the islet.
At de Raite’s order, Will led the way to the south shore with Dae and others behind him, keeping low to the muddy, broken ground and far enough above the water to be invisible to men in the castle or
on its ramparts. Cautiously, he and Dae led the way eastward amid rocks and shrubs until they neared the loch’s outflow.
There, its water spilled noisily into a shrubbery-flanked burn flowing steeply downhill. If Will reckoned right, it likely joined the river Erne, which flowed northeastward from the mountains and emptied into the Moray Firth ten miles northeast of Raitt, near a village called Invererne.
He soon got himself settled on mostly dry granite where he could see that the castle and loch remained peaceful. It was so peaceful in fact that, despite the glow of dawn from behind him that now lit the castle, he saw no hint of movement on its ramparts. Was Malcolm so confident of himself that he did not even post lookouts above? And where were his boats?
That last thought no sooner occurred to him than pandemonium erupted above them. Men seemed to erupt from the rocks and shrubbery there, trapping the Comyns between their attackers and the loch.
Leaping up, snatching his sword from its sheath, Will whirled to see an attacker rushing at him, his sword already aimed to knock Will’s away from its central, protective position and likely slit his throat with its backswing.
Opting for closer quarters, Will stepped into the attack with his right foot and began shifting his sword toward center, as his opponent would expect. As quickly as the man brought his sword up and back to strike, Will dipped the tip of his under the other man’s blade near its hilt, causing that blade to glide up along his own sword and bringing the two men closer together.
In a flash, his opponent’s blade slid to the hilt of Will’s sword and Will spun at once to his right, watching the end of the other blade pass left to right in front of his eyes as both blades closed and arced up together. Knowing he now had leverage, Will forced the other sword to the ground and stepped on it, anchoring it there.
As his opponent tried frantically to tug his weapon free, Will swiftly raised his sword tip skyward and struck the man’s left jaw hard with the hilt.
The man dropped at his feet and lay still.
Will was bending to see that he still lived when another man challenged him.
Hoping to deter the second one with a wide swoop of his blade that slammed into the advancing sword with a clang that jarred his shoulders and nearly knocked him off his own feet, Will watched with almost as much dismay as his attacker did when the latter’s sword crashed to the rocks, its blade shattered. The man turned away, his right hand seeking wildly, likely for the dirk sheathed beneath his plaid.
Action to his left then drew Will’s eye briefly to Dae fighting someone. In that glance, beyond them, he also saw Malcolm’s boats lined up safely on the islet shore, and swimmers in the water, heading toward them.
Comyns, likely still hoping to take the castle, he thought as he edged swiftly through an open space to Dae’s side, just as Dae’s opponent tried to behead him with a wave of his sword. Jerking Dae backward by his plaid with his free hand, Will engaged the driving sword, knocking it upward and away from Dae.
Its wielder was made of sterner stuff than the others, though, and retained control of his weapon. Aware of Dae scrabbling low behind him, doubtless having dropped his weapon, Will kept his attention on his opponent and tried to ignore the screams, shouts, clanging of steel, and general chaos around them, sounds to which until then he had been deaf. He was nonetheless aware that he and his opponent were moving too near the outflow of the loch for comfort.
With more light now, he saw that his opponent was tiring. As they circled each other, feinting, he also noted men on the ramparts, raining arrows down on the swimmers in the loch. By then, Will had determined that he could control his opponent’s movements with his own, because the man was clearly more interested in killing him than in heeding the ground beneath their feet.
Granduncle Thomas had taught Will early on to avoid letting his opponent establish the ground. He had made Will practice not only such tactics but also how to control movements of almost any opponent in subtle ways. The trick generally required one to know the ground and gave an edge to men fighting on their own land. Will had practiced on every sort of terrain that Thomas could find, though, until rocks and declivities, shrubbery, and other such details of a landscape had become his friends. When he had spied out a path for himself, he worked his opponent toward the burn and then up onto the slope down which it plunged.
Seeing Dae duck behind bushes below the outflow, he realized that the men around him were so engaged in life-and-death struggles of their own that they paid no one else heed. Taking the first chance he saw to close with his man, he whipped his own dirk from its sheath and put its sharp point through the man’s sword arm.
Snatching the weapon from his weakened hand, Will gave him a shove, growling, “Hide yourself in the rocks or under a bush. Ye’ve nae need tae die here.”
Then, without pause, he dashed toward the place where he had last seen Dae and found him below the rise, cowering in a thicket of willows beside the burn.
“Ye see now that I be a feardie, just as Hew said,” Dae grumbled.
“Hold your whisst,” Will said curtly. “I mean to see us both safely home, but we must first follow this burn for a time, unseen. I’m unwilling to die in support of de Raite’s daft notions, and not only did we know naught of this, but everyone up there is trying to kill an enemy with whom I have no quarrel. Nor do you. Sakes, we do not even know where de Raite and our other men are.”
“From what I ken o’ Hew,” Dae muttered morosely, “for all that he calls me the feardie, when things go awry, he disappears. I ken fine that he, Colley, and Liam stayed well north o’ the loch. As for yer da, he seems tae be the sort o’ leader as would liefer lead from behind, as ye might say, so I’d wager he’s somewheres on that side, too, high enough tae see the fighting without taking part in it. Neither o’ them gives a man much confidence.”
Silently, Will agreed with Dae’s assessment of both men. He said firmly, though, “We have no time for talk if we’re to get away from this place alive.”
“Right, then, which way?”
“The sun is still behind those peaks east of us, and we are below the action here,” Will said, thinking aloud. “Even so, we must move quickly to avoid notice, so you go ahead of me, straight downhill. Keep to shrubbery if you can. I’d liefer meet no swordsmen if we can avoid it. I don’t even know most of the Comyns de Raite recruited, and every man here looks much the same as another to me. However, we must also take care to cross this burn before it joins the river Erne …
“… if it does,” he added silently.
“Art sure ye ken how tae get us out o’ here?” Dae asked minutes later.
“I hope so. I do know the river Erne flows east of Raitt to the Moray Firth, so we must keep west of it and head north. In time, we will cross a path that runs from Moigh eastward to Glen Spey, where Malcolm’s war leader lives at Rothiemurchus. My route along the ridge from Raitt has been to follow it to that path and back whilst keeping watch for groups of strangers or odd events.”
“That may be a place tae ford, yonder,” Dae said a short time later, pointing to an area below them where a number of boulders sat well above the water.
“Good,” Will said. He could not hear the battle any longer over the sounds of the river, so he hoped it was over and that Colley and even Liam had had the good sense or good fortune to evade death. He was nearly as certain as Dae was that de Raite and Hew would emerge unscathed.
Just as the thought crossed his mind and he started to step from one boulder to another, he heard a rumbling crash above him and turned to see two boulders careening down toward them. His forward foot slipped, and knowing he could not save himself from a fall, he let himself go limp to minimize the damage.
He landed awkwardly, pain shooting through his right ankle, his head banging a rock. He heard Dae say distantly, “I think some’un ha’ seen us.”
Chapter 14
The da
ys following the cèilidh passed slowly for Katy and other inhabitants of Castle Finlagh. On Malcolm’s orders, received Friday, Fin had stayed home to be sure the castle did not become a target if things went amiss at Loch Moigh.
The twins knew their parents were uneasy, because their two older brothers, with holdings in Glen Spey, would have responded to Malcolm’s call. Reports from several sources indicated that Comyn de Raite had assembled an imposing army.
The first news from Loch Moigh arrived late Sunday evening, when MacNab returned alone. Katy, Clydia, and Cat were with Fin in the inner chamber when MacNab arrived. When he smiled, showing that his news was not dire, Fin let them stay.
“I came as quick as I could, nigh running most of the way, but Moigh Castle be safe, for the knaves never got nigh it,” MacNab said. “Malcolm sent runners out as soon as he got your warning, sir. He had a fine response, too, from every clan in the Confederation. From others, too, including your brother, Ewan Cameron, and his lot from west of Glen Mòr. I tell ye, it were a fine thing tae see.
“As Malcolm got word of Comyn de Raite’s routes,” he added, “men on our side hid themselves all around, well back from Loch Moigh. We let the Comyns move in and surround it, giving them glittous hellicats tae believe they could force unsuspecting Malcolm tae surrender. Instead, we ambushed them. We did lose some men in the battle but none as I know of from Finlagh, Glen Spey, or Cawdor.”
“’Tis good news, then,” Fin said, as Catriona expelled a breath of relief.
“Aye, Malcolm’s plan worked, and de Raite’s failed. We never even caught sight of him. He seems tae be one as avoids a fight by keeping hisself safe and sending others tae do the fighting. ’Tis no my way of leading, nor yours, Sir Fin, or Lochan’s, or the Mackintosh’s, either.”
Katy’s stomach had clenched when he said that de Raite sent others to fight. Certain as she was that Will must have been one of those he had sent, her throat closed so tightly she could barely breathe, let alone speak.
