Just in Time for a Highlander

by Gwyn Cready

  Abby said, “I should like every man here who is sworn to my leadership to raise his hand now. Lads, you too. No one is too young to make this vow.”

  The boys, deciding perhaps this was part of the ceremony, lifted their hands at once. The men’s hands rose more hesitantly, but each did rise. Undine flicked Duncan’s leg with a fingernail, and he lifted his hand, belatedly remembering he, too, was a part of this now.

  “One of you, unfortunately, is a liar,” Abby said. “One of you, upon hearing the news of the English army’s sword rattling, decided to take matters into your own hands this morning. You gathered your sons. You went to the border intending to stir up trouble. And you turned back when realized you weren’t prepared for what you saw. I do not blame your sons. What, after all, is a loving child to do when his father commands him? But you…you are spineless and false. Do ye have the courage to admit your treachery?”

  The men stared blankly, but the boys were enthralled, save one—a lad of six or seven, who looked up, terrified, into the shifting eyes of his bearded father.

  The man squeezed his son’s shoulders, and the boy steeled himself. Duncan didn’t know what was going to happen next, but he knew he wanted Abby to look to him for help. He made his way to where she stood. The fire in her eyes nearly set him ablaze, but he took his place beside her.

  “Repeat your oath before God.” Her voice filled the hall. “All of you—if you dare.”

  The men repeated words in Gaelic Duncan didn’t recognize. His grand-da had tried to teach him the language, but Duncan had had no interest and knew only the everyday phrases he’d heard his mother and grand-da say. He recognized only two words in the oath: blood and death.

  The bearded man did not move or speak. But at a pause in the oath, when the other men pressed their hands to their hearts, the man closed his eyes for a long instant. Then he opened them and launched himself through the open door, leaving his son behind.

  The footmen, stock-still, waited for Abby’s command.

  Duncan grabbed her arm. “Choose me,” he said.

  She shook her arm free. “Sit down.”

  “No.” He hardened himself against her gaze.

  “Damn you,” she said, and Duncan knew she’d given in. “Go! Make him repent.”

  Sixteen

  Duncan flew out of the castle’s main door with the sword he’d torn from the wall into the blinding sun of the castle bailey. The steel felt awkward in his hand, improperly weighted and already slippery with sweat. The man was bloody fast and had the advantage of knowing the twists and turns of the grounds far better than Duncan.

  Make him repent.

  The man pulled a long dagger from his plaid and ducked through a door in the bailey wall, slamming it behind him. As Duncan expected, the door was locked when he reached it, and no amount of pulling would open it. Duncan spotted an open archway fifty feet farther on, began to run toward it then paused. If the locked doorway and archway led to another bailey, the man would run not toward the archway, where he’d expect Duncan to emerge, but away from it. Duncan did an about-face and retraced his steps at a run. As he’d hoped, there was a second door, this one unlocked, thirty feet in the opposite direction. He ran through the darkened room to the door at the other side and emerged within fifty feet of his bearded prey, who was heading directly toward the open castle gate.

  They flew by the castle guards, who were uncertain which man to stop, and sprinted for a quarter mile, but Duncan slowly and inexorably closed the distance. Angling into a scattering of outbuildings, the man turned too quickly and fell. Duncan caught the man’s plaid before he could climb to his feet. A single swing of Duncan’s sword flung the knife from the man’s hands. The man scrabbled to escape, but Duncan put his full weight on the man’s leg.

  “God, ye’ll break it,” the man cried. “Ye’ll break it!”

  But Duncan sensed the fine line between pain and destruction, and held his pressure. The man was boxed up against a low stone wall with nowhere to move. For being the height of the day on a working estate, the world around them seemed eerily quiet. The only movement Duncan registered was a hawk sunning himself in a gentle glide across the southern sky.

  Make him repent.

  “What’s your name?” Duncan demanded.

  “Harry,” the man said through gritted teeth.

  “Why did you betray her?” Duncan’s anger was growing—irrationally, he thought, given Harry’s de facto surrender.

  The man spat, and Duncan pressed his weight harder, no longer shrinking from what would be a nauseating crack.

  “No lass…can run a clan,” Harry said in gasps, sweat running from his forehead, “especially one whelped as she. She’s a wild thing, she is…a whore, plain and simple—and without the sting of her father’s strong hand, she’ll bring doom upon the Kerrs.”

  “Are ye under the impression a clan chief should be well loved?”

  “Fouck ye. She wouldn’t make a pimple on the arse of her brother.”

  Duncan brought the sword point to Harry’s heart.

  The man called in Gaelic for Jesus.

  Duncan’s blade glinted in the sun. He knew what was expected. The pulse in Harry’s neck beat furiously. One swift thrust and Harry would bleed out in seconds. Duncan had done this in reenactments dozens of times, but confronted with a real foe and a blade polished to lethal perfection, he was unable to move.

  His impotence bathed him in a white-hot fury, and he tried to redirect his anger at the man on the ground, but it was as if he were trying to punch his way out of a fog.

  The man closed his eyes and braced himself. “Tell my son I love him.”

  “Get out!” Duncan roared. “Get out! Run till your feet are bloody. Run till you collapse! Run till you reach Inverness, then board a ship and run some more. If you ever, ever show your face in Scotland again, I will kill you, and your son, and everyone related to you.”

  He pushed himself from Harry’s leg, sick with self-loathing. Harry’s shocked eyes followed him, waiting for the trick, but when Duncan thrust his sword into the soft ground, Harry grabbed his knife, scrabbled to his feet, and ran for his life.

  Duncan dropped to his knees. He’d failed her. He’d failed the clan. He’d let a traitor run free. And he’d forever parted a father from his son. He jerked the sword free from the ground and threw it as far as his failed strength would allow. Then he put his hands on the sun-warmed earth and vomited.

  Seventeen

  The sun had fallen in the western sky, spilling its blood-red light over the hills. Duncan had spent the rest of the day walking numbly. He eyed the low, wide castle at the top of the rise with reluctance, but the fact remained, he had nowhere else to go. He was lost in this time, with only one person who had the remotest interest in him, and her interest went only as far as teaching him what he needed to know so she could be rid of him.

  Unlike Harry, Duncan knew he owed Abby the truth of his failure, and he intended to give her just that and accept the fate that would come with it. With a sigh, he began up the hill that led from the town’s small square to the castle gate.

  “Mr. MacHarg, is everything all right?”

  Duncan jumped. Serafina stood in the shadows beside a tall stone cross, the sign of the market town. He realized how he must look, with bloody shirt, hands and knees covered in filth, and plaid streaked with vomit.

  “I slipped. It’s nothing.”

  She peered at him thoughtfully but held her tongue. Then she whistled, and Grendel, who had been sniffing the perimeter of a distant shop, came bounding toward her, carrying a huge stick. Spotting Duncan, he turned abruptly and ran directly at him, thick tail thumping.

  She smiled. “I wanted a walk, and he looked like he wanted to play.”

  “Och, I’d say so.”

  Duncan bent to bury his hands in the dog’s warm fur and was rewarded
with several licks to the neck and ear. Feeling unworthy of the dog’s enthusiastic affection, Duncan took the stick and tossed it across the square. Grendel raced away.

  “Has Undine been able to help ye?” he asked.

  “We’ve conferred, but she’s reluctant to lend a hand at present. I am to wait a bit, she says, until the sands of the universe have shifted and her magic returns to its former potency. She says her spells of late have disappointed.”

  Duncan felt another stab of self-pity. The sky’s crimson stain was resolving into a thin rose band across the horizon. In a quarter hour, a million pinpricks of light would labor to take the sun’s place and fail miserably—just like Duncan.

  “Is there a chance I could help?” He took the stick from Grendel and threw it again. “I don’t know what help you need, and it’s nae my business, but I am able-bodied, at least, though I seem to lack most of the skills that make a man valuable here.”

  Serafina’s mouth rose in a gentle smile. “Is that what Lady Kerr told you? Ye mustn’t pay her too much mind—at least not today. She’s carrying the weight of Ben Nevis on her shoulders.”

  Serafina had turned her gaze toward the eastern tower of the castle, the structure’s only round tower, whose crenellated roof bit the sky and whose narrow windows rose, each higher than the last, till they reached what appeared to be the tower’s only inhabited floor, a horizontal line of flickering lights. Duncan recognized it as the tower with the winding staircase he’d explored the day before.

  “I suppose you’re right,” he said.

  “I am right. And I thank you, Mr. MacHarg, for your offer. I dinna think ye can help, but the story is no secret, at least between us, so listen and tell me what ye think.” She gathered her wrap more tightly around her shoulders. “The story begins two years ago. I met a man and fell in love—”

  “The start of many a good story,” Duncan said. Grendel had returned again, but Duncan held up his hand to tell him the game was over for now.

  Serafina gave him a rueful smile. “Less good than foolish, I assure ye. He was an Englishman. Perhaps I should have known better. I behaved incautiously, thinking the promises he’d made gave me leave to be.” Duncan dropped his gaze, and Serafina said, “Still interesting, no? Just not very happy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Grendel dropped to the ground with a sorrowful sigh and looked at his pack mates with disappointment.

  “Poor thing,” Serafina said, and Duncan sensed a change was coming in the story. “My da died not long after—my ma had died when I was young—and I came into possession of a small inheritance. I should have left Edward then and there, but he was so comforting, and I was so sad…”

  “I, too, lost my da. I can understand your sorrow.”

  “Edward said he knew how to take a little gold and make it into a lot of gold. We would marry in style, he said, and live on the Royal Mile. Under those circumstances, I agreed.” She knelt to rub Grendel’s ears. “My father had owned a merchant ship, Mr. MacHarg. I knew it was possible for poor men to become rich overnight. But Edward was not a good investor. He tried importing silk from Shanghai, then sugar from the West Indies. Nothing worked out for him. My little heap of gold became a long list of debts. But I loved him, foolish girl that I am, and we’d created a life together. Then I found him in our bed with another woman. That was the end for me, finally. I spent the last month we were together imagining the ways I might kill him—poison, a ball to the forehead, a knife to the belly.”

  “I am most certainly not the man ye need then.”

  She laughed. “No, Mr. MacHarg, I am not looking for a murdering brigand. Foolish I may be, but wicked I am not. I want only what is mine.”

  “And that is?”

  “One shipload of cargo remains. It is to arrive in Edinburgh in a few weeks, a bit earlier than Edward expects it. If I can claim the cargo, I know men who will pay top dollar. I will be able to erase the debts and clear my name. But I need someone to pretend to be Edward.”

  “I should think any man—or a big enough bribe—could help you with that.”

  “Ye would be right except in this case. The supernumerary on the ship is Edward’s cousin. They were the dearest of friends as children, though they haven’t seen each other in nearly thirty years. The transaction was conducted by post, and I’m certain Edward’s cousin would do nothing to hurt Edward’s interest.”

  “You could claim Edward was ill and sent you in his place. You are his wife, after all.”

  “That would work very well if I were his wife, Mr. MacHarg, but the wedding he promised never took place. The investments were in Edward’s name, and the debts are in mine.”

  Duncan thought there ought to be a special place in hell for men who bankrupted others. “I would be most happy to serve as your husband.”

  She gave him an uneven grin. “A more tempting offer I am unlikely to receive. But I must decline. You see Edward’s father was verra short, and his mother even shorter. I need a man who is no more than nine or ten inches above five feet, with golden hair; a wide, square jaw; eyes the color of honey—and as full of his own importance as the King of France. I daresay ye would not do, even if ye were as blond as Cupid and just about as tall.”

  Duncan chuckled. “No, I suppose I miss on all counts. Could ye not advertise for such a man? Must ye wait for Undine?”

  “There is verra little chance this effort will succeed, MacHarg. Not without a great deal of luck and all the magic I can muster. I have heard Undine can help those she chooses.”

  “Except of late. You see, I was summoned by her magic.”

  Serafina’s jaw dropped. “For Lady Kerr?”

  “Ye see? Even ye can’t help but wonder why.”

  “You misinterpret my surprise, Mr. MacHarg. ’Tis not for your unsuitability. ’Tis because I applaud Lady Kerr’s unashamed pursuit of her desires.”

  A wave of heat crashed over his cheeks, and he found himself at a loss for words. “I—I—You must understand Lady Kerr sought a strong arm, nothing more.”

  “Aye, but perhaps Undine’s magic was responding to something more, something Lady Kerr didn’t even realize she needed.”

  He thought of waking up abandoned outside the chapel and of his humiliation with Harry. “Aye, well, she still doesn’t know she needs it—and for very good reason.”

  “’Tis only my opinion, but what I think Lady Kerr needs is a pair of sympathetic ears not an arm or a fist. She’s in a very hard position with the clan, and I imagine getting those would please her more than anything.”

  Duncan gazed at the tower, thinking of his own experience leading men. His “clan” worked in a cushy office in Manhattan, but leading them was challenging enough—the competitiveness, the politics, the backstabbing. Abby had to deal with all that, as a woman barely more than twenty, in a world where the stabbing was done with a real sword.

  He looked down at his hands, the ropy knuckles, skin caked with dirt. No doubt he’d serve Abby better with his ears than his fists. But he’d never get the chance, not now, not after failing her so miserably.

  He was awakened from his reverie by a short growl. Grendel had evidently decided the time for sympathetic listening was over. He had laid his stick at Duncan’s feet and prompted him with a comically fierce curled lip and a wriggle of his hind quarters.

  Serafina laid her hand on Duncan’s arm. “I am a very poor judge of men, but this much I ken: ye may lack the skills to be Lady Kerr’s strong arm, but any man who’s loved by a dog as much as ye are has all he needs to be her friend.”

  With a resigned sigh, Duncan bent to pick up the stick. “Come, dog. I think it’s time we return you to your mistress.”

  Eighteen

  Nab caught up with Duncan as he and Grendel climbed the castle’s long, curved stairway.

  “Did ye kill him?” the boy said, running to k
eep up.

  “I owe our chieftess the honor of the first report,” Duncan said grimly.

  “Was it hard?”

  “Harder than anything I’ve ever done.” He stopped, and Nab nearly ran into him. “Listen, I must give you some money for your help. Tell Jock I have authorized you to collect my pay. It’s only a day’s worth, but I hope it will cover what I owe.”

  Nab eyes clouded. “Are you leaving?”

  “I…I am unsure in what circumstances I will find myself after I talk to our chieftess.” He began to climb again.

  “What about Rosston? And Lady Kerr?”

  Yes, what about them?

  “Lady Kerr kens what is best for the clan,” Duncan said. “Whatever she does, ye can be sure it’s the right thing.”

  “Then you dinna want my report on Rosston?”

  Duncan paused. Two clansmen from Rosston’s sept walked through the hall below, talking. Duncan caught Nab’s eye and the boy quieted. One of the clansmen looked at Duncan and nodded. Duncan signaled to Nab to follow him upstairs.

  “I suppose if I’ve already paid for the report, I might as well have it.” Duncan looked both ways, then slouched against the wall.

  “The whole thing or just the interesting bits?”

  “The whole thing.”

  “Rosston was at Langholm Abbey today.”

  Duncan froze. Please, God, let Nab not have seen what happened after the sword lesson. But the boy’s face showed nothing more than an earnest desire to please. Duncan cleared his throat. “And?”

  “And he practically begged Lady Kerr for a kiss.” Nab made a face like he was sucking lemons.

  “Did she give it? No, I dinna want to know. And you shouldna be telling me, either.”

  “When I am a clansman,” Nab said, “I shan’t bow and scrape like that. Perhaps it’s different since Lady Kerr is chief here, but when I find the girl I’m going to marry, I will expect her to do my bidding.”