by Aileen Adams
“When we hadn’t,” he corrected. “Alan was with me.”
“I said what I said,” she replied in a small, but firm, voice.
He looked at her, only to find her watching at him.
“He cared more for your return than for Alan’s,” she explained. “I think I was the only one who saw, because I cared more for you than for him as well.”
Another lump in his throat, and this one wasn’t as easy to ignore. He’d never given much thought to how his father had been affected by their absence; he’d been angry by the time Rodric had warmed up enough to give much thought to what was going on around him. Before that, being half-frozen had taken up too much of his thoughts for anything else to sink in.
“Thank you for telling me,” he finally muttered, eyes away from hers.
The rest of the ride passed in silence, as he thought over what she said. And over, and over. Never once had his father expressed love or affection. He’d rarely, if ever, expressed approval. He was a fair man, to be certain. To Rodric, as a grown man, Ross Anderson’s fairness was clearer than it had been when Rodric had been a boy.
Some of the stupid things he’d done, too. The sorts of scrapes healthy, boisterous young boys found themselves in, to be sure, but the sorts of memories which made him cringe years later. Father had never meted out unwarranted punishment, and had always made a point of asking his son what he’d learned once his punishment was through—even if it had taken the form of a beating.
The most unforgivable thing a man can do is make the same mistake twice, Ross had often lectured. And the more you force me to teach you a lesson, the harsher your punishment will be each time.
Rodric had at least made a point to learn.
Alan had not, and had taken beatings which still caused Rodric to question how he’d ever managed to sit again.
In light of what Caitlin had shared, those beatings took on another meaning.
They emerged from the woods, and instantly sweat beaded on his forehead. It would be a relief to return to Jake’s home, even if he hardly had good news to share. Perhaps Phillip might consider returning with him in order to reach a—
“What is that?” Caitlin’s voice was shrill. When he followed the direction in which her shaking arm pointed, he saw why.
Smoke on the horizon, billowing in thick, black clouds which stood out starkly against the blazing sky.
Sick certainty turned his stomach to ice, and he was about to order her to stay where she stood when she kicked the mare’s sides and sent it into a gallop.
“Wait!” he shouted, knowing as he did that it was a pointless endeavor. He looked to Brice and Fergus. “Watch around us. Whoever did this might be waiting to see if she’ll appear.”
He turned back to Quinn. “Follow me.”
The two of them galloped behind Caitlin, who all but stood in the saddle as the horse tore across the lush countryside. Wind ripped the hat free from her head, sending it flying along with the braid which now swung wildly behind her.
If anyone were watching for her, they’d see her. She’d be impossible to miss. He shouted for the horse to hurry, urging it to catch up with her. The mare she rode hadn’t seemed so fast, but appearances deceived.
The closer they came to the site of the smoke, the clearer the source became.
It was a house, or had been a house, one which sat on the slope of a gentle hill between two groves of spruce trees. He thought he heard screams floating to him on the wind and realized they were Caitlin’s.
She reached the smoldering mass before he and Quinn did, falling from the lathered mare and staying on her knees, face in her hands.
He exchanged a glance with Quinn, who understood what needed to be done. Rather than meet her, Quinn directed his horse to ride around the house to the rear in order to check for attackers lying in wait.
Rodric pulled his horse to a stop and dismounted quickly, gathering her mare’s reins before hobbling both animals. While the fire had burned out, the smoke still upset the beasts, and they might rear or bolt in spite of the exhaustion they were surely suffering.
Caitlin was still screaming, still on her knees. Rodric fell beside her, gathering her in his arms and holding her to his chest. She shook violently, the words coming from her mouth all but impossible to understand. He wasn’t certain he needed to understand her. Not really. It was enough to feel what she was suffering.
He felt it, too. He felt rage. Disgust. Disbelief.
His own brother had done this terrible thing. He’d gone further than Rodric had ever imagined.
16
It was a nightmare. It had to be.
She had never really awoken that morning. She was still on the floor of Sorcha’s house, sleep having finally overtaken her, and this was all a terrible dream. Nothing this horrible truly happened in waking life.
Did it?
The smells. Burned wood, straw. Roasted flesh. She realized it was the animals in the barn, which had also been burned until it was little more than a few wooden beams. The creatures had been inside.
Animals.
Animals had done this.
She shook with despair, with grief. The memory of Fiona’s sweet smile, the love she’d shown by protecting her.
What had that love done? It had lead to her death. A horrible, painful death. Far too early. She and Kent had only been wed a year. They hadn’t been granted the chance to have children.
Children who would’ve died with them.
Her shoulders, her back, her ribs ached from sobbing and yet she couldn’t stop, just as there was no stopping the flood of words coming from her mouth. Begging God to make it not be true. Begging to take their places. Begging Him to forgive her for leading her loved ones to such an end.
Begging for them to forgive her, if they could somehow hear.
Strong arms held her in a tight embrace, rocking her back and forth as she mourned what she’d done. For it had all been her doing, just as much as it would be if she’d set the house ablaze. She had destroyed them, two people who’d never wanted to be part of anything with which she was involved. They had only wanted to live and work, to build something together. Just the two of them, along with the help of their friends.
“What have I done?” she asked over and over until no further sound would come from her smoke-clogged throat. And still, her lips moved. She raised her head from her hands, the side of her face against Rodric’s chest, staring at the carnage and asking silently what she had done to them.
“You didn’t do this, lass. You didn’t do it. It wasn’t you.”
She hardly heard him. His words meant nothing to her, as they were only offered out of pity. What else was he supposed to say?
Oh, the horror they must have gone through! Her chest clenched tight, pushing all the air from her body, making it impossible to draw in a breath. She gasped for air, struggling.
“Breathe, lass. Breathe. It’s not your fault. You didn’t do this.” He took her face in his hands, pulling her away just far enough to look into her eyes. “Listen to me. You did not do this. It was…”
He closed his eyes, hanging his head, a cry wrenching itself from his chest. “How did he know?” he asked, looking over the burned-out scene. “I didn’t tell him. I had no reason to. He wasn’t aware that I’d even seen you. I’m so sorry.”
There was no apologizing for what another person did, not really, but that hadn’t stopped Rodric from trying to apologize for his brother all their lives. Her husband. Look what he was capable of.
Quinn rode up, shaking his head. “Don’t go back there,” he warned as he dismounted. His color was considerably grayer than it had been earlier.
“Is that where they are?” she asked.
He nodded, exchanging a troubled look with Rodric.
He needed not have worried on her behalf. She had no desire to see her cousin’s beauty destroyed, charred. No need to see with her own eyes what she’d done by running away from Alan.
How could
it be? She had only stood outside the door a day earlier, hadn’t she? And Fiona had watched from the doorway while she rode away.
Had she suffered? Had she been afraid? Had she regretted allowing Caitlin to hide with her?
Brice and Fergus rode up, leading a third horse by the reins. They both looked strained—so strained, in fact, that she didn’t notice until they came to a stop that there was a body hanging over the third animal’s saddle.
It didn’t shock her. She was certain nothing would ever shock her again after what she had just seen, the smoke still thick in the air and in her lungs.
“Who’s this?” Rodric asked, helping Caitlin to her feet. She could hardly stand but didn’t know it until she tried. Her knees were weak, her legs shaking. It seemed all of her strength had left her.
Rodric kept an arm about her waist, bolstering her. There was no question of whether she needed him.
“Just as you suspected, we had a pair of eyes on us.” Brice grimaced, shaking his head when his eyes grazed the charred remains of the house. When he ran the back of his hand over his forehead, the dried blood on his palm was evident.
“What happened?” she asked, her attention now on the lifeless figure over the horse’s back.
“He put up a fight,” Fergus explained with a short shrug. “He lost.”
Rodric looked down at her. “Are you strong enough to see this? Perhaps you ought to look away. Where is the well? You need water.”
“I know what I need,” she replied, surprisingly cool considering the situation they were in. “I need to see who he is. Who did this.”
Rodric sighed heavily but knew her well enough to know the futility of arguing. He nodded to Brice, who lifted the man’s head by taking a handful of hair.
And she gasped.
“You know him?” Rodric asked, his mouth agape.
Her legs were weaker than she thought. His arms held her up, but barely, as she slumped against him.
This changed everything.
“Who is he, lass?” Brice asked.
She looked up at Rodric, struggling to understand what it all meant. How could it be? “He’s one of Connor’s men,” she whispered.
17
They buried the bodies. It seemed the right thing to do.
Rodric wouldn’t be able to live with knowing they were left just outside the house, the pair of them looking as though they had tried to flee during the blaze. Something had overcome them, perhaps the smoke, and the flames had eventually claimed them.
They had died close together, only inches apart. Perhaps that was what struck his heart most of all, the way their hands rested side-by-side.
Fergus and Quinn then went about the work of hauling buckets of water up from the well to douse the smoldering ruins. They both looked ill by the time they’d finished the job of putting out the outer buildings. “Every horse, every head of cattle, and what looks like a few farm hands,” Brice reported.
All of them had served, had seen carnage and destruction, and yet they were all shaken by what they’d seen and smelled. And what it meant.
Only a truly heartless brute would subject fellow humans to such terrible death.
Which was why the discovery of one of Connor McAllister’s men not far from the sight of the fire came as a relief.
While the work was done, Caitlin sat on a tree stump, hands folded in her lap, face pale, completely withdrawn, as though she were elsewhere, in her mind, somewhere far, far away. She wouldn’t turn back to what was once a house and a thriving, if modest, farm. She’d seen enough. Rodric made certain to watch her at all times, afraid she would take leave of her senses and do something truly foolish.
“How is she?” Brice asked him as the two of them shoveled dirt into the graves. It would’ve been hard work on a temperate day—with the sun blazing down on their backs, it was brutally harsh.
No less so due to the knowledge of who they were burying and why they’d died.
“All I can do is guess,” he muttered, shaking his head. “I haven’t been able to get through to her. After she calmed a bit, she went… away.”
“Aye. We’ve both seen it, haven’t we?” Brice leaned on one of the two shovels they’d found in one of the few unburnt outbuildings, drawing the back of his arm across his forehead and leaving a trail of dirt behind.
“Aye, we have indeed,” Rodric agreed, remembering the many comrades of his who had gone mad in the aftermath of battle. Sometimes there would be screaming at night, unnatural howls that seemed to rise from the very bowels of hell.
Even the screaming wasn’t as terrible as the laughter. High-pitched laughter when nothing humorous was going on. Laughter that seemed to never end, the laughter of a broken mind.
And the staring. Silent staring, so constant and unblinking that the person in question appeared dead. There were times when Rodric believed the poor creatures would’ve been better off if they had, in fact, died in battle. What was the purpose of surviving a fight if survival meant living as a fragile, shrieking shell of a person?
“She’s stronger than that,” he muttered, more in answer to the silent questions running through his head than to anything Brice had suggested.
“I’ve met many strong people in my time,” Brice observed, shoveling a heap of dirt into the gaping hole. The body was covered—a good thing, too, as Rodric cared little for looking on the charred remains.
It wasn’t the charred remains so much as it was the reminder of who those remains used to be.
“And?” Rodric prompted.
“And it came as a surprise every time one of those strong men broke under the weight of something they simply couldn’t bear.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I don’t know that I’m trying to say anything, not really,” Brice admitted with a shrug, scooping another load of earth and grunting as he threw it into the grave. “I’m only trying to tell you how concerned I am for the lass, I suppose. We all are. She seems a good sort.”
“She is.”
“And you care for her, which is enough for me,” Brice added. There was no jesting in his voice, no twinkle in his eye. He was stating a plain truth.
“I don’t know what to do for her now,” Rodric admitted. “If Connor McAllister is willing to do this, where can she go? Where will she be safe? I’m certain that no matter where it is, she’ll feel as though she’s putting those who shelter her in danger.”
“The poor lass,” Brice muttered in an uncharacteristic flash of pity, shaking his head. “She’s been ill-used, for sure.”
“Evidently. I had no idea McAllister was capable of something this brutal. It brings to mind questions I’d rather not know the answer to.” Such as what the man had done to her, if anything.
From what he remembered of Caitlin’s stepfather, the man was thoughtless, cold, rather idiotic. His fellow clansmen had respected him only due to his position within the clan, not because he was the sort of man who commanded respect. He was nothing like Ross Anderson.
Rodric recalled his father laughing over McAllister more than once, making jest of the man’s stupidity. Like a rutting stag with roughly as much sense, he’d once observed, much to the enjoyment of those in earshot. They’d laughed at him, called him a man with ideas above himself.
That much was true as well. He’d always been ambitious. Leading a modest clan of modest means had never been enough for him, hence the uneasiness which had always touched his dealings with the Andersons. Ross knew, as Rodric did, that the McAllisters were always of a mind to grow—including the expansion of their land holdings. Land which happened to belong to the Andersons.
“It was a message to her, if nothing else,” Brice growled. “He wanted her to know that he knew she’d been there.”
“You believe so?”
“Why go to such lengths otherwise?”
Rodric couldn’t answer this, because he couldn’t imagine a situation in which going to such lengths would have even crossed his mind. To
kill an innocent couple, neither of whom had ever harmed anyone?
“And the man told you nothing?” he asked, as though repeating the question would bring a different answer.
“Nay, though I would very much have rather taken the time to question him on why such a dreadful thing was done. When he lunged forward with the dirk…”
“Of course, you did what anyone would have done,” Rodric assured him. From the way Fergus had told it, Connor’s lookout had fought like a wild animal to escape once he’d been cornered against the boulder behind which he’d been watching the scene below. Evidently, the sight of Caitlin’s grief had distracted him from the sound of approaching horses.
“Not much good it did the poor lass, though.” Brice looked down into the grave, now all but filled with earth. “Nor this lass, here. God rest them both.”
Rodric had never heard his friend so much as speak the name. It seemed the horror they’d witnessed had brought out a depth of feeling unseen before.
“I’ll finish this, if you wish to speak with her,” Brice offered, nodding in Caitlin’s direction.
She hadn’t moved since the last time he’d looked in her direction.
He wasn’t entirely certain he wished to speak with her just then. He didn’t know what to say. What words were there which could possibly soothe her? Nothing could take it back, just as nothing could convince her of her own innocence.
If he’d ever met a truly innocent person in his life, it was Caitlin.
Still, his friend had a point. He needed to check on her, to at least remind her she was safe with them. Let Connor McAllister and any number of his brutes so much as try to lay a hand on her. They’d soon find out how mistaken they were.
When he reached her side, the look of peace on her face was a surprise to him. Not even blank staring would’ve surprised him so. If anything, that was what he’d expected to see, that she had simply stepped away from herself and gone elsewhere, to that land beyond the self into which he’d witnessed so many others retreat when the horrors before them were too much to bear.
