A Warrior's Soul

by Aileen Adams

  “You know very well that there isn’t a chance at all. I won’t be leaving you alone, young woman, so open this door immediately.” She could imagine Nurse’s breast heaving up and down, her ham-sized fists on her hips, face flushed both from irritation and the strain of carrying her sizable frame up the stairs.

  With a sigh, Alana rose from her chair and crossed the room in order to move aside the table which she’d used to keep the door closed.

  Nurse burst through almost immediately, and her tired eyes fixed on Alana. “What are you on about?” she hissed, immediately putting the room to rights.

  For such a large woman of advanced years, Nurse had never lacked for energy. At that moment, Alana knew that energy would’ve been directed at her had there been nothing else to do. A small blessing.

  “Why must ye ask questions to which ye already know the answer?” Alana returned to her chair, where the view outside was now darkened to the point of being unrecognizable. What had once been acres of woods and a thin ribbon of running water in the distance had become nothing but blank night. There was no moon thanks to the clouds which had built throughout the day.

  Weather which reflected her mood. Perhaps that was why she’d been so drawn to the window—either that or the possibility of leaping from the window and avoiding her fate.

  “You’ve been frowning and sighing and grumbling for days, dear.” Once the room was in its proper order, Nurse came to her and rested what she likely believed to be a comforting hand on Alana’s shoulder.

  It was anything but. Nurse, who had always been Alana’s one sure confidant, was nothing but an enemy in light of her taking Douglas Stewart’s side.

  “You are well aware of why I am,” Alana hissed, shaking her shoulder in order to shake off her nurse’s touch. “I cannot for the life of me understand how ye do not understand. Do we know each other at all? How can ye stand by me and pretend to wonder what the problem is?”

  Nurse leaned against the wall, standing by the window so Alana could not avoid looking her way unless she left the chair—and that would be a wasted effort, as the nurse would merely push her back down.

  That had happened before. Many times.

  Alana braced herself for a dressing down. That had happened many times before, too.

  Yet rather than opening her mouth to unleash a diatribe, she curved her lips into a pout. “I know, my love. I know what it is you’re suffering.”

  “You know nothing of it,” Alana whispered, staring out at a blackness through which she could discern little. Yet it was better—easier—to stare out at nothing than to look in the eye someone who, in her estimation, had brutally betrayed her.

  From the start, Nurse had championed Alana’s father’s plan to marry his only daughter off to an Englishman. While the two of them had an age-old tradition of smiling to Douglas Stewart’s face only to conspire behind his back, this time had been like something from a strange fever-induced nightmare.

  For Nurse had maintained the same cheerful demeanor in private as she displayed in public. Rather than retreating to Alana’s room after the announcement had been made in order to commiserate, to share in each other’s pain and bewilderment, she’d all but cheered when Alana had turned to her in misery.

  The only real, true parental love she’d ever known since her mother’s death had been brutally torn from her without warning, without so much as an inkling of precognition. In her eyes, she’d gone from having a partner with whom she could face the world to being alone. Adrift on an endless sea, by herself, with nothing and no one in sight no matter which direction she peered.

  “Alana, love. Look at me.”

  “I would rather not, thank ye,” she whispered. “It pains me to look at ye.”

  “Oh, dearest. Would that you understood.”

  “I understand perfectly well. My father wishes to sell me back to the English as payment for having wed my mother, one of their kind. It’s merely a debt which he has to repay. And I am the currency with which he will pay. Is that roughly the sum of it?”

  “No one is thinking in terms of payment now,” Nurse murmured mournfully. “Least of all your father.”

  “Oh, spare me.” She shot up from the chair, nearly tipping it back in her fury, eyes blazing when she rested them upon her lifelong nurse. She’d look at her, all right, and she’d let the woman know with her notoriously expressive eyes just what she thought of her deception. “You’re a part of it just as much as Father is. I’m certain the two of you have held secret meetings while my back was turned in order to work out the best way to lull me into submission. Isn’t that right?”

  Nurse held her gaze, but only for a moment before she looked away. “Aye. We’ve been meeting in private, but not for the reason you give. Nothing is missed by your sharp eye, is it? I ought to know by now.”

  The way she behaved as though this were a situation concerning her sickened Alana. As if she were the victim, rather than the young woman being sold into marriage to a stranger. “Well, then? Why were you meeting with him behind closed doors? I doubt that at any time in my one-and-twenty years I’ve seen you disappear with him behind a door which was then closed to me.”

  Were Nurse younger and a bit less—well, less—Alana might have suspected her father to be conducting a dalliance with the woman. She was old enough to know of his unsavory reputation among the village lasses, not to mention the whispers throughout the house over the years of a young kitchen maid’s or scullery woman’s disappearance from the household. Those disappearances had occurred regularly—one day, a woman was in the household’s employ, and the next she’d be gone—and as rumor had it, this was the case when Douglas Stewart had tired of the girl’s… services.

  The very thought turned Alana’s stomach. She wasn’t overmuch fond of her father, and not just because he treated her as property to be bought and sold. Even before the announcement of her marriage, she’d borne no false impressions of the man who’d lead the Stewart clan for thirty years. She understood him perfectly.

  He was a man of appetites, who behaved according to his whims in everything but clan business. When it came to the clan, even Alana could admit what a shrewd, cunning and brave leader he was.

  As a man, on the other hand, he was less than nothing in her estimation. He used women and threw them away as he’d throw a gnawed-upon leg of fowl to the dogs once all the meat had been torn off.

  And her mother had been his wife. The thought made her shudder.

  Elizabeth Stewart was everything lovely, elegant and beautiful Alana could imagine, all rolled up into one blonde-haired, blue-eyed, gentle and soft-spoken woman. If the ideal of beauty had ever been personified, it would have been Elizabeth who did so.

  Married to the short-tempered, coarse, ill-mannered Douglas.

  The entire enterprise must have been a terrible strain, or worse. Little wonder, then, that the angelic Elizabeth had perished at such a young age. How could someone so gentle and pure suffer a long life under such conditions?

  Alana glared at her nurse, who had yet to offer an explanation. “Well? Will you tell me, or will ye not? Have you completely stopped being yourself? We used to tell each other everything, you and I.”

  “Aye, we did that.” Nurse’s pout turned to a frown—then, to a grimace. “Och, my love, you’re driving me beyond the point of self-control. It’s been such a long few days. You honestly believe I’m cheered at the thought of you being sent away to marry a stranger, when all I’ve endeavored to do was to lessen the pain I know you’re suffering through.”

  The old affection hadn’t died, it seemed, because the moment it appeared that Nurse was in pain, Alana threw her arms about the old woman’s thick neck and peppered her cheek with kisses. “Please, Nurse, do not hate me. Close me away from ye no longer. This is when I need ye most, and ye seem to have deserted me.”

  Nurse’s eyes filled with tears. “That is what you believe? That I hate you? That I’ve closed you away from me because I no longer lov
e you? Och, I love you more than I could ever love my own flesh and blood, and have every minute of your life!”

  They wept against the other’s shoulder for a long time, days of pain and frustration pouring out of them both until their loud, gusty sobs quieted to a mere sniffling. Both of their kirtles were soaked from the neck down to the breast by the time they finished.

  “My dear,” Nurse sighed, wiping at her eyes with the hem of her apron before dabbing Alana’s cheeks. “You’ve been thinking about this all wrong, though I cannot blame ye. If I were in your position, I’d think me an enemy, too.”

  “What is it, then?” Alana asked, sitting on the bed with Nurse’s hands in hers.

  They’d spent many an hour like that, the two of them seated together, the ever-patient nurse listening as Alana had prattled endlessly about the sorts of things young girls dreamed over.

  “I suspect you’ve hated me,” Nurse whispered, smoothing back a lock of Alana’s dark blonde hair. “I wouldn’t blame ye for it.”

  “You’ve hurt me,” Alana conceded, “though it would’ve have hurt half as much if I hated ye. I could never truly hate ye.”

  “I do not know what it is you believed your father and I were discussing while we were closed off. No, then again, I think I might be able to guess,” Nurse shuddered. “As though I would ever.”

  “No, no, I didn’t believe that,” Alana was quick to assure her. “But what was it, then? What did you speak about?”

  “About my leaving the household once you’ve gone to England, of course.”

  Alana gasped. How could she have been so blind? Naturally, once she had gone on to her married life, Nurse would have no place with the Stewarts in the great house.

  “I am not the only one who shall lose her home,” she whispered, tears threatening to overwhelm her once again. “Oh, Nurse, I was such a fool to only think of myself!”

  “Nonsense. I’m an old woman, a grown woman. I can make my own way.”

  That was a lie, and Alana knew it. There would be nothing for her.

  “I’ll go back to my family, is what I’ll do. My sister and her children and their wee bairns. They live along the Irish Sea, or so I recall. There are many babes in the family. I’ll be busy and happy there.”

  Alana was certain her heart was bound to tear into pieces. The thought of living out the rest of her days without Nurse’s ever-constant presence was unimaginable. How could she survive in an unknown place with unknown people when there would be no one to love her?

  “What shall I do without ye?” she whispered fretfully.

  Nurse forced a smile. “You’ll go on, of course. You’ll have babes of your own, and a household to look after and your life will be full and happy.”

  If only either of them believed that.

  “You must promise me one thing, young woman.” All pretense of gentleness disappeared as Nurse’s expression hardened into one Alana had rarely seen over the years but was recognized just the same.

  “What is that?” Alana sighed, knowing well what was about to come.

  “You won’t try to run away again. Promise me. Swear it, Alana.”

  Nurse squeezed her hands until the bones ground painfully together. Alana barely bit back a cry.

  It had been a terrible plan from the start, if it could even be called a plan at all. She hadn’t given much thought to it, of course, acting out of sheer panic after a long, sleepless night filled with fretting and thinking about what her future might look like.

  Nothing she’d come up with came close to something in which she wished to take part, and so she’d gone to the stables at first light to fetch her favorite mare with food and a hastily-gathered pack of clothing tied up in a linen sheet.

  She’d made it no further than the village beyond Stewart lands before three huntsmen had spotted her and demanded they escort her to her father’s house. It had been silver they were after, and silver they’d received—along with Douglas Stewart’s demand that none of them speak a word of what had transpired, lest the three of them meet up with him on a darkened road one night.

  They wouldn’t survive the meeting, he’d promised, fingers grazing the handle of his war hammer. He kept the huge, hulking thing on the table at his right hand, always. A silent reminder to all who entered his private chambers of who held the power in the household and the clan.

  The men had all but fled, knees shaking, grateful to escape with their lives.

  While Alana had watched from the corner, trembling inside in spite of the brave face she tried to wear. Her father had dismissed her without a look, telling her to go to her bedchamber if she knew what was good for her and to avoid meeting up with him.

  It would not go so well for her the next time they saw one another, he’d warned.

  She was smart enough to do as he said, eating the food she’d carried with her rather than risking stepping a toe outside the door for the rest of the day.

  At least she’d be suited for her husband in one way, she thought with a rueful smile as Nurse helped her prepare for bed.

  She’d already become accustomed to spending time alone, locked away, for fear of the man who all but possessed her.

  4

  “It isn’t as if they’ll never see one another again,” Quinn grumbled as Rodric bade Caitlin one final goodbye.

  Their fifth final goodbye, by Brice’s count.

  “Let’s go, then,” Fergus called out, still with a good-natured note in his voice, which Brice knew would quickly sour if the fourth member of their party did not make haste to join them.

  It was now well past sun-up, the day promising to be a fair one, and they were already losing time.

  They’d worked it out among themselves, and it appeared as though they might be able to make it back before the first frost if they were smart about covering as much ground as they could, when they could.

  Clearly, Rodric had forgotten what they’d only just discussed.

  “Come on, then!” Brice called out, allowing the irritation of all three of them to reveal itself in his voice. There was a time for courtesy, and there was a time to get down to business. They would need to ride to the village and confirm with old Murphy, their longtime go-between, that they’d take on the responsibility of the journey.

  Just how Murphy managed to learn of such opportunities for work such as theirs had always been a mystery to everyone. He seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere.

  So long as those eyes and ears kept benefitting them, Brice wasn’t concerned about the specifics.

  Rodric mounted his horse, avoiding the eyes of his friends as the four of them started down the trail leading to the road. Brice turned in the saddle as the others did, waving farewell to Sorcha and Caitlin. They would make the short ride to the Anderson house in a matter of minutes.

  Caitlin waved back, making certain to hold Brice’s gaze when she did. He knew what she silently urged, just as she had urged before. And he would do his level best to keep her husband safe, just as he always had.

  Though why it had to be his responsibility was not a question he’d ever dare ask her.

  Of all of them, he was closest to Rodric. It made sense, he supposed, that he should be the one to watch over his friend. Not that Fergus or Quinn wouldn’t be just as well-suited to the task.

  Perhaps it was the easy kinship which he’d developed with Caitlin during their journey together which had left her more likely to call on him, then. She had seemed to latch onto him, in a way, likely because he was always quick to throw a jest in Rodric’s direction and she had appreciated that at the time.

  She’d appreciated it most heartily, as she and Rodric had been in a sort of silent war. Before they’d finally come to their senses and admitted their love for each other.

  It all seemed very silly to him and had at the time.

  The trail soon opened to the wider road, well-trod, and the four of them rode in two pairs toward the village. Rodric to Brice’s left, while Fergus was behind him and
Quinn to the right.

  “It was a real stroke of luck, your brother coming through when he did.” Brice chose his words carefully, still aware of how he’d nearly spoiled Caitlin’s news the day before.

  Rodric hadn’t brought it up, but Brice wondered if that was merely because he’d wished to wait until they were away from the women.

  “Aye, it was that,” Rodric conceded. “Leave it to Padraig to save my hide once again. I’ll rest easier, knowing she’s under his protection. Aside from you three and the Duncans, I trust him over any other man alive.”

  “If you only knew what your wife wished for me to argue on her behalf.” No harm in telling him now, with the four of them already well on their way to the village. She wouldn’t have to know he’d told tales.

  Rodric merely rolled his eyes and groaned. “What was it, then? Do not tell me she wished to join us.”

  “She did that,” Brice chuckled.

  “I should’ve known. I’d expected something along those lines, between the two of us. And damn my weak soul, I was already half-convinced it wouldn’t be a terrible thing at that.”

  “What?”

  “I know. You needn’t chastise me. I’m certain that by the time it came for us to leave, I would’ve changed my mind.”

  Brice wasn’t so certain of this. Not at all. “Well, as it is, the babe would’ve kept her in place at Sorcha’s.”

  “Aye, and I might have asked my brother to take her in then, had I known before he came. It all worked out as it was meant to, I suppose.”

  “I suppose so.” Brice glanced at his friend. “And it will continue to do so. We’ll return before the first frost and perhaps take one or two more journeys before winter comes in earnest. Perhaps it would not be ill-advised for us to take up winter quarters with your brother.”

  Rodric stiffened in the saddle. “We’ll discuss it when the time comes.”

  Brice grumbled at the repetition of the same answer Rodric had given time and again, whenever the question of the coming winter was voiced. “It’s certainly something we have to decide, and soon. I don’t know if I wish to spend another winter riding hither and yon, hoping the next village has an inn with an available room. I already spent part of last winter doing just that.”