There was no help, no kin to be had for him here in the midst of these warring, bitter strangers. Edinburgh, then. The king of Scotland was his only hope.
“Thomas!”
He froze, hoping, praying that it was no more than his terrified mind playing tricks on him. No one save a handful of Blairs knew his name.
“Thom…Thomas,” a man gasped again. “Thomas Annesley! Please, God, help me!” he sobbed.
Thomas stepped from behind the tree and was confronted by the sight of a young man staggering up the hill toward him. His hair frizzed from his head as if he had just come from his childhood bed, the gray light of dawn rinsing it colorless. He seemed like a religious icon from the East come to life, with his pale skin and upturned gaze, petitioning the heavens for the man he sought. But it could be no angel but a martyr who searched the woods for him, for Thomas saw the lad’s charred arm pressed against his flank, the wash of black blood that drenched his right side to his boots.
“Thom…as,” the young man wheezed.
“Here,” Thomas called. “I’m here.”
The man halted, bringing his gaze slowly forward but obviously struggling to focus on Thomas’s face. He wobbled on his feet and then dropped to his knees. Thomas rushed to meet him on the ground, grabbing the man by his shoulders while his head lolled.
“I am Thomas Annesley,” he said. “Who are you? Where are your kin?”
“No kin here,” the lad whispered, looking up at last into Thomas’s face. A chill raced up Thomas’s spine at the phrase he himself had thought only a moment ago. “Vaughn…Hargrave.”
Thomas’s blood froze. “What?”
“Came by the bay.” The lad’s breath clicked in his throat, and he clutched at Thomas’s shirt. His mouth gaped, gasping with the effort to form words, and Thomas remembered the ball through his own lung, and how each inhalation had been all but worthless as his chest sucked air and filled with blood with each wheeze. “Looking for you. Kill everyone ’til he finds you. Kill us all. Heard him. Ships…gone.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Thomas asked, forcing the words through his throat while the woods seemed to burst with sunlight. Dawn, dawn was here, and there were footfalls in the leaves.
“Thomas…Annesley,” the lad whispered, and his fingers tightened on Thomas’s shirt, pulling him closer. “You’re…Carson. Kin.” The young man gave a stifled sob. “Run. Run.” The word was little more than formed air, and in the dawn light, Thomas could see the speckles of blood on the man’s gray lips. And then his eyes went vacant, still, in the morning mist, and his solid frame sagged in Thomas’s arms.
Thomas laid the lad in the cold, wet leaves, staring at his face as if he could decipher some relation in the features. Kin. He turned his head to peer through the trees in the shadows that still swirled along the bottom of the hill. Vaughn Hargrave had found him again. How? Did that mean he’d also found Harriet? Meg? Was Roscraig still standing? What of his friend, Iain Douglas?
Kill everyone ’til he finds you. Kill us all.
Thomas heard the footfalls coming closer, caught the English accents on the air. If there had been any hope left in him that this was nothing more than a feuding raid between clans, the man’s body before him was bitter evidence. And if what the dead man had said—and what Thomas knew of Hargrave—was true, everyone between Loch Acras and the sea was damned because of him. Thomas looked back at the young Carson, wondering that he could have been his family, could have come to know him, talk with him. They even shared similar coloring…
Kill everyone ’til he finds you.
Thomas moved without allowing himself to think of what he was doing, jerking out of the Blair shawl around his head and shoulders, lifting the young man’s body to place it gently around him and tuck it into his bloodied belts. Then Thomas reached behind him to rock a stone free from the mire at the base of the tree. It was bigger than it had looked when half-buried, and heavy. He raised it above his head.
“Forgive me,” he whispered.
He brought the rock down in the center of the man’s face as hard as he could, trying to block the crunch of flesh and bone from his ears. Again he struck, and again. Until his last spare glance confirmed that there were no discernible features among the blood and bits of flayed skin and muscle. Only blond hair and a Blair shawl.
Thomas staggered to his feet, the sudden chill cutting him to the bone. He heaved the rock to the south, where it crashed down the hill.
“Up there! I heard something!”
Thomas took the lad’s finely made, short sword from the leaves at his side and replaced it with the dagger given to him by his father, only returned to his possession last night by a frightened Archibald Blair. There was no other made like it, of that he was certain. And then Thomas ran north, perpendicular to the hill’s rise with the coast, away from Edna Blair and Geordie-boy, away from the Carsons, away from Vaughn Hargrave.
He ran and ran and ran.
Chapter 4
Finley sat at the table near the kitchen cupboard, her elbows on the wood, her chin in her hands, staring out the open doorway toward the center of town. The sun poured down on the rounded, thatched roofs and adorned each ripple of the bay beyond with blinding white jewels, and the warm breeze swirled the dirt and straw on the floor into tiny tempests. Finley could hear the buzz of the hungry bees from her seat. The path that led up the hill to their house remained irritatingly empty. She sighed.
“D’ye want a corner?”
She started and turned her head toward the fire; she’d nearly forgotten her mother was in the room. Ina sat in a low chair near the central hearth, a long piece of fabric in her lap, the end stretched tight in her hoop. She gestured with it toward Finley. “Come busy your hands.”
Finley sighed again and turned her gaze back to the door. “You’d just pick out all my stitches.”
