“Aye,” the other answered. “Not worth it. We’ll be gone by morning, and they’ll be just as dead on the green or in their beds.”
As soon as Finley and Kirsten were around the front of the house, they came away from each other. Looking in all directions for anyone else who might raise a warning, they bolted hand in hand toward the shadows of the roof overhang. Kirsten went immediately to the door of the house.
“Nay,” Finley warned in a whisper, pulling her away. “That’s the first place they’ll look for us if they change their minds. Come on.”
They crossed the narrow street and headed northeast toward the center of town, ducked through two narrow passages, and then Finley fell upon the door of a longhouse with a back made up the outer edge of Town Blair’s green. It opened easily, and the two women dashed inside, closing the door as silently as possible.
Finley and Kirsten worked together to quickly locate the bar and secure the door. Then they both stood panting, staring at the closed barrier in the dim light of the house’s interior. They looked at each other in the same moment.
“What is—”
“Who were—”
Finley drew a breath and started again, in a whisper. “I think they’re English soldiers.”
“English soldiers?” Kirsten squeaked.
“Shh!”
“What are they doing at Town Blair? OnLá Bealltainn?”
“I don’t know,” Finley said, looking around the dim, unfamiliar interior. Snugged under the eaves of the rear wall was a short window, its wooden shutter propped open at the bottom with a stick so that it slanted outward. Light from the green beyond filtered through and down into the room. Finley walked toward it.
“And why did they say we’d be dead in the morning?” Kirsten whispered.
“I don’t know.” Finley picked up a chair to move it soundlessly beneath the window and lifted her skirts to step up to the seat in a crouch, so that her head was not above the bottom edge of the opening.
“What are we going to do, Fin?”
Finley half-turned on the chair. “Why do you keep asking me questions you know good and well I have as much answer for as you?”
“I thought you were the leader.”
She sighed and turned back toward the window, gripping the ledge with her fingers and then rising up slowly, slowly, until she could see the scene beyond. Her breath froze in her chest, her fingers digging in to the hard sod window ledge.
It looked as though all the inhabitants of Town Blair were indeed gathered on the green. But rather than singing and dancing and gaming, instead of laughter and making merry, the people sat silently on their benches at the tables lined up like a battalion. The children and those for whom there was no seat were clustered on the ground, huddling together as if in fear.
Around the perimeter of the green, also nearly shoulder to shoulder, stood a ring of men dressed just as the ones who had stopped Finley and Kirsten. Most of them wielded broadswords at the ready, although some braced wicked-looking crossbows on their hips. Finley realized that if she could see a solid ring of soldiersacrossthe green…
She rose up on her toes slowly, slowly, and cast down her eyes. Indeed, there was the shiny silver top of a soldier’s helm just beneath the window. If he fancied to turn and raise up on his own toes, he’d be looking directly into Finley’s eyes. She eased down again and stepped silently off the chair, careful not to make a sound, turning toward Kirsten and swiftly bringing her hand to cover her friend’s mouth as it opened.
“Shh,” Finley breathed into her ear. “The green is crawling with them—there’s one standing right under the window.” She leaned back to look into Kirsten’s eyes, and her friend nodded her understanding.
Kirsten pulled away and moved to the chair, and Finley heard the murmur of voices coming from across the green. She watched as her friend took in the scene out the window, and Kirsten brought a hand to her mouth suddenly. She looked over her shoulder and waved Finley forward, pulling her up next to her onto the makeshift stool.
Finley at once saw the cause for Kirsten’s alarm: A lone man had stepped onto a tabletop, a well-dressed man in finely cut clothes, and who was addressing the crowd. But while it was clear from his costume that he was a foreigner to this Highland town, the most startling aspect of the changed tableau was the presence of Marcas and Dand Blair, standing to the side of the table. Two soldiers aimed their crossbows at father and son.
“That’s all I want,” the man on the table said to the crowd, and his words were ghostly and hollow-sounding from inside the house across the green. He held his arms wide and looked around in each direction at those seated nearest him. Several of the women were weeping into their shawls, and Finley was glad that that particular sound did not carry.
“You got rid of him for reasons of your own—I’m certain you were quite justified,” the man went on in a queer, almost praising tone. Finley noticed then Harrell Blair and his daughter Searrach standing at the opposite end of the table as Marcas and Dand, and although the dark-haired woman who would have been Lachlan’s wife looked frightened and unsure, clinging to her father, neither of them were being held under the threat of weapons.
“But now someone will volunteer the trek to Carson Town, someone Lachlan Blair will trust, and they will bring him back to me without revealing my…occupation of your town, as it were. They will bring him,andThomas Annesley.”
Marcas Blair called out then. “I’ve told you, Hargrave: Thomas Annesley isn’t here. He hasn’t been here since the day thirty years ago when you made the ben run with blood.”
The gray-haired man whipped around and pressed his palm to his chest. “Why, I did no such thing. I was merely seeking to apprehend a fugitive. Thomas Annesley’s destination was Carson Town, so that is the town where I made my initial inquiry.”
“You burned it to the ground,” Marcas accused.
