Finley was here? In the midst of the fighting?
“Where is she, Searrach?” Lachlan demanded.
Hargrave tsked. “Oh-oh, lovers’ quarrel?”
“I hope she’s dead,” Searrach screamed at Lachlan over Harrell’s shoulder. “I’ll rip out her throat myself if I see her!”
In that moment, Lachlan didn’t know how he ever could have desired the twisted-faced, dumpy, sullen woman before him. She was like the dark, murky water left in a puddle compared to Finley’s bright, fiery spirit.
“Dand! Behind you!”
The woman’s voice seemed to somehow come from over Lachlan’s head, and he noticed Marcas’s face going slack as he stared across the green. Lachlan turned and saw his brother stumbling backward over a fallen body, while two English soldiers advanced on him with swords drawn. Dand’s back was to a longhouse wall; there was nowhere for him to run. He held his sword before him, ready to fight. He looked younger than his age, then, despite his brave face.
“Marcas, go!” Lachlan shouted.
His foster father hesitated only a moment and then sprinted toward Dand as Harrell took the opportunity to attempt to pull Searrach toward Archibald’s dark, old house through the void left by Marcas’s departure.
She struggled against him. “I’m nae staying here, Da! I’m going to be married! Lord Hargrave said I’ll—”
“You’ll come away before you get us both killed!” Harrell slapped Searrach’s face and then attempted to take advantage of her shock to haul her from the fray, but she shoved the spindly man with a shriek.
“I’m going!” She struggled against her father’s flailing embrace.
Lachlan dismissed Searrach to lock eyes with Vaughn Hargrave. “It’s just you and me now, Hargrave.”
“Precisely as I’d hoped.” The Englishman twirled his own weapon expertly in his hand, then crouched down with a grin. “I’ve not done this in so very long. I believe I’ve rather missed it. Come on with you, then,boy.”
They ran at each other, both swinging their blades. There were no blows landed at first, but the wind sang with each mighty thrust, youth and experience, desperation and righteousness springing up from the green around them like ancient spirits. Hargrave’s blade caught Lachlan’s shawl, sending his brooch flying with a sharp ting of metal; Lachlan nicked Hargrave’s forearm, doing more damage to the man’s velvet tunic than the flesh beneath it.
“So slow, Lachlan. Shall I stop toying with you?” Hargrave taunted.
“I’ve not even st—”
An explosion ripped through the air, then another, and another. The underside of a tree beyond the green went up in flames, and the blasts still did not stop, taking everyone on the green by surprise.
Everyone, apparently, save Vaughn Hargrave.
He turned and drew his blade across the back of Harrell’s knee in one swift motion, causing the man to scream and fall to the ground. There didn’t seem enough time for him to seize hold of Searrach by her hair, twisting his hand with a practiced motion so that her head swiveled back on her neck, but he did. She shrieked, and her hands went to her scalp, but she did not struggle as the Englishman dragged her over the green, flaming bits of detritus falling from the sky like giant, flaming snowflakes.
Hargrave waved his knife. “I do not wish to kill her.”
A Blair man ran down the length of a house toward Hargrave and seized Searrach’s arm. Hargrave swung around in a graceful, powerful arc and drove his blade into the underside of the man’s chin. He jerked it free just as quickly, releasing a shower of blood over the gasping, whimpering Searrach.
In a blink, they disappeared between two houses.
“Searrach!” Harrell cried, attempting to drag himself along the dirt, one hand grasping at his wounded leg. “My daughter! Someone help her! She canna go alone with him!”
Lachlan ran in the direction in which Hargrave had gone, but his intention was not to save Searrach. He wanted Vaughn Hargrave dead. Dead for what he’d done to both towns, dead for what he was trying to do to Thomas Annesley and everyone Lachlan’s true father had ever known.
But then there was Finley, staggering onto the green from the next alley, one sleeve of her otherwise light gown black with blood. Her hair was orange as the flames rising behind her, her face bloodless around wild eyes.
“Lachlan,” she sobbed and stumbled toward him.
He ran to her, catching her just before she fell forward. He saw the deep wound in her arm, looked over her head on his chest at the blackened holes all along the back of her gown, like spots of ermine.
“Finley, did you—?”
“He was going to do it again,” she said, looking up at him with wide eyes. “Town Blair, this time. I couldn’t let him.”
