As she passed the drayage horse, she snapped her fingers and Fergus barked at her command, spooking the cart horse and sending it rearing into air. Fergus loped safely past.
More of Montrose’s curses filled the air as the cart spilled over with a loud crack and blocked his path. Hay went everywhere, and the noise suddenly became like a battlefield.
In the chaos, a spark from the smithy’s fire caught the hay.Smoke billowed upward. There was a shout—a warning of fire—then a heartbeat later, the whole thing flamed up like a bonfire on solstice.
Ahead of her were the long docks and the end of the road. Wharvesmen were unloading crates from a ship onto a cart and others were rolling barrels of pickled fish down the plankway up to the wharf.
There was no way she could keep riding. At a haphazard row of stone cottages, she went left and past a back lane near the cooper, flanked with huge empty ale barrels, and sped across a stone path that turned and led down to the docks.
In the distance behind her, the noise and shouts were fading, so she slowed Skye to a walk and easily doubled back around to the lane, where ahead of her, like an answer to a paternoster, stood the open doors of the stable behind a dockside tavern. She rode straight inside and dismounted before her horse had barely halted. Quickly shoving the bay and Fergus in a stall together, she muttered her thanks and ran back to close and lock down the stable doors, leaning against them, her heart pounding in her ears.
Now what?
Hay flew everywhere,a cloud of flying straw, and as it settled, Lyall saw the hayrack and horse blocked the whole road. Swearing, he had no choice but to rein in. Beyond the cart he could see Glenna, bent low over her horse, glancing back over her shoulder and riding as if the hounds of hell were after her, her own hellhound, all legs and fur and tail, at her side.
The colorful group of angry merchants was coming fast toward him, shouting en masse, weapons raised, a mob of curious villagers trailing at their heels. He knew they were not after him. To keep her safe, he had no choice but to keep them away from her. Lyall turned his mount, raised in his stirrups andtook a stand, pulling the sword from its sheath. It felt strangely odd and unfamiliar in his hand.
A sword was a sword, he told himself and instinct overtook him. He shouted a battle cry, “A Robertson!“ Realized what he had said and wanted to swallow his words. This was not a battle. He cursed himself for an idiot and brandishing the sword he cried out. “Halt! All of you! Cease!”
The mob stopped immediately, eyes wide, murmuring. A few of the merchants taking up the rear took one look at his raised sword and turned and ran. A merchant in the forefront, the ironmonger, looked uneasy, before his eyes grew suddenly wide and he dropped his fire iron and frantically began to point. “My lord!”
Someone shouted, “Fire!”
“Behind you!”
There was a loud whoosh! A blast of heat hit him in the back, and his horse reared. He was suddenly falling through the air--intensely hot air--and bright flames flared all around him. The strong and sudden smell of smoke filled his nose and lungs, and he hit the ground hard, landing flat on his back. His head shot with jabs of sharp pain. Impact sent the air from his chest. Word would not come; they were lodged in his throat. He could not speak or move, could only stare upward, rendered frozen on the ground, the world spinning around him in images as foggy as if he had drunk too much wine.
Time too moved slowly, too, and the edges of his sight turned white and began to fade. He could not breathe and pain slithered in waves down through his whole body. His sword in his hand was heavy and warm and the metal was growing hotter and hotter. It was burning his hand. Why could he only lay there?
Burning ash swirled into his line of vision. He blinked his eyes. Red fire and flames licked all around him. Like before. So much like before… The air was burning, scorching and sweltering hot. Almost as if he were being cooked alive.
No!No!his mind screamed. He was coming back to his ownhell. Something burned his eyes and he almost cried out, gasping for breath and he felt his lungs finally fill, but the air was choked with smoke. “Malcolm,” he murmured as his brother’s face swam before him. Then blackness descended, and he saw and heard nothing more.
4
Fifteen years earlier
Lyall was barely ten that day when he sought escape from the dark moods of home and fell asleep in the deep woods, cradled against the thick, sinewy trunk and sprawling roots of an ancient river tree. Between those roots was his favorite fishing perch and next to an outcrop of flat rocks where a narrow, clear and swift running section of the River Tay cut through the dense forest to the south of Dunkelden Castle.
Above him, through gaps in the crown of dark and lacy yew leaves, the sun grew warm and bright and speckled over the ground like the skin on the sweetest trout. He opened his eyes then yawned. His hound Atholl lay next to him, the wolfhound snoring, snout resting on his lap.
Before Lyall could move, a bee buzzed near his nose, so he stayed perfectly still. The bee lit on his hand, which was resting on his ribs, and Lyall held his breath. Someone once warned him if he held still, a bee would never sting him, but instead it would realize he was not sweet clover and fly away.
The bee sat as still as he did, wings down, tail up, then itdropped and stung him. He yelped and jumped up, dancing around and shaking his hand with the stinger in his skin. Atholl awoke and frowning up at him as if he were mad. He pulled the stinger out and stuck his hand in the cold river water. “Hold still,” he muttered. “And a bee won't sting you.”
When his hand stopped burning he pulled it from the river. Atholl sat waiting, watching him from familiar trusting brown eyes while his thick tail began to thump on the damp ground. Lyall stood, gathering his things. “Come, you worthless hound,” he said with affection, rubbing his pet’s ears before he bent and picked up a sack full of freshly caught trout and tied it to his belt. “We are late.”
Looking up, he studied the sun moving across a wedge of blue sky, which told him they had been gone from home too long. “Mother will be worried. Come, else she will send Malcolm to prod me home with the sole of his boot and he was in a foul mood this morn. If he has to spend his time searching for me, then he will be angry and blustery and refuse to play draughts with me.
Atholl sat at Lyall’s feet, head cocked and listening. “You know how Malcolm’s anger swells and then he’s as impossible to live with as the English.” He laughed out loud, because he was jesting, preparing his sharp words for nightly bantering with his older brother. The truth was he worshipped Malcolm, who would be ten and three and was not all that much older. In less than a fortnight, Malcolm was due to leave Perthshire and Dunkelden for Angus, to Castle Rossie, where he would be fostered. The agreement had been drawn and sealed before their father was killed—the reason why home was uncomfortable and why their mother hovered around them all too closely of late and sometimes looked as if she was in a place far, far away from the rest of them. Without their father, Mother was not the same woman and added to her fretfulness was the fact that too soon her first born son would be leaving.
After their father’s body was brought home and buried in thesmall lime washed chapel at Dunkelden, Malcolm wandered the whole castle with his hands in fists because he did not want to leave and fought with everyone who would listen and even those who did not. Still he lost his frantic bid; all said Malcolm must do what his father wanted and foster with Ramsey. His brother was repeatedly reminded of the honor and respect of following their father’s wishes. Now that Ewane Robertson, the great warrior and friend of the king, was dead, the agreement he'd struck for Malcolm was even more important.
That same night of the death of their father and under the light of a full moon, Malcolm had dragged Lyall up to the tower parapet, pricked his hand with a knife, and made him blood- swear to protect their mother and sister in his absence.
Lyall understood that his brother would be gone all too soon. His heart grew heavy and he slowed his steps, thinking about his father’s wishes. He, the younger, did not know what his father had wanted from him, other than to grow into a man of honor. He did not like to think of his father, who had always talked to him as if he were not too young to understand, and who oft times rested his strong hand comfortably on Lyall’s shoulder as he spoke to him and told him of the world in which they lived and about the kinds of men who inhabited it.
Those moments when he forgot his resolve and thought too long about his father, his grief came back hard and strong. He would not shame himself and weep again like he had done when they buried his father’s body deep in the bowels of the small family chapel. Someday he, too, would be a great knight; he would be like the men his father spoke of, the proud and the good, and knights did not cry. He stomped faster through the woods, the mulchy leaves soft beneath his heavy boots, Atholl panting faithfully at his side.
