Lyall walked back to Dunkelden without thought or care, out of the cover of the woods and out into the open. He walked to the front entrance and over the bridge, but paused when his eye caught a muddy scrap of yellow that lay in the ditch. He hopped down and picked it up--the traitor’s flag, a banner of yellow with a red ‘S’ for the serpent from the Garden of Eden painted over his father’s emblem. He climbed back up to the bridge with the flag in his fist and forward through the burned out gates and the cinders of the guardhouse.
Nothing stood before him but blackened ruins, buildings collapsed, and smoldering fires, the burnt remains of chickens and caged hares that were not taken by the servants. The upperfloors of the hall were naught but a huge skein of wood and were still smoldering.
There was no one left in the place but him. Not a chicken, a cow, a lamb or a dove in their mother’s cote, even the rats that had oft times been in the cave had fled. His was the only heart that beat in the midst of what once was theirs.
Gone, too, were the men who had done this. The servants, the animals…at least the ones that weren’t dead and burnt. He let the banner fall from his numb fingers...the loneliest boy in the world, standing in what felt like hell, with everything he had known as safe now destroyed and burning down around him.
He had two choices: he too could melt under the weight of it all, crumple into a ball and sob himself silly like a wee child. Since his legs were quivering and his blood was racing ‘twould have been all too easy. Or he could choose the path he knew his father and brother would have chosen. His age and years were only sums—numbers that had naught to do with anything. His choices and actions were all that mattered. When faced with the choice of cowardice, to just run, run away to anywhere as fast as his legs would carry him, he could not; his true heart could not go there. His father was no traitor, and he vowed he would prove it so, and his brother’s life had been uselessly ended. Malcolm would be avenged. Someone had lied, and those lies had set all of this in motion.
Moments later he dragged his brother’s limp and broken body toward the smoldering ruins of the chapel and searched the bailey until he found a shovel in the embers of a shed near the stables. The handle was hot, and he used his tunic to pick it up and then dropped it into a nearby trough where it singed and spat when it hit water as if it were just cast by the smithy. Soon he was back standing amidst the black ash and waning smoke next to Malcolm’s lifeless body and the flat carved stone marking their father’s crypt. Lyall wiped his eyes and began to dig.
It was a long time before he placed the last rock on a stack of stones where Malcolm lay. Exhausted, he fell to his knees besidethe graves, his brother’s golden cross in his hand, his face heavenward, his arms outward and his head thrown back, and he swore in his brother’s name, in his father’s name, he would right the wrongs done this day to the house of Robertson.
He picked up his bow and quiver and left; he never looked back, but walked slowly, deliberately. What he carried in his heart was heavy on him. What he carried in his soul and memory affected him through every inch of his blood and bone, down to the very meat of him, and he thought then that he understood the man who carried his own cross to Golgotha.
By the time he joined his mother and sister in the woods, his sister was sitting against the tree as he had been earlier that day, her head nodding forward, looking exhausted. He knew she was frightened. Today she had seen too much of life. He picked up the sack of fish, tying it to his belt as he studied his mother. Her clothing was burned, her face red and swollen, one cheek puckered with burned and blackened skin, one of her eyes unseeing, one hand holding the damp cloth he had torn from their clothing. She sat on a rock by the cool water of the stream as serene as if she were not scarred and half-blinded and mourning. Her lack of emotion said how truly broken she was.
His need for vengeance overcame him in almost uncontrollable waves. His body felt thick with anger. It ran hotly through his blood, firing the need in him to want to kill the men who did this. Keeping his control and his sanity was not easy, but he needed to be able to see his mother and sister who needed him, not the red heat of revenge.
He knelt down by his sister. “Mairi come. Climb onto my back. I will carry you.” He shifted her small, exhausted body, bow and quiver, and stood with her on his back. The silk of her fine hair brushed his face as she laid her sleepy head on his shoulder. Her shallow breaths quivered in her chest and her silent tears dripped onto his sore, fire-scorched neck.
That almost broke him; his own throat choked suddenly withthe urge to cry, but he clearly understood his duty and walked over to stand by his mother.
She reached out for him and touched thin air, her good eye spilling with tears and the other naught but a blank stare in the burnt and puckered skin on one side of her once- breathtakingly beautiful face. “Lyall?
“I am here,” he said.
She turned to look at him from her good eye. “Where’s Mairi.”
“She is asleep. I have her here on my back. See?” He turned. “ Take my hand. ‘Tis time to go.“ He helped her to her feet and together they slowly walked away.
5
Glenna opened the weathered stable door barely enough for her to see down the narrow back lane, which was empty. The smell of smoke and the sound of distant voices carried back to her. Before she could close the door, the black suddenly came trotting ‘round the corner and down the back alley. He was riderless.
Montrose?
Oh God… She moved swiftly, throwing open the stable door and running down the shadowy lane toward his horse, which was skittish and looked as if he would bolt if there had been any sign of open road.
Cooing and talking softly, she approached him, watching his ears flicker and his eyes dart to hers, then she easily grasped the reins. “Come, my laddie,” she said to him. “Come…” In a half run, she led the horse back to the stable. Montrose was in trouble. If she went to help him, the mob would recognize and overtake her.
Her thoughts sped toward some kind of plan, and a moment later she pulled off her hat, unbraiding her hair as she walked with determined steps toward the stall and Skye. Inside her satchel was the package Alastair had given her and she touchedit before she moved past it to take out the stolen gown, the only one she owned; this was her only chance. Surely the spicewife would be the only person to recognize it. She had filched it a long three summers before. She changed her shoes, from peasant boots to an expertly tanned and tooled pair of costly red leather lambskin shoes only a noblewoman could afford. She had stolen them near Invergowrie and knew they would show from the jagged edges of the gown as proof of what she was about to claim. But they were too big and slipped when she walked. She ran her fingers through her long hair, wavy and full after its tight braiding, and felt the relief from her scalp from no tight braids. She took a deep breath and glanced out the doors.
She did not dare abandon him when she needed him to get off the island so she could escape safely. Neither a woman nor a lad traveling alone was safe to ferry across the sound. Both El and Al made her swear on her life she would never try to do so.
So she told herself, she needed Montrose for her own safety.
Minutes later, black hair flowing down over her shoulders and back, his signet ring in one fist and her knee up near the pommel and she precariously rode the black back down the lane, praying for balance and courage as she headed for the main road, hoping she could pull off the guise.
What she saw ahead of her did little to ease her nerves. A crowd hovered to either side of Montrose, who was splayed unmoving on the ground and from the looks of the dirt trail, had been dragged over to the side of the road. A group of men were passing buckets of sea water to put out the hay fire and the burning cart. Smoke was everywhere and she could feel it burn her chest.
“Get away from him!” Glenna commanded, waving smoke away, and she rode straight into the middle of the mob. The crowd parted slightly. Montrose was almost unrecognizable. His skin was not burned or charred away--Glenna had unfortunately seen a burned man once and it was horrifically unforgettable--yet his whole face was black with ash and smoke, his clothing singedor burnt where it was covered with chips of ash and pieces of burnt hay. Even his golden hair was ash grey. There was a deep red-blue welt in the crucifix shape of a sword hilt across the skin of his palm, which lay limply next to his fallen weapon. He was so still her heart stopped.
Then he moaned loudly, which gave her great hope, and she released a breath she had not known she had been holding.
“’Tis my gown! I stitched it myself! Look at her! She is wearing my gown!”
Glenna turned and rode directly up to the spicewife, mere a hand’s breadth away from the stubborn woman, her chin high so she could look down at the woman when she waved an arm and said, “What is this? You worry over some measly piece of cloth and naught for the life of my lord, Baron Montrose.“ She paused meaningfully before adding, “You do not know that all you in Steering have grievously harmed the emissary of Himself the king.”
