“Right.” He looked at the nervous stable boy. “Get to saddling horses. Captain McGregor is going to summon his men.”
He didn’t need to say any more to James. His friend just gave him a nod and raced back toward the Keep to begin rallying the guard.
Ewan drew in a deep breath and looked down at the boy.
“Ready the mounts for battle. It may end up being war.”
The boy paled, but he rushed off to do as he had been bid. Ewan felt the tremulous, anticipatory surety that always settled over him before a conflict.
He would do whatever it took to get his wife back into his arms. He would fight whatever adversary was necessary. He would get her back.
“I knew ye were trouble from the first time I set eyes on ye,” he murmured into the wind, imagining his words being swept across the long miles to wherever his wife had gotten herself to. “The very best kind of trouble. And mark me, I will have ye back.”
Eilidh was fading. She wasn’t complaining, but Ailsa could tell.
“Let’s take a break,” she said, only realizing when her voice came out in a disused croak that she hadn’t spoken in hours. “Nobody is chasing after us this time. We’ll be better served with some rest.”
Ailsa didn’t mistake the relief in Eilidh’s expression. Davina, too, dismounted immediately and flopped back in a soft patch of grass. Even Vaila stretched out her back ominously.
It made Ailsa feel wretched. It had been reckless and impulsive to drag her sisters out of Buchanan Keep in the middle of the night, but she hadn’t been able to stay there a moment longer, not with Ewan’s words echoing in her mind.
She had taken something from him that he would never get back. The distillery had been bad enough, but that could be rebuilt. His father, though?
That was a loss from which he would never recover. She knew it well.
So even if it had been foolish to leave so quickly, she hadn’t felt as though she had any other choice. She couldn’t risk bringing more pain down on the man she loved.
And she did love him. It hurt so much to even think it because Ewan hated her, and she likely deserved every moment of that hate. But she loved him, and she couldn’t bear to bring him any more trouble. She just couldn’t.
For the length of their break, Ailsa let herself mourn. She didn’t let it show, she had to be strong for her sisters, but as Vaila stretched and Davina and Eilidh rested, she let all of the sorrow for what might have been course through her. She let her grief for her parents consume her. She felt every barbed inch of her regrets about her marriage cut her. How might things have gone with Ewan if she hadn’t brought so much trouble to his door? What happiness might they have enjoyed together?
She felt all of it, and when it was time for them to mount their horses again, to begin their journey back toward the home that had been stolen from them…
She locked it all away, shoving it down, down, down inside her until it coalesced into a kernel of white-hot rage, which she cast entirely at the man who was to blame for all of this.
Finlay Gordon. She hated him with every ounce of her being. He had takeneverythingfrom her.
And she would do whatever it took to make him pay for what he had done.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
As Ailsa lookedup at the high Dunnet cliff where Castle Dubh-Gheal sat perched like a sentinel, she thought about how it made a twisted sort of sense that Gordon had gotten a foothold in the place by means of treachery. There really wasn’t any other way to do it, after all.
The castle was perched high on a windswept cliff, looking out over the rocky northern shore. Ailsa could remember taking the long, difficult walk down to the shoreline, listening to her brother explain the castle’s legend.
“Do ye see the shape of the Keep down in the shadow?” he had asked, tracing the line that separated the light from the dark with his finger. “That’s our guardian, ye ken? The castle is more than a mere building, leannan. It watches over the clan.”
Ailsa had loved that story as a little girl. As she’d gotten older, she’d pushed it to the back of her mind, treating it more like a story than truth. But now, as she looked up, she could only pray that there was something real beneath that tale.
They would need protection now more than ever.
“We cannae take it by force,” Vaila said, coming up alongside her.
If they had hoped to find allies in the surrounding countryside, they were destined for disappointment; instead of the usual hustle and bustle of the clan around the castle’s surrounding lands, the gates on the cliff were shut up tight. Everyone was inside.
Ailsa gave her sister a grim look.
“No,” she agreed. “We will have to be let in and then fight back from there.”
