PROLOGUE
“Get that blade up,” Vaila McGregor, née Donaghey, snapped at one of the soldiers she was training. “Ye’ll nae block anything with your sword down there. Nay, dinnae look at him,” she shouted, striding toward the man with her own blade in hand as the young soldier dared a look at Vaila’s husband, James McGregor, the Captain of the Guard for Clan Buchanan. “He’s nae teaching ye. I am.”
The soldier made the foolish choice of still sending a pleading look over at the captain—themalecaptain.
James’ mouth hitched to the side.
“She’s going to thrash ye,” he informed the young man from his position leaning against one of the fenceposts in the training yard.
Several of the other guardsmen paused in their training to observe as well, something that James would normally have scolded them for. He understood the urge to see his wonderful, competent wife put the overconfident youngling down on his arse, though.
Vaila raised her own sword in the appropriate form, her dark eyes flashing as her lithe form rippled through the movements of preparing a strike.
The young soldier stumbled backward.
“I cannae fight ye,” he stammered. “Ye are a woman.”
Around James, the soldiers started laughing at the young lad’s mistake.
“Now she’s really going tae thrash ye, lad,” James called, not even bothering to hide his amusement.
Vaila’s long dark plait slithered down her back like a snake about to strike as she took a step forward, then another, then raised her blade?—
“Vaila.Vaila!”
Eilidh Donaghey, the youngest of four Donaghey sisters, raced into the training yard, unheeding of any moving blades or potential dangers. James, along with half his battalion, took an alarmed step forward.
Vaila, though, trusted her own competence. She halted her strike with expert precision, stopping her movement the instant her sister was within reach.
“Damn it, Eilidh!” she snapped, annoyed rather than afraid. “Ye ruined my drill. Now this bawface excuse for a warrior will never learn.”
“Oi,” the lad protested, his hand going self-consciously to his cheeks which did, indeed, have a certain babyish roundness still clinging to them.
Both sisters ignored him.
“Your training can wait,” Eilidh said.
She squared her shoulders, tossed her golden braid over her shoulder, and spread her arms wide in a grandiose gesture. James knew that this penchant for the dramatic in her youngest sister drove his wife to distraction, but some of the older soldiers chuckled affectionately at her antics.
“It istime,” Eilidh said grandly. When this did not have the effect she desired, she let out an impatient huff. “Ailsa’s gone into labor,” she said in a much diminished tone.
Vaila’s response, however, was significantly more marked this time around.
“She has?” she exclaimed, her eyes going wide in her face.
The real marker of her intense reaction, however, was that she let the tip of her blade drop to touch the dirt, something that James had never once seen her do before.
It made sense, however, that if one thing was going to distract his wife from maintaining a warrior’s form, it would be the news that her eldest sister, Lady Ailsa Buchanan, was in labor with her first child.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, whirling to face her husband, who was already approaching to take Vaila’s sword. The two elder Donaghey sisters were close, and Vaila was the one person, aside from midwives and assistants, that Ailsa desired at her side during her labor. Ailsa’s husband, Ewan, Laird Buchanan, had not been happy about this decree, but he’d been outvoted by his wife and all the other women of the family, who had insisted that birthing babies was women’s work.
“Men are too fragile about childbirth,” Dowager Lady Buchanan had confided to her daughter by marriage, while her son sputtered his protestations. “He will merely distract ye when ye cannae afford distraction.”
“Mithair!” Ewan protested.
Three sets of female eyes had narrowed on him as though he, and indeed all of mankind, were responsible for every ill ever suffered by the fairer sex. James, who had wished ardently to be elsewhere but had remained out of a sense of solidarity to his Laird and friend.
Now, however, he was determined to do his duty by accepting his wife’s blade for cleaning so that she could grasp herskirts in both hands and dash up to the keep proper, where her sister’s long challenge was beginning.
