Thiswas why he was a legend, Eilidh realized with a breathless sort of awe.Thiswas why everyone’s eyes had gone wide with wonder when they’d learned that Ciaran Gunn was among them.
The remaining mercenaries gathered themselves, clearly recovering from the surprise of Ciaran’s attack. Steel clashed against steel, and perhaps Ciaran might still have been overcome, but he dodged a blow in such a way that one of the mercenaries struck at his companion, then sidestepped to deliver another deadly slash.
Six of them were dead, Eilidh counted frantically. Grian had left one more clutching his broken ribs and gasping for air; he wouldn’t last long. The tide was turning.
She had no doubt that Ciaran would have finished them all without so much as a scratch if not for the hiss that streaked through the air, followed by a sickening, wet thump as the arrow buried itself in his shoulder.
“Ciaran!”
His name was torn from her lips in a scream as she watched him fall to his knees, then catch himself with his swordhand before he collapsed all the way to the ground. She had dismounted in an instant, moving before she could consider the lack of wisdom in such a thing, and by the time she reached his side, Ciaran had regained his feet. He scanned the shadows for signs that another attack was coming, but the three mercenaries that yet lived—the archer, the leader, and one other—had wisely taken the opportunity to flee.
“We should follow them,” he said through gritted teeth, taking a stumbling step forward as if he intended to plunge directly into the thicket, even with the long shaft of the arrow still protruding from his shoulder. “They will report to Gordon. They need to be stopped?—“
Eilidh caught his uninjured arm, but even that made his words stop around a hiss of pain.
“Stop,” she said. “You are hurt, and there’s nothing they can tell Gordon that he doesn't already know.”
Ciaran looked as though he wanted to argue with this, so she pressed ahead.
“We need to go back,” she insisted. “Ye are injured.”
Her heart was racing in her chest, and she could feel tears beginning to drip from her eyes. She had been scared aplenty in her life; this past year of war had brought naught but terror after terror. But she didn’t think she’d ever been quiteasfrightened as she’d been when she’d seen the arrow pierce his skin.
But she could not yet fall apart. He was not yet safe. They were not yet safe.
Ciaran frowned at her tears and put down the sword so that he could wipe her cheeks with the backs of his fingers. His hands were spattered with the blood of the men he’d killed, but she was glad that he didn’t stay his touch.
She needed to feel the warmth of his skin on hers, no matter how briefly, to remind herself that he wasstill alive. That arrow had not taken him from her.
“Dinnae waste your tears on me, lass,” he told her. “All that matters is—” A hitched breath of pain—“that ye are safe.”
His gaze was so earnest on hers as he said this, his eyes burning bright in the darkness. Eilidh felt her heart shatter, and from the pieces, she scooped up all the courage she possessed.
She seized his face in both her hands and kissed him.
If their first kiss had been frantic and unexpected, this one was even more so. The embrace in the armory had been heated and full of trembling desire; this kiss held that as well as the fear that she’d felt watching him in the deadly dance of blades and the knowledge, deep in her center, that she would never be the same if she lost him.
They were at war, and there were no guarantees that any of them would live through the mess to come, so she poured everything into the kiss. All her terror and joy and relief and dread and, yes, love—the love she knew she would begin to feel for him if she let herself.
The love that, perhaps, had started to take root the very first moment she’d seen him.
The coppery tang of blood reminded her that they could not linger here, in this copse of corpses. She released him and he stumbled back, knocked off balance both by the kiss and by the blood that continued to drip down his arm.
“Eilidh,” he said, the word full of wonder and warning.
But Eilidh had made up her mind. She was not going to lose him—not to death and not because he pushed her away. She was going tokeephim, and, for now, that meant keeping him alive.
“Later,” she told him firmly. “For now, let’s get home.”
12
To his burning shame, Ciaran could not ride alone for the mad dash back to the Keep. With his injured arm, he couldn’t even mount Shadowbane’s back properly; he had to let Eilidh help him in a bitter reversal of the way he’d tried to help her back in the Buchanan stables. The searing pain that went through him when she helped heft him onto Shadow’s back was so brutal that his vision went briefly black around the edges.
Eilidh held both reins in her hand as she sat behind him, keeping Grian at Shadow’s side and Ciaran in the saddle each time he swayed, the lost blood on top of his lingering injuries leaving him dizzy and lightheaded.
He was so lost to agony that he couldn’t even properly enjoy having her sweet, soft form pressed firmly against him as they rode, which was one of the damnedest shames of his life.
But everything good and true in the world was hidden from him by the screaming from his shoulder every time Shadowbane jolted, the lightest impact driving a breathy, miserable rasp from his lungs.
