He watched in furious horror as Elena was seized and flung across a saddle, carried off at a gallop. Jacob spurred forward at once, but another rider cut hard across his path, steel flashing. There was no room to pass, no angle to slip by. Jacob wrenched his reins and met the charge head-on, the shock of impact jolting up his arm as blades rang.
The man pressed him hard, hacking wildly, driving Jacob back step by step, horse screaming beneath the strain. Jacob parried once, twice, feeling the weight of each blow, knowing he could not break away without giving the rider his back. A the same time, he was counting seconds, measuring the growing distance between him and Elena.
“Thomas—ride!” Jacob shouted to the shrinking, bloodless face man, while locking blades and shoving the rider off balance. “Sound the alarm!”
As if in answer, the long, urgent note of a horn rose from the direction of the castle—thin at first, then clearer, carried across the open ground.
Jacob swore and fought for balance, hacking down to break the raider’s press, but the man stayed tight, crowding him, trapping him. Jacob tore free only by brute force, wrenching the man sideways and sending horse and rider crashing together into the mud. He hauled his horse around at once, scanning the orchard, but the bulk of the raiding party was already breaking for the trees, Elena lost among them.
Jacob drove his horse into the trees after them, the orchard already falling away behind him.
The destrier’s sides heaved beneath him. He tightened his grip on the reins and drove toward the gap between the oaks where the raiders had disappeared. Branches clawed at his arms as he entered the trees. No path existed—only torn leaves, snapped twigs, and churned soil climbing toward the ridge.
Shouts rose from the castle in his wake. Jacob ignored them. By the time help organized, the raiders would be gone with Elena. He would stay close on their trail. He would catch them or die trying.
Chapter Four
Elena had no clear sense of how long they had been riding, only the accumulating evidence of it: the ache blooming along her back where the raider’s arm pinned her fast, the dull throb in her jaw from where it had struck the saddle when he had flung her across it. She lay stomach-down over the horse, the world reduced to flashes of ground rushing past beneath her, to hooves pounding earth, to the sharp, metallic smell of sweat and leather. Her hair had come loose entirely, torn free of its pins, whipping across her face and into her eyes so that she had to blink through strands of black caught against her lashes, the wind pulling it in every direction at once.
As the horse surged forward, she forced herself to look, to take in what little she could from this jolting, breathless vantage. There were men ahead of her, and more to either side, riding hard and close, their voices rising now and then in rough, clipped English that left no doubt as to who they were. She counted instinctively, the way her father had taught her to count horses and men when scanning a field: too many to mark precisely, but close to twenty by her best reckoning. They rode with purpose, close enough to one another to leave no gaps, yet loose enough to move quickly, their mismatched armor and weapons marking them as men gathered for gain rather than service.
The woods closed in around them as they rode, the light thinning, the air cooler beneath the canopy, twigs and forest debris crunching beneath the hooves. The raider’s grip tightened whenever the horse stumbled or shifted, bruising her back and ribs anew.
As the horse drove on, Elena’s mind was in chaos, grasping for some answer to what was happening beyond her narrow, jolting view. She tried to look past the men riding nearest her, past the blur of trees and ground, wondering if there were others—more riders spreading out beyond her sight, more women dragged from paths and courtyards as she had been. She wondered whether the castle itself had been breached, whether her mother and Meggie Jamison were safe or not.
She strained to listen for anything that might answer her—shouts, horns, the clash of pursuit—but the rush of wind and hooves swallowed nearly all sound. For all she knew, this small knot of riders was only part of something larger, a piece of a wider violence unfolding beyond her reach. It was not unheard of for such gatherings to draw danger; too many important men in one place invited boldness. For all she knew, Strathfinnan itself had been chosen for that very reason.
She tried to slow her breathing, to bring it under control, but her body resisted her, breath coming shallow and uneven no matter how she willed otherwise. With that came a quieter realization, unwelcome and undeniable: she did not know what to do. Not truly. Not beyond speaking, reasoning, appealing—skills her mother had honed in her with care, skills that served well at table and council and in the small, sharp negotiations of daily life, but meant very little here, pressed against a saddle and surrounded by men who might have no interest in listening.
She had always thought of herself as strong—not in muscle or power, never that—but in judgment, in resolve, in the ability to hold her ground with words when others might yield. Isabelhad taught her that courage was not always loud or violent, that a steady mind could be as powerful as a blade, and Elena had carried that belief with her into womanhood without question.
But this relentless motion, this helplessness of the body, revealed the narrowness of that strength. She had never been taught how to fight, how to turn fear into action when the moment demanded something more than composure. She had grown up safe, certain that if danger came, someone would answer it for her—her father foremost among them.
As the trees rushed past and the raider’s arm held her fast, fear settled fully at last, and with it a single, desperate hope: that Liam MacTavish was already riding hard in her direction.
She trusted only him to save her.
THE PARTY HOLDING ELENAplunged through a wide, shallow stream not long after leaving the orchard behind, the horses churning water and stone as they crossed, angling downstream before climbing out on the far bank. Jacob noted it without surprise. It was a simple enough tactic, meant to muddle the trail for anyone coming after them, and it told him something else as well: they expected pursuit, just not immediately.
The raiders drove their horses hard across the broken country, and Jacob matched them stride for stride, keeping them in sight—sometimes no more than a flicker of movement between tree trunks, sometimes a dark line cutting across the slope ahead. He didn’t dare press closer, not yet. Until he could formulate a plan to wrest Elena away from two dozen armed men, he needed distance as a shield. They would be listening and looking for armies to chase them. Though no chief or lord present at Strathfinnan had been accompanied by his full army, most had traveled with a retinue of a score of men at least—thesecombined together, emerging from Strathfinnan to give chase would easily outmatch this lawless group ahead of him, but only if they could find and catch them.
He heard nothing behind him. No answering hooves, no shouted orders, no horn carried faintly through the trees.
By the time the alarm had been sounded at Strathfinnan, his father and Liam MacTavish would still have been miles out with the hunting party. They would have turned at once, he had no doubt of that, but returning to the castle would take time, and more time still to gather men and mounts fit for a hard chase. Any force riding out after him would have to find the trail, sort the false paths from the true, and push on blind through ground already cooling toward dusk.
