Chapter Ten
“Ye’ll rub a hole clean through it if ye keep that up.”
Jacob did not turn as he said it, keeping his eyes on the narrow track ahead while the mare picked her way along, but he felt the pause behind him all the same—the brief, offended stillness that suggested Elena had frozen mid-motion, the fingers of one hand caught in the motion of twisting the wool of his breacan—hers, now, he supposed—tighter and tighter around the hand between her front and his back. Her other hand sat unmoving, clenching his waist as it had for hours by now.
“I was only adjusting it,” she said, her voice cool.
“Aye,” he replied. “A constant occupation, it seems.”
“I’m hungry,” she said, as if that explained everything, but then expanded, “and trying to distract myself.”
Silence dropped between them again for the next mile, shaped by the words they had said and could not take back. He knew the measure of her quiet now, the disciplined steadiness of her breath when she chose not to speak, and what unsettled him was not the absence of engagement but the way it troubled him at all. He had lived most of his life content in his own company, preferring the clean simplicity of solitude to the hazards of closeness, and he had never been a man who feared silence. Yet this one pressed at him, sharp and persistent, because it belonged to Elena.
The thought first came to him yesterday, surprising him. He told himself—coldly, sensibly—that this road ended the same way it always would: with her returned to Strathfinnan, to safety, to a life that did not and never would include him. She would wed another man. He might never see her again. Knowing all that should have made the distance between them easier to bear. Instead, it made the tension feel like a squandered thing, time wasted on bitterness when there was so little time to spare. Jacob had no wish to part from her carrying anger, and the realization sat heavier in his chest than he cared to admit.
The land opened as the afternoon wore on, the dense shelter of forest thinning into rolling pasture and low, stony rises, the sun broad and clear as they made their way west. Birch stands rose pale and straight along the hills, their trunks catching the sun like watchful sentries, and old walls broke the fields into narrow strips. Jacob mostly kept them off the main roads, skirting field edges and half-forgotten tracks.
When unease stirred within him, it did not begin as sound. It began as the old, familiar tightening of sense, the feeling that the air itself had altered, that the land behind them was not as empty as it ought to be. Jacob slowed and pivoted the mare slightly and let his gaze drift without obvious purpose, not meaning to alarm Elena, scanning the rise they had just crossed, listening through the ordinary noises of day.
At first, he heard nothing that could be named. But still, he altered their course without speaking, angling them toward rougher ground where the grass gave way to stone and scattered scrub, because hooves rang louder on stone, and men who followed too fast there would give themselves away.
Elena was not deceived by his feigned idleness. She was so much better attuned to him and to sound than she’d been even as recently as two days ago. She leaned forward slightly asthough about to ask a question, but Jacob held up his hand to keep her silent.
They had gone perhaps another quarter mile when the wind shifted again, and with it sound arrived at last, carried faint but unmistakable across the open land: the dull, rhythmic thud of hooves, not wandering, not aimless, but arranged in a way that spoke of mounted men moving with purpose.
Jacob felt his spine go hard, the old coil returning as swiftly as if it had never eased. He stared ahead, trying to judge the distance to Strathfinnan, though the land offered him no certainty. Many parts of the lowlands were a stranger to him, and whatever guess he made was little more than instinct. Five miles he might have risked a straight run, hoping to strike a Hamilton patrol by chance, but he knew—without knowing how—that they were not so near, and that twenty miles, or even thirty, lay well beyond what his destrier had been bred to run.
“We’re nae longer alone, are we?” Elena asked.
Either her instinct had advanced or her awareness of him had.
“Nae.”
Two hands gripped his waist now, her fingers curling into cloth and flesh, readying herself. “How many?”
“I canna be sure,” he replied. “Too soon to ken, but enough that I canna make a stand, enough that I’ve nae wish to meet them on open ground.”
He urged the mare forward, not yet into a gallop, unwilling to announce their flight before he must. He could not be certain whether the riders he discerned were friend or foe, but it was not a question he intended to linger and answer the hard way. He angled them toward a line of scrub and broken stone where the land dipped and rose in quick, uneven waves. The sound of hooves behind them grew clearer, and then came voices—carried indistinctly, but present, the tone sharp with intention ratherthan casual travel. He didn’t know for sure but might assume that they had found their trail, or had crossed it by chance, and Jacob did not waste time deciding which.
He urged the destrier faster, meaning to at least keep pace with the rhythm of the hooves in pursuit, but the rocky ground underfoot only allowed for so much speed.
“They’re gaining,” she said, hearing what Jacob did, the noise of the chase louder, pressing closer.
“Aye,” he said, scowling at the sudden shift in the terrain ahead, imagining they were about to be betrayed by the land.
The scrub and trees thinned abruptly, and the ground rose into bare stone that offered no cover and no quick turn, and the sky widened above. He urged the steed forward anyway, because changing course or stopping was not an option.
The last of the trees fell away, and they burst into open ground, the land flattening briefly before breaking off at the edge of a cliff. A short, sharp curse tore from him. Sky and stone spread wide and unforgiving, and the sudden exposure sent a cold prickle through Jacob’s spine. He urged the steed on without hesitation, driving her along the rim, risking a glance downward as they raced along the clifftop, searching for anything that might pass for a descent. It was impossibly steep and sheer, offering no path and no mercy.
Far below, a gushing river tore through a narrow channel, white water churning deeply before widening again downstream. The distance made his stomach tighten; the drop was sheer in places, the walls cut sharp and clean. He pushed the horse harder, scanning the length of the cliff as it curved away, hoping for a break in the stone, a ledge, a slope—anything—but he was shown no salvation.
He reined in hard, bringing the destrier skidding to a halt several paces from the edge, and the horse snorted and tossed her head, her muscles trembling with fear under his legs. Heforced himself to think, and he found almost nothing. There was no cover. There was no path down. There was no time to circle back through the narrow ground and hope they could lose them again, because the riders were too close. If he fought, he would be overwhelmed. If he surrendered, he would likely still be killed and in either case, Elena would likely suffer far more than he would.
His chest heaved with indecision, his teeth clenched with the knowledge that there actually was a way out, wondering if he dared take it. His eyes cut to the river again, measuring distance and depth in the few heartbeats they had left.
Elena’s small voice broke behind him. “Jacob...?”
The pursuit finally broke from the trees in a staggered line, three riders at first and then more behind, coming to an abrupt halt to find their prey cornered in front of them. Jacob heard the harsh bark of shouted English, and saw the eager, ugly confidence of men who believed the end was in sight.
