Find her.
Finlay heard those words thunder in his mind. Then the battle surged back at them. Howling faces and steel on every side. He had a last glimpse of O’Hanlon’s face, streaming sweat and blood, as the man turned. The great claymore with which Reagan fought flashed and intercepted a blade that most surely would have taken Finlay’s head. A great nudge from the Gallowglass sent Finlay sprawling into the soaking turf.
He landed on his back and felt Brada break beneath his weight.Sword still in his hand, he saw rather than heard Reagan shout at him, “Go.”
Saw an enemy blade take the Gallowglass in the shoulder so he fell.
Fell.
A mortal wound? Who could tell? It had looked so.
Finlay wanted to get up and fight on. Every fiber in him longed to avenge the man who had just saved his life, quite possibly at the cost of his own.
But O’Hanlon’s men had gathered around him, and anyway Reagan’s concern was all for the chief he served. For Katrin.
Did Reagan love her? He worried for her, that was certain.
Finlay struggled to his feet, the gouge to his left cheek streaming blood, and looked around. Tried to look around, for it proved impossible. The last of Murtray’s men plodded past and he laid hold of them, one after another.
“The chief? The chief’s daughter?”
At last one answered, “I saw our men carrying him fro’ the field.”
“His daughter?” Finlay repeated on the ragged edge of desperation.
“She were wi’ them.”
It felt cowardly to leave. The warrior, that ancient warrior deep inside him, insisted it was. To move off and hie away while still others thundered into that morass of death.
Yet if Murtray’s men carried him from the field, he must be injured, perhaps mortally so. And Finlay possessed one last bit of the story that Anders MacMurtray needed to know before he left this world.
That knowledge, as much as his longing for Katrin, spurred Finlay from the field. Others moved in the same direction as he, not many. The turf lay littered with dead and dying. A vast massacre, the arrows had wrought.
Others made their way on foot, limping and creeping, some helpingtheir fellows.
He could not see Katrin or the chief anywhere.
The battle moved away from him. Up here on the moor, he could still hear it, the bellowing, the terrible screams of horses and of men. But it echoed like a memory down through time.
For a blessed moment he closed his eyes. Pictured a young woman with yellow hair standing in the sun outside a roundhouse. A graceful lass with a gray deerhound at her side. The woman he loved, gazing into his eyes.
Here.
He turned and made off toward a kind of ridge covered in dying bracken. Men took refuge here, a few lying, their fellows trying to stanch the flow of blood from hideous wounds.
He found them behind a screen of bracken, the old man lying stretched on the ground and the three others gathered around him. His relief at finding them, at seeing Katrin, went beyond expression. The chief looked dead. He had an arrow through his thigh, and his face had gone the color of daubed wattle.
By all that was holy, had he reached them too late?
He stumbled forward. Katrin looked up and their eyes met. She shot to her feet.
He wanted little more than to embrace her. For she was here, alive and whole, from what he could see. But the two clansmen looked up also, watching with what appeared to be astonishment.
Somehow, he kept from clasping her tight. The emotions flashing between them and what he saw blazing in her eyes would have to be enough.
“Ye be hurt.” She lifted a hand to his cheek.
“’Tis naught.”Reagan saved my life.He could not tell her that now. Mayhap later. “The chief—”
